I felt inspired by the change the community is undergoing as we prepare ourselves for 1.0 launch, so I wanted to hype a couple of things I'm excited about.

Bitshares beats ripple at ripples own game.

Ripple is such an amazing system because it's the first project in the post-bitcoin world to take blockchain tech and use it to create a focused and strong product, just like a business in any other industry. As we can see on the XRP price, this approach has paid off, even with horrible distribution and a semi-centralized tradeoff in their consensus model. But if you just look at the way ripple actually functions you'll see that it's a genius system regardless. Because transactions speeds are fast and every IOU (ripple user issued asset) is traded for XRP on ripples own decentralized exchange, it's possible to seamlessly get high liquidity for any trading pair by going IOU -> XRP -> IOU in one transaction. XRP thus functions as a kind of liquidity token, and is seeing a high amount of trading now as banks and users begin to actually use the system. Of course the more liquidity XRP trading has, the more attractive it is to use the ripple system as a whole, and thus liquidity attracts even more liquidity. A side effect of increasing liquidity is also a higher XRP price. However, as you will hear again and again from ripple supporters, the price of XRP doesn't actually matter to the systems usefulness, and it's not meant as a currency or store of value.

The reason why bitshares will eventually be more attractive to gateways and users for trading or remittance is because of what actually makes liquidity valuable: low spreads. The more a given IOU/XRP trading pair is being traded, the lower the spread will naturally become. This is also why liquidity attracts more liquidity, people will always prefer to exchange their money at the place with the lowest spreads. But spreads are not determined only by liquidity, they're also determined by volatility. And volatility is why bitshares will beat ripple, and almost certainly become the decentralized exchange of choice in the long run.

While ripples liquidity token XRP is free floating and can experience bubbles just like the one we're observing now, bitshares' liquidity token will most likely be bitUSD. So where on ripple you have to go EUR -> XRP -> JPY to exchange and send someone JPY, with bitshares you can go EUR -> bitUSD -> JPY. As bitUSD liquidity increases, its USD peg becomes stronger to the point where it is essentially 1:1, making the exchange look more like EUR -> USD -> JPY, two trading pairs that have orders of magnitude lower volatility than their XRP equivalents. Incidentally, this is also how all forex trading and transfers are done in the current financial system, since the US dollar in its capacity as world reserve currency also functions as the banking systems "liquidity token".

What this actually means is that even though ripple has a huge headstart against bitshares when it comes to liquidity, in the long run their system needs dramatically more liquidity to keep their spreads lower than bitshares, to account for the massive difference in the volatility of XRP compared to bitUSD. However I still think we're still a quite a while off before we can fully compete with ripple on convenience, because right now I don't think it's possible to do several market orders in a single bitshares transaction (and thus jump 2 pairs in one block, making our transaction speed competitive). There shouldn't be anything keeping us from implementing trading jumps in some form in the long run, and then gobble up ripples entire market. Nom.

Bitmail is a pretty big deal

So I honestly still don't fully understand how bitmail even works, but I won't let that stop me from claiming it's a big deal and probably the most overlooked thing in bitshares right now. The reason is pretty simple, secure communication is in high demand. There are many systems currently in existence but they all have one of two problems: either they are a traditional secure email service like lavabit that can interface with the existing email system but can never be provably secure. Or they're a new system like bitmessage that is fully secure but is isolated from the rest of the internet.

Bitmail is in the same category as bitmessage, but with the advantage that it has a pretty clear business model: it will be developed to perfection by well paid delegates since it is integral infrastructure for the bitshares system itself.

But Bitmail has the capability to also become fully integrated with the existing email infrastructure because there is an economic incentive for email "gateways" to be created (if nothing else they will be run by delegates). An email gateway would basically function as a remailer that receives a bitmail with an email address in it, and then sends the message on to that email. Or it receives an email with a bitshares key in it and sends the email to that key as a bitmail. To make it even more seamless, but at the cost of turning the system pseudonomous, bitmail senders could reveal their bitshares key to the mail gateway service when sending their first email, and the service would be able to instantly create a key@gateway.com email address for that specific bitshares key, meaning that email recipients of a bitmail would be able to simply click reply to directly respond to the emails they received. From their perspective it would be just like receiving any other email. This means that once the system is properly polished adopting bitmail will be no different than adopting gmail. The transition can be seamless and you can keep all your contacts when you begin to use the new system, with the added benefit that you can now also do secure communication inside the bitshares network.

(Now... Don't forget that since I don't actually know how bitmail works there could be some technical detail that renders all my babbling wrong)

First of all I don't see all the drama that's coming out now as a reason to be bearish on BTS. Bitshares is still on track to be the best crypto product once it launches next year, and there is a huge pool of talented marketers preparing in nullstreet now, even if it turns out that the official marketing team had nothing all along. In fact I think many people will see it as a bull sign if the marketing can finally start over and get fixed.

The violent reaction were seeing against the marketing team now is a result of months of pent up frustration. This time it's not going to blow over by itself, it will continue until the community has gotten its minimum requirement: transparency.

I'd like to propose that the community appoints one of the community marketers from nullstreet to do a full "audit", so that we can finally get answers to the long standing questions that have continuously been ignored:

How much has the marketing team been paid so far, counting both bonuses and salary? (Exact numbers)

What's the bonus system in place for Brian? (Exact numbers, exact result metrics, no vague answers)

What has Brian and murderistics marketing and business development actions been so far (no vague answers, we want specific steps taken and specific deals or results)

What plans do Brian and murderistic have for the next 6 months? (These plans do not have to be made public, but the auditor has to see EVERYTHING and pass his opinion on to the community)

Is there anything in the works for fixing the website (currently a wordpress theme)?

The community has clearly had enough of the inherently contradictory secret keeping of what is supposed to be the marketing team for a DAC. We're so insanely tired of vague promises I can hardly put it into words. It's time finally treat stakeholders as owners and give them the straight answers they deserve. Once these answers are put forth to the community, the community can decide if the plans for the remaining marketing AGS funds should be changed (options could include putting them into transparent multisig or burning them since delegates now fulfill the role of funding anyway).

If we act now to finally get transparency in our marketing effort, we can still have plenty of time to prepare a huge marketing push for when the full node and mobile wallets are ready, in a way that is transparent (forced by delegate funding) and that the community will be satisfied with (because it will be done by community members).

IMO the most obvious person to do an audit would be methodX, considering he is the one who finally got the community marketing effort going in the first place, and is himself a marketing professional.

It's clear from BM's posts that he has ambitious plans for a BTS native bazaar system with improved features that allows it to actually be useful for ordinary people and have a UX similar to eBay.

We already know it will have no volatility due to bitassets, and that escrow will be very convenient to use since it will be inbuilt in the bitshares protocol.

There have also been some posts by BM revealing one of the killer features: hosted merchant nodes. This is probably the most important feature because most merchants will not want to deal with hosting their own node, and secure hosting services will allow anyone to quickly set up a shop simply by paying some fees.

What other features do you think a bitshares powered bitbazaar will have?

I think it would be interesting to jot down the concept of this future system, then take it to the open bazaar forums and see what they think of it and see if we can hire some of the talent from there to help us build it.

大家好，

中国人谈关于bitassets的时候用汉字还是英语？比如说bitUSD=比特美元？bitCNY=比特人民币？

谢谢！

Fees used to have two functions: Prevent spam and pay delegates for their services. With BTS delegates now inflate their salary into existence to ensure they can get a competetive pay, meaning that fees only really exist for spam prevention now.

I think it could be interesting if we experimented with using our fees as a way of making our bitassets more attractive to accept and support. If big payment processors could somehow get a special master key from which they could derive other private keys with a special attribute: Payments sent to the addresses of these private keys will have their fees going to the master key instead of being burned.

This would give the big processors a very concrete value proposition that shows them why they want to support our blockchain, and why they should help us make sure our blockchain gets big, because it will be able to offer them something no one else can, even if we're currently tiny.

The price we will pay for this will be essentially nothing. If money goes to payment processors it means they're able to spend those funds on marketing their services (and thus marketing our blockchain) more aggressively, and provide better service to their customers (which are also our customers). Once we have absorbed the entire crypto market we might elect to remove these special keys again since they will no longer give us a competetive advantage over other blockchains, or we can keep them if we determine they are still profitable to have since they empower trade.

This is just a random suggestion, I would love to hear input.

So I just listened to the mumble hangout and apparently this is going to be a thing (hopefully in 1.0?).

This is probably the biggest news since the merger, as it copies the core feature of ripple and makes it significantly easier for anyone to run a BTS/bitasset on-ramp. I think there could likely be a rally once the market realises the actual ramifications of this getting implemented in bitshares. IMO it is bigger than counterparty copying the ethereum scripting language.

More excited than ever for the future of BTS!

Some of you might have seen the giant post I made a couple of days ago, describing how BTS could essentially "attack" and acquire bitcoins' market cap. I since deleted the post because I realized the bitshares community shouldn't have to deal with the potential negative fallout from such an action. The superior idea of using a new, dedicated blockchain to perform the attack was also brought up, which is clearly better because it allows it to be framed as an upgrade (which it is) rather than a attack by a seperate community.

Now I'm back with version 2 of the strategy, having solved the earlier flaws that some bitcoin developers pointed out. The grand plan is to upgrade bitcoin to a dual chain POW/DPOS hybrid with an 18 million absolute hard cap and all the features of the bitshares toolkit. If you found the idea interesting then you can read this reddit post for a breakdown of the new upgrade strategy: http://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinUpgrade/comments/2mlkn5/how_and_what/

Currently we're just a tiny amount of people involved in this. No matter who you are, if you find the idea interesting or exciting, then you're very welcome to join us. We do not yet have a developer that would be capable of creating a genesis block with the bitshares toolkit, but before we hire one we need to see what kind of interest there actually is. Luckily the development required for our strategy is only that + creating a future hard fork with a new genesis block in it, so it is not vital that we get a superstar developer. Someone able to understand and proficiently use the bitshares toolkit is enough.

Our greatest accomplishment so far is vitalik telling me "if you bribe existing miners with some quantity of BTC that definitely will work too.". Next step is to create a simple video that explains the reddit post i linked in a more digestible way.

https://github.com/BitShares/bitshares/releases

It looks like the first step in the transition to BTS will begin tomorrow. From what I can read here, the name change from BitsharesX to Bitshares will happen tomorrow at 5 pm GMT, and paid delegates will also be introduced then. The final rules for delegate pay are: They can earn up to 50 BTS per block, and this reward halves every 4 years, like bitcoin. I think that is an excellent solution to the bad impression people got from the initial introduction of "unlimited dilution". There is now a hard cap put in the code, and the total amount of BTS that will ever be in existence is now known (assuming no more sharedrops).