Better idea: you send me 1m bts, so you'll never have to sell it

jokes aside, a lock feature (see savings account in steem) would be convenient.

This is something that can be done now without any modifications. Besides if someone moves their stake after making the promise then they have just declared themselves an untrustworthy witness fit for not being voted for.

Aside from that, my idea on having shareholder balances would certainly benefit from this. Could be something similar where you need to have 1m BTS deposited in order to register to be a witness.

If it is 'with risk' then it is not a sidechain. It s a multi-sig gateway. It should be called a multi-sig gateway. Calling it anything else is false advertising in my estimation.

As bitcrab noted.. some projects have claimed they are going to deliver blockchain interoperability in some way. There has been literally tens of millions of dollars of funding going into the research and development of this concept/idea. Still, nobody has done it.

Lets have a degree of realism about the technical possibilities with what is in reach with a virtual zero budget available to Bitshares dev.

Multi-sig gateways, sure, that can all be done right now. Just takes some individuals willing to take the risk and technical difficulties of running one. I for one won't participate in something like this till I have seen it working with considerable transactions. I don't want to be liable for the lose of peoples bitcoins for whatever reason.

So to recap. We are talking about multi-sig gateways here, not sidechains.

I agree that the wage of witness now is too low, but I suggest that the income should be adjusted automatically according to the current network load, say"work more, get more".

This would be very bad. Very easy to setup bots that would artificially flood the network to increase rewards. The incentive to do so is aligned and it could be completely anonymous.

We already have the committee capable of making adjustments as needed. At present that is our most efficient means to adjust reward rates.

I tend to disagree to increase witness pay, on the opposite, perhaps it's better to decrease it. Witnesses are investing into the system, they're not pure employees.

In many cases higher wage doesn't bring higher performance.

We need a HR department to review every employee's performance, including witnesses' and workers' and perhaps committee members', say, give them a basic wage, then a bonus depending on their performance.

An HR department type setup is something I have been encouraging for a while. Put the hiring, firing, management of the workers in their hands so that real measures can be done, and greater accountability.

I think the pay pressure is going to increase the need for accountability.. I think there will be less tolerance for 'lazy witnesses' after this while at the same time heating up the competition. If the objective is to get new blood, better feed data, and make being a witness something that people are striving to be best at because there is a clear reward for it, then this will help accomplish that. I think the change in the rate is going to change the culture significantly.

When I try to Buy Peerplays I get the following error " Failed to Broadcast the transaction: is_authorized_asset( d.*seller,*_receive_asset):". Not sure what I'm doing wrong?

http://www.peerplays.com/news/important-announcement-peerplays-snapshot-date/

Market is shutdown for the snapshot.

kindly vote witness node "jerryliu".

I am not senior in programming or administration, so I get help from @alt and @boombastic and some other developers. and as an active trader/market maket I will keep on caring the market and also the witness status everyday.

at beginning I'll run alt's btsprice script to feed price for bitCNY and bitUSD, later will feed price for other key smartcoins.

Server Specs: Linode VPS, 6 Cores, 12G, Tokyo.

Appreciate your vote!
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不多说了，希望大家为我的见证人投上一票：
见证人账号：jerryliu
见证人 id：1.6.72
见证人服务器配置：Linode 6核，12G 内存，东京

bunkerchainlabs-com proxy supports this witness.

whether we can call it competition is not so important, a similar thing is US President election, are there clearly defined what kind of people should be elected president? no, but is this a competition? I think so. the final result comes from competition.
to qualify witness, take the "feed price every 5 min" as an example, at the time that the market price does not change in 30 mins, why should the witness publish price every 5 min?

another example is, several witnesses removed yunbi price when they are told that yunbi price is easy to manipulate, however alt's script uses a different alogrithm: it collect orders from different exchanges, including yunbi, and simulate to put these orders together to generate a result price, so this gives each exchange the weight it should have, right? but before this script comes out, I don't know the price script can be coded like this.

in my view price feed is such an area that it is easy to judge which witness doing well but it's not easy to hard code some rules to determine which nodes is qualified.

as a proxy, in long run I think I will vote witness that
1. generate block with low block missing rate.
2. publish price that reflect market price exactly and globally enough, maybe no need to be very frequent, but when market price changes obviously, need to publish price in time.

maybe I will unvote all the witnesses that does not publish price. however I think we need first reach some conclusion on the reward issue.

I do not like the worker proposal advice, as it depends on trustee, not decentralized enough.

the voting machanisim can work without clearly defined game rule, just as a satisfactory president can comes out from the general election. of course, a lot of communication are needed here between the proxy/stakeholders and the candidates.

There are rules to being able to qualify for election for president. It is not ruleless. In the above however this is being conflated with electioneering. Before they even get into the game, they have rules to follow and know what can and cannot be done. There are laws. Witnesses have nothing but the whim of some people who have no clear guidelines, rules, or to compare to running for President of the USA, laws, that they can then follow to become a candidate.

You want competition to be a factor, then there has to be a playing field that has rules and/or guidelines that can be followed and considered.

I agree to let the competition machanisim solve the problem: obviously shareholders appreciate and would like to vote the witnesses that provide more and better service.

and AFAIK, to provide good price feed is also possible via free/open source script, for example, alt has published his script at https://pypi.python.org/pypi/btsprice/0.2.21, it's a good reference.

on the other side, I wonder whether  we need to consider one question: suppose publishing price feed become what witness must do,  shall we increase the block reward? and to how much?

now being a witness can get some reward, but the reward is not very attractive, we need to balance the responsibility and the reward, maybe we need to reestimate what a reward is more reasonable? maybe a more reasonable reward can lead to more active ecosystem?

kindly give your input on this topic.

@Bhuz sorry if I did things carelessly, I' recheck and take actions accordingly.

Competition COULD be part of the mechanism. Proxies are making choices about who to vote for for other reasons however. The way the system is now that is their right. However, we cannot claim this to be a competitive field so long as the voting is done by different rules for each proxy voter and stakeholders.

In other words, you cannot expect people to compete in a competition where the rules are not clear for being a witness. I can point to myself for example. Regardless of fulfilling what I and many consider the parameters of what is needed for a witness, I still do not get your vote. So if you want competition, you have to offer a fair playing field. It doesn't exist now. In Bitcoin mining as @btswildpig likes to keep referring to, such competition is all just mathematics. Those that enter into that play field can simply do the math and calculate the reward/risk and invest accordingly. Comparing that to what happens is DPOS is utterly futile.

Sure there are plenty of free feed scripts, however the primary issue which this thread claims is the sources being the problem. Specifically Yunbi and its thin and easily manipulated market. I have chosen to remove Yunbi entirely as a feed source thus, and have enabled some other sources for publishing CNY. My price appears to be similar to abits now in its median.

If publishing feeds are to become 'officially' part of being a witness, then the process the way it works now would be reversed. Each witness would generate blocks at random intervals as they do now, and at random intervals the blockchain would query the witness for feed data. If it is not available, then there is no 'reward' for the generated data. This would help a number of factors over the way the current way works. Right now being completely voluntary you have some witnesses publishing at different intervals than others.. some every hour or every several hours, while others more frequent like every several minutes (as I do).

Now with feeds being 'unofficially' part of what witnesses do, witnesses are disincentivized to publish data feeds because they are an expense. Some of the TOP voted for witnesses (including ones you vote for) do not publish very often only for the sake of not having to pay as much BTS fees. This is doing nothing good for the median price in my estimation. I maybe wrong, but I think having as close to real time data as possible certainly makes the DEX look more attractive and impressive than a floating median that bears no resemblance to any current pricing due to a motley crew of variable price times.

To have it something they must do as part of the job description, but increase the price, might be helpful, but only if the 'rules of the game' are clearly defined. eg. a witness MUST publish feeds at a minimum of every 5 minutes. If a witness settings are shown not to follow the rules, then votes should be removed regardless of the political implications or nepotism. That's the only way to have competition.

Increasing the block reward would certainly make for raising the bar more attractive and bring in new blood. Again though I come back to the rules of the playing field, without that, we can never attract anyone to want to play. The current compensation makes being a witness a hobby at best. It is not monetarily attractive as current compensation for running optimal nodes instead of minimal ones is break even at best. The only saving grace now is that because there is zero development happening on the blockchain and thus no new version updates due to no worker proposals, it doesn't require a lot of time.

I already know the arguments against increasing the reward are going to be that we should be willing to settle for less and work harder to increase the value of BTS so that what we get becomes more valuable. Nobody in the crypto space is going to tolerate this line of thinking for long when they can go to other projects and get paid reasonably well for even less effort than what goes into being a witness (eg. dash master nodes). So this volunteerism fantasy really needs to be considered just that, a fantasy, and we need to start presenting BTS in a unified community manner that is no nonsense, rational, exciting, and profitable.

Proposal:

Worker proposal is made to pay out to witnesses for professional feed data. The worker proposal will be administered by a trustee who operates a script. The script will take all BTS and borrow bitUSD collateralized at 300%. It will then daily distribute the bitUSD to all the witnesses based on the number of publishings done daily to a certain maximum, and the number of markets that were published too. Ideally if all witnesses are participating they should all receive the same reward. However, if some are doing better than others, they will get more. Competition keeps everyone going for the greater reward, or at least keeps everyone putting MAXIMUM effort into getting the rewards that are available for publishing feeds.

It would be more ideal if we could know just how many data feed sources are being used, but the current system doesn't support that in any transparent way. If it didn't then I would suggest rewards be distributed based on number of sources.

That is my input on this topic.