Sometimes our suggestions that third-party developers should honor the BitShares Social Consensus sound a bit like Invictus is just making up a set of take-it-or-leave-it rules.  We are not.  What we are suggesting are more like Natural Economic Laws we have discovered that we are bound to follow as well.

Winning the favor of the BitShares PTS/AGS community is a Big Deal because owners of PTS and AGS already represent the lion’s share of informed early adopters of the concept of crypto-equities and Decentralized Autonomous Companies (DACs).  If you get these folks on your side, they can help you fine-tune your concept and spread the word once they understand what you have in mind.  And they will be the ones most likely to invest in your idea.  Everyone else in the world needs to be educated from scratch.

Winning the favor of our community also motivates Invictus to help you launch your DAC (or even your DAC-developing company) in ways we outlined in our February 2014 Newsletter.  PTS and AGS owners expect us to build and help others build DACs that will honor their donations to building the industry.  When we do that, it increases the value of PTS and AGS, which in turn increases the purchasing power of the resources that have been donated to us to help you and other developers grow this ecosystem.

The Dark Ages

When BitShares PTS burst on the scene on Nov 5th, 2013 (barely 3 months ago) the launch process for crypto assets was a completely different arena.  People actually expected you to give away 100% of your new idea – the product of all those hours you spent in training and research and late night working sessions and sacrificed opportunities to party with your friends.   Worse, they were quite happy to burn millions of dollars of their own money in renting mining machines (buying lottery tickets) just as long as 100% of the money from those interested in your idea was burned up rather than invested in developing and promoting that idea.

And, because that was what was expected, that’s how we offered PTS.  100% of the money spent and still being spent mining PTS is irretrievably burned up in server farms and botnets around the world.  Those resources did absolutely nothing to further the development of the crypto-equity industry.  They were wasted, because that was what the group-think of the industry back in those Dark Ages demanded.

Except for one thing.

It did produce a share distribution throughout the entire world community of people interested in owning unmanned companies that was generally perceived as 100% fair.  Now there was a community of early adopters with which we could work to develop a better, more rational, Social Consensus.  A renaissance community held together by a common vision and a new top-ten crypto-currency.

The Current Renaissance

This renaissance of new thinking is priceless to you as a potential new developer, because now we have a community that understands and supports a better way.  A way that doesn’t require you to burn whatever development money you may have been able to raise just to buy back some shares in your own blood, sweat, and tears.    You have a community that understands the value of getting their shares by investing in your idea instead of consuming lottery tickets.

Now you can come to this community, honor the money they already burned for PTS to get a widely-decentralized community of stakeholders and honor the money others have donated via AGS to help build and promote a fertile field in which to launch your new idea. And you can give them the opportunity to invest directly in some of your shares, thereby raising the development funds you need.   Isn’t that better than burning 100% of the money that might have funded your idea and giving away 100% of your stake in developing it? 

So, when we say you must give 10% to PTS and 10% to AGS that’s not really true.  You can still give away 100% of your shares in an old-style mining lottery and attempt to attract some other group of supporters – those who don’t understand DACs and just want some free coins to quickly sell for a pizza or a new PC.

But if you do give those informed early adopters their 20%, you get truly committed supporters who can launch your idea to world wide fame overnight.  And you get the support of Invictus in all the ways we spoke of in our newsletter.  And you still have 80% of your shares available to raise funds and otherwise compete in the arena.

But you must be prepared to actually compete.

And that’s where all the advice we have been offering you in this forum has been coming from.  It’s not a set of rules that Invictus is trying to force on you.  It’s our observations about how we think this new ecosystem works.  We are sharing our understanding of what the BitShares Social Consensus means to all developers, including ourselves.

The Ten Natural Laws of the Crypto-Asset Universe

So here is our list of the rather obvious Ten Natural Laws of the Crypto-Asset Universe.  All wise developers should be aware of these unspoken rules of competition and plot their private business strategies accordingly:

1.   All software must be open source to be trusted.
2.   It is ethically acceptable to clone alt-coins from anybody else’s open source.
3.   If you demonstrate a good idea, others will clone it – without market objection.
4.   They will clone it if just to give it a better name.
5.   They will clone it to slightly modify one of its parameters.
6.   They will clone it to better appeal to another group of stakeholders.
7.   They will clone it to make it more profitable (and therefore more appealing).
8.   These clones will compete in the free market.
9.   The clone that appeals to the biggest and most influential crowd wins.
10.   The clone that achieves the Network Effect first may ultimately get to ignore the first 9 rules.

So, when you are considering how best to launch your new unmanned company, remember that, like it or not, you are competing in an arena governed by these Natural Laws.  This means that if you don’t get to be Number One in your market quickly, someone else will clone your product and take advantage of all the competitive edges you failed to include.

1.   They will come up with a better name.
2.   They will throw in a better algorithm.
3.   They will offer PTS and AGS holders their fair share to capture their support.
4.   They will offer PTS and AGS holders the biggest possible more-than-fair share.
5.   They will make their clone more profitable so your shares get sold to buy their shares.

So when you think about keeping that last 80% for yourself, ask:  “What will my competitor do?”  “What percent does she really need to sell to raise money for development – especially after you have done most of the work for her?”

You will quickly find that your best business model is to offer the PTS/AGS community the best deal conceivable and achieve the network effect first.  Meanwhile buy some of your own shares before everybody else figures out how great your idea will be.  Better yet, buy PTS so you will own shares in your competitor too!

Make the BitShares PTS/AGS community an offer no other competitor can beat.  Leave your competitors no viable place to grab a toehold.  Stay competitive.  Stay invested.  And let BitShares help you cross the finish line first.

BitShares    - Reimagine Everything
Keyhotee    - Own your Identity
PTS            - Trade future BitShares
AGS           - Build future BitShares
BitShares X - Save & Exchange Anything

Another Idea:
BitShares X - Earn 5% or MORE on ANYTHING

Now that our momentum is building and we have an active marketing arm, it’s time to think seriously about branding.  We need an umbrella brand in which to invest our marketing efforts so that we don’t water them down with too many sub-brands.  Given the number of DACs we envision, that could certainly happen if we start advertising ProtoShares and AngelShares and BitShares and DomainShares and LuckyShares and, um, DogeShares etc.

We need to market all these products under one brand that everyone recognizes.  Like Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Windows, etc.

Our Invictus brand is focused on our role as a trustworthy partner known as a behind-the-scenes innovator and even-handed community developer.  But we need a more highly visible brand for our whole crypto-equity ecosystem.  A brand not for who we are but for what we are building. A brand with Satoshi-like immunity from the risks of association with a flesh and blood company. One Brand to find them all with a single Google search.

We have decided to dedicate our established BitShares^TM brand to the cause.  It is already getting a lot of attention and it has a nice parallelism with Bitcoin, which in the public mind has become virtually synonymous with the crypto-currency ecosystem, including all its altcoins.  We hope that BitShares will serve a similar function for the crypto-equity domain.

What does this mean for our existing projects?  Well, BitShares already applies to a whole family of our exchange DACs.  Now it applies to them all.  For example.

•   BitShares PTS is our brand of proto shares honoring industry miners.
•   BitShares AGS is our brand of angel shares honoring industry patrons.
•   BitShares BEX is our flagship brand for our first Bank and EXchange DAC.
•   BitShares CEX is our brand for our first Commodities EXchange.
•   BitShares LKS is our brand for LuckyShares – robotically honest gaming.
•   BitShares DMS is our brand for DomainShares – an IP address registry.

Keyhotee is not a crypto-equity and therefore has its own privacy-oriented brand.

We could use everyone’s help in starting to use these new names in all our dialogs, documents, graphics, and web sites. 
 

Dear Bitshares Forum Members:

I'm very excited to introduce myself to this community and to be serving as Director of Marketing for Invictus, the most innovative company in our industry.

I'd like you to know that I haven't come to change Invictus.  Dan has built a great company with a revolutionary idea that's unlike any other in this space and we intend to continue in that direction.  My job is simply to communicate the immense potential of Invictus and the Bitshares brand in a clear and concise way.

With your help, I plan to make our company the most valuable brand in the space with a message that not only has credibility but is relevant, consistent and recognizable.  In essence, we'll be taking the brilliant products and ideas of Invictus and packaging them so the look matches the substance of what's inside.

I truly love the values this company stands for and I'm thankful for the incredible support I've received from the executive team.   I'm confident that great things are in our future and that together we can make Invictus and the Bitshares brand into the single most valuable opportunity available today.

 
Sincerely,

Brian Page

Director of Marketing

A thought experiment for DAC Angels

I once misquoted the actor Charlton Heston by saying, “You can have my ProtoShares when you pry them from my cold, dead hands!”

Then, in our latest Newsletter I implied that, as a DAC Angel Investor in Good Standing (DAIGS), I might willingly contribute some of my precious PTS to help kickstart a promising new DAC.

Well, which is it?

If, as a Developer, I’m going to propose a new DAC myself, I’d better construct a deal for investors that, as a DAC Angel, I myself would gladly accept.  What kind of deal would that be?

Well, setting aside philanthropic impulses, one that makes a lot of money for me, I suppose.

What would make money for me? Let’s do a Einstein “thought experiment”:

Suppose at some point I have one ProtoShare worth 0.1 BTC.
Suppose that some sexy new DAC comes along whose shares I think may quickly grow from 0.001 BTC to 0.01 BTC, just like PTS did in its first two weeks.

Option 1 - Assuming this is a PTS DAC (one that honors the PTS Social Contract) if I just hold my PTS, I will  automagically wind up with 1 ProtoShare @ 0.1 BTC and 1 DACshare @ 0.01 BTC.  This gives me a total net worth of 0.11 BTC for sitting on the sidelines - I gained 0.01 BTC!

Option 2 - Suppose instead I trade my 1 ProtoShare @ 0.1 BTC for 100 DACshares @ 0.001 BTC.  The DAC launches and climbs in value to 0.01 BTC in the first month.  I then sell 10 of them to get my 1 PTS back. I now have 1 ProtoShare @ 0.1 BTC and 90 DACshares @ 0.01 BTC.  This gives me a total net worth of 1.0 BTC - I gained 0.90 BTC, a 90x improvement over my 0.01 gains with Option 1. And I still have my PTS to do this again for every promising new PTS DAC that comes along.  If I sold all my new DACshares, I’d raise enough BTC to buy 10 PTS - a 10x gain.  Or I could let it ride, expecting the new DAC to grow faster than PTS for a while.

Naturally this all depends upon my due diligence, judgement, and skillfully applied luck in evaluating the potential of a DAC proposal before I invest.

With apologies to Charlton Heston, “take my PTS, …please!”

I wonder what kind of press we're getting out there. 
If you find a relevant article about our emerging ecosystem,
why not post a link to it here for everybody's easy access?

   

We’re all big boys and girls.  Many are veterans of former hash wars.  So intellectually we all know the score.  We know why mining is supposed to be hard. We know that markets can be irrational and volatile. Nevertheless, everyone occasionally gets a small case of Hash Traumatic Stress Disorder (HTSD) and loses sight of the Big Picture.  There are sound psychological reasons we are all out there in the hash trenches. It’s why humans succeed as a species.  Time to turn off that left brain, drink a cup of Kool-Aid, and let your right brain run free.  I’m a Certified Quack Psychiatrist (CQP) and here to get you pumped up and back out onto the battlefield as soon as possible.   If I cure your mining and trading blues, and you feel compelled leave a big tip (e.g. to insure good mining karma), you may send vast quantities of ProtoShares (PTS) to PuiWo9RKkSR3Y31CqXEdpRaCF2HQwtfjGf.  Your actual mileage may vary.