I think this is quite huge:
https://followmyvote.com/parallel-presidential-election-2016/

Came in todays newsletter

Nice proof of concept, nice demo, but how does it bring money in to fund new development of FMV?

Also I don't know why the focus is on political elections. Decision making in the more general sense is a far more profitable market and with less regulatory or political barriers.

Non-profits or even unions could use online voting.

Bitshares has great built in exchange . We should be more open for new customers, especially those who cannot find help or proper service in other places.

A lot of exchanges has "Request new Coin" mechanism (some of them are automated):
https://poloniex.com/coinRequest
https://bittrex.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/202583854
https://c-cex.com/?id=vote
https://www.cryptsy.com/coinvotes
...

We should strive to do better than that.
1) We should make it fun.
2) We should add prediction markets (let people guess which coin will make it next).
3) We should add chance, frequent rewards, for the people who can correctly guess which coin will get the most votes in the next election cycle for example.
4) We should develop ways to let coin creators who pre-mine to lock up a certain dollar amount value of their token in order to get on the exchange. This way coins which don't have much of a market cap won't make it.
5) We should offer some sort of premium services for issuers, coin creators, DAC creators, who want favorable treatment in certain areas.

One way to monetize would be to simple let ads display in the interface. I don't know why Bitshares isn't monetizing ad space but it should. The profit from this should either go to the users who view the ads as some sort of interest, or it should be burned.

Doing that would allow an attention economy to be born and it would monetize the attention real estate of the GUI. Of course the coin makers would have to pay for this premium service, they would have to pay for our attention. The result is we'd be able to get people off of the forum and onto perhaps a more decentralized communication platform.

I requested to the developers to put in a troll box but so far they haven't listened to me on that. I would also hope they monetize the attention real estate because it's an optional source of income which is being put to waste. It of course should be opt-out for people who don't want ads, but those people should not get the income stream.

I am about to watch the video, but from my reading of the wiki I am highly skeptical of the practicality of the "Semantic Web". Besides the need to prove the facts asserted, some "certification authority" needs to verify the claims made,  a problem in itself. An interesting experiment would be to see if the wikipedia database could be processed to produce a semantic web representation. It may also be impractical for the reasons stated in the wiki:

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While learning the basics of HTML is relatively straightforward, learning a knowledge representation language or tool requires the author to learn about the representation's methods of abstraction and their effect on reasoning. For example, understanding the class-instance relationship, or the superclass-subclass relationship, is more than understanding that one concept is a “type of” another concept. […] These abstractions are taught to computer scientists generally and knowledge engineers specifically but do not match the similar natural language meaning of being a "type of" something. Effective use of such a formal representation requires the author to become a skilled knowledge engineer in addition to any other skills required by the domain. […] Once one has learned a formal representation language, it is still often much more effort to express ideas in that representation than in a less formal representation […]. Indeed, this is a form of programming based on the declaration of semantic data and requires an understanding of how reasoning algorithms will interpret the authored structures.

You're not considering the potential of a semantic web, with value transfer, with blockchains. It's literally going to change life as we know it when we combine these aspects.

A semantic web is capable of evolving into a smart web. Smart in the sense that it can take advantage of machine intelligence. Then you have stuff like dbPedia, the Internet of Things, the Blockchain, and you can build distributed computing into the semantic web.

At this time it might sound alien or not make sense, but you wait and see if I was right. The semantic blockchain web is what I'm predicting.

 

Quote from: onceuponatime on November 24, 2015, 12:17:29 am

Quote from: NotSmart on November 23, 2015, 11:40:48 pm

Quote from: onceuponatime on November 23, 2015, 11:32:26 pm

Quote from: bytemaster on November 23, 2015, 11:21:56 pm

Quote from: tonyk on November 23, 2015, 11:07:29 pm

I really do not get 'the no lifetime fees' crowd.

What is up with you people? Someone making too much money, according to you?

If yes go pay it yourselves, or get up and organize it as a UIA funding that you can buy into...


PS
And keep in mind that I say that while I have only 3 prime suspects for this secret investor - CNX being one of those.

CNX is not one of them, nor is it CCEDK nor Bunker.   In other words, there is no slight of hand here, I just wanted to air the idea without involving them.  Would the mystery investor please speak up if you are ok discussing this publicly?

I approached Stan and Dan with the thought of my paying CNX $45,000 to get the Stealth work funded. This is a huge chunk of my lifetime savings, and it is a huge risk for me to be taking. However, I am in total harmony with Bytemaster's philosophy and goals as far as I understand them and want this project to succeed, and to succeed .

I find that a lot of community members are expecting others to do the work needed to get this project rolling for free or for less than market rates. And out and out jealousy rearing its ugly head in some comments today.

Any reason you prefer stealth transfer over bond or prediction market? Is it because you think it is more important or you feel that the developers are intent on doing this first?

Will you be open to a crowd funding where you dont have to put up the whole $45,000?

Only curious, dont attribute anything to my questions.

I am all in favor of bond and prediction markets. My thinking was that if I pay for the stealth transfer myself, then the other funds can be used for those. With a $45,000 up front cash infusion CNX would have the stability and wherewithall to expand and produce more and more quickly.

Crowdfunding would be great, but I am a technically challenged person and am still grappling with the 2.0 release which I have only just recently gotten set up. I suppose that I could try to hire Cryptonomex to take care of that for me (Stan?).

I approached Stan and Dan with the thought that I fund the whole Stealth Worker proposal for $45,000to to get CNX working on it and get the ball rolling. This was for several reasons, among them that Dan stated that he thought that it could be a valuable boost to our ecosystem, and also that I personally am uncomfortable with current levels of privacy.

Stan and I tossed the idea back and forth a couple of times with Stan actually seeing the opportunities for entrpreneurs much faster and more thoroughly than me. He came up with the analogy of building a parking garage attached to someone else's mall.  And then Bytemaster put it out here in the forum for public discussion.

I would gladly be responsible for less than the full $45,000 if others want to join in.
For me to put up $45,000 in an effort to get BitShares out of the doldrums and kickstarted is a huge risk. IT REPRESENTS THE MAJORITY OF MY LIFE SAVINGS. The risks are huge. But I believe in what we are attempting to do with BitShares, and I am trying to do everything in my power and within my limited skill set to make BitShares a success as a way to safeguard life liberty and property in face of the enormous economic disruptions that are headed our way as the legacy financial system reaps what it has sown.

While this might benefit my BTS investment...

As a general rule, unless you are under 30 and have a very secure profession, I would advise against risking the majority of your life savings on any investment.

In this calculator http://www.albionresearch.com/kelly/ input your savings under bankroll and input what you think your return and odds of being successful are.

Quote

This is the same question that a business owner, investor, or speculator has to ask themself: what proportion of my capital should I stake on a risky venture?

This will return the upper bound/maximum you should mathematically  risk & most would reccomend much lower.

Quote

Many investors including Warren Buffett[8] and Bill Gross[9] use Kelly methods.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_criterion

Warren Buffet is already rich. Poor people should not invest like him if they want to ever get rich.

Getting rich requires you take big risks. Odds are you'll never get rich if you don't risk your life savings trying. Not saying everyone wants to gamble like that but we don't want to discourage risk taking or else why would anyone start a business at all?

In a UIA you distribute the risks but you socialize the rewards. On the other hand centralized risk should produce centralized rewards unless the risk taker decides they want to socialize the rewards through some mechanism. In any case, the UIA or an individual can fund it and get the rewards.

Dilution in my opinion isn't worth it for this and most people don't want to wait 6 months or a year for it.

Quote from: JonnyBitcoin on November 23, 2015, 07:58:38 pm

But there has to be an end date so that bts share holders can make money from it in the future.

But that's the beauty of it -- BTS shareholders do profit from it, by getting exponentially improved features and a flood of new users who are drawn to BTS by the new features. So I'm also in the lifetime revenue camp; no end date necessary. It really does seem to be win-win-win all around, and I feel this could prove to be the most exciting BTS development in a long while.

I'm in the eternal revenue camp. If the Bitshares community is willing to fund a worker proposal then after the initial ROI is made by the private feature then the Bitshares community can do their own implementation funded by dilution.

I don't see why people who didn't put any money up should have a profit share. Why?

On the other hand if its just a GUI feature then it's not eternal, there can be other GUIs. Multiple implementations, but until you are ready to pay for those implementations via dilution you should let them have eternal royalties.

I really like the idea of people buying shares in features and getting dividends through lifetime fees. If we were to automate the creation of shares for a proposal like this one, the person/people investing the money or work-hours would own all of them, and if they'd like, they could go public to make some of their money back by selling shares. I think the ability to trade the ownership of the fees could help us with the centralization issue here, as well as give us a way to measure the profitability of different features. I guess it could be argued this could be done with the existing framework but I still like the idea of having it right on the blockchain.

Someone called it "Featureshares". Not a bad idea for marketing purposes.

I remember someone mentioning this solution wasn't as secure as Monero rings.  Is this something that would be implemented and as someone mentioned above, if we change up the stealth implementation down the road, how would it effect the payout?

Myself, Bytemaster and many others have determined it's more secure. The point is practical security not theoretical security, and in terms of practical security it's very secure even if you can find some theoretically more secure alternative. A lot of the time something which is theoretically secure is only secure on paper and no implementation of it can live up to the academic literature or math.  It's also possible people confuse this with the previous method used in Bitshares 1.0 because of the name.

My understanding of the Stealth Transfers is that it combines stealth transactions with confidentiality, where the amounts are encrypted along with the sender and receiver. Bytemaster might know the code and terminology a bit better than me but conceptually if you don't know the amounts, and you don't know the sender or receiver, it's invisible.

Maybe for marketing we might want to call it "invisible transactions" instead of stealth transfers.

Sounds great! As I said in the earlier stealth transfer worker topic, people who appreciate privacy are great early adopters for Bitshares. I didn't expect anything like this, but this is a nice example of a person who is willing to put his own skin in the game. Yeah, we really need these kind of people as our early adopters.

Quote from: Riverhead on November 23, 2015, 03:48:25 pm

What if they took 80% of the fees until they'd recouped, for example, $60k worth of BTS - currently about 18 - 20 million shares. That's a 33% ROI - more if the price of BTS goes up during the payback phase.

Feature funding for profit makes sense. Lifetime royalties not so much.

Haven't thought this over yet, but this might be a good counterproposal. Lifetime royalties do not sound very good idea.

Quote from: luckybit on November 23, 2015, 04:02:51 pm

It's really interesting. It's a privatized feature. That is a first because I don't recall seeing that happen before or if it has it's very rare. Maybe once or twice Bitcoin has done something like this but it's unusual for a private investor to fund a new feature, but if we can standardize the process, maybe we can use this process over and over again and let people suggest new features, crowd fund them privately, and then pay up front to have it implemented while pocketing the fees to reward investors in the private crowd fund.

Absolutely, this is great idea!

Quote from: luckybit on November 23, 2015, 04:05:45 pm

I say give them 100% of the fees indefinitely. If they funded it then they deserve 100% of the fees indefinitely unless they decide they don't want the fees and in that case burn the fees.

Bitshares is offering a platform for this feature so of course it should benefit from it too. Transactions use resources of the blockchain and it has to be compensated.

Bitshares benefits because we'd get a new UI for a feature. If we really want we can use the Cli so we don't actually need this. This is why I would say let them have 100% of the profit until someone decides to make a community version. Honestly I think private features is not a bad thing for stuff like this.

I don' t care who gets the transaction fees to stealth transfers. I don't think it's going to be a lot of money but even if it is, it's also a lot of risk to take. Whoever is willing to take that risk at this time in my opinion deserves 100% of the profit because in my opinion profit should reflect the risk.

Other low risk features might not need such a high reward but this is not a low risk feature. The investors don't know if this feature will be used. The investors don't know if they'll get their ROI. The investors don't know if there will be a crackdown on the feature itself by the EU, or how the feature will be used.

It's a controversial feature, it's a risky time to implement it, but because of that it should be the maximum reward for the person or group willing to stick their neck out there. This is why I would say give 100% of the fees to them.

In the future with the bond market or prediction markets we could use a UIA and formally crowdfund the feature if the worker proposal process fails. This allows us to get what we want without having to deal with the gatekeepers if the gatekeepers are either too afraid, or if the feature is controversial, or if there just isn't enough money to do it any other way.