Quote from: bytemaster on November 07, 2013, 05:45:00 pm

We will be releasing a lot of alpha software in the weeks/months ahead.  If you want to be an early tester with code that is very likely to break then follow this thread.  We will let you know of alpha releases that are not ready for general users.

Can I join in at this late time?

Certainly.  We'll make such opportunities highly visible here.

Only flicked throw this as I was pretty amazed at the audacity of JPMorgan, I guess they might become what itunes is to bittorrent if they market this correctly. I would have thought they'd have vested interests in the current electronic banking industry who wouldn't want to loose grip of the market they control but anyway...

The biggest, insurmountable, competitive advantage that Bitcoin has is that it is not JP Morgan.   

Is the Keyhotee project  still on track and to go live on New Years? Haven't been updated much about the progress of Keyhotee in the last few weeks.

We have a team of developers working on it intensely.  To accelerate things we have been feeding them liquid pizza at 78 degrees C with Mountain Dew delivered intravenously at 30 PSI.

Thanks Staff for answering my questions. So if Bitshares is just one split from Protoshares what will give Bitshares their great value, which I'm sure they will receive in comparison to other new alt-coins? By mining Bitshares you can easily convert them to bitusd and bitgold, is this what will make them valuable? I know its early in the game which is good but how would you go about predicting the value of future bitshares, when there could be so many future DAC popping up and ripping off the PTS chain?

BitShares gives you a bank and exchange that you can own, that can't betray you, that pays dividends / interest, and gives you the ability to store and trade your wealth in terms of a wide range of currencies and commodities all without leaving cryptographic Free Space and exposing yourself to the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.

Since its all open source code, everybody can build on everyone else's work.  So this won't be the discriminator. 
It will come down to the network effect and which developer(s) serve this community best over time.

... Ideas short of the obvious mark on forehead or hand,  I presume. Technology as useful as this risks being embraced and extended for evil. Azazel's punishment was for providing man with knowledge which enabled divisiveness. Each gift strengthened the individual; and through division,  conquest. Hopefully the situation is nowhere similar,  and this is only man acting to liberate from evil. The future has been foretold,  He will return with sword to defend as man is not so equipped.

To the topic at hand,  no form of key guard is immune. The best keys are for locks that are not known to exist. Fingerprints and dna are God's examples of unique identifiers. Is it possible to hide the lock rather than the key? The key is used in special ways to find locks that then offer a key challenge. A seed to the key begins the discovery. The seed is a simpler combination of information that forms a map into the key. I don't have the answer for you either,  but hopefully this will be inspiration for your journey. To you,  these would not seem as riddles.

Indeed.  "Admiral, if we go "by the book", like Lieutenant Saavik, hours could seem like days."

I would like to think about possible DAC's for development but i am not sure i understand the exact requirements and limitations. I realise that at this stage of development no one knows where this could end up but i basic terms am i right thinking a DAC needs.

1. Somthing with a changing but well recognised number/value in the material world.
2. People willing to bet on which way that number/value will change.

This definition is a good start for the small sub-class of DACs that implement prediction markets.

But DACs in general have a much broader definition. (Just look at the Wikipedia article on "Decentralized Autonomous Corporations" to see one deep thinking author's greatly expanded view.)

To us, even Bitcoin is a DAC whose business is efficient currency exchange.  Bitcoin and the Three Laws of Robotics lists all kinds of possibilities and characteristics.  Most of these have nothing to do with prediction markets.

To me, the essence is that a DAC has the characteristics of a corporation with its own currency and a public ledger into which it will store incorruptible information for a fee payable in its own currency.  That's general enough to implement a whole lot of  things we haven't even thought of yet.   

Maybe you can get more ideas by scrubbing your succinct definition against the more verbose one on our web site below.  Not every DAC needs all these characteristics, but the general definition should span this range of ideas at a minimum:

Distributed Autonomous Corporations (DACs) are a generalization of the concept of a crypto-currency where the currency is backed by the services its miners perform rather than a real-world commodity like gold, oil, or, ahem, thin air.  If we can barter for goods and services, why can’t we back currencies with goods or services?

DACs may be simultaneously viewed as crypto-currencies and unmanned businesses. As businesses, they perform services intended to be valuable to their customers.  Such services might include money transmission (Bitcoin), asset trading (BitShares), domain name services (DomainShares), or a thousand other business models sure to emerge as people realize that DACs are not mere “altcoins”.

DACs pay for the services they need (like computer resources and bandwidth) with shares of their own company “stock”.  They charge for their services using those same shares. Finally, they transfer all profits they earn to their shareholders denominated in those same shares.  To the extent that their services are in demand, those same shares will be in demand. Just like a brick and mortar and flesh and blood company.

To the outside world a DAC is nothing but a crypto-currency backed by the value of the services it provides.   But as owners of shares in a DAC, you may be entitled to a share of the profits that DAC earns from providing those services.  Every DAC will have its own terms and conditions.  You can always choose to view your DAC shares polymorphically – either as spendable coins or as shares in a profitable, perhaps dividend-paying business.  Just like light can be viewed as both a particle and a wave.

We'd love to hear other attempts at a 1-paragraph criterion for DACness.

Quote from: Stan on December 07, 2013, 03:47:58 pm

The value of a protochain is not based on how the shares come into existence, its what the shares are good for.  In this case, its the potential, quality and performance of the company or companies behind it.

Invictus will always support PTS so that sets a value floor based on Invictus' track record.  Newcomers will have to decide whether it's better for them to join the PTS freight train or launch their own.  If lots of newcomers join some other freight train, it could develop into something people want to own more. 

Such is the nature of free markets.  Such is the benefit of competition.  May the best DACs (and DACframers) win!

What if, after Invictus has shown the way, other companies does the same thing and eat your lunch? You can't patent your mode of operations. Other companies could do better than you exactly because it's a free market. Holders of your PTS may as well hold other Invictus-alike company's PTS.

We will invest in whoever we think has the best product while we are building on top of her improvements to our improvements to his improvements. With free, open source software there's no such thing as building a lead and sitting on it. Having competitors to keep the pendulum swinging means a healthy market with lots of investment opportunities for everybody.

From the author of The Postman, esteemed Kevin Costner film
http://davidbrin.wordpress.com/2013/12/06/bitcoin-and-other-dacs-a-new-cyber-lifeform/

== Will online distributed “robot” corporations dominate the economy? ==

Distributed-Autonomous-CorporationsIn fact, Bitcoin is only the best-known and most widely used example of a wider class of system. So let me link you now to a very interesting… and perhaps necessary… reading for those who would like to have a Big Picture look at the new ecosystem of autonomous networked entities online.

These Distributed Autonomous Corporations – as named by Stan Larimer of Invictus Innovations — dwell in the separate computers of thousands of individuals and groups who independently decide to run — or update — host software for the system, allowing it to “live.”  Like stockholders in a company, or customers, they thus vote for it to exist, by using it and providing it with an array of distributed homes.

The rapid evolution of these DACs cause Larimer to opine that we appear to be heading toward a realm that automatically and organically invokes Isaac Asimov. That this is the way robots have truly arrived.  And they need laws. And “nature” will be pretty much compelled to provide them.

Larimer foresees independent software-residing and internet spanning entities that are “corporate” in that they have a semblance of motivation and life, they thrive when they attract customers based on high reputation, and they defend their existence.  Unlike standard corporations, however, a healthy DAC soon becomes independent of human control EXCEPT the market need to keep attracting and satisfying customers. No other human parameter can interfere, he claims.

Bitcoin-RoboticsIn “Bitcoin and the Three Laws of Robotics,” Larimer attempts to show how a set of Generally Stable Attractor States (my terminology here), will make it likely for these DAC’s to stay autonomous and healthy in a market ecosystem that naturally and organically tends toward synergies similar to the renowned Asimovian laws (that I channeled and dissected in my novel, FOUNDATION’S TRIUMPH).

Accelerando_(book_cover)Indeed, Charles Stross’ Accelerando, popularises this concept of autonomous economic legal entities, demonstrating in accessible ways this concept as one logical set of ends.

On the other hand, this market-home model of distributed markets that are out of human supervision has a scary side, since there may be a critical mass of humans willing to provide networked home bases for any kind of activity, including bazaars for evil, like hiring assassins. Indeed, the last vestige of human control… customers and members setting up virtual homes in distributed computers… may seem quaint when we approach the cloud-like cyber world forecast by William Gibson and Vernor Vinge, way back in the 1980s.

Without any doubt, Larimer’s incantation and prediction is fascinating, even persuasive…

… until we recall that it is still an incantation and a polemic. A just-so story, like countless we have been told about markets, like Supply Side “economics,” that just ain’t necessarily so.

Me? I think parallels for these new software  forms are found in biology, all right.  But not in the leap from single cell to multi-cellular life. The true fundamentals span all of that, going back to life’s very beginning — predation, parasitism and so on.

Life, for most of its eras, never saw a lick of cooperation or genuine, deal-making quid pro quo, but rather ferocity, voracity and ruthless taking-advantage. These basic drives and successful methods have a billion years more precedent than the much more recent — and demonstrably unstable — regime of human-made markets, corporations and libertarian conceptions of fair exchange.

Khan-BitcoinShow me the benign “market” of voluntarily-exchanged goods and services that evolved organically in the Cambrian! Or Devonian, or Permian, or Cretaceous. It might have happened on other worlds! It might have happened here – letting animal species trade in positive sum games – that is, it might have, had the market state of quid-pro-quo been as automatically compelling in the real world as Mr. Larimer implies, in breathless enthusiasm. Just as Karl Marx and Murray Rothbard and other transcendentalist logicians urged us to believe in their if-therefor incantations.

But biology did not spontaneously evolve or create quid-pro-quo markets. Although there certainly have been symbiotic relationships — e.g. between plants and pollinators — these arose amid death and exploitation and almost never involved the kinds of knowing reciprocity that Larimer describes as happening automatically with his beloved DACs.

Elsewhere I describe how close we may be to quasi intelligent information systems that grow spontaneously and unsupervised, bursting onto the scene of artificial intelligence from a wholly unexpected direction… programmed with exactly this age-old voracity, with parasitism lying at its newborn heart. A scenario motivated by short-sighted, human greed and one that we allow to play out, at our great peril.

Pain, exploitation and death were the attractor states for a billion years.  Mr. Larimer and other cyber transcendentalists ought to bear it in mind.

Brilliantly written!    All metaphors have their limits, but I'll still take my chances with an DAC whose engineered sense of honor I can inspect in open source code over all those products of "evolution" whose degree of incorruptibility has been well established over the millennia of recorded human history.