You've posted a total of 23 times, and you've taken your money out of BTS to put it into Bitcoin so that you can lose money as the Bitcoin price goes down?

For some reason I don't believe you. Why didn't you just buy BitUSD like I did?

If you read my post, you'll see that I am holding BitAssets as well - actually to the tune of about 25% of my holdings. My reasoning for switching to Bitcoin is that I may invest elsewhere and diversify. I guess I was signalling that I'd like to see something that makes me want to put funds back here and avoid that need to diversify. Obviously from my post a lot of my concern surrounds the way the marketing is being handled. I just think that some here think that because they understand how it all works it automatically means that this project will ultiately be a asuccess. Most people won;t spend the time you've spent i here in order to become a true beleiver and that is why the marketing angle is so important in my view.

I'm not particularity confident in the long term price of Bitcoin, but I don't think holding some short term while I decide what to do with the funds is necessarily a bad idea.

The fact that I've only ever posted 23 times does not mean I am newcomer here, I've spent literally weeks reading things here on this forum over the last year.

Hmm.. isn't that as good as broadcasting to the SEC that Dan is changing the 'language' of Bitshares on purpose and with a clear intention to avoid the SEC?  This does not sound like a good idea to me.

What fuzzy said about Rune has an impact on btsx price?  Common.. you are stretching it.

Maybe I'm wrong about Rune's post. I think clear explanation as to why we need to change the language would help both us and the SEC understand how perhaps we do not fall within the bounds of something that would traditionally be seen as a hierarchical company with a centralised structure and CEO. This is not what we are about and that is why we have so far been called a 'Digital Autonomous Company' and not just a  'Company'. Surely the arguments to the SEC can still be made as to why we should not be treated in the same way without completely changing language and the direction of all marketing efforts away from the 'Company' metaphor. If I'm wrong here though and people really think it's worth steering clear of the 'Company' moniker then personally I prefer 'Digital Autonomous Cooperative.' It sounds more like something that actually produces something rather than something that just pushes an ideology.

I know this is a total noob question. But does this mean that this block actually executed (i.e. someone sold a load of BitUSD ?) or that they simply placed an ASK that may or may not have been filled? Perhaps to create a temporary wall of some kind? If it is the former then I guess someone is a true believer in BitShares and has taken advantage of the currently low share price? I think I actually saw more than one block containing similar amounts.


http://www.bitsharesblocks.com/blocks/block?id=879648

When you are preaching to the choir this sounds awesome. When you are not, it becomes a tougher sell.

I have to ask - was this run through Brian and the marketing team before being announced? What is Brian's view on this if so? I think it's really important for the community to know that it was at least discussed with him first? Because if it wasn't and I were him, I'd be really pissed right now and losing patience. This decision will radically alter the marketing message he has to push going forward.

I realise that there are larger things at play here than just marketing, SEC etc, but on first blush this decision does not seem to have had much community discussion. The decision, it appears, has already been made. No real discussion, at least not here on the forum. Seems kinda perverse given the nature of the post.

My Spidey senses are tingling again, I honestly can't work out if it's in a good or a bad way yet. Better sleep on it I guess.

Let's not mix up ideology with values with emotions. We might not succeed pushing either ideology or trying to sell BTS based on emotions. VALUES is what we need to define and live imo.

Even coming from various backgrounds and having different worldviews we bitSHARE certain values e.g. such as freedom, privacy, fairness, creativity, meritocracy, security - to name a few... bitValues should define BitShares culture!

I like the idea of having a set of tenets somehow attached to the brand. (e.g. Bitshares stands for freedom, privacy, fairness, creativity, meritocracy, security etc), but that's it - literally a list. Let people interpret these words to fit their own worldview and belief system.

Anything beyond that and we become preachers. Do we want to become preachers? I don't think we do. If we were to go down that route IMHO we place ourselves in to very dogy territory from a marketing standpoint. We have to start negative campaigning against other economic models and quickly you get in to an place where you are having to agree that you don't believe in a nations and states. This message, whether you believe in nation and state or not, does not have mass market appeal IMHO.

Don't forget to factor in that fact that other 3rd party DACs are still being encouraged to snapshot PTS after Nov 5th. If you sell your PTS now then you obviously give up genesis shares in other 3rd party DACs. Not exactly an apples for apples situation. Please correct me if I'm wrong here...

I've been eagerly following the recent discussions about the merger. I was initially a little freaked out but it now all seems to make a lot of sense to me - in the short term we are stronger together rather than diluting effort. Luckily I didn't freak out enough to sell out back in to Bitcoin and hopefully share price will recover again once there is greater understanding across the whole community and weak handed short term speculators are shaken out of the tree. We'll also sadly lose some genuine believers who just find this evolution little bit too hard to swallow. C'est la vie. For those who have been genuinely burned by DNS I think that BM and Toasts recent appeasement for post genesis DNS buyers should help restore some shattered nerves and fill up some suddenly lighter DNS wallets. Those who felt that they were on the sharp end of what seemed to me to be one of the biggest negative outcomes will hopefully feel better now. Also there seems to be a fund being raised to try and appease other biggest losers who don't qualify for BMs and Toast's proposal (see this thread for details on both https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=10381.0)

My main question:

Currently I own BTSX. 1/3 of my current BTSX stake is from Feb 28 PTS genesis snapshot and about a 1/3 of my total investment inside BitsharesX is pegged to BitUSD. Good to see a few more people hedging in there with me of late instead of leaving $ on a BTC exchange   
I am also a long term holder of PTS and have tripled my stake there too since Feb 28.

I haven't actually set up wallets for or claimed for any other DACs yet, apart from my genesis for BTSX. (i.e. DNS, Vote, Lotto?). Under the new proposal what should I do now?

Nothing for DNS/Vote I think...? It'll get taken care of by the automatic dynamic value allocation/dilution post merger (i.e. my new BTS balance will be more than my old BTSX one). What about Music? Are there other DACS I should have claimed for that have done snapshots and will live on as separate DACs? I did I see Lotto mentioned somewhere.

Other related musings and some more questions:

The above one-time-only-merger-confusion and the historical confusion/effort required to keep track of new DACS is exactly the kind of confusion that this new merger proposal will eliminate.  There will be much less need to worry if there's a new product on the horizon from the team, when was the snapshot, is the wallet ready yet , can I import yet, which exchange supports the new DAC, where should I shuffle funds (PTS, BTSX, presale) etc etc. This is boring and time consuming. Moving away from this is a really good idea for those who want an efficient team and more profitable easier to track investment. If you wan to do some short term speculation then do it within the bitAssets ecossytem once the number of assets available grows. Overall a 100 separate bottle rockets vs one Falcon 9 rocket seems like a no brainier, especially when you couple the F9 rocket to the now easier to attain network effect.

I guess some entities will still decide to go it alone with their own DACs (hopefully not Music) and I'll have to keep an eye out for them. Ultimately separate DACs are going to be a fact of life if the DAC model proves itself to be a wider success. It may make a lot of sense for some DACS, especially competitive or incompatible or niche ones, to go it alone. In the grand scheme and the longer term it is to be encouraged. Over time more serious competition in the DAC space from larger similar-to-BTS (perhaps Etherium is closest. Anyone agree?) will mean that anyone long on BTS will hopefully have a big smile on their face anyway. Increased  real competition is validation of the whole DAC idea and will hopefully see lots more liquidity coming in the wider DAC ecosystem as a result. Let's just hope we can be at the number one spot.

So another clarification needed here. I'm sort of ELI5ing to myself here: under the new merger proposal, features/products added to a Bitshares DAC will not result in new BTS allocation, like we used to see with separate DACs, instead we hope they'll just add to the overall value proposition for the Bitshares DAC. This in turn will hopefully attract more liquidity and push the price of BTS upwards and that's how us early adopters benefit (i.e. no more snapshots or new shares for features added that get added inside the new SuperDac - our BTS share price hopefully just goes up instead). Have I got this right? I hate the term SuperDac by the way, FrankenDAC even more so. Maybe we should agree on a term? Universal DAC sounds much better to me.

For those DAC entities that use the toolkit and go it alone with their own blockchain, those that are outside the Bitshares Universal DAC, what will happen here?  If these entities want to honor the idea of a DAC having used the toolkit and reward those with a genesis allocation (i.e. like how PTS and AGS snapshots operate today). After the merger will they instead take a snapshot of BTS and publish their % allocations for BTS holders at the time of snapshot? If so is it still expected that if you use the toolkit you'll allocate some portion of your DACs genesis to BTS holders (i.e. nothing changes here - just the vehicle for working out the the snapshots becomes BTS instead of PTS/AGS)?  I guess what I'm asking here is, as long term holder who wants exposure to the BTS Universal DAC and future incompatible/niche extremal DACS using the toolkit, is just holding BTS a good strategy? For external DACs that I'm particularity interested in I can look out for pre-sales to try and get more exposure to them I presume.

On practicalities of the client software itself:

My one initial worry was that a BitShares FrankenDAC  from a usability point of view would be ugly and confusing - vote , exchange, music and eventually much more all under one GUI roof. The mall metaphor that Stan initially made, though generally pretty sound, made me think of this from a usability point of view. I hate malls - too busy and too much fighting for my attention.

But actually the mall metaphor from Stan is perhaps more meta than my initial basic interpretation of it. I prefer Universal DAC because it fits better with my more recent insight. The new Universal DAC is a bit like a mall, but that doesn't mean that all the shops have to be on the same street. The GUIs to all the different components of Bitshares do not have to be contained within one downloadable client.

With this insight it seems clear to me that there is a necessity for splitting up the various BTS products into separate GUI silos or apps. They will obviously need to have the BTS brand in common. A bit like how you have a separate Google Maps, Gmail and Google Cardboard app on your mobile phone today. All brought to you by Google, but each product with a separate focused app that you can choose to download or not. Each app has it's own team of engineers too. So the way you access the features and products, all sitting on the same BTS blockchain, may differ depending on the BTS product or feature you are interested in making use of. You most likely buy things with BitUSD or BitEUR within these apps. For some products it might be via specialized downloadable clients/wallet for your pc, for others a a browser-only based interface, others still will be touch/mobile apps. Perhaps some products will eventually have all three or more.  Personally I'm looking forward to features and products that require a VR based interface. What is the short term plan here? I've not seen the practicalities of how it will all work together discussed or spelled out. Will Vote/DNS and, perhaps Music if they come on board, all be initally contained in one client or will we have separate ones? I hope to god it's the latter otherwise it's going to get messy fast.

I'm all in on BTSX/PTS at the moment ($0 Bitcoin for a few months now). Confident in the team and community long term to steer the ship in the right direction. PR needs to be handled better in future without muting BM. This will become less of an issue for price volatility as more liquidity from the mainstream flows in. As we grow most investors won't read the musing and detail discussed over here in the forum. The big decisions will get made and passed off through Brian's marketing team. Most investors will then just read the main official press releases and blog posts and keep an eye for Bitshares news on Coindesk and perhaps Reddit etc. What they see there will hopefully be correctly spun or managed by an efficient and proactive marketing machine once it finally comes online.

Once last thing! For those who think they are in a similar place to me (i.e. long), do you think we're near bottom on PTS yet? Are you planning to buy more? Looks tempting to me.

IMHO, where the marketing material will be used does not make my points any less valid.