I think this deserves its own thread so I'm reposting my feelings on the merger and re-org here.
I see a complete reversal of strategy happening on this forum and, frankly, it is frightening. Some of us have abandoned the “open platform” model of the Bitshares Toolkit in favor of protectionism and centralization. Bytemaster is a smart dude, but the assumption that any innovative idea must have his blessing and must consume his limited resource is just plain wrong. Why should we sink or swim on the basis of a single DAC? The original vision of the Bitshares Toolkit was collaborative and open. 3rd party developers would be encouraged to fork the toolkit and to innovate. Now it seems that we’ve reverted to the very model that Dan campaigned against in the Bitcoin space - that one chain would eventually rule them all. What is the price of all this protectionism? Even if it were true that individual DACs would indirectly compete in the marketplace, why do we assume that this is some sort of a “failure”?
I understand that Dan himself, as an individual, cannot work on competing alternatives. That has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not to position the Toolkit as an open platform for innovation by 3rd party DACs. When I hear people calling for an end to PTS and AGS, it signals to me that we’ve abandoned this vision. Dan doesn’t need to personally develop each DAC, but I think he can do certain things to keep the platform open and to incentivize development by third parties. For example:
* Keep and promote PTS and AGS as sharedrop instruments for future DACs. (Thank you for the recent change of position on this.)
* Create a reasonable and voluntary divestment strategy for the Bitshares Trust to ensure that 3rd party DACs are incentivized to sharedrop for a fair and balanced distribution.
* Either contribute to, or promote the efforts of others who wish to separate the core DPOS code base from DAC-specific applications such as BTSX, DNS, and Vote. Separating the code base would go a long way towards incentivizing 3rd party development. Not only is this good practice from an engineering perspective, but it lowers the barrier to entry for the developer who has an idea for “the next great DAC”.
If a superior technology is built on the Toolkit, then as shareholders of AGS and PTS we would greatly benefit from it. Pushing 3rd party devs and DACs away from the platform will not prevent the existence of competing alternatives to BTS. More than likely, it will just ensure that those alternatives are built elsewhere and that we as a community do not benefit from them.