I may try to give more detailed comments in a few days, but, in brief, we need to consider the costs to such a strategy and also better articulate exactly what would be the benefits of such a move.
It costs literally nothing. New chains can be split 50/50 at 0 cost to us. So I don't understand what you mean by cost.
Offering such deals to different communities, in my opinion, would be a big mistake. The problem is that if deals are not offered to every community, or even to every POS-related community, that would create ill will and jealousy.
Business decisions aren't personal. If it's not in our strategic or economic interests what difference does it make if other communities get jealous? Maybe they'll compete with us and that would be great. It's not really possible to launch 100 chains at the same time and market them all so we have to set priorities which means some will be winners and some losers.
When exchanges decide which altcoins to accept do other altcoin communities get jealous? Of course they do. But are we obligated to accept everything at once? Of course not. That doesn't mean they'll never be selected.
In any case the forks are going to happen so it's better if they are official forks. Every technology gets forked a lot when it's a big breakthrough.
This is just human nature: people want to belong and be accepted. The haves will be looked upon with resentment by the have-nots.
In business priorities have to be set. Which community actually wants the technology the most and would care about it?
Litecoin isn't that community. If they wanted Proof of Stake they'd have had it. They don't need us to build it for them with the kind of funding and size they have. It's clear their culture is all about mining and until they specifically change their culture to a culture that cares more about technological progress then why should we give them what they don't care about and expect anything other than a dump?
If they feel like they lost or like have nots then we can give them ways to get in on the action but it should not be a snapshot because they are a mining culture, and it should not be a priority to help PoW.
Also, this move may cheapen the bitshares image forever. It wouldn't build true loyalty of the beneficiaries of the deal, who might just dump the shares and continue with what they had before.
When you're talking about recklessly making a snapshot to Litecoin I agree with you entirely. It would be considered a scam probably by our community and theirs. No one would want it and it would likely be dumped.
Then you have a much bigger supply of DPOS trading units floating around, and a stagnant share price. Finally, Bitshares would be seen as trying too hard to colonize other cryptocurrencies. People might wonder, why does bitshares have to try so hard to win approval? Is there something wrong with it?
Here is a quote from BytemasterWill it be possible to use Bitshares to trade on stocks as well? That asset enum has only 16 values at the moment, but will it eventually be extended to include popular stocks such as Apple, Google etc?
It seems a bit limiting to have a fixed enum for assets - wouldnt it be possible to allow the bitshare holders to vote new assets into existence?
The issue isn't the number of assets, but the volume of transactions. Unlike bitcoin, a market blockchain would have many more transactions. Too many markets on a single chain will result in high transaction fees.
This is why we have many competing BitShares chains and why owning AGS / PTS is important because it will get you a cut in EVERY chain not just the first.
The whole point is to "colonize" as you say when Bitshares by design is to be multiple highly customized chains. It was never designed to be "one blockchain to rule them all" or "one hierarchy to rule them all". It was designed specifically to be sharedropped which is why you have a Bitshares toolkit and a limited amount of BitAssets per chain.
This limited amount of BitAssets per chain means we absolutely must do crypto-mergers. How else will we test out new assets? I don't think we should go to the Litecoin community and ask them because they don't seem to care about DPoS at all. I don't see one representative from the Litecoin community on this forum.
But I did get a rep from Blackcoin to post here. The Blackcoin community is at least interested which means if given Blackshares they would likely use it. I think the Peercoin community may be interested too because SunnyKing and Dan have communicated. Finally you have other PoS coins out there which may be obscure but which may be interested as well.
If you don't believe this, just imagine what you'd think if you heard that NXT was trying to openly or secretly broker 50/50 deals to convert Peercoin, Blackcoin, Monero, to their technology, but NOT bitshares. And what if you heard that they converted these coins anyways despite the objections of the BlackCoin community. How would that affect your perception of nxt?
Good. That is exactly what I hope happens. This would cause a technological arms race between the Bitshares and NXT community which would result in more innovation from both communities. Competition to innovate is a good thing and I think it should be encouraged but at the same time collaboration should also be encouraged.
If you don't have any friends, alliances, or user base, you lose. The only way to get a userbase is to do 50/50 deals otherwise you're asking people to pay their way in and if they don't then there is slower growth/less volume.
If NXT starts doing 50/50 deals as well then how would that be a bad situation for people who own Peercoin? Blackcoin? Monero? That would make the price of all their coins shoot up and everyone would have a vast technological upgrade. I don't know why you wouldn't want the best technology possible to be used.
Unfortunately NXT cannot do this because it's not design to be forked and to benefit from forks. Bitshares is designed to be forked from the start and with the official forks there would be nothing to gain by doing a hostile fork.
I think if marketing and brand awareness are the goal, then the best strategies would include a combination of the following: (1) Building a great product with continual high-quality development and support, leading to a consistently-rising share price; (2) More presence on Bitcointalk forum, with some knowledgeable posters to evangelize and answer questions (this is a gaping hole at the moment--the awareness of Bitshares on the bitcoin forum is very weak). (3) Targeted drops by the individual DACs, pre-loaded wallets, viral distribution strategies, etc. But these must be targeted drops and not 50/50 deals that try to "colonize" existing coins to the DPOS protocol;
You give no real reason why the userbase of coins with inferior technology wouldn't want a free upgrade. Why wouldn't you want a free upgrade to DPoS if you're on some outdated PoS technology? If you're talking a PoW technology then I could see your point. PoW communities don't have the same philosophy but PoS communities share the same philosophy.
Blackcoin exists specifically because it's based on another technology. It was basically colonized already if you want to think of it like that. Technologies spread exactly that way in general in this space. You have Litecoin which was a tweaked Bitcoin. You have Feathercoin and Dogecoin which came from the Litecoin family.
Peercoin was the first PoS hybrid. From it you had Novacoin.
You had Freicoin which was the first coin with Demurage.
And you have pure PoS coins like Blackcoin which at first were hybrids but got instamined.
Communities that believe in PoS should want the most advanced technology possible and I see no point in not doing a 50/50 split. If you wait they'll eventually copy DPoS anyway so there is nothing to gain by waiting. If you do it for them then they don't have to wait and we don't get a hostile fork.
(4) Buzz in the media, nice websites, great conferences, etc. But (1) is the key, as it makes all the others more effective. If Bitshares can get anywhere close to the investor interest that Bitcoin has, it will have succeeded.
Good luck with that. The market is saturated. The only advantage of Bitshares will be it's technology DPoS. If DPoS doesn't become the standard then Bitshares could fail.
What I mean is that from the beginning when Bitshares was talked about they said something like 16(32?) BitAssets per chain. So how can we have 256 BitAssets this year? It means we need at between 8 and 16 chains.
So all along the idea was to fork. How else do you create all these Bitshares chains and test them? Do you think our little community would be big enough to test 8 chains at once? On the other hand if you release a new chain every month then you can test a bunch of custom chains during the year.
It's either do this or somehow you believe forks wont happen if we don't fork it ourselves. I believe the forks are going to come regardless so why not have official forks of higher quality than the ugly hostile forks? 50/50 split in exchange for an official fork.
The list of 16 BitAssetsstruct asset
{
enum type
{
bts = 0, // 1 BitShare (smallest storable unit)
btc = 1,
gld = 2,
slv = 3,
usd = 4, // $0.001 = 1 BitUSD
count, // TODO: move this to the end, for now this will shorten print statements
cny = 5,
gbp = 6,
eur = 7,
jpy = 8, // Japan Yen
chf = 9, // Swiss Frank #5 world currency
aud = 10, // Austrialia
cad = 11, // Canada
sek = 12, // Sweedish Krona
hkd = 13, // Hong Kong
wti = 14, // Light Sweet Crude Oil
iii = 15, // value of 1 of 1 billion shares in Invictus Innovations, Inc
};
}
Below is an example list of 32 BitAssetsCurrencies:
AUD (Australia)
BDT (Bangladesh)
BRL (Brazil)
CAD (Canada)
CNY (China)
EUR (Europe)
GBP (United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland)
IDR (Indonesia)
INR (India)
JPY (Japan)
KRW (South Korea)
MXN (Mexico)
NGN (Nigeria)
PHP (Philippines)
PKR (Pakistan)
RUR (Russia)
USD (United States of America)
VND (Vietnam)
Crypto
Bitcoin
Litecoin
Peercoin
Stock Indices
Global (MSCI World)
China (SSE Composite Index)
India (BSE)
Europe (Eurostoxx 50)
USA (DJIA)
Indonesia (IHSG)
Brasil (Ibovespa)
Commodities
Copper
Gold
Silver
Crude Oil
When we offer a 50/50 split to various communities this list of BitAssets can change significantly. This would create value for both communities to use the customized Bitshares chain. So Blackshares could have whatever BitAssets the Blackcoin community chooses.
Tell me one reason why this would be bad? How else would we get tens of thousands of people to test it overnight?
And it would be profitable for both communities so I cannot see how it would make a Blackcoin holder upset to suddenly be able to trade commodities and stocks chosen by the Blackcoin community.