We found that it did not work well in most cases and only led frustration and disappointment on all sides.  We decided to try a more traditional approach of vetting and hiring people or companies with a proven track record and spending extra time to carefully define the requirements.  While we will still use bounties for smaller jobs, we are not interested at all in making much bigger bounties where there is an even bigger disappointment for everyone at the end.

Things change fast, please humor me - Based on this part of your above statement it seems to me you are saying no.  Am I incorrect?  I made my specific proposal according to your request, so it's not hypothetical what I'm asking be done.  https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=3448.0

Thanks for the update Dan

Invictus has said many times that what sets apart their platform from others, is good economics and a focus on profit.  It is with that in mind that I present the DAC War of Profit (working title).   A year from being announced, the first prize will be awarded to the DAC that achieves the greatest aggregate profitability for its token holders over a 30 day period of time compared to all other qualifying DACs.

The DACs must operate in the invictus ecosystem (must honor PTS at least, and must also honor AGS if they receive any funds via the Sharktank or other mechanisms)

Once the first prize has been awarded, the process repeats every six months with prizes according to the schedule below.  This prize schedule seeks to give people time to build and develop profitable dacs following the Invictus model before requiring judgement to be made on who is successful.  The entire invictus ecosystem wins since all competitors are competing to make profit for token holders, among whom Invictus is the largest.

Most Profitable DAC Awards - 100,000PTS over 5  years, represents less than 10% of AGS funds.

10,000PTS - 12mo
25,000PTS - 18mo
20,000PTS - 24mo
15,000PTS - 30mo
12,500PTS - 36mo
10,000PTS - 42mo
5,000PTS - 48mo
2,500PTS - 54mo

The keys controlling these funds should be held by a large number of trusted community advisors, not less than 10 and 20+ would be better with a 70% threshold required to release.    Key Holders should be selected based on their ability to look at objective situations rather than what they stand to personally gain or wish to be true.

It would be ideal if the same DAC could not win more than once.

I don't believe Bitshares products should qualify for this competition as Invictus is drawing all employee salaries and costs from these funds already.  That would be like paying someone to compete in your contest for the prize, makes zero sense.  If employees want to in their spare time work on a non-Bitshares project thats fine, it grows the ecosystem.  I would argue the community has already paid very well for Bitshares.

I do not want power in this process, I want the rules to be set once and never changed again.   I want development teams to be able to look at the landscape and say "If I build for Invictus, I can shoot for that prize and compound my success".   This is not mutually exclusive of any other plan, but is neccesary in addition to whatever else is done.   Please ask questions or comment as appropriate.

Stan,
I'm not trying to gain control of funds.  It is insulting you would insinuate I am wasting my breath here on anything other than trying to help you fix the mess you have created.  If you cared about not scaring away investors, invictus would have a blog.  I looked at my post history, I told you that, in my own name, in public on this forum the first week of January.  I told Daniel privately for weeks.  I expressed my concerns to Brian multiple times, and he blew me off. There are basic things you guys have refused to do for reasons that are unfathomable to me, but it's led to the place we are now.  Still not even a blog.

With the long term bounties, I am trying to get Invictus to allocate funds to whomever best fulfills what Invictus defines as a profitable DAC.  I am asking this be done in such a way that is consistent with incentivizing teams who have the ability to make long term strategic plans. instead of only using funds to pay for internal company operations, basic payroll and bounty-chores with the promise to give away more funds to people who convince you their idea is good enough.   Stan, I don't know how you can look at how things have gone so far and say anything other than you guys have been wrong about more important things than you've been right on, and the deal has had to change several times because of that wrongness.

I've laid out my proposal calmly and simply many times both publicly and privately, I even shared a paper with daniel on it weeks ago entitled "The collaborative roadmap - incentivizing R&D with bounties" from my Distributed Minufacturing project that explains the logic behind this.  I have done my best to bring these changes about because I feel like you guys are talking about decentralization and building centralized solutions to control funds which was never the deal. 

You can choose to take this personally or insinuate whatever you want about me but I think it should be pretty clear I have been a personally supporter of your project, want you guys to succeed and I feel strongly enough you're on the wrong path to be spending my time talking at you.  Why would I do that, am I a hater?  No..... Just a long time investor who has watched you set and fail to meet target after target, and who no longer trusts you.   I am not alone in that, it's just that most people just leave.

As mentioned I'll lay out my suggested bounties but I have zero interest in fundraising.  You guys took in millions of dollars already, what the hell are you doing with that money if not incentivizing the long term growth of the ecosystem?  Where in the AGS agreement did it say "and invictus will try one experiment to incentivize participation per annum with these funds, never more than one at a time" because I didn't get that memo.    The point of collecting this much money up front is to have it to guarantee you can spend it at a later point when it is more valuable because you have succeeded.

You are looking at this money and saying "well, we better surivive on this for the next few years!" but again, I didn't realize the point of this was to pay invictus salaries - I thought it was to incentivize the growth of the ecosystem.

You've got to spend money to make money, outcome oriented bounties are the only way you can 100% guarantee you are not spending money on anything other than the solution you're looking for, and while the downside of these is they require larger prizes and more time, that is an advantage talking about a deflationary, ecosystem based cryptocurrency since the prize will be worth more when its awarded than when it is offered.

Tell me what points I'm missing, I hear you complaining about how unfair I am to do so but I'm happy to address whatever you require further elaboration on.

Quote from: CLains on March 06, 2014, 05:21:42 pm

Quote from: asenski on March 06, 2014, 04:36:44 pm

Am I to go and beg Invictus to invest in my vision? I mean I could but ultimately they will hold the power and my vision would be very limited by their choices and decisions.

Or do I do 20% for AGS/PTS holders and then another 20% of funding the same way? Will people not be sick of these funding rounds?

I'd love to hear more of your thoughts on these matters. I think it's really important. Let me give you my take on it by putting myself in your shoes, and then tell me what I'm missing.

You allocate 20% to the community here and you would get people's attention and judgement. If everyone here loves your idea then Invictus will necessarily follow up on it, as Daniel Larimer has numerously declared that Invictus works for the PTS/AGS shareholders.

Once you have the favor of this community, you'll be placed centrally on the new website they are building, which will fast-track you ahead of everyone else in terms of publicity. You'll have all infrastructure necessary, and everyone will look to Invictus to see how they are treating you, so Invictus has to overcompensate you on all points for your allocation. First child will be spoiled!

And you'd still have 80-whatever-% left to do a fundraiser on your own.

I can't see how it's not a good deal atm. It just seems that nobody realizes it because Invictus has been lagging in their promotional efforts. If I had been an apt developer I'd go for it no question; like it or not, Invictus are first-movers in the realm of fundraising, and the funds will show their power in the next months. You just have to convince regular joe PTS/AGS shareholder that you have a decent product and you're set for the moon.

Make it coincide with their new website launch and you'll moon^2. If you really have something and aren't just puffing air, then I can't imagine why you wouldn't take this opportunity that lies right in front of you. You'll be set for life if you just do it good enough, and first.

It's not just Invictus.  Yes, we have a responsibility to vet anything that uses AGS funds, but as we said in the Shark Tank newsletter article:

Quote

Bring us your business plan, win the hearts and minds of our community, and get past the industry leaders on our Panel of Judges at our Las Vegas Beyond Bitcoin Summit and you could win our support in incubating your new company.

You view it as "begging" but I spent my whole career writing proposals to funding sources of all kinds.  Such sources don't just throw money in the street.  They all have a process to make sure the money is used effectively.

We have defined a good-faith process that involves everybody as described in that article.  It offers to put funding in the hands of those who need help to get started based upon a public merit-based competition.

Nothing stops people from pursuing other models.  This is the one we have developed so far and we will keep refining it.

We don't believe people with the resources to develop and deploy a DAC need any more incentive to do so.  A successful DAC is its own reward.

We choose to help those who don't have the resources by removing obstacles in their paths.

You spent your whole career writing proposals, and you want to bring the legacy, bottlenecked system into Invictus?  Way to build the new paradigm

Quote from: AdamBLevine on March 06, 2014, 04:51:02 pm

Quote from: GodsCreation on March 06, 2014, 04:45:09 pm

What happened to the people who start up their own next big thing whether it be an app, game, website or DAC in their spare time? If you have a great idea and the skill-set to do it, just go for it and pick up some funding along the way or when it's ready for launch to pay lawyers or a marketing team. You'll be your own investor, paying with time.

Here, every time you wonder "Why wouldn't someone just do it for free, when they're not working at their paying job, and then give away 20% of the money supply for nothing" just think of this

WHY WOULD THEY?

For the community kickstarting your project?

[edit]
Listen I do understand the issue here but me as a person would not be held back by not getting funding if I believe in something and have no problem giving back to the community , without it no-one would be even dreaming about these things in the first place so 20% is a small price to pay in my opinion.
[/edit]

Dude, you're missing the point.  If Invictus was the only game in town you could concievably be right but you're saying "well they're only giving away 20% and then can fundraise with the other 80%" but you still aren't explaining what value they are getting from the 20% they give up?   The reason you aren't addressing this is because there is no good reason, the community is small and already at capacity on projects they can help with.  So you're giving people coins so they'll be more interested in buying more coins from you?  That makes zero sense.  If the idea is good and I think the team can execute, I'm going to invest whether they honor PTS or not.  In fact, it's better if they don't honor PTS since I don't see the value in honoring PTS besides the fact that I hold some personally and so benefit.

I see why *I* would want people to honor the thing and give me free money, but I don't see what advantage they have and I don't see why that would be better than just doing what they want with 100%. 

You say it's a small price to pay, I think that depends on what you're buying and as a guy who is helping develop five new token based systems I can tell you 20% is an ENORMOUS amount even when you're trading it for something valuable.  We are only giving away 30% of LTBCoins to the audience over a five year period of time because even though they're a huge part of what we're building, there are more important uses for the initial token distribution.  I am allocating 10% for infrastructure development and will be laying out a long term bounty system as I have suggested invictus do.

The whole point of systems like this is they are more efficient.  When you insert arbitrary value-sucking bullshit, you remove the advantage and you lead to people preparing to fork IMMEDIATELy as we've already seen just because they percieve this community as weak and vulnerable.  They're not wrong. 

Quote from: AdamBLevine on March 06, 2014, 05:04:46 am

Seriously, just incentivize the market to duke it out for the big prizes you set up to give to the winner.  If you try to pick winning projects now YOU WILL BE WRONG but if you just say "Whoever is the most successful Invictus DAC as judged by profitability for the token holders in one year gets <big pile of money>", do the same thing again in year two but the guy who won last year can't win this year.   

Don't predict outcomes, reward them.  The market will solve your problem and you'll only pay for the best solution.

Bounties to this point have been specific and task oriented, outsourced R&D really.   This is different.

Bounties rewarded for specific outcomes do work. Have you heard of Peter Diamandis and his X Prize Foundation?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BltRufe5kkI

Yep, it sure does.  What doesn't work is changing the deal whenever you feel you can make it better.   The variables can change but the deal should never change, and the fact that it has so many times here has caused this lack of trust.