Here's a video summary of what happened in Texas this week...

https://vimeo.com/88479003

And a drop box link to download it:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/lzzib0ljl7bj2o3/u-iPCeHuR7

Is it possible to give out free copies of the client on a CD or DVD at the event as a gift to everyone? It's one way to get everyone to install it.

Additionally for marketing would it be possible to go the AOL route and send a CD to people's homes and/or have it included in magazines?

Please pass my ideas to Brian. If the money exists let's do it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=trueview-instream&v=j1cIubyXz7M

This is one of the best videos I've ever seen to advertise this sort of product. The presentation, music, voice, angles, this is for anyone who is going to be making videos. We need a video just like this styled as a demonstration.

What does everyone else think?

As everyone has probably discovered when they design a DAC that one of the hardest things to solve is how a DAC can hire someone to perform tasks that require human judgement.   Memory Coin 2.0 was the first attempt at such a concept where there were several positions for which the users could vote to hire specific roles.  As everyone quickly learned, this voting process was subject to manipulation. 

Since discovering the solution to hiring Insurance Adjusters for the Insurance DAC I have been thinking about how we can apply that process in a more general manner and thus open up the door to many more DACs.  For those of you who have not read about the Insurance DAC, let me review the problem:

1) We need an Insurance Adjuster to evaluate claims and decide upon a payout.
2) Claims may be private and most people do not have access to the information necessary to make a solid judgment. This rules out using a prediction market to establish the result.
3) If we were to select someone to have authority to payout claims, then how do we prevent complete fraud?  We want someone who will deny fraudulent claims, pay out fairly for legitimate claims, and not pay any more than necessary. 

To solve this problem I came up with the idea of using a prediction market (BitAsset) to set the upper limit on total outstanding payouts that may be authorized by the Insurance Adjustor at any one time, and I used a 30 day delay to give the market time to identify gross fraud and repeal the license and thus cancel any pending awards.   

This general idea can be used on a broader scale to have the DAC hire anyone to do anything.    So if a DAC needs to hire a software developer to maintain the software and fix bugs, then many different developers would have to 'interview' with the market and get enough support (market depth) for a BitAsset to be created that priced their salary.   The salary would be paid out of revenues (or via raising capital by the issuance of new shares).   The salary would be paid daily and with 30 day waiting period.  The salary rate would equals the lowest salary in the 30 days after the work was performed as represented by the BitAsset for that developer.   If the developer slacks off or acts in a way the market does not approve then his salary will go to 0.   

Here is the cool thing, anyone could apply for any job without having to define 'roles'.   Some jobs may become entire departments where the DAC hires the department heads and gives them a budget they are trusted with.   

With this design pattern we now have the means for a DAC to do literally anything because it has a way to interview, try, and they hire anyone for any job and even the ability to define new jobs as necessary without any centralized control.

Powerful ideas. What about the ability to have DACs contract out other DACs? Would this process allow for that as well?

Quote from: weiry on January 28, 2014, 03:31:05 am

I think that the logical response would be to recognize that people ought to be free to participate in whichever market they choose.

I'd guess that it's not condemned and criminalized immediately. The decentralized nature of the platform will take regulators longer to come to terms with. The US government would have shut down bitcoin long ago if they could simply just condemn and criminalize it.

Given that the platform is fraud proof I think they'll initially leave it alone and any eventual regulation we see will be for all crypto-assets in general.

I agree but thats not how the us government operates. They have shut down all prediction markets other than the Iowa Electronic Market and thats only because this market is heavily regulated and is used for academic purposes. Additionally governments can shut down bitcoin. Crypto currency adoption depends upon exchanges which are centralized establishments that must work within the confines of the law.

I think Bitshares will need to find a way to self regulate. You're right if it's filled with the wrong kind of prediction markets it could make the entire Bitshares experiment look bad.

The initial version of Bitshares XT isn't a big deal. It all depends on the nature of the prediction market, I think anything involving politics would quickly be attacked and should be avioded. Anything involving celebrities, or just any predictions involving people in general should not be encouraged.

Avoid stuff like this in particular http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/07/29/terror.market/

Code: [Select]

We need to decentralize knowledge.brings me to ask about a wikipedia blockchain!

Besides that, wonderful ideas

I think there are a lot of really bright people on this forum. But while each of us has a lot of knowledge in a certain domain and it may even be highly specialized, the incentives are geared mostly towards implementing rather than conceptual. This means almost all the ideas are coming from a few people and usually only Stan or Bytemaster are in the position to fully grasp the big picture.

It is my opinion that the theoretical foundation is as important as the execution/implementation. The genius of Bitcoin wasn't in the source code itself, but in the entirely new ideas, the elegant conceptual design. Bitshares offers similar new ideas but if I wanted to spend 6 months just focusing on solving one really tough theoretical problem is there any incentive for me to do it? Or for anyone else?

Before we can know what the biggest problems are we need a list of unanswered questions.

One of the questions answered by Satoshi Nakamoto was the question of how to make a currency that is both counterfeit proof yet completely decentralized. We now have questions such as how can we bring privacy to users without total secrecy while keeping accountability, how to do decentralized reputation, how to create true crypto-corps or decentralized autonomous corporations which produce jobs for human beings and can pay human and machine alike.

These are problems which have multiple approaches which must be weighed. They are tough theoretical problems. It's not good enough just to have a bunch of programmers making a bunch of altcoins cut and paste because anyone can do that. We need a strong theoretical foundation so programmers can actually use the latest research when designing their DACs.

To describe what I think we need.

1. An academic journal on decentralized autonomous networks. This journal should give prizes to good ideas, brilliant new theoretical approaches, brilliant whitepapers, even if the ideas are not implemented just by rewarding their creation you create a better environment where ideas and knowledge have value. In the community today there is no reward for generating new ideas or new knowledge. If it's a good idea then someone will probably use it but the originator wont get the credit. There is no economic value attached to a good idea so there is no incentive to share knowledge, ideas, theoretical concepts, and I think this is pushing us into a culture of knowledge silos and competition where cooperation is better.

2. Beyond just giving incentives to visionaries and theoretically inclined researchers we should develop some formality and decentralization to the process. The forum was sufficient for putting new ideas about DACs into the public and I've put several of my ideas onto the forum, but it's not a very scholarly environment. If an idea is good it's not peer reviewed with the level of scientific rigor which in the future will be necessary. The knowledge isn't all in one place, it isn't searchable, you would have to literally either scan the entire forum or select certain thought leaders to follow in order to track the new ideas (this is not sustainable).

An initial solution I am proposing is based on a solution I offered up for Peercoin called "AskPeers"(I had a Devcoin version called "AskDevs" also). The idea is to have a question and answer site where anyone can sweeten the bounty to have any question answered. The people who answer the question best are voted to the top. The top results are paid the bounty.

Now that Invictus exists and has the money to build sites how about a site like this so that we can decentralize knowledge while simultaneously rewarding people who generate knowledge? It would be open, accessible to all, anyone could make a bounty, anyone could answer or ask a question on the topic of DACs, voting is allowed.

I don't think we can seriously build a new industry if we don't attract and reward the generation of knowledge. If you look at any industry there is an academic journal with loads of great research articles, whitepapers, books, etc. This is where people test and develop out new concepts like Zerocoin, the zero knowledge proof, the proof of work, we need a theoretical foundation for decentralized autonomous networks.

So you want to take 10% of the entire AGS funding and you want to give it to 8 of the largest players?  But as a DAC builder you don't want to give 10% of your own venture back to the community of AGS investors?  What if the market doesn't move in the way you think it should move - years in advance? Is your fee structure correct?  Would you stick to the terms outlined here no matter what or would you be willing to change it?

Why should AGS holders only be awarded for DACs funded by AGS? What if AGS-DAC solves common functions that every DAC could then duplicate?  Is it now free for you to use at your own will? Or do you start walling off functionality and do it your own way? Do we want to start splitting people into camps based on which type of shares they want to honor? Wouldn't it be more beneficial to encourage everyone to work together as much as possible?

Is putting the community in a perpetual competition against each other really a good idea? I think this could discourage people from wanting to help each other out - especially the largest DAC developers in the market. We are an open source community. We can all build on top of what we do as a community.  Right now we have more DACs than developers.  We need to focus on the core product before trying to squeeze out every last share of an immature platform. 

I really think after reading these forums these last few days, we need to unify PTS and AGS, as described by bytemaster in another post.  Not for a while, not until they both run their course.  Because honestly, in a couple of years, why would anyone new to the community give a shit about trying to decide whether to honor the religion of the shareholders who paid money vs. the religion of the shareholderss that plugged a bunch of computers into a wall. Then they would have to go through the forums and read about an ongoing civil war and get confused as hell trying to figure out who to support.  This would make things much simpler, seeing as people are already confused now. AGS would become liquid, and PTS would upgrade to a TaPOS system. And do you know what would be the best part about this? You could drop the clunky Bitshares AGS and Bitshares PTS monikers, and that one unified unit could then simply be known as a BitShare.  Anyone could buy into the community and be on the same level of expectation as everyone else in the community.

So what do I honestly think about this competition? I like it, but only if we do it one year at a time.  After the first one ends, the community should vote whether or not to have one for the next year.  No need to commit ourselves so far out in advance.

I think it should be a reward in Angelshares. There is no benefit to rewarding in Protoshares because the receiver could just treat it as cash and sell it. Angelshares can't be sold which is a good thing for something like this.

Additionally we could just create Awardshares which also can't be sold and make people buy them with Protoshares.

Quote from: AdamBLevine on March 06, 2014, 03:24:30 am

Also, announcing it in the Newsletter is not what you do if you want people to actually know about it.  How big exactly do you think this community is?

In the recently posted video Daniel said that the other DACs will be on board in the next few years. So I guess they don't want to bring them to the table at this moment.

We need to see a few DACs released this year. They don't all have to be sophisticated, they don't all have to be released by Invictus, just three DACs which we can hold up as examples and one of them could be Bitshares.

We have to show the world what a DAC is this year, not over 3 years because time moves faster in this space and 3 years is way too late.