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Messages - bitsapphire

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106
kenCode asked yesterday a bunch of great questions. I thought I'd post them here for anybody else who is interested.

Questions:
1. If BitSapphire got seed or vc backing, then why are you crowdfunding Moonstone?
2. Is Moonstone open source like Jay (NXT)?
3. Is Moonstone trustless like jay?
4. Is Moonstone decentralized like jay?
5. Comparisons: What does Moonstone offer that blockchain.info doesn't? Blackcoin? Counterwallet? Omniwallet?
6. Crowdfunding: What will my BTS be used for?
7. Crowdfunding: Will I earn interest on my BTS donation?
8. Crowdfunding: If the crowdfunding does not meet its goal, how do I get my BTS back?
9. Is Moonstone entirely web-based, or do I have to download and install an app?
10. How is Moonstone more secure than most web wallets?
11. Does Moonstone rely on a traditional centralized server, ever?
12. Will Moonstone allow me to access my existing BTS account info?
13. Will Moonstone allow me to import my BTS (from Linux) json backup file?
14. Will Moonstone allow me to stop using the Linux BTS client software and migrate to Moonstone exclusively?
15. How do I get my grandparents to understand, and use Moonstone?
 

Answers:
1. Bitsapphire has no VC backing whatsoever. We are fully bootstrapped. In the market of exploding funding for crypto startups capable developers are a more scarce resource than money. We have been able to position our business model accordingly.
2. If we reach our fudning goal of 130,000 USD in BTC within our 30 day funding period we will release both the front and backend under the permissive MIT license. This will allow other projects and startups to use parts of our code and add value in their own ways. If we don't reach our goal then only the frontend will be released open source, but under the less permissive GPL 3 licence. This would mean that startups and projects would have a harder time reusing our components.
3. Moonstone is trustless in as far as we don't hold any private keys and only store encrypted wallet files. In a sense, we just help you not lose your stuff. If you don;t feel comfortable with that then you can host your own server too (provided we reach our goal!) The closest comparison to another wallet would be copay.io by the Bitpay guys
4. Moonstone is not decentralized. It accesses a full client server which however cannot forge any signatures as the server holds no private keys.
5. Well, access to BitShares of course! But beyond that we have a timeline to add native Bitcoin support and through the integration of Metaexchange in-wallet cross-chain exchange. For V2 or 3 which is pretty close down the line we want to make it possible to verify your ID on the BitShares blockchain so you can trade legal fiat, stock, and bond IOUs from around the world.
6. The crowdfunder happens completely in BTC which will be converted immediately to fiat for operation purposes. For your donation you will get 1.15 Moonstone tokens per BTS equivalent exchange value of your BTC. As an example: If the amount of BTC you donate is worth 10,000 BTS then you will receive 11,500 Moonstone tokens in exchange. We plan to buy-back all Moonstone tokens via our pre-selected but opt-out wallet delegates at a 1-to-1 ratio with BTS. This means that if everything goes according to plan can make a 15% return in terms of BTS.
7. Yes! If everything goes according to plan you will be able to earn a 15% return in terms of BTS. The cutoff duration for the buyback via the delegates is 30 months after the start of the buyback.
8. If the crowdfunder is not successful, meaning we don't reach our goal of 130,000 USD worth of BTC within the 30 day window, we will proceed to release the frontend under the GPL3 license without releasing the backend. The delegate buyback commences nonetheless and we will buyback the tokens in the same manner. No BTC can be taken back.
9. Moonstone is primarily a web application but can be downloaded to your computer similar to how the current BTS wallet can be downloaded. You can chose to either download only the thin client or the full package including the server.
10. Most BTC web wallet hold your private keys. Hence, they are effectively banks as they hold your funds for you. Moonstone does not hold any private keys, that is your job. You are in charge of your assets.
11. The full blockchain is stored in our server (or any server you wish if we reach our goal). We cannot forge any transactions and cannot steal your funds. So yes, with V1 it relies on a central server-client setup.
12 & 13. Yes. You will be able to import your existing wallet securely.
14. V1 of Moonstone won't support TITAN names. So complete migration will only be possible if you are ok with that. Future versions of Moonstone will be capable of doing TITAN transfers. There are some technical challenges we need to resolve first.
15. The design is simple and intuitive enough to understand it. In fact it's pretty close to traditional non-crypto wallets currently out there. We believe that in the near future our user base will primarily consist of people who want to hold multiple assets (IOUs, UIAs) as well as potentially multiple blockchain tokens (e.g. BTS, BTC, ETH, etc) in one and the same interface and trade between each of them effortlessly. That is our target group.

One more thing. If we reach our fundraising goal we also pledge that V2 and V3 of the wallet will also be open source MIT licensed, the only potential exception being the ID verification module.

107
You seem to have a large talented team, good business acumen and can see the potential in what this technology can offer but at the same time you've seen how BitShares has struggled price wise these last 6 months.

Have you ever thought of starting a BitShares competitor instead?

Thanks for the kind words!

We don't think that the price decrease has to worry anybody as Bitshare should be a longterm play for most people. Our only worry is that BTS (and really currently any crypto tokens) are first and foremost digital commodity tokens, then secondarily in the case of Bitshares actual shares. Because BTS are such hybrid tokens, market cap has almost no meaning as traditional market cap evaluations currently used for stocks simply don't work.

Generally speaking, we are against starting new "competitors" or alternative projects, primarily because blockchains are in our opinion codified social consensus/contracts. As such the actual value of the network is in the social network, not the code itself. In a sense, the community here is what actually back the value of BTS.

That said, we are working with 3 guys part time internally on a project called Pactum. It is blockchain tech, but does not compete in any way with Bitshares. Our plan is actually for it to use DPOS. We are expecting another 6-12 months of stealth development time until we have a PoC to show... if our hypothesis works out (some pretty big ifs).

108
Based on the outcome of the poll we have decided to denominate the buyback in terms of BTS. This means that for every BTC you send in the price will be converted into the equivalent in terms of BTS at the time of donation, and you will receive 1.15 Moonstone tokens for every BTS equivalent you donated.

To accomodate the changes and to do some more testing on our crowdfunder setup we are postponing the start of the crowdfunding campaign to April 9th.

Once the wallet is released as version 1.0 the buyback with the d delegates will commence. Our delegates will be operational and can be voted in by May.

Final Timeline:

  • Thursday, April 9th 2015 12.00 PM UTC (noon) the crowdfunding campaign will start
  • Saturday, May 9th 2015 12.00 PM UTC (noon) the crowdfunding campaign ends.
  • May: The wallet software version 0.9 final public test release will be made (with the MIT license if the crowdfunder reaches our goal of 130k USD)
  • June: Version 1.0 of the wallet is released after extensive public testing.

If you have any questions please let us know!

109
General Discussion / Re: What's happening with the price?
« on: April 05, 2015, 10:00:05 pm »

with only $37,000 24h volume we are 5% down... what does it mean? ( I ask the traders to interpret what means low volume with increased price volatility)

It means there is very little buying support, even at these levels.

The key developers still seem very committed though and there are good developments all coming through soon. If I didn't have any BTS I would take a punt at these prices but as I've already tried to call the bottom incorrectly and lost as a result, I'm personally waiting for a significant reversal in the downtrend or evidence of actual BitAsset adoption before I buy more. (I value BTS almost exclusively on BitAsset progress and adoption.)

BitSapphire though have identified perhaps the key problem with BitAssets which is liquidity. So creative ways to address that are possibly needed.

Also if there was a use for BitAssets like buying Music, Gaming or my personal favourite Blockchain based Gambling, then we could see an uptick in BitAsset use and growth.

The two easiest ways to add gateways to the picture is in our opinion:
  • Add legal stock and bond gateways
  • Add legal fiat IOU gateways

Both need easy and friction-less KYC to be legally compliant. I think adding easy KYC compliance should be the number one thing in mind of every delegate and wallet creator out there atm.

The easiest to reach potential gateways are most likely already existing equity crowdfunding websites in Europe and already existing Bitcoin ATM networks. The ATM networks especially could easily integrate by providing ATM Gateway fiat IOUs rather than do the whole buying and selling of bitUSD at the ATM. This would also be a lot more secure.

Our two cents.

110
中文 (Chinese) / Re: Moonstone.io Chinese version
« on: April 05, 2015, 09:08:17 pm »
Please vote in our poll in our official thread: https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=15138.0

Main point:
We have decided to hold the fundraiser exclusively in BTC, there won't be a BTS or bitAsset option. The reasons are that the liquidity between BTS and BTC is so low that selling 130k USD worth opf BTS into BTC to cash out into fiat would according to our calculations move the market simply too much.

However we would like everybody to take part in the poll in this thread and let us know whether you would like to get 1.15 USD or 1.15 BTS through a buyback. Our original plan was to do a bitUSD buyback but it seems there might be interest in doing the unit of account in terms of BTS rather than USD. After all, the community is long on BTS.

Depending on the outcome of the poll we might have to postpone the corwdfunding campaign another day.

Please vote in the poll in this thread and let us know what you think!

111
We have decided to hold the fundraiser exclusively in BTC, there won't be a BTS or bitAsset option. The reasons are that the liquidity between BTS and BTC is so low that selling 130k USD worth opf BTS into BTC to cash out into fiat would according to our calculations move the market simply too much.

However we would like everybody to take part in the poll in this thread and let us know whether you would like to get 1.15 USD or 1.15 BTS through a buyback. Our original plan was to do a bitUSD buyback but it seems there might be interest in doing the unit of account in terms of BTS rather than USD. After all, the community is long on BTS.

Depending on the outcome of the poll we might have to postpone the corwdfunding campaign another day.

Please vote in the poll in this thread and let us know what you think!

112
Meta / Re: Preview of recent posts
« on: April 04, 2015, 10:34:48 pm »
Sorry guys, this is our fault. We've been removing as much unnecessary stuff as possible from the forum. It has already helped in speeding up the forum, taking strain of the server, and on-site activity per user-session has gone up too.

However, this was, as it turns out, one thing the frequent users use a lot. Something that simply doesn't show up in a Google Analytics sheet.

We're looking to add this mod instead http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=512057.0 asap.

113
Thanks everybody for your thoughts! You definitely spawned a lot of ideas with the team!

We're in the final testing phase of our crowdfunding mechanism (Thanks metaexchange!). We would like to ask the community whether you want both a BTC and BTS based fundraiser or a pure BTC fundraiser. Please let us know about your preference and your reasoning!

We initially wanted to include both as to increase the total available liquidity for the fundraiser, however, looking at the order books of most of the BTS exchanges out there it seems selling the BTS on the market at market prices (rather than with a trade strategy) could potentially depress the price of BTS even further. This would obviously not be the case for BTC.

Looking forward to your input!

It would be cool to use BitAssets like BitUSD - In all seriousness it would probably be silly to keep all of the raised funds in BTS or Bitcoin due to the volatility. It's far more important to know the dollar value of funds raised (unless of course you intend to pay everybody with a fixed BTS/BTC amount each month regardless of their exchange rate against the dollar).

That is our main concern. While for the Moonstone fundraiser it is unimportant in what unit the funds are raised (because we need to convert it for business operations all to EUR anyway), it can and most likely will become an issue for the buyback via the delegates.If the unit of account fluctuates a lot vis-a-vis BTS (which is what delegates are paid in), then this can lead to the situation in which we can never buy-back all tokens.

Another concern of ours is that many people in the crypto scene want to be able to diversify their positions somehow. Because neither stocks not bonds are available, they seem to really like our approach which is denominated in terms of USD.

Here is a copy of a PM that I sent to fuzzy:


I would really, really like to see the Moonstone fundraiser be successful.

That having been said, I will say that I am having second thoughts about being a large investor. I am worried about the value of the USD during the time of the repayment period. I think that the US is going to have to do another "quantitative easing" or do something else that will greatly diminish the value of its fiat currency.

Since Moonstone plans to convert any donations, no matter whether BTS, bitUSD, bitGOLD BTC. or whatever, at the time of donation into the fiat dollar equivalent price at that time - and then repay 1.15 times that fiat value - I think the risk to investors is greatly increased. If the fiat dollar value drops by one third, then getting back 1.15 times the dollar value of my donation is not very appealing.

If Moonstone would both accept bitGOLD and repay 1.15 times the bitGOLD investment - that would alleviate my concerns. And they could hold funds in bitGOLD except what they HAD to convert to another form for project purposes as the need arises.

I would like to hear Taulant's input on this fear of mine. Otherwise, I'm afraid my investment will be less than I would hope.

Worrying about the stability of the USD during the buyback period is a fair concern. To be honest though, the USD is nonetheless the healthiest and most liquid currency out there. It will be the last to fall even if something really crazy happens. Our operational expenses are almost all EUR denominated, and we nonetheless are denominating the Moonstone crowdfunder in terms of USD because the Euro is much more likely to suffer some shock than the USD.

BitGold would suffer the same problem. Looking at the price chart of Gold for the last quarter you see a 10-15% fluctuation. If we denominated the crowdfunder in terms of bitGold that would expose the buy-back period also to a 10-15% per quarter fluctuation. What is even worse the donors would need to be by definition long on gold, or at least bitGold, something I doubt most people here are.

Reality is, most investors are at least to some extend long on USD because they know that nothing else is a safer bet. The USD wins in this regard as a unit of account not because it is good, but rather because it is not bad.

My intuition says: "Use BitAssets!!"

using BitAssets, and NOT converting immediately, will

1) increases BitAssets exposure,
2) increase BitAssets liquidity,
3) increase BitShares marketcap
4) Provides stability for your fund,
5) Provides security for your fund (multi-sig!!)
6) Provides transparency for your fund (public audit!)

While we agree with everything on your list, we think bitAssets are not ready for usage yet. As pointed out in earlier discussions, at Bitsapphire we believe that the initial beachhead market for BitShares is not bitAssets, but rather the decentralized exchange and order book for UIA and gateway assets such as stocks and bonds. While bitAssets have a chicken and egg problem (you need liquidity to get liquidity), UIAs and Gateway IOUs don;t have that problem. The only thing needed to kickcstart the liquidity of the UIA/IOU market on BitShares is in our opinion the ID certification mechanism for gateway KYC purposes. Creating sufficient liquidity on UIAS/IOUs should naturally lead people to using bitUSD or similar bitAssets as a liquid and instant open position against all other UIAs/IOUs on the chain. We think this is the right approach to create liquidity on BitShares.

This means that holding the fundraiser funds in bitUSD on the chain would be at this point counterproductive as we need all the funds for operational purposes anyway. However, I hope that 1-2 years down the line the created UIA/IOU liquidity will be so great that the bitUSD/USD spread will also be minimal and make such cumbersome conversions a thing of the past.

Agreed - it is a lot of risk to take on for a potential 15% (which could take a very long time). I'd much rather it if moonstone took an approach of say selling 20% of equity in the company/product at the crowdfunder with no buyback (with an IPO for the equity share on the internal exchange)

Good that you mention that! Version 1 of the wallet is intended to be open sourced. The community is really paying for it to become a public good rather than to become something closed source like coinbase. We included the buy-back mechanism just so at least some of the risk can be covered and so that at the end the community as a whole can repay the risk takers (via the delegates) for a public good, without having to take on risks which the public did not agree to.

As for selling stock, we hope to be able to do that for V2 and 3 of the wallet for which we already have the featureset defined. That is when the wallet will be able to ID users for gateways. Turns out we can do that quite easily and legally in Kosovo, we're just trying to figure out the legalities of offering stock in this way to citizens in the US, China, and other places. Many countries seem to have "lockin" laws which we might not be aware of at this point. With a successfull initial fundraiser for the MIT license we know we can finish up the wallet properly and get to the next stage faster.

My thoughts:

Don't accept BTS for the reasons you stated.

If you are unwilling to keep bitUSD as bitUSD then don't accept that either.

That seems to be the best approach so far, as we won't hold any position in any crypto anyways. It's all operational expenses.

But what about return of investment should be 1.15 x (whatever asset used for donation)? Under that scenario I will make a much larger donation.

i would suggest this. Yes!

bitsapphire wants to race 130k USD - so they could do it 130k worth of USD, they would just convert at the point of donation to the current exchange rate and the donors can be paid in their asset back. But maybe for this proposel they need more then one UIA to track what they collected. moonGold, moonSilver, moonUSD, moonBTC , moonBTS, moonCNY . Sounds nice to me, and i like the idea that the investors will be paid in their invested asset class.

This could only work in terms of BTS. We have pondered this option for some time. What we could do is issue 1.15 moonstone tokens for every BTS we receive (or BTC in terms of current BTS market price) and then repay directly in terms of BTS from the delegate proceedings. Some really early Bitcoin mining operations used to do this. However this would mean that only people long on BTS would donate.

Maybe we should do a poll about this potential implementation? We will look into this.

114
We're in the final testing phase of our crowdfunding mechanism (Thanks metaexchange!). We would like to ask the community whether you want both a BTC and BTS based fundraiser or a pure BTC fundraiser. Please let us know about your preference and your reasoning!

We initially wanted to include both as to increase the total available liquidity for the fundraiser, however, looking at the order books of most of the BTS exchanges out there it seems selling the BTS on the market at market prices (rather than with a trade strategy) could potentially depress the price of BTS even further. This would obviously not be the case for BTC.

Looking forward to your input!

115
General Discussion / Re: Christmas Be born 1.0 wallet?
« on: April 02, 2015, 01:46:37 pm »
However, IOUs/UIAs don't have that problem and it is obvious that there is a huge unmet market out there of people and companies who want to have a combined, automated, and secure order book like that. This is why we position Moonstone not primarily as a bitAsset wallet but as a wallet where you can manage your IOUs/UIAs.
It's a shame we still don't have any documentation about UIA .. can you guys help us out there?

Once Moonstone is wrapped up, certainly! Our priority is to deliver Moonstone as promised.

116
This reply on another thread might be of interest to you:

1.0 isnt going to be some magical fix.

Back last winter, we had been told that there were fiat onramps and corresponding marketing campaign coming, and that these were just waiting on a 1.0 release.  That has since been revealed to be not true at all, and was likely just a cover by Brian Page for why he didnt accomplish anything.   ("Oh yeah, I'm totally working on things!  As soon as you guys get 1.0 released its ready to launch").   

So don't expect 1.0 to do anything magical to the price.  Moonstone might do some good however.

Contrary to what some people believe now I think that 1.0 (though a true 1.0!) is important for market adoption. Potential gateways are hesitant to integrate with unproven software which handles some sort of value exchange. Bitcoin only got away with it because its user base grew faster than the code quality.

As for Moonstone, we think of Bitshares as the potential combined order book and price discovery mechanism for tons of assets which could be issued in the near future via gateways (primarily stocks and bonds, secondarily fiat IOUs). BitAssets, the one feature the core team is currently pushing, won't be in our opinion the main driving factor for some time to come. That is because bitAssets have a chicken and egg problem: They need high liquidity to attract liquidity.

However, IOUs/UIAs don't have that problem and it is obvious that there is a huge unmet market out there of people and companies who want to have a combined, automated, and secure order book like that. This is why we position Moonstone not primarily as a bitAsset wallet but as a wallet where you can manage your IOUs/UIAs.

In the mid-to-long term Moonstone will hopefully start supporting the Bitshares market value by providing the on-blockchain ID verification for third party gateways. That way you can easily sign up to gateways around the world and trade all kinds of stocks/bonds legally. This is definitely part of our plan for 2015.

117
General Discussion / Re: Christmas Be born 1.0 wallet?
« on: April 02, 2015, 12:15:28 pm »
1.0 isnt going to be some magical fix.

Back last winter, we had been told that there were fiat onramps and corresponding marketing campaign coming, and that these were just waiting on a 1.0 release.  That has since been revealed to be not true at all, and was likely just a cover by Brian Page for why he didnt accomplish anything.   ("Oh yeah, I'm totally working on things!  As soon as you guys get 1.0 released its ready to launch").   

So don't expect 1.0 to do anything magical to the price.  Moonstone might do some good however.

Contrary to what some people believe now I think that 1.0 (though a true 1.0!) is important for market adoption. Potential gateways are hesitant to integrate with unproven software which handles some sort of value exchange. Bitcoin only got away with it because its user base grew faster than the code quality.

As for Moonstone, we think of Bitshares as the potential combined order book and price discovery mechanism for tons of assets which could be issued in the near future via gateways (primarily stocks and bonds, secondarily fiat IOUs). BitAssets, the one feature the core team is currently pushing, won't be in our opinion the main driving factor for some time to come. That is because bitAssets have a chicken and egg problem: They need high liquidity to attract liquidity.

However, IOUs/UIAs don't have that problem and it is obvious that there is a huge unmet market out there of people and companies who want to have a combined, automated, and secure order book like that. This is why we position Moonstone not primarily as a bitAsset wallet but as a wallet where you can manage your IOUs/UIAs.

In the mid-to-long term Moonstone will hopefully start supporting the Bitshares market value by providing the on-blockchain ID verification for third party gateways. That way you can easily sign up to gateways around the world and trade all kinds of stocks/bonds legally. This is definitely part of our plan for 2015.

118
Random Discussion / Re: Accessing forum over TOR increasingly harder
« on: April 01, 2015, 07:37:25 pm »
The problem is that we're getting DDOS attacks regularly and needed to put up some protection on our server provider. Other solutions as outlined by others put up captchas hich is a problem in and of itself.

Hopefully we can put up a hidden service on TOR itself soon, that could solve the problem, though that's not possible with our current server provider.

119
The moonstone trading interface will be relatively simple and targeted at average users. However, for V2 and 3 we plan to become more modular and allow third party extensions to any interface part of the wallet. We hope people will pick up the slack and provide higher end trading interfaces for professionals at some point.
Will I be able to load plugins into moonstone?
yes, for v2. We need to figure out the security implications first though.

120
General Discussion / Re: BitShares.tv - A closer look at Moonstone
« on: March 30, 2015, 02:40:21 pm »
Awesome interview .. plenty of information.

I myself explain the blockchain pretty much the same way as Taulant does: Append-only excel sheet :)

Yes, it seems that slowly but surely the industry is converging o a set of obvious interpretations.

Since blockchains are so obviously different from other databases (they never delete or modify anything), I have been thinking for some time that we could design a new kind of key-value-store which uses this "drawback" as an opportunity. Turns out the Ripple guys have been thinking about this for some time and have come up with their own special blockchain db! I would love to hear your opinion on NuDB. I think it might be an important potential change to Bitshares in the near future.

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