What if gateways passed on part of their delegate pay to their customers as some kind of bonus, or interest? Would there be any economic incentive to do this? Would there be any economic incentive to not hire and/or fire gateways that do this? Would this be a good or bad or neutral thing for BTS holders?

Yes, that's the way to do it, if done at all.

Offer the gateway delegate pay on the condition they use it give discounts to users to make use of their new BitShares features, for a limited time, such as 1 year.

Should only be done for really big serious gateways such as bitstamp or coinbase.  Once you got a couple of major gateways on board smaller sites will want to do it too for free.

The problem is ensuring the gateway keeps the delegate position.  If there was a way to 'lock in' a vote for certain time period then deals like this could be made a lot more easily.

Found this on r/bitcoin
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2qm6rd/a_report_about_how_blockchain_technology_might/

Summary version:
http://www.longfinance.net/images/Chain_Of_A_Lifetime_executive_summary_December2014.pdf

Any thoughts on this?

Absolutely, having them become gateways and/or accepting a bitasset as direct payment would be a great partnership.   

Quote from: toast on December 28, 2014, 03:18:53 am

I don't think we need a dedicated recruitment delegate. The real problem with finding talent is that we can't offer them a real job anymore! Delegate positions don't cut it and I3 is out of money. We can only do contract work where a payroll delegate can set aside a $$ value.

(I'm happy to continue recruiting - my recruitment history includes vikram, agent86, drltc, and now zach lym for a trial).

First, thank you for your continued push to recruit talent. Kick ass Toast. The second part is inconsistent from what I heard in BM's latest mumble.

-recruitment is our top priority
-we are only using 10 percent of budget
- we need additional development talent
- gateway engineers are needed immediately
-if you need more than 1 delegate, propose it

 

How about a recruitment.toast delegate to collect funds ready to spend on hiring?  Or a bunch of them, say 3-5 delegates just collecting BTS for easy hiring.  If becoming a delegate is the only option, it limits growth as not every suitable dev will want to do that.  Best to encourage devs to become delegates, but also have a fund for just hiring to get exactly what is needed done.  Maximise growth in both directions.  Riverhead talked about a 'projects' delegate, ready to pay for various development projects.  Imo we need trusted + capable people collecting funds (holding them in BTS or bitUSD) so that there's a budget ready to spend.  Not all the delegates of course as that would be too much centralisation, but at least a few more would be fine.

If you think the issues with BTS snapshots are complicated now just wait until things really get rolling.

Let's say BTS has a multi billion dollar market cap, a thousand UIAs, hundreds of millions of BTS locked up in collateral and cold storage, institutional investors owning large stakes in BTS, etc.

Now something like PLAY or MUSIC comes along and wants to AirDrop to an engaged crypto community. Is BTS the best answer? I think it'd be an absolute nightmare.

I'm trying to look at this and find which is really the best snapshot token. 

Non-technical me (as you know:p) doesn't know how hard it will be to just snapshot all the BTS in collateral and cold storage.  Is that a big undertaking?  Not sure that UIAs would effect it.  The other side effect of BTS being a snapshot token is that people who only want to buy a snapshot token have to buy the much more expensive BTS, which they might not want to do.

The main problem I see with PTS is it's so easily manipulated.  A price increase from dropping on BTS will be much smaller so it's harder for the developer to pump up the price with the project announcement.  The bigger the market cap of the receiver the less powerful the insider info about the drop is, so that's an objective plus for BTS. 

Other potential pluses for BTS are the high market cap which could potentially be made use of by a DAC which snapshotted it heavily enough to win voters approval.  e.g.  A BTS delegate could fund the new DAC if it dropped heavily on BTS.  Also the BTS community is very large and very active.

Active voters are needed for DPOS to succeed.  Does anyone know the difference between the levels of voter activity in BTS vs PTS?  Higher voter activity is great argument to receive a sharedrop.  BTS must have far higher numbers of individual voters as there are considerably more active users.  It's possible PTS will still have a high percentage of active stake, but it will be owned by far fewer people I would think, which is what matters for a DPOS chain looking for active individual voters to sharedrop on.

With such a weak social consensus, if any, still existing, on what 3rd parties should do, there's no safe way to invest in all future DACs.   Buying PTS and hoping for a stake is a gamble if there's no solid social consensus - which no one has the power to declare.  If there is disagreement then the consensus is gone, sadly, or not depending on your position.

Ironically if PTS hadn't been revived there would probably be a consensus that BTS should be snapshotted as there would be nothing to dispute.

So now people who want to invest in all future (bitshares-toolkit) DACs, there is no clear path.  All that's left is fighting between BTS and PTS.  How can the two be brought out of conflict so there is no competition for future 3rd party sharedrops?

Ok, I'll take people's word that DVS will be basically worthless.  At least that mind-change has been accomplished.   

PTS+AGS are a sensitive topic because BTS haemorrhaged shares in order to be free of any obligations to them. 

Some including me thought the new PTS was 'unofficial', and would probably not receive much in the way of sharedrops from anyone.  I thought 'maybe its dead, people aren't really going to use it now the social consensus has been all messed up'.  I presumed BTS would be the new main sharedrop target if any occurred.  PTS does compete with BTS as a sharedrop target.  Core devs giving PTS anything, even complete junk, matters (a little) because it being from them legitimises the new PTS as a sharedrop target.  It's extending the PTS salespitch, 'so far we've recieved' etc.  It's plugging PTS back into the system and does feel like it would increase the chances of PTS getting real sharedrops in the future.  Splitting it evenly between the 3 may become standard procedure, or 100% BTS could become the norm, as lead by the lead devs example.  The norm (or social consensus) is being set now, perpetually.  In the future BTS devs should always recommend drops on only BTS with no mention of any others, it's a little harder to do that now having offered an empty hand to PTS to pull them back up from a cliff face.  It may not have cost BTS anything now, but it's worth something to PTS as it endorses future sharedrops on them, which costs BTS in the future.

There's also the issue of BitShares supporting PTS more generally, it's on the forum, it still has the BitShares name, it complicates the BitShares message, it would be better for BTS if it disappeared completely.  So please don't feed it.

PTS could inflate their supply and sharedrop PTS on BTS lol, then we're all included in everything. :p

Quote from: julian1 on December 25, 2014, 09:27:46 pm

Quote

Quote

Would you be angry if the devs coordinated a massive dump to test out undercollateralization?
DON'T HOLD DEVSHARES!

Would you be angry if the devs discovered and exploited a bug in DVS which permanently brought down the network and forced a reset?
DON'T HOLD DEVSHARES!

Would you be angry if the devs reset the network and allocated 100% to Vikram?
DON'T HOLD DEVSHARES!

The counter argument is that, devshares will be the platform that gets exposed to the best new Bitshares features first (if I understand the intention of a release-candidate/test platform correctly). 

Someone outside the community who hears about some new feature development in a public press-release for example, and wants to get involved, is going to be told that it's not in Bitshares BTS yet but is in devshares.

The first thing they will want to know is how to acquire devshares.
 
 Also, If Bitshares' developers are paid out of BTS contributions through delegate inflation, then it should be BTS holders that are the recipient of sharedrops irrespective of the perceived value. Dropping to PTS gives PTS a lot symbolic legitimacy when BTS holders already paid to acquire them, at least that seems to be the common understanding.

Yeah I would be worried if DVS is traded that it could be a competitor. My worst case scenario is something like...

DVS -  The Trojan Horse

- The sharedrop will make DVS independent of BTS & seem well distributed.
- Key BTS developers will buy it up after it's purposely made pretty worthless at first.
- The result is you now have a traded DAC that looks well distributed, isn't beholden to BTS and all the key BTS talent has a much larger % stake in.
- Will all the BTS development talent be incentivised to turn DVS into something more over time at the expense of, but while being salaried by BTS? 

Crazy I know 

Exactly, it's scenarios like this being possible that makes the distribution not ok.  It might turn out to be almost worthless, or something like this could happen.  A chain with lots of developers working on it each with large stakes is a recipe for a competitor.  BTS dev time is going in to it, it's BTS funded, so BTS should receive it, just to make sure that base is covered and to set a precedent of BTS loyalty from its own devs.

If such a huge proportion are going to be given away, wouldn't it be better to drop on Ethereum, or github users?  That would bring in more new developer interest than PTS/AGS.  Or give DVS away as bounties and prizes for completing tasks for BitShares.  There's lots of great ways 66% of DVS could be given away.  Dropping on chains which are already incentivised by the BTS drop is a waste, and in this case stirs up old problems.  I would favour 100% BTS drop, or majority BTS combined with some creative community-sourced ideas on drop targets.