This includes hours of off-camera interviews where Bytemaster has given them insights about what is coming later this year. They are not allowed to disclose that information, of course, but they are free to tell you their general impressions and personal levels of interest in what is going on at Bytemaster Labs.
I'd love to hear/see/read about their impressions
any shareholder, in any company, in this situation, would always want an insight.
"In many ways this is the strongest the team has been. The only thing worse off is the share price."
-Vikram
Visiting the BitShares guys in Blacksburg was a real treat. When we first arrived into town, we drove the BTS mobile over to the office in a business complex owned by Virginia Tech. Stan greeted us outside the building and we followed into an office building that seemed to serve a start-up incubator, with many companies represented. We entered the BitShares HQ into a space with a small conference setup. Nathan, Valantine, Vikram, and Ben had their desks positioned in each corner around four tables arranged as a round table. The Follow my Vote crew and Dan each have a small office off this space. The team consolidated into this room in a move of frugality to reduce costs incurred from using the offices accessible from the main space. A discussion around the tables followed, where we proceded to learn a little about the internal project road map and float ideas out in a free flowing brainstorm session. At some point Dan went into some details regarding efficiency improvements to the code that they have been experimenting with, some of the problems with multi sig, and other interesting topics. The devs wove snippets into the conversation as they worked intently from their desks. Sometime around 1 PM Stan came in with a boatload of pizzas and we all happily proceeded to devour it.
Stan put us up in a nearby hotel for next 7 days, and we proceeded to come to the office each day to work alongside the team; the Bitscape guys cycled through interviewing devs at their availability. I made some more in roads on the wikipedia page and got some feedback from Nathan. We many of the evenings meeting up with various members from the team for dinner, beer, or just to hang out and have some tea. Some events from the week were going to a BitShares meetup at NuSpark, and visiting the town of Floyd in search of a local spring and finding a local shop owner with Floydian scrip, a local currency. She seemed quite interested in BitShares!
We also partook in a tasty BBQ out on the Larimer compound. Pam makes a delicious potato salad. We enjoyed some more "talking shop" as Stan phrased it, soaking up some sunlight and knowledge.
The experience has impressed upon me that these guys have been working tirelessly to continue the pursuit of innovations that will make BitShares highly scalable, predictable, quick, and competitive.
"Most cryptocurrency projects are just blockchain toys, and none of the projects out there can scale to the transactional loads of banks if they were approached today."
-Bytemaster
"We are positioning BitShares to be the industrial blockchain."
-Nathan
Disclaimer: these quotes are approximations of what I overheard a week ago. They may not be exactly verbatim but they still convey the essence of the quote.