I have posted before that I liked Sparkle as a concept but there are many people who still worry that it will hurt BitShares.
Being proof of work Sparkle is fundamentally less efficient and predictable than BitShares. Proof of work is not sustainable at large scales and of course leads to centralization and control. Anyone who has been following BitShares long enough knows that anything based upon Proof of Work is no threat in the long term.
However, just because we know that Proof of Waste is a dead end, there are literally 10's of thousands of individuals out there who view anything other than Proof of Waste as a scam. There are even exchanges that refuse to list any proof of stake coins.
Sparkle gives BitShares a huge marketing opportunity because I suspect that 50% of people who investigate/try Sparkle will ultimately convert to BitShares. In a way Sparkle is like giving away PromoShares in BitShares without having to dilute BitShares.
Lets make an assumption that Sparkle can get into the top 10 cryptos, that is good for BitShares because every Sparkle user ultimately learns about how BitAssets work. It will then have a development budget on par with BitShares via its dilution.
Sparkle will have a harder time forking to upgrade. While BitShares can fork "at will" by simply voting out delegates that don't upgrade in a timely manner. Sparkle will be mined by thousands of individual computers that will have to upgrade. This will force Sparkle to have a slower upgrade path than BitShares and ultimately Sparkle users will switch to BitShares to get the latest features.
BitShares has lost a large portion of our user community twice: once when we dropped mining and a second time when we introduced dilution. Sparkle provides a way to welcome these users back into the fold because Sparkle has a hard limit on sparks and because it uses mining.
Sparkle also has paid positions that will be able to fund development of infrastructure that will help BitShares. If sparkle funds wallets, block explorers, marketers, etc then that is all going to help BitShares and help grow our ecosystem.
Sparkle gives our community initial control over how development funds from paid workers are allocated. If we are wise we will hire initial workers that will fund projects that serve both our chains such as gateways and other open source items. If sparkle manages to "grow" and "kill" bitshares, well we learned a valuable lesson. Would you rather own a small stake in something big or a big stake in something small? Because we all have a stake in Sparkle we can view it as a hedge.
Mining has been approved by governments where as delegate positions are less clear. Having a version of BitShares based upon mining helps us achieve our real goals of a long-lasting solution by having some redundancy.
So rather than compete with Sparkle we should attempt to give it support and respect and welcome every Sparkle user to our forums and teach them in a friendly way the benefits of DPOS over POW without deriding Sparkle. Lets have a unified community built around extending the philosophy of freedom first and not divide ourselves on religious divides such as POW.
Some have critiqued Sparkle for having such a high dilution rate, but I contend that is necessary to grow a solid base of support. Mining does one thing right, it only allocates stake to those who are interested in a project early on. On day one Sparkle will have a low initial market cap, without high dilution there is little incentive for anyone to get on board such a fledgling system. The dilution rate falls off quickly. Bitcoin produced 5 million BTC the first year. The second year it had 100% inflation (50% dilution). If you look at the inflation rate from when bitcoin had 1 million until a year later when it had 6 million you are looking at a much higher dilution rate than Sparkle is planning.
Like all things in life, perspective matters. Proof of work isn't dead yet and therefore Sparkle may be the best marketing stunt the BitShares community could pull.
Just an opinion, but I say we fully back Sparkle as an onramp to reach new users that we couldn't reach directly with BitShares.
Thoughts?