for 38PTS!

He got his first official referral to today!  - not easy for someone doing much of his work offline where a user would have to type in his long referral code after the bitshares.org

How can this be made easier? I don't know how the referral code system works. It should be as easy as possible or people won't bother to advertise to friends

Shows little understanding that measuring performance relies on information. Easy access to information, not scattered here and there all over the Internet. The blockchain is the obvious place it should reside, so it is available and readily accessible to all shareholders worldwide. Fines or other "enforcement" measures, if shareholders agree to them, must be coded into the fabric of the ecosystem. That is, by consensus and based on publicly accessible info stored on the blockchain. IMO, "enforcement" should be carried out by the shareholders in the form of votes. It could be considered centralized in the blockchain (i.e. information) but decentralized in shareholder voting / consensus.

Ken, I've been observing your accountability campaign for a while.
I think your intentions are good but the methods you are proposing are not going to get any traction here.

Delegates (or workers) are never going to apply for a sick leave from a blockchain. This is just unrealistic.
Forcing them to report is just a bad idea. It might work in a corporate world but my gut tells me it is just not going to happen here.

Voters would love to make informed decisions but to do so they need an up-to-date and concise source of information.
So let's give them this information.
Let's vote for one HR delegate whose only duty will be preparing, managing and publishing information about all other delegates, both active and stand-by.
Compile delegates' forum posts and compare their promises with results delivered.
Create a dedicated website for this. Make it clear and keep it up-to-date and show their progress (or lack of it).
Your Google roster was such a good start.

If you were willing to become this HR delegate I'll be glad to vote for you.
You are the man, Ken, you have the passion but please make good use of it.

Perhaps the blockchain could be coded to deterministically assign which delegate should audit which other delegate/worker in a cycle so that every delegate and every worker gets an inspection on average of once every 30 days.
Delegates could be put in rotation to continuously audit each other and worker proposals. Every x blocks a delegate is chosen and they must audit/review/comment-on a selection of delegates and worker proposals. These roles could be known months in advance with all costs budgeted for.
So long as each delegate is reviewed on an acceptably regular basis then accountability shouldn't be an issue as there is only a 30 day window for corruption or laziness.
The method to determine who audits who and when should ensure that a statistically significantly decentralized network of delegates is maintained and would still require 51% collusion in order to scam the auditing process for longer than ~3 months? Or some length of time that makes it profitably untenable.
Basically the same delegates shouldn't be allowed to audit their friends every time. Delegates should be incentivized to truly scrutinize other parties in their audits and their profits should be hurt if they collude.

Perhaps worker proposals are assigned values that ensure that they come up in an audit lottery at least once a month. Delegates then audit the worker as given by the blockchain. The pseudorandom nature of determining who audits which proposal and when should prevent parties knowing in advance who they will audit and therefore cannot plan corruption as easily.

This would enable shareholders to focus on vetting delegates and ensuring they are trustworthy enough to be honest when conducting HR and holding workers accountable.
This extra responsibility of Delegates would not require too much time and would scale well with the delegate pay rate as the market cap increases.
For now, a monthly mumble hangout or skype call along with scrutinizing any 'proof of work' documentation the worker provides should be sufficient.
But in the future when delegates and worker projects increase in scale I can see delegates each hiring HR divisions of 4 or 5 people to complete these blockchain-determined human-enforced tasks on behalf of the shareholders in a decentralized way.

I agree customer service is very very important and love the idea of a system that automatically redirects user requests to one of the available bitshares reps. If that can be efficiently put into the blockchain then I'm all for it.
Is there some way to have more information about a delegate tied to their account in the blockchain? Perhaps it can be edited by voting to edit it with their own stake as proof or something.
Stuff like: Day-specific working hours, Timezone, 'department' etc. that the blockchain can reference when routing requests to relevant online delegates and workers.

Still having the same issue. Tried to load the site 5 times with tor, 0% success rate (stuck @ "Loading" with blue thing spinning)

Tried 5 times without tor, 100% success rate.


Either I'm the most unlucky guy in the galaxy, or something is up

I have the exact same issue.

The site won't load via tor.

Cloudfare is so annoying. Oh you wanted to view this page AGAIN after being idle for 2 minutes? Better try this impossibly blurry captcha.

TL;DR - I like BitShares because of the message of freedom, Optional regulatory compliance, Bitcoin exchanges issuing UIA to attract bts users, Development is funded by the blockchain and voted for by the shareholders, At least 101 distributed block producing witnessing nodes, Core development is funded by the blockchain and voted for by the shareholders, Workers are paid by contracts voted for by the shareholders, Delegates are elected officials that act as the human element of the DAC, Blockchain Human Resources, Marketers profit from referrals, All aspects of the DAC are subject to change by a shareholder vote. Hard forks by shareholder vote only, 1 second transaction confirmations, Fast scanning of and reconnection to the network.

Bitshares aims to be a decentralized autonomous community that is funded and directed by shareholders that caters to as large a market as possible to increase profits whilst retaining the principles of freedom and privacy.
Each increase in market cap leads to an increase in the funds available to sustain and develop the DAC to increase profits in a virtuous cycle.

I do not think BitShares will replace bitcoin and other crypto projectswill coexist in the medium term. But due to the shareholder controlled nature of bts and the efficiency of block propagation and confirmations I think that bts will grow to be the largest with the highest market cap.
Bitcoin survives on game theory. I do not think bitcoin will shrink in size because if bitcoin fails then what would that say about the successor? Every time a new innovation comes along the sharevalue will drop as the new system takes over. Bitcoin holders aren't going to let that happen, so it's not going anywhere.
But a decentralized company with the means to adapt and fund itself is IMO going to capture most of the investment money flowing around the world economy. Investment money is already subject to risk, so the meager differences in risk between the secure ledger of bitcoin and the more efficient ledger of Bitshares is negligible.
I think customers will go to bitcoin for security and to BitShares for banking services, coupons/vouchers, trading economic instruments, derivatives and executing smart contracts.

Benefits of BitShares:

Optional regulatory compliance.
Access to fiat banking services requires this compliance. Until every aspect of the economy becomes compatible with crypto there will always be customers who want to move from crypto to fiat seamlessly. So long as these regulatory burdens are never allowed into the broader ecosystem and regulatory compliance remains optional then there shouldn't be a problem.
The only other way I can think to access fiat is to use a system similar to localbitcoins and Abra. Motivate users to buy and sell bitAssets for cash in person. This method could only replace direct banking access if it was so popular that cash traders are available everywhere.
OPTIONAL Identity verification will be useful for this.

Bitcoin exchanges issuing UIA to attract bts users. Arbitrage of these UIAs will keep price feeds of bitAssets tight and will provide a crypto-fiat gateway.

Development is funded by the blockchain and voted for by the shareholders.

At least 101 distributed block producing witnessing nodes sufficiently (determined by shareholder vote) spread across the globe in numerous legal jurisdictions, continents, away from significant natural disaster threats and run by entities that have given evidence to suggest that they will not collude with bad actors and have systems in place to alert shareholders if attempts are made.
Perhaps shareholders will encourage dead-mans-switch type systems to be implemented. Witnesses could be required to sign a message with the current blockchain hash every ____hrs and if they are asked to collude all they have to do is not sign a message. The shareholders are alerted and a new witness can be voted in. The fact that it is so easy to discover collusion attempts should deter any attempt from ever being made.

Core development is funded by the blockchain and voted for by the shareholders.

Workers are paid by contracts voted for by the shareholders.

Delegates are elected officials that act as the human element of the DAC and provide oracle services to price feeds and multisig worker budgets.

Blockchain Human Resources. Accountability for workers employed by the shareholders increases DAC efficiency.

Marketers profit from referrals.

All aspects of the DAC are subject to change by a shareholder vote. Hard forks by shareholder vote only.

1 second transaction confirmations. (Dan hinted in a thread a few days ago)

Fast scanning of and reconnection to the network (Dan hinted at seconds or minutes to reindex (?) the chain.). The amount of time a user or business owner has to spend connecting to and downloading a copy of the blockchain of choice is going to be a big selling point.

Efficient full-nodes also benefit SPV and light client wallets. The easier full nodes are to run the more numerous and better connected bts lightweight client servers are going to be. 100% uptime is very desirable so the system that can get closest has a big advantage.
A lot of the confidence I hold in BitShares is how it will run at scale after being convinced by several articles on Bytemaster's blog. Sufficient decentralization, block propagation speed, block sizes and handling transaction volume at scale are all aspects of BitShares that I think are better than the competition. No project has reached a large-scale yet and nobody truly knows for sure how separate block chains will handle it. From what I've read I think BitShares is the superior system already but if it is not then bts shareholders are better placed than any other project to make the changes and development necessary to adapt to problems as they arise. Look at Gavin's block size debate for examples of how shareholder voting on development could solve that problem much faster. Although perhaps not a direct comparison as bitcoin's #1 priority is security rather than adapting quickly.
A large part of the ease of use is how easy it is to connect to the network and fast scanning of transactions.

Efficient super-nodes will allow new participants in the network to reliably connect as quickly as possible.

Can anybody convince me that another project can do this better?

Quote from: xeroc ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ on May 20, 2015, 02:19:21 pm

I would be fine with a 2D animation similar to what the introduction movie gives .. however .. it will take some time to describe what bitshares is to them .. I was talking ALOT with Arlene to improve here awesome info graphics .. you need someone to do this with them too ..

Standard 2d explainer videos are a dime a'dozen. They get buried amongst the hundreds of thousands of other 2d videos out there.
If we spend the money on something like this, it has to be of viral quality and have some "punch", something people will want to share.
 
Even a little humor can add the punch I'm speaking of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YwMwTZw12k

I 100% agree that videos and marketing need to be of the highest quality possible.
I watched that razor video and laughed more than once - I usually HATE adverts

This reminds me of something Deborah Meaden said on the UK tv show Dragon's Den. 'Spend at least £3k/month on marketing or don't bother.'
I would imagine this is even more true with so many "average" videos floating around on youtube.
If I'm going to show these promotional materials to my friends then it better be GREAT or I'll be too embarrassed to push it. You have to make people laugh, most (young) people don't care enough about their banking services to be interested unless it's both informative and funny.
'If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you.' Oscar Wilde.
People don't like change and don't want to hear that their money might not be as safe as they think. We need some humour-trojan-horses. There needs to be a separate reason to share the video other than ways they can benefit from bts.
If I was to make a video I'd probably highlight things everyone hates about the current banking system; queues, paperwork, banking hours etc. and make skits out of them with the bts equivalent in comparison. Hopefully in a way that wasn't too gimmicky or not-genuine. I think that $1 razor video is a great model to follow. It pointed out obvious flaws in the current way people buy razors and made their NEW way to buy razors sound fun and the obvious thing to do.

I support kenCode on this kind of thing.
I'm also a big fan of the #blockchainHR campaign, accountability is what stops us from drifting back to the corrupt ways we're here to escape.
I will be voting for worker proposals or initiatives you put up after the next update, Ken

EDIT: Just watched the showreel on http://wildek.com/ - fantastic.
If you've already got a good relationship with them Ken I think it would be foolish not to make use of their services.

I like this idea but rather than relying on altruism and charity to recapitalize shorters could they be encouraged to start a hedge(?) fund?
Instead of just donating them bts, could I lend my bts to them with the expectation that they will pool funds and manage them to make profit. The fund's data could be published so that donators could see that their bts is actually being used to short bitassets and not just hoarded.
The community charity aspect could come from letting the shorters just keep all the profits and give me my bts back later down the road?

Do you think this could achieve the same thing?

I'm thinking something like Cryptohedge that Riverhead and Toast are working on
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=13904.0

I appreciate the updates on what you are doing, I'm sure other shareholders do too.

Could you give us a list of topics you'd like covered for blog posts?
I'd like to help but I don't know where to start

I'm no good at SEO but I think I can write an interesting short article about most of BitShares.
With all the changes to BitAssets and upcoming announcements I'm wary of writing about any of the technical stuff that's subject to change

So to stay private you can't register accounts?

If one wanted to remain anonymous, should they only ever be sending to public addresses 'BTS34535353454....'?

If you send to an account name does that mean that it is obvious who you are transacting with?

I thought the whole point of registered account names was to make TITAN (anonymous) transactions easier

What do you mean by 'registered as public'?
Are all registered accounts 'public'?