Would anyone else be interested in a "privacy-first" Bitshares fork?   As I see it, privacy oriented features have languished with Bitshares.  I'm not sure there's much desire on the part of the current community to support better privacy protections.  Given Daniel Larimer's recent pronouncements, I don't expect proper privacy protections with EOS either.    Therefore, a privacy-centric fork might be the best path forward. 

Here's some of the features I'd like:

1.  Monero-level privacy protections:  sender, receiver, amount, IP address.
2.  All transactions private by default. (Like Monero)
3.  Privacy-centric communication channels (such as Riot.im).
4.  Regularly scheduled hardforks (every 6 months). 
5.  100 trillion total supply with tail emission (0.5%/year).  (100 trillion USD is roughly equivalent to the global broad money supply, which includes coins, banknotes, money market accounts, savings, checking). 
6.  Daily Dutch auctions for the first 10 years (to insure a widespread, fair distribution).   Similar to EOS token distribution, but extended over 10 years instead of 1 year. 
7.  10% of the total supply reserved for investors, development team, marketing, governance, testing, lobbying (similar to Zcash)
8.  Governance by a non-profit foundation  (similar to Zcash Foundation)
9.  All code open source, under same license as Bitshares (MIT)
10.  Share drop to existing Bitshares owners
11.  Steempower-like token which give long-term HODL'ers greater influence over the governance of the ecosystem.
12.  Fee Backed Assets fully implemented
13.  Social policy bond like bounty system:  https://www.socialgoals.com

I'm aware of the following forums: 

BitsharesDEX Telegram (daytrading chatter)
Bitsharestalk.org (general discussion)
Bitshares reddit (general discussion)
Bitshares github (code repository, bug reports)

However, there doesn't seem to be a public forum intended primarily for technical discussion for developers, such as a Bitshares Slack channel.   Does such a thing exist yet?  If so, could someone point it out to me? 

Thanks in advance for any assistance!

On the OpenBazaar subreddit, I I recently suggested that Bitshares would make a good replacement for Bitcoin within OpenBazaar.  You can read my proposal to them below.

The advantage for Bitshares would be to see potentially much greater demand for Bitshares, thereby driving up the price.  The OpenBazaar Foundation is well-funded, and seems to have a vision that aligns with Bitshares (a private, borderless, decentralized world of trade, open to everyone,  and free of the rentseekers who plague much of the fiat financial markets). 

1)  Is there support within the Bitshares community for funding a Fee Backed Asset (let's call it OBI, for "Open Bazaar Integration") to fund the development costs of replacing Bitcoin with Bitshares in the OpenBazaar ecosystem?

2) As I'm envisioning it, once implemented, Open Bazaar users would be offered a choice to price their goods and conduct payments with  bitUSD (or any other bitAsset).  If they chose bitUSD, then they would be charged a fee (for the sake of argument, let's say it was 1%).  75% of the money would go to the OBI token holders, and 25% would go to the Bitshares network.   

Thoughts?  Does this seem like a reasonable course of action?

Here's the proposal I made on the OpenBazaar subreddit:   

Right now, Openbazaar faces several problems as a result of its reliance on Bitcoin:

* Slow confirmation times.  Confirmations can take days or never complete at all.   
* Expensive network fees.  Network fees often cost more than the cost of the item. 
* Wildly fluctuating prices.  As  I write this (2017-12-22) Bitcoin dropped in price >20% over the last 24 hours.

Bitshares / bitUSD can solve all of those problems.  Bitshares offers:

* nearly instantaneous confirmations (<3 seconds)
* trading fees under $0.20/trade
* price-stability (as stable as the dollar)

These are no white paper fantasies; Bitshares is proven technology.  The current iteration was launched in November, 2014 and has been in continuous operation ever since. 

Here's a brief description of some of the features Bitshares offers:

* Bitshares is similar to ethereum, in that it is the "base" currency, upon which a bunch of other token can be created.  Unlike ethereum--which aims to be a general purpose computer--Bitshares specializes in financial instruments. 

* For example, Bitshares offers Smartcoins.  [Smartcoins are tokens whose price is pegged to a national currency](
https://bitshares.org/technology/price-stable-cryptocurrencies/) (or any asset with a regular, reliable feed).   For example, bitUSD, bitCNY, and bitEuro track the US dollar, the Chinese yuan, and the Euro respectively.  As of this writing, the two most popular Smartcoins are bitCNY and bitUSD; there are 330 million bitCNY in circulation, with a 24 Hr trading volume of 390 M, and 22 million bitUSD in circulation with a 24 hour trading volume of 17 M.

* Smartcoins are backed by Bitshares itself as collateral.  For example, each bitUSD is backed by at least $1.75 worth of Bitshares.  Smartcoins can thus be created by the network itself, without any interface to the legacy fiat system.  As a result,  Smartcoins offer the same benefits as other cryptocurrencies (irreversibility, decentralization, censorship-resistance), but track the price of the pegged currency.   (Note that there's some fluctuation up or down, due to how the peg works.) 

* Smartcoins have three big advantages relative to other cryptocurrencies.  First, they allow people to easily price their goods in their national currency.  Second, Smartcoins tend to be much less volatile than other cryptocurrencies.   This allows both vendors and their customers to better plan for the future, write contracts, and do anything else that requires planning.  Third, they save money, since people can don't have to immediately convert to back and forth between fiat to avoid price volatility.

* Bitshares also offers a built-in decentralized currency exchange; you can trade any of the Smartcoins, User Issued Assets, or other Bitshares based assets (bitAssets), without being forced to hand over invasive personal information, or giving anyone your private keys.  Anyone can become either a buyer and seller on the exchange. 

* Trades on the Bitshares are fast.  In testing, the Bitshares network has supported [transaction speeds as high as 100,000 transactions per second (TPS)](https://bitshares.org/blog/2015/06/08/measuring-performance/), and has supported speeds as high as 8000 TPS in production. By comparison, Bitcoin and Ethereum support under 10 and 20 TPS respectively.  The Visa network supports 45,000 TPS. 

* Fees  on the Bitshares exchange are [very inexpensive](https://cryptofresh.com/fees?asset=USD).  As of this writing, trading fees are less than $0.20/trade. 

For the reasons above, Bitshares is a good fit for OpenBazaar, and integrating it would solve several problems that OpenBazaar is currently facing.  Integrating Bitshares and other bitAssets should also be relatively easy, as Bitshares code was derived from the Bitcoin code base.   

It's a longshot, I know, but I really like the comments of "Howard" on this article:

http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/bitusd/

He's apparently an attorney by profession.  Anyone know how to get in touch with him?