Bytemaster, I would appreciate public answers to all of these questions. Sorry to do this to you, but when lots of money is involved, asking hard questions is the right thing to do. You’ve always championed transparency as far as I can remember, which is part of the reason I have invested so much and am ready to invest even more once these are addressed:
1) What value is Follow My Vote supposed to be contributing? When will we see deliverables? Will you make them pay for / work on BTS stuff, considering you gave them a huge monetary gift (30m BTS which is half a million dollars) and apparently a core developer as well (nathanhourt on github, a top contributor for github.com/bitshares/bitshares until recently)?
2) I understand Brian and his team have a performance-based incentive of some kind, can you give us exact numbers? Is it another 30m like for Adam?
3) What will you do if a different marketing team can prove that a marketing success is due to their contributions and not Brian's?
4) Yes, I said *prove* - you know marketing is an objective science, right? How do you measure marketing success? How does Brian? Have you ever used the word "metric" in your marketing discussions?
5) Would you support a hard fork to freeze FMV’s funds if a majority of shareholders approved it? When will we have the proposal feature so that we can vote on it? ~~Poll question~~: Should we freeze FMV’s half-million-dollar sharedrop until they deliver something with non-0 positive value?
6) Bonus question: What is your hypothesis about why Ethereum, which is younger than BTS, is literally 10 times more well-known by most freely-accessible internet marketing metrics? "I don't know" is an acceptable and honorable answer.
Thanks for your time and sorry again for bringing up this uncomfortable topic. You still have my support 100%, because I don't blame you for the failures alluded to above.
P.S. If you want to do something, but internal politics prevent you, all it takes is the proposal feature with a properly-worded proposal for your shareholders to get it and vote how you want. Don’t be a slave to contrived social pressure and stop letting your friends plunder your investors’ funds.
To everyone else: I think Brian Page and Adam Ernest (among others, but these guys have fat BTS stake now) are both leeches who are sucking value out of Dan, taking advantage of his inability to make value judgements about some aspects of business (marketing and business dev). It is the job of BTS holders to prevent corruption, incompetence, or whatever is really going on. Demand a proposal / polling feature.
These are my concerns with FMV and some are speculative and others are just facts and hurdles that I see as complications with the entire process:
1. FMV has a direct geographical relation to the Bitshares origins. Since no one on the team had any political experience (the Ernest listed as a "political Scientist" has zero experience in politics through listed references or an advanced google search, and frankly saying he is active in politics means what? He votes?), I am suspect that there is some non-familial nepotism i.e. Adam Ernest is friends with someone in Bitshares.
2. It is quite clear that FMV is just an idea and outside developers are being brought in to actually build the tangibles. This again bothers me that the community is giving huge wealth to the supposed idea grabber and not the people truly inventing it. The money will trickle down I am sure, but there is an unnecessary middle man and frankly, the idea was birthed well before Adam Ernest was involved within this community.
3.CAVO is not anything to be hyped up about. They are an advocacy group in its infancy and it's debatable whether they have any influence over anything at this point or ever will. It is a group of a few county registrars and entrepreneurs (who are most likely promoting their idea for open source voting structures).
As a recent law was passed here in California, any county registrar has the ability to test and try new voting systems. There is no need to pay into a group if you have a platform established. You could go to any county, ask to demonstrate and then try out and they will get funding and you can then prove your system works.
4. Implementing a new voting system isn't as easy as you would think. You need it to conform to Federal and State election codes,Accesability requirements (HAVA), and counting standards. For California (as is where CAVO applies), Once a particular voting system meets these requirements and is certified by the EAC, the Ca Secratary of State has to approve the system. This is not the end all. Then the county registrars get to pick and choose which system they want their county to use. Currently, there are 7 voting systems approved by the Sec. Of State. used in 58 counties in Ca.
5. FMV has no representation in CAlifornia, the state they are trying break ground in. They have a self appointed "Political Scientist" who lives in San Diego with no real political experience.