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Messages - Thom

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31
General Discussion / Re: price feeding review
« on: November 17, 2018, 03:13:09 am »
I find this talk of transparency somewhat disingenuous, as very few witnesses produce a report of their operations periodically.

I will soften that to the extent I don't monitor non-English publications, so if there are non-English witness reports out there, great. Would be nice to see them announced on a prominent platform or in the Bitshares_Witnesses channel of Telegram. I asked one Chinese speaker to translate for me once, but he never followed thru. Neither did I in finding another.

I think Google translate has probably gotten good enough where it is adequate to bridge the language barrier between Mandarin & English now.

I have very consistently published a monthly witness report, I have been more transparent than most witnesses in what I do each month. I have repeatedly stated I use bts_tools for my price feeds. That will change when the MCR fix is released, at which time I will use zapata's price feed script.

I have been publishing my reports on steemit, but given the recent changes on that platform I will be moving to the whaleshares platform. I have no idea which sites Chinese shareholders have access to, given their governments censorship of the internet. I will make it a point to update my witness proposal thread here on this forum, to at least provide a link to my full report on Whaleshares.

I encourage all witnesses to follow the lead of zapata and myself to improve your level of transparency of ALL of your witness operations, at least those that don't compromise security, not just transparency in how you produce feeds.

Maximum respect to you @zapata. As a relatively new witness you set a good example for others to follow.

32
General Discussion / Re: price feeding review
« on: November 16, 2018, 03:28:17 pm »
Quote from: ouresw on November 16, 2018, 03:11:34 pm
Our views are slowly becoming more consistent in practice. From the beginning of the reform, I have always suggested that without the chain acceptance function, there is no objective judgment on whether the supply of bitCNY is sufficient or not. Based on this, the strength of the negative feedback should not be too large. In addition, the establishment of the chain acceptance function helps the commercialization and promotion of bitCNY. Now I think the most important thing is to discuss the feasibility of accepting on the chain. By the way, we can also "pull it."

WTH? "chain acceptance" "pull it" ? I do agree an lack of objective judgement for BitCNY supply being "sufficient", depends on who you ask. We've heard from bitcrab and his followers. The same thing can be said for all other bit assets.

33
General Discussion / Re: price feeding review
« on: November 16, 2018, 02:38:19 pm »
I will resume cny and usd feeds when a proper fix is available thru MCR AND a reasonable algo is established that doesn't need minute by minute "adjustments".

We actually can't be certain without doubt bitcrab's objectives can be achieved through MCR, but that is our best hope. Time will tell.

I'm not a fan of rushing when it comes to these things. I wish more witnesses would think independently and question what is actually going on, not just trust in proxies blindly.

I also wish more witnesses took their roll more seriously and work to set standards and conventions, to "tighten the ship" and consider the many factors, not only focus on 1 or 2 aspects like feeds. Very few are even wiling to discuss those matters, such as better ways to track witness operations. What can be automated and what are the metrics we could measure?

That is MY appeal to witnesses.

34
General Discussion / Re: suggest to disable forcesettlement for bitCNY
« on: November 13, 2018, 02:44:24 pm »
Quote from: matle85 on November 13, 2018, 02:14:22 pm
I'm assuming the vote above is just informative - I guess the Committee have the authority make the decision and if they decide they want to put it to a worker vote on chain they do?

Sure informative, like CNN or fake news.

Rather than admit the sentiment is against this change, those pushing for it will keep trying to spin inputs until they get what they want, damned be the shareholders and contrary opinions.

35
Stakeholder Proposals / Re: [Worker Proposal] - A bounty based smartcoin marketing campaign
« on: November 12, 2018, 04:52:15 pm »
Quote from: Thul3 on November 06, 2018, 12:59:54 pm
There was also no annoucement of bitusd feed price getting manipulated .It just raised by 40% .
This kind of behavior is the reason why no big exchange is going to implement these bitassets as a small group is using it as it is their private toy they can experiment with.

I stopped my USD feed when USD feed manipulation started, despite xeroc and others being very direct in saying experimentation on that bitasset was dangerous and should wait for the MCR fix. Nevertheless, many witnesses decided to start playing around with BitUSD despite admonitions and the dangers.

I'm sure some of the witnesses that did so justify their actions saying bsip42 didn't prohibit it. In fact the only statement about when experimentation could start on BitUSD is:
Quote
It will be good to apply the change to bitCNY first, which has much better liquidity than other smartcoins. After witnesses and community learned enough in the process it can be also applied to bitUSD.

When did we pass the threshold of "enough" ?

I have maintained from the start how loose and vague the language of bsip42 was, and have been vocal about tightening that up BEFORE the MCR fix is ready and another hap hazard, poorly organized round of "experiments" are conducted, but that thread has not gotten the attention it should have.

Another important point is that bsip42 can be enabled and disabled at anytime through the poll workers 1.14.118 and 1.14.119, which is the best thing about how bsip42 was written. However, as of this moment the NO worker has only 6 committee supporters while the YES worker has 8. The plain fact is bsip42 could be disabled at any time by committee involvement.

The bsip should never have been approved as written. It was too vague, especially regarding use on non CNY bitAssets. Xeroc has been vocal about wanting to support the bsip for CNY, but not USD. He was put in a bad position due to how the bsip was written. I presume that's why he is supporting the YES worker. IMO he should have pulled his vote for YES and added it to NO worker as soon as it became apparent manipulation of BitUSD started, but he didn't.

TBH and genuine with my sentiments on this matter I am disgusted by the lack of concern I see on this feed issue as well as how poorly our "DPoS governance" works to establish consensus on important matters. 

Although Thul3 was very blunt with his most recent remarks I can't say I blame him for expressing his dissatisfaction with a strong emotional tone. I also think he raises an excellent point about why would any legit, non-fake volume exchange risk listing out bitassets with all this drama going on. The ecosystem is not unified and doesn't seem to operate with consensus and clear understanding of how to manage or market bitassets.

36
General Discussion / Re: Breaking Bitshares: The Wargame
« on: November 11, 2018, 04:44:37 pm »
Although I was concerned about seeing this topic in public, and introduced by a total newbie to the forum, I commented. Not adding ideas to how to break the system as much as what we should be weary of.

Nevertheless, I don't believe such vulnerabilities should be discussed in public. I have thus suggested that this thread / topic be removed.

Although significant improvements can and should be made to provide a trusted way to discuss these things, it should not be public for obvious reasons, and should not allow anonymous newbies, no matter how well intentioned, to participate. Trust must be earned, and that come from being known, and that takes observation of person's actions and words over a period of time. Instantaneous trust is worthless.

I suggested keybase as a secure app we could use for secure, private comminications. Most of the devs are already on keybase, as are some witnessses, includning myself.

37
General Discussion / Re: Breaking Bitshares: The Wargame
« on: November 11, 2018, 04:03:52 am »
Quote from: iamredbar on November 10, 2018, 02:54:46 pm
Quote from: matle85 on November 10, 2018, 08:39:40 am
6) Launch spam/scam versions of it to undermine confidence and create general feeling it's a scam.

This would be the most detrimental one for BitShares IMO. Right now BitShares is sitting solid as far as functionality goes, but what BitShares doesn’t have is a good marketing. If something malicious was to appear, how would the community know? It would take people getting scammed to realize we have a problem, then we are reacting instead of being proactive.

How would we know... that's a difficult question to answer b/c it requires psychological scrutiny and sensitivity to detect the usually subtle signs of sociopathy or psycopathy.

At least one hostile takeover has been attempted in this community and the community response was not good at all IMO. Most people were afraid to side with one party or the the other, and it reminded me of the old excuse, "I don't want to get involved", and the oft quoted, "All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing".

I see several aspects of BitShares governance that have weakened decentralization and increased the chances of manipulation by those with a a personal agenda which is contrary to the well being of the ecosytem. I don't believe any community or project can succeed if the people that comprise it aren't willing to take responsibility for it. This community is a reflection of the attitudes and character of society at large, no longer of the team that created it. Thus we see actions taken outside of consensus and pushing agendas contrary to [some] of the values held by the original devs / creators, with no regard to the reasons and rationale those values were established for. I see it in many crypto projects, the shift away from the original core principles and attitudes that led to the creation of blockchain technology in the first place.

Also keep in mind one of the fundamental flaws in any POS based consensus algo, including DPOS. All it takes is enough money and you can buy your influence. Actually you could gain major influence simply by using persuasion to convince enough shareholders to proxy to you. It wouldn't be easy for a normal person but for a "talented" and practiced psychopath I think it would be quite possible.


38
Technical Support / Re: NOBLE/BTS - There are issues here
« on: November 11, 2018, 03:09:43 am »
Quote from: iamredbar on November 10, 2018, 11:13:43 pm
Quote from: sschiessl on November 10, 2018, 11:10:52 pm
It does show it on the exchange, but not prominently enough.

Go to https://wallet.bitshares.org/#/market/NOBLE_BTS and find the "Buy Noble" panel. There is a line with the market fee.

Found it. Thinking of new users, this might be something that could be improved.

I agree. Almost anything can be improved for a cost. It would make for a better UX if the confirmation page showed that fee. The way you described the transaction it was basically a donation, one you didn't expect.

However, if I were investing in an asset it is part of my due diligence to research it to discover such costk.

39
General Discussion / Re: Remove "asset owner can transfer asset back to himself" on stablecoins?
« on: November 09, 2018, 04:10:44 pm »
Quote from: xeroc on November 09, 2018, 07:18:41 am
As a community, the easiest way forward would be to appoint *additional* committee members.
No one forces us to stick with the hard-coded minimum of 11, code only prevents us from reaching 1002!

So, community, please apply for committee membership!

It would require quite a large number of additions to be an effective level of decentralization against they-them-those that control billions and trillions. I don't disagree on principle but it isn't a truly practical solution until the numbers get much larger.

Moreover, where are the docs (do any exist?) that describe the operation of the committee? I know there is at least one multisig account each committee member uses, but I'm not aware of any doc that describes how often they meet, how they select issues to discuss or which parameters should be reviewed and how often...

Such information should be documented (perhaps it is, but I am not aware of it) so those who are newly elected know what to expect and can be prepared. I wouldn't volunteer for a role if all I knew about it were generalities.

Think about when you get a new job. Usually the info one needs right away comes from the boss or peers. Company policies and procedures are typically more important for Human Resources than for your every day work, assuming you're not in management.

So when somebody gets elected to committee (clockwork and johnr are most recent additions, you 2 could speak to this) how do they know what to do? Do they rely on other committee members to tell them when meetings occur? Can they be effective in the committee without guidance or instruction from others? How can a new committee member avoid manipulation? Primarily by being well informed and confident the information is accurate.

It seems to me the more we rely on ad hoc methods to orient new people to the role the less independent they will be in making decisions, at least initially, especially of those decisions and issues are framed to achieve an agenda.

I hope these concerns about adding members to the community are baseless, the documentation is available and I'm just not informed of the manor the committee operates.  Regardless of committee operations, I just don't believe we could add enough informed committee members to be an effective solution, but the concept of decentralizing the committee further is indeed a good direction to take. 100 or 1000 committee members will be nothing more than puppets to someone's agenda if they are not informed and able to act in the role independently.

40
General Discussion / Re: Remove "asset owner can transfer asset back to himself" on stablecoins?
« on: November 08, 2018, 10:24:40 pm »
Quote from: matle85 on November 08, 2018, 08:57:07 am
(compliance? I think this needs some discussion in itself because having the ability to do something opens us up to being compelled to do it through legal channels).

^^^this

By removing this option you also reduce risk to committee members. Should some bureaucRAT / jurisdiction get it on their agenda to control bitassets and the committee consensus is not to take action they ALL might be thrown in the slammer. Yes I know that would need to occur in multiple jurisdictions, but I don't think it's out of the question with so few on the committee. Much more difficult undertakings have been accomplished by governments, so don't underestimate them. Removing this permission is a preventative measure IMHO. We need to be proactive rather than reactive when some "official / legal" entity requests such action.

I am in favor of removing this permission for the same reasons mentioned by others who also favor removing it.

Thank you matle85 for bringing more attention to this.

41
General Discussion / Re: [eng] Marketing Efforts and Pre-Worker Discussion
« on: November 06, 2018, 05:44:28 pm »
I'll look it over in detail later, but I did watch the video and it didn't offer anything very useful. It was all about what they hope to do but nothing at all that explained their approach or WHY BitShares is largely unknown.

In skimming their pdf I saw a statement to the effect of "there is no website to direct people to". This is false. Although Apasia's work is relatively new, any marketing firm worth is salt would have found it.

I'll provide a more comprehensive review later, but thus far I am not impressed.

42
Stakeholder Proposals / Re: Conventions / Coordinating BSIP42 for BitUSD market with MCR algorithm
« on: November 02, 2018, 03:26:14 pm »
One thing that came to mind we should discuss is the list of sources witnesses should use during our coordinated experimentation.

Looking over Zapata's script I see it supports a rather large list of feed sources, some require an API key and others don't. I would be surprised if every witness has all API keys for the sources that require them.

If all witnesses are not using the same list of feed sources it introduces an uncontrolled an unnecessary variable that needs to be understood so it doesn't adversely affect the goal of finding optimal feed and algorithm parameters.

So lets determine which feed sources we should use for each BitAsset we'll be optimizing the feeds for. Once that is known witnesses can obtain the necessary API keys for those sources. Waiting for the day of testing to do this is unwise. Witnesses need to prepare, and be ready when experimentation starts which means having the necessary API keys for the feed sources we agree to use.

If a fee is required to obtain any API keys we'll use it or the requirements for a source are beyond what a witness is willing / able to pay, perhaps some witnesses could share API keys to use while testing.

Another consideration is experimentation might reveal weaknesses of certain sources and we might decide to change sources during experimentation.

Feed sources are only one aspect of things we should coordinate among witnesses. Feed publish frequency is another. In the early days of graphene witnesses picked a time slot (0 - 59 minutes past the hour) to publish feeds to assure someone was always publishing a feed at almost anytime. Is the timing each witness publishes feeds important? Could it affect the algorithm?

I hope to see more people and witnesses participate in discussing these things here, otherwise I feel experimentation will be chaotic and hard to follow, and I'll have less confidence the algorithm was actually "engineered".

Lets start a list of feed sources we will use for BitUSD. Which sources are witnesses currently using?

Although I have temporarily disabled feeds for BitUSD, here are the sources I was using for that:
Quote
Binance, Bitfinex, BitStamp, CoinMarketCap, CoinCap, AEX, ZB, Livecoin

Those are listed in the config.yaml for bts_tools. The list of possible feed providers in bts_tools (list of code modules):
Quote
aex.py, bitfinex.py, bloomberg.py, coincap.py, fixer.py, poloniex.py, uphold.py,
binance.py,  bitstamp.py, btc38.py, coinmarketcap.py, yunbi.py, bitcoinaverage.py,
bittrex.py, bter.py, currencylayer.py, livecoin.py, quandl.py, zb.py

bts_tools will be irrelevant for experimentation, but I wanted to kick off discussion of feed sources by describing what I'm using.
I have API keys for bitcoinaverage.py, currencylayer.py and quandl.py.

43
Stakeholder Proposals / Re: [Worker Proposal] Sponsorship on spanish crypto podcast
« on: October 31, 2018, 02:51:24 pm »
What's with the Horizen logo on the videos on youtube channel? Just curious, Horizen us a good project IMHO, tho it's PoW based.

44
Stakeholder Proposals / Re: [worker] OpenSource BitShares Mobile SDK (android/ios)
« on: October 31, 2018, 04:44:25 am »
An interesting approach to provide a framework. It sounds like you are building this SDK to be similar to the ref wallet, in that it is a general purpose SDK for use by any application (i.e. trading, saving [think portfolio], investing, recurring payments...), and by any particular target audience.

This will allow you to avoid dealing with market research or identification of a target audience, leaving those concerns to those who use the SDK to build a wallet with UI / UX tailored to specific needs. That is something we have needed from the start, so very glad to see this.

I like this proposal better than the one to produce only a UI / UX design but no code. The cost is also more favorable.

45
General Discussion / Re: New mechanism to prevent bad debt (black swan)
« on: October 31, 2018, 04:18:26 am »
Quote from: xeroc on October 30, 2018, 01:33:16 pm
IMHO, those that go short with too little collateral shouldn't be bailed out by "profits" of everyone else.
Instead, I do believe they should be "punished" to an extend because they leave the bitasset at a risk by not maintaining their collateral.

Well said Xeroc!

I'm in total agreement. To do so actually rewards bad behavior by those who break the rules or don't care at all about the integrity of BitShares. Their priority is on something else (making money for themselves). Is that the type of person that should be rewarded?

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