Author Topic: What if I don't like Cryptonomex and BitShares 2.0?  (Read 17499 times)

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Offline klosure

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The community ending up split between two chains would be a disaster, imo.  It looks bad to outsiders, its very confusing, and it means that people are needlessly duplicating effort instead of working together.

Lets avoid that.
That happened between Ripple and Stellar. It wasn't at all a disaster.
If each chain has a well identifiable brand, people will just perceive SmartCoin/Graphene/CryptonomexCoin as a new currency from the award winning creators of BitShares and learn to like it for its own merits and hate it for its own defaults.

The problem in that partiular case of BitShares is that BitShares always defined itself as a free software project with libertarian leanings so doing a 180 degree turn to become a proprietary project with commercial endeavour is likely to get it red flagged beyond repair in the crypto community. Look at the amount of flak Ripple got for doing things not remotely as controverrsial as what we are discussing now...
« Last Edit: June 15, 2015, 11:02:24 pm by klosure »

Offline Thom

Without BM & team BitShares is probably dead, and we can't blame them if they want to get paid for their work.
^THIS.
However, the OP of this new thread avoids many other issues being discussed.

EDIT: For the record I started drafting this post prior to the 20 that were posted before this one appeared!

AGS / PTS
For those that claim AGS / PTS investors have an expectation of ownership I say they shouldn't. It was all a donation based contribution to fund the creation of the BitShares ecosystem. You can split hairs on whether that has been accomplished but in my book it was. Is it perfect? No. Could it be improved? Of course, but that's always true. So what?
Have all of those funds been spent? If so when did they run out, before or after work on graphene was well underway?

This issue keeps coming up. Many never really backed the merger and many have since changed their minds about it. Although all funds collected through AGS / PTS had no contractual, official obligations, we all know that was necessary to keep the dev staff legal. That made it an issue of trust and integrity that I3 would do what they claimed. If the trust wasn't there the investments wouldn't have been either. The way people measure integrity is subjective. Some people feel that trust was violated. That is one reason why this issue keeps recurring.

Current Funding of Dev Staff
What about the delegate pay the devs are receiving right now? Is that bonus money to develop 2.0? Is it repaying a perceived deficit from low marketcap? Going towards 0.9.x expenses? Just what are those exactly? Some may feel they are subsidizing proprietary software development. Full disclosure about this doesn't seem unreasonable, but this issue hasn't been explicitly addressed.

Controlling Interests of Cryptonomex
The community has not been fully informed about Cryptonomex's obligations. CNX is a new entity but we are largely in the dark about it and that makes some people nervous. What conditions did the investors of Cryptonomex require to fund the company? Are those obligations in conflict with past expectations (implied) for BitShares?

To say the community should have a strong sense of gratitude towards BM & the core devs for the very existence of this ecosystem is a major understatement. Are they being generous towards this community or only trying to protect their own investments of time & money? I think it's a bit of both, and I see nothing wrong with that.

I am surprised by the lack of depth of the OP in dealing with the issues raised in various threads, including these.
« Last Edit: June 15, 2015, 10:54:08 pm by Thom »
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Offline klosure

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To critics: Be real, offer a viable alternative otherwise you're just resenting reality.
How can we propose viable alternatives if there is no debate in first place?

Yeah that was a mistake, and for my part I have no doubt that you express a genuine concern. Now that you have expressed, from what I can tell, the alternative that they launch a new chain and give us 20% or something like that in it, here is how I see it: This alternative solution will remind people of the situation before the merger, with a lot of fragmentation, liquidity lost between cracks, a confusing mess for marketers and a lot of uncertainty. I doubt more than 5-10% of the stakeholders in this project would like this idea, but let us see what people think.
Who said the sharedrop should be 20%?
The reason I'm asking the question to Bytemaster is that if he is doing this migration for Bitshares and not out of self interest to recover the brand, community and ecosystem on his new chain, he shouldn't mind creating a second chain and sharedrop 100% of the stake on BitShares. This won't change his stake in the new chain that will be based on his original BTS stake and he will stand to benefit too from a potential coming back of the original BitShares. The only entity that stands to lose from BitShares surviving and coming back to the fore front is Cryptonomex, but since the whole purpose of creating Cryptonomex was to help BitShares (or so we have been told), that shouldn't be a problem.

Offline CryptoPrometheus

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I would like to encourage everyone to consider that none of us "deserve" or are "entitled" to anything from our devs. Really, the only thing any of us "deserve" is the right to be compensated for our efforts.
The debate isn't at all about who owns the code produced by Cryptonomex independently. We didn't even know that this code existed two weeks ago. The real debate is whether the proposed technical optimizations and continued support model justify losing our sovereignty on the code and straying away from our philosophical foundations and mission statement when it would be as easy to create a new chain and have the best of both worlds. This debate, the full disclosure of relevant information and the freedom to choose, that is what we are asking here, and this we are definitely entitled to it.

Sovereignty means "having supreme power of authority over a domain". How exactly would we (the holders of BTS) be losing our sovereignty when we have never had "sovereignty" over the BTS code to begin with?  BitShares code, up to this point, has always been public domain. Nobody has sovereignty over it, anyone can use it for any reason, that's the whole point of public domain. Cryptonomix gave us a choice: rather than using our current "inferior" but fully public domain software we could accept their gracious offering to give us a free license to the (still fully open-source) code that they have written over the last 4 months. [actually, today they amended the original offering and decided "public domain" everything written before June 1]. Additionally, they have outlined their terms for continuing to code for BitShares if we want them to. What's more, the code they have written will allow us to vote on discarding any or all of the current code for something different at any time in the future.

As far as potential opportunities for other projects sharedropping on BTS, I guess we have to make the decision, as shareholders, as to whether the superior feature set of the Graphene toolkit under the given license agreement is a reasonable trade-off for the possible decrease in likelihood of BTS being the recipient of future sharedrops. As for what you mean by "philosophical foundations", I suppose I would ask you to be more specific, because this area of debate often leads to unproductive mudslinging due to both sides attacking a straw man they have erected in place of their actual opponent.
« Last Edit: June 15, 2015, 10:46:45 pm by CryptoPrometheus »
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Offline Ander

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The community ending up split between two chains would be a disaster, imo.  It looks bad to outsiders, its very confusing, and it means that people are needlessly duplicating effort instead of working together.

Lets avoid that.
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Offline klosure

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e question that you haven't addressed: why not launch the new chain under a new brand name (I've read some references to SmartCoin), all other things being equal? This wpuld allow the original Bitshare to keep going and fulfill its mission of enabling the development of an ecosystem of DACs so everyone is happy and we don't have to make an impossible choice.

It isn't BM you need to convince. It's the delegates that have the choice to switch toolkits or not. If the delegates all decide to switch to the new licensed software you can find new delegates. Non-Graphene BitShares isn't going anywhere. Find some delegates to run the nodes and some developers to address the issues.
That's the theory, but in practice it's going to be much more complicated than that. Unless the question has been debated well enough and gained enough traction to lead to a consensus at community level, supporters of the new chain will be hostile to the old chain that they will perceive as a parasite eating on the market share. The survival of PTS after the merger is a good example of that kind of thing occuring. There is also the question of the brand, and the existing ecosystem bindings: who will get to be BitShares, and what network will the exchanges pick when people withdraw their balance of BTS and bitAssets? Obviously there will be a huge lobbying from the new chain to be recognized as the one real BitShares. If we are going to keep two chains, they must carry different brands so that there won't be any confusion and the new chain must create its own ecosystem. This is something we must decide now.
« Last Edit: June 15, 2015, 10:51:04 pm by klosure »

Offline klosure

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If we get greater adoption and price rises, well then Bitshares blockchain could start affording to hire the core developers full time. Thus adding more value causing share price to rise and freeing up even more funds to add more value. SNOWBALL!
Price will recover naturally when we get out of this bear market. We don't need Graphene for that.

Offline CLains

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To critics: Be real, offer a viable alternative otherwise you're just resenting reality.
How can we propose viable alternatives if there is no debate in first place?

Yeah that was a mistake, and for my part I have no doubt that you express a genuine concern. Now that you have expressed, from what I can tell, the alternative that they launch a new chain and give us 20% or something like that in it, here is how I see it: This alternative solution will remind people of the situation before the merger, with a lot of fragmentation, liquidity lost between cracks, a confusing mess for marketers and a lot of uncertainty. I doubt more than 5-10% of the stakeholders in this project would like this idea, but let us see what people think.

Offline Riverhead

e question that you haven't addressed: why not launch the new chain under a new brand name (I've read some references to SmartCoin), all other things being equal? This wpuld allow the original Bitshare to keep going and fulfill its mission of enabling the development of an ecosystem of DACs so everyone is happy and we don't have to make an impossible choice.

It isn't BM you need to convince. It's the delegates that have the choice to switch toolkits or not. If the delegates all decide to switch to the new licensed software you can find new delegates. Non-Graphene BitShares isn't going anywhere. Find some delegates to run the nodes and some developers to address the issues.

The choice I see the crew in Blacksburg had was go public early and completely crash the price down to a few Satoshi or come up with a completely thought out plan. Either choice would have its detractors and supporters.
« Last Edit: June 15, 2015, 10:30:48 pm by Riverhead »

Offline MrJeans

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I see a lot of positive in the new ideas for moving forward.
I'm very excited to start using 2.0.
I believe it will allow for increased adoption.

If we get greater adoption and price rises, well then Bitshares blockchain could start affording to hire the core developers full time. Thus adding more value causing share price to rise and freeing up even more funds to add more value. SNOWBALL!

Offline klosure

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To critics: Be real, offer a viable alternative otherwise you're just resenting reality.
How can we propose viable alternatives if there is no debate in first place?

Offline klosure

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Pretty rough post from BM, sounds more like a veiled threat than anything.

The threat is "we won't work for free"?
If that's really the bottom of the question there was a much better way to handle the problem than decide everything alone and try to push it on the community. The obvious first step would have been to announce that the core developers were not going to be able to continue the effort with that level of funding, and ask the community to brainstorm on the question or try to find other developers who would be willing to take over. This wasn't even done.

Offline klosure

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I would like to encourage everyone to consider that none of us "deserve" or are "entitled" to anything from our devs. Really, the only thing any of us "deserve" is the right to be compensated for our efforts.
The debate isn't at all about who owns the code produced by Cryptonomex independently. We didn't even know that this code existed two weeks ago. The real debate is whether the proposed technical optimizations and continued support model justify losing our sovereignty on the code and straying away from our philosophical foundations and mission statement when it would be as easy to create a new chain and have the best of both worlds. This debate, the full disclosure of relevant information and the freedom to choose, that is what we are asking here, and this we are definitely entitled to it.

Offline CLains

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This is just the same procedure as every time. To critics: Be real, offer a viable alternative otherwise you're just resenting reality.

Offline Pheonike