I think there is a conflict of interest with you releasing a BTS wallet that may have competitors but also controlling our main information vehicle - the forum. Do you agree?
Blockchain.info earns millions of dollars a year in revenue. Isn't a DAC's optimal strategy to support, promote and build a following for its own wallet or one that gives a good portion of future monetisation revenue to our developers and DAC?
We think it is a problem that we are creating BitShares products which in the long term potentially can become startups and at the same time are in charge of the forum. Keep in mind though that we purposefully took a very laissez faire approach to moderating. The mods did most of the moderation, we only intervened on a technical level and from time to time when a mod overstepped his boundaries.
I personally hope that sooner rather than later we'll be able to use some sort of user friendly decentralized forum. That might be the best long term solution for distributed projects.
I did not get your second question? Could you elaborate?
I too am also glad to see that you are open to dialog.
Can a user of the wallet approve 1 out of the 4-5 delegates or is it a all or none deal?
Also can you confirm that you have never received funding from I3 or individual users? Other then your forum pay of course.
Upfront 5 delegates are voted in but you can opt-out with a clearly defined field. Once you open the wallet you'll be able to unvote as many as you want.
We have received about 2k USD in BTC/PTS from Nikolai for the dotp2p website and two BitShares inforgraphics which are still in use today. We have received from Invictus a one time donation of 2k USD when we took over the forum from Amazon. Since then we did not ask for any more donations because it seemed to us we should not be sucking money out of the developers building BitShasres. For the past 6 months we have been running the forum out of our own pocket (Bitsapphire) including server cost, maintenance, and moderation.
So no, there is no forum pay, this is a loss business for us at the moment. We hoped that the community would vote one of our delegates in to offset some of our expenses, but because we are simply to busy working and don't have enough time doing PR for our delegate we were not able to keep the delegate position. We might have to add advertisements some time in 1-2 months to the forum if we don't find an alternative approach to funding the forum.