Moonstone - New Bitsapphire Wallet: Fundraiser proposal

[zerosum]

Very nice scheme...everyone stays to lose but bitsapphire devs.


Investors in the IOU:
 - investing in BTS but being paid in USD, in up to 1-3 years if ever.
 - how is this 1:1 conversion gonna work? The IOU holders will sell for discount? Good for them.

 BTS holders:
 - let give some of our BTS to this project so the devs can dumpr them on us right away.
 - let's have mandatory voting and diluting of our shares. The more sucsesfull the wallet the more wallet users (aka BTS holders)  will have forced/no-choice voting.


Now I kindly suggest you go and try to sell this to the one who actually ordered it - PeerTracks.
If they do so we will not mind using it on BTS for free btw.

[disclosure] I have (will have) slightly bigger stake (percentage wise)  in Music than in BTS.


PS
Just a quick question - What qualities do you think you (and your wallet) have to think that the dev, making the backbone behind your wallet do not deserve to pre-sale their product and to hold BTS hostage but you can/should do so?

[fluxer555]

I actually agree with this sentiment. However, from this point on it would be a free market for Bitshares wallets. That means that people can choose which wallet they want to use, and they can choose which term of service they are ok with. Furthermore, the risk of donors not to get their money back would most likely be too great.

Not to mention that instead of asking for delegate money upfront we almost completely developed the wallet with our own money and then put forth the proposal to the community.

I think you guys should just apply for the delegates, no funding phase. 4 delegates, one for each developer. If you are confident that your wallet will increase the BTS market cap, then this will pay for itself. No need to offload your risk to the shareholders, you already committed to take on the risk when you committed months to developing this.

As recently discussed on the last mumble session, the most successful delegate pattern has been:

1. Engage the community, build connections
2. Do work, ask nothing in return
3. Gain shareholder confidence with your demonstrated abilities
4. After everybody sees you are passionate about bitshares and are competent, post a delegate bid

Your proposal is uncomfortable and feels hostile because you are holding your work hostage. On top of this, you have the intention to unnaturally get voted in through hard-coded delegates, which also gives the feeling that you are not confident enough in your own abilities and/or the future of bitshares.

[hpenvy2]

I assume PeerTracks is going to use a custom moonstone wallet to handle all of the users funds. This is slightly off topic but have you made any progress on how users will go from their Credit Card to BitAssets (NoteAssets?) on the PeerTracks system? Is the music team / bitsapphire working on any on ramps or relying on those to be built?

PeerTracks using a custom version of our wallet is the plan, yes.

Unfortunately I can't disclose anything about PeerTracks (NDAs), however Cob should be able to do a forum or mumble session very soon. March is when everything will be unveiled.

1  Has PeerTracks and Play paid for any of the development?
2. Is there any plans to integrate some type of BTC wallet or projects like MetaExchange?
3. I'm in full support of projects that add to the ecosystem to go after funding,however the idea of hard coded delegates seems like a slippery slope.

[robrigo]

I assume PeerTracks is going to use a custom moonstone wallet to handle all of the users funds. This is slightly off topic but have you made any progress on how users will go from their Credit Card to BitAssets (NoteAssets?) on the PeerTracks system? Is the music team / bitsapphire working on any on ramps or relying on those to be built?

PeerTracks using a custom version of our wallet is the plan, yes.

Unfortunately I can't disclose anything about PeerTracks (NDAs), however Cob should be able to do a forum or mumble session very soon. March is when everything will be unveiled.

Thanks... looking forward to more information! As long as someone is considering that piece of the puzzle I am happy. That has been the thing bugging me a bit with the whole concept because there aren't any publicly disclosed fiat onramps into bitassets yet.

[bitsapphire]

I assume PeerTracks is going to use a custom moonstone wallet to handle all of the users funds. This is slightly off topic but have you made any progress on how users will go from their Credit Card to BitAssets (NoteAssets?) on the PeerTracks system? Is the music team / bitsapphire working on any on ramps or relying on those to be built?

PeerTracks using a custom version of our wallet is the plan, yes.

Unfortunately I can't disclose anything about PeerTracks (NDAs), however Cob should be able to do a forum or mumble session very soon. March is when everything will be unveiled.

[robrigo]

Thanks for the answer. I also agree that hardcoding delegates that cannot have votes removed into the wallet sets a bad precedent and should not be done. Recommending delegates to vote for would be a much better option; the community was up in arms at the suggestion that core devs have their delegates "recommended" (i.e. automatically approved by default) but because your startup is funding its own operations I think it would be ok for you to do that on Moonstone.

I assume PeerTracks is going to use a custom moonstone wallet to handle all of the users funds. This is slightly off topic but have you made any progress on how users will go from their Credit Card to BitAssets (NoteAssets?) on the PeerTracks system? Is the music team / bitsapphire working on any on ramps or relying on those to be built?

[bitsapphire]

I will boycott and actively lobby against this wallet if there is a hardcoded-delegate version released as the official version.

Hardcoding delegates sets a very, very bad precedent. We do not want to walk down that road.

I actually agree with this sentiment. However, from this point on it would be a free market for Bitshares wallets. That means that people can choose which wallet they want to use, and they can choose which term of service they are ok with. Furthermore, the risk of donors not to get their money back would most likely be too great.

Not to mention that instead of asking for delegate money upfront we almost completely developed the wallet with our own money and then put forth the proposal to the community.

[Bitcoinfan]

Are you considering adding Shapeshift API for BTC type wallet?

[bitsapphire]

Aren't there at least to other light wallets in developement: Yunbi and Valentine? Why another one?

Yes. However we are using the copay signature transaction and building architecture as inspiration. The angular app does not build any transactions client side, it only receives already build transactions from the server and signes them.

We have had extensive experience with Bitcoin wallet architecture and transaction signing models from previous and current Bitsapphire startup clients. We have come to the conclusion that transactions should not be build in the client for two reasons:

• Need to recreate transaction building code for every platform/language.
• Multisig transactions and future contract transactions will need to be signed by more than 1 private key, as a result you either have p2p communication between clients (which is bad), or you have a central but optional server which reads the blockchain, builds transactions according to client needs, and then sends already build transactions to clients to simply sign. This way multiple clients can sign for example multisig transactions without the need to be online all at once for P2P communication. Furthermore transaction signing is considerably simpler than transaction building. This also means that the central server cannot fake your transaction or move your funds.

This way mobile wallet development should be a lot simpler. Furthermore, once BTS is Turing complete, there will be apps our there which want to communicate with BTS without having to download the full blockchain. Imagine your word processor just signing a transaction for notary services on BTS rather than downloading the whole blockchain.

Step 2 says "Sign up online or install the wallet on your PC". Does that mean moonstone will have a web wallet interface on top of a native client?

The native client will be a wrapped Angular app just like the current wallet. Therefore both the web and client wallet will be the same with the client wallet having some additional logic in the wrapper.

[fluxer555]

On an unrelated note, unsticky this. Most people are used to ignoring everything stickied here, I almost didn't see this.

[fluxer555]

DecentralizeEconomics (aka 2Kool4Skewl) will go crazy over this if we let it happen. Regardless of what he does, It will be a PR nightmare. We do not want developers holding technology hostage. We want developers proving themselves to be an added asset to the ecosystem, worth more than their delegate pay, and shareholders will vote accordingly.

[Ander]

Instead of hardcoded delegates, how about recommended delegates that the user can vote for by default, but they can turn off?

[fluxer555]

I will boycott and actively lobby against this wallet if there is a hardcoded-delegate version released as the official version.

Hardcoding delegates sets a very, very bad precedent. We do not want to walk down that road.

[bitsapphire]

Excited to see what you've created!

Essentially the $130,000 fundraiser-loan allows the community to "buy" an MIT license. Do I understand correctly?

Assuming BTS stays around 1 cent, 4 delegates would make $130k in 25 months.. what are the plans for your delegates at that point?

You say hard-coded delegates.. users will still be able to unvote, right?

Exactly roadscape! After talking to many potential stakeholders it seems that an MIT license would do the most good, but we need to cover our costs so far. We've been investing most of our company's margin into Moonstone so far.

We hope that with the introduction of a much more user friendly (and modular) wallet, BitShares might increase in market cap pretty quickly. After all, nobody I know with large BTS holdings has used the current wallet due to several issues. Potentially new users are also put off by the current wallet issues. Moonstone is a light wallet, so no blockchain syncing needed.

The hard-coded delegates won't be able to be unvoted on the wallet until our goal is reached. However, anybody could fork the wallet and put it out there without the hard-coded delegates. We believe though that due to our added value such as identity verification for external exchanges, as well as encrypted storage of config and wallet files users would prefer our official version.

Nice fundraising ideas with the ious .. as roadscape mentioned .. what will happend after ious are bought back ... or .. what id the hardcoded delegates wont make it into the top 101?

Very good question. Once the UIAs are bought back we intend to make the delegate vote opt-out. Any further delegate income will be subject to normal delegate voting.

The hardcoded delegates not making it into the list is a risk, but also an opportunity for the donors. The way we look at this is that the donors would start promoting the wallet and our delegates based on rational self interest. Very much the way Bitshares people promote Bitshares itself. If the delegates don;t make it we will also announce a max buy-back period for the UIA, probably 50 Months or so.

[robrigo]

Step 2 says "Sign up online or install the wallet on your PC". Does that mean moonstone will have a web wallet interface on top of a native client?