This is an interim status report for delegate.verbaltech. If you review this thread you will see that on July 24
th I announced that my former delegate partner, gentso, has abandoned his role as business delegate, leaving me to determine what course of action I should take regarding the disposition of this delegate.
I created a
separate thread to poll the community and get input on how to redirect gentso's 85% portion of the delegate pay. I tried to provide a wide array of options, however the results did not achieve a clear cut consensus, and basically it boiled down to either burning the 85% or redirecting them to a mixture of recipients. You can judge the poll results in that thread for yourself.
Many contributed to that poll thread, and near the end of the discussion it was donkeypong that suggested it was more about finding a partner than where to redirect funds. Ironically, it was DataSecurityNode that suggested a partnership between myself and Nicholas Wack of
btstools.digitalgaia. I have worked with wackou in the past on extending his most excellent bts_tools python code, by helping him to refine the documentation for it and authoring a payroll plugin to distribute delegate pay to multiple recipient addresses on a percentage basis. It is with this in mind that I propose a new mission for delegate.verbaltech, working with wackou to strengthen the delegate infrastructure and improving overall reliability and robustness of the decentralized, worldwide BitShares network.
I have contacted Nicholas and we are both very enthusiastic about a partnership
between delegate.verbaltech and btstools.digitalgaia
Nicholas (wackou in the forums) is currently traveling and has limited Internet availability, so this report is of my own making. When he returns from his travels it is my intention to solicit his input to create a formal proposal for our partnership, centered mostly around the goals he has expressed in his original proposal to continue the development of bts tools and extend the backbone architecture he has described in detail. He suggested a 50 / 50 split of delegate.verbaltech funds between us, however I believe that a 70 / 30 split is more appropriate, with 70% being redirected to btstools.digitalgaia and 30% retained by delegate.verbaltech. Essentially this will result in a reversal of the delegate pay percentages of our 2 delegates, since currently delegate.verbaltech is a 100% pay delegate and btstools.digitalgaia is a 30% delegate.
This proposed partnership will result in btstools.digitalgaia getting 100% and
delegate.verbaltech getting 30% to carry out our combined mission.
I will split my 30% portion between: 1) paying the fees for VPS systems to provide reliable, redundant operation of the delegate.verbaltech node as well as additional seed nodes and support for the backbone network architecture which wackou and I feel is required, 2) paying for separate VPS servers to help with the testing of witness nodes for BitShares 2.0 (graphene) and 3) the remainder as a labor fee to compensate for the time to perform this work and continue the effort of writing The BitShares Saga book series.
I have already begun to establish several new VPS accounts around the world (in the USA, Germany and Australia) for graphene testing, to run delegate.verbaltech and a backup VPS for failover of delegate.verbaltech. 2 of these are 4GB KVM VPS servers and one is a 2GB OpenVZ server for graphene testing. Other systems will be added as deemed necessary by wackou and I. Many of you may have noticed the reliability of delegate.verbaltech increasing this week as I deployed the node to a new VPS. When gentso shut down our Digital Ocean VPS the reliability has hovered just below 95%. Since going to the new VPS, now located in Australia, reliability is increasing and the number of missed blocks has not gone up (it is sitting at 300 missed blocks right now). I find it interesting that the node averages between 60 and 80 network connections in Australia vs. 30 - 50 in Europe.
Lastly I want to thank all who have supported delegate.verbaltech and btstools.digitalgaia in the past and encourage you to continue that support as we move forward with our combined mission to extend the BitShares network to the far corners of the globe. Be on the lookout for a new formal proposal from our collaborative voice. Our goal is to serve the needs of the BitShares community through a strong alliance of technical skills and decades of software development experience, as well as spreading the word about BitShares through the publication of The BitShares Saga.