BitShares Forum

Main => General Discussion => Topic started by: CountOfTheSparklesGhost on November 29, 2014, 07:05:15 pm

Title: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: CountOfTheSparklesGhost on November 29, 2014, 07:05:15 pm
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.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: vegolino on November 29, 2014, 07:18:47 pm
Why don't you post under your normal forum name?
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: CountOfTheSparklesGhost on November 29, 2014, 07:31:58 pm
Why don't you post under your normal forum name?

I have limited political capital. BM is obviously getting crushed and needs help but I cannot help him. This is a cry for help from *you* the shareholder.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: zerosum on November 29, 2014, 07:36:22 pm
Why don't you post under your normal forum name?

I have limited political capital. BM is obviously getting crushed and needs help but I cannot help him. This is a cry for help from *you* the shareholder.

[disclaimer] It was not me posting the OP.

I have posted like 80% of the above under my own name... so I do not need to say I double those...except for the timing of it.
Why now is a mystery to me, but I was OK with earlier so...

on Q#2 - I believe the number is 15 Mil BTS currently for Brian up to now, btw.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: onceuponatime on November 29, 2014, 07:37:15 pm
Why don't you post under your normal forum name?

Two possibilities:

1.  He's shy

or

2. His posting history might possibly reveal something about motivation
    and/or perspective.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: santaclause102 on November 29, 2014, 07:38:35 pm
Courage is only needed to be controversial within the own peer pressure group. I appreciate the OP. It has the BTS holders and BM in mind. Everything mentioned is worth being discussed (best without much emotions), especially (3). Aligning interests is crucial.

Personally I think Brian (I have no idea about Adam) is doing a good job at what he is doing which is not building a reputation for BitShares among tech enthusiasts. Still the points are very much worth being discussed.

I also requested more transparency https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=11725.msg154349#msg154349 and did not get a satisfying answer. Everything the AGS funds are spend on should be 100% transparent. If it is not it should be stated why (legal reasons) which is also acceptable.

PS: It doesnt matter who the OP is (not me :) ). Ideas and arguments matter not people!
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: matt608 on November 29, 2014, 07:58:44 pm
I am willing to trust Bytemaster with regards to the 'official' marketing for now, but that wont stop me from doing it myself too.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: bytemaster on November 29, 2014, 08:11:19 pm
Follow My Vote is a group of people not just Adam.   They are part of a larger strategic partnership that I hope will pay huge dividends for BTS in Q1 2015.  Adam and his team is helping provide a different kind of marketing effort than Brian and his team or Methodx and his team.   

Why did follow my vote get such a large stake?  Because I have faith in what Adam can do.   Things Adam & Team are working on for BTS.

1) Scratch-Off BitUSD cards of various denominations for promotional purposes and to be a physical manifestation of  BitUSD
2) Merchandising / Online Store for BitShares products
3) Attracting users and publicity to BitShares from the voting, democracy, transparent government crowd. 

Nathan is only working for Adam through the demo we are doing for CA voting officials and the work he is doing will double as infrastructure for BitShares KYC.

There are a lot of moving parts going on all at the same time.  I am not an internet marketer but Adam is.  Adam has management experience and is already helping to recruit free marketing interns and developer talent.    Adam is working very hard for BTS and was a tough negotiator (But so was I).   

Adams long-term compensation is based upon the metric of the number of users he signs up.  Brian's is based upon our market cap relative to Bitcoin.  The funds allocated to Brian are being divided among 4 high powered marketers with amazing connections.   

So what we have here is transparency from me on who I hired, but less transparency from Brian, Adam, and Bo on what they have done with the funds I trusted them with.   That said the Chinese marketing has been far more effective to date.  Brian's team is switching gears in the short term but will start seeing results this month.     

Things are moving forward and when all of these forces start firing a full force it will be quite amazing.


     
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: Ander on November 29, 2014, 08:13:18 pm
I feel that the 'official' markting team has actually been doing business development activities (forging relationships and partnerships with potential business partners), and not as much 'marketing'.

I dont think thats bad, its just that we havent yet seen most of the results.


At this time I'm still willing to be patient and see what they come out with once the full 1.0 release of bitshares happens.  It certainly makes sense that they would wait until the full release version before they launched significant marketing, so I am not going to blame them yet.


If the 1.0 release occurs, and then significant marketing comes out, I'll be happy.  If 1.0 comes out and then we still dont see anything much from the official team, then I will think posts like this one are justified.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: sparkles on November 29, 2014, 08:16:32 pm
Freezing FMV's stake would be a disaster for BTS price.  It would easily cause a drop and loss of confidence in excess of the ~1% of BTS that it represents.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: CountOfTheSparklesGhost on November 29, 2014, 08:22:57 pm
Thank you! I am about 80% satisfied, which is as good as I'll get with the snark level in the OP.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: toast on November 29, 2014, 08:27:09 pm
Freezing funds is a slippery slope.

Frustration with marketing is nothing new, but things have only been improving. Adam is legit and CAVO is a huge opportunity, Brian's crew is legit but cannot execute until we give them the go-ahead with a nice wallet and protocol v1.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: mike623317 on November 29, 2014, 08:28:28 pm
Thank you! I am about 80% satisfied

I appreciated the response from bytemaster. I think we've seen these guys deliver what they have promised up to now and we should see a lot more over the coming months.

Lets keep moving forward.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: Rune on November 29, 2014, 08:32:38 pm
I don't understand why FMV is being brought up, it seems like legit innovation. I agree that there has been nothing to show for the money that has been given to Brian Page so far. If he doesn't actually do anything soon, I think it would be better to simply give his remaining bonus money to the dev team, or burn it.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: zerosum on November 29, 2014, 08:34:24 pm
Freezing funds is a slippery slope.

Frustration with marketing is nothing new, but things have only been improving. Adam is legit and CAVO is a huge opportunity, Brian's crew is legit but cannot execute until we give them the go-ahead with a nice wallet and protocol v1.

I get that part. I personally only ask BM (and if possible you) to be 100% sure that:
1.There are very serious (per his/your judgment) plans, (as well as the  details of said plans available to him/you), ready to go!
2. The only thing on the way of the start of the campaign is the lack of nice wallet and protocol v1, as of yet.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: Empirical1.1 on November 29, 2014, 08:35:15 pm
That's a bit of a 20%+ day buzzkill. OP is not me.

I concur on the fact that Brian's & as a result Western marketing has been fairly underwhelming on the actual marketing front to date. I'm hoping the marketing push will be their chance to shine, it's pretty hush, hush so I don't know.

I honestly don't know much about measuring marketing metrics. From what I've seen so far,  I personally expect our Western marketing success will be driven more by the community marketing team. If I was in their shoes I'd be frustrated  if the main team were hitting paydirt for marketing results, that could be measured and were shown to be more the result of  the community team and their initiatives. So I'm in favour of greater disclosure there and perhaps putting some of the incentives up for grabs to whoever produces actual results.

Looking at BM's response below that's a no go. I guess the best thing we can do, is reward those who produce measurable marketing results on the blockchain.



Follow My Vote is a group of people not just Adam.   They are part of a larger strategic partnership that I hope will pay huge dividends for BTS in Q1 2015.  Adam and his team is helping provide a different kind of marketing effort than Brian and his team or Methodx and his team.   

Why did follow my vote get such a large stake?  Because I have faith in what Adam can do.   Things Adam & Team are working on for BTS.

1) Scratch-Off BitUSD cards of various denominations for promotional purposes and to be a physical manifestation of  BitUSD
2) Merchandising / Online Store for BitShares products
3) Attracting users and publicity to BitShares from the voting, democracy, transparent government crowd. 

Nathan is only working for Adam through the demo we are doing for CA voting officials and the work he is doing will double as infrastructure for BitShares KYC.

There are a lot of moving parts going on all at the same time.  I am not an internet marketer but Adam is.  Adam has management experience and is already helping to recruit free marketing interns and developer talent.    Adam is working very hard for BTS and was a tough negotiator (But so was I).   

Adams long-term compensation is based upon the metric of the number of users he signs up.  Brian's is based upon our market cap relative to Bitcoin.  The funds allocated to Brian are being divided among 4 high powered marketers with amazing connections.   

So what we have here is transparency from me on who I hired, but less transparency from Brian, Adam, and Bo on what they have done with the funds I trusted them with.   That said the Chinese marketing has been far more effective to date.  Brian's team is switching gears in the short term but will start seeing results this month.     

Things are moving forward and when all of these forces start firing a full force it will be quite amazing.


   

 +5% Interesting. Obviously you'll use them in general promotion but  I was just thinking along the lines of something like 'Make it a BitShares Christmas' & was wondering the best way to share/gift BitAssets. (I've long thought that some of the best people to spread & gift BitAssets were our 1000+ strong community, out of our own pockets, to family, friends &  acquaintances, we think they'd appeal most too, when BitAssets were mainstream ready. I doubt those will be ready for Xmas, but would love to be able to give scratch off BitSilver and BitGold cards as gifts in the future!)
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: Ander on November 29, 2014, 08:37:51 pm
I think it is not fair of us to be bashing Brian, Adam, etc, when they havent been allowed to unleash their main marketing campaign yet because the development is not yet to version 1.0. 
We need to give them a chance to show us all what they have done, once 1.0 comes out.  THEN if nothing happens, you can criticize them.  (And if the marketing campaign works well, you should praise them).
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: merlin0113 on November 29, 2014, 08:38:58 pm
I think it's time for doing things  in a milestone manner. Start with the official documentation, perhaps? Oh right, who is fitted under this JD? Officially i mean?
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: toast on November 29, 2014, 08:39:15 pm
Freezing funds is a slippery slope.

Frustration with marketing is nothing new, but things have only been improving. Adam is legit and CAVO is a huge opportunity, Brian's crew is legit but cannot execute until we give them the go-ahead with a nice wallet and protocol v1.

I get that part. I personally only ask BM (and if possible you) to be 100% sure that:
1.There are very serious (per his/your judgment) plans, (as well as the  details of said plans), ready to go!
2. The only thing on the way of the start of the campaign is the lack of nice wallet and protocol v1, as of yet.

I only know sparse details for #1, but brian's crew has a very good track record (max wright by himself is easily worth the entire marketing budget up until now).
For #2 I think the other constraint is finalizing deals with on/off ramps.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: toast on November 29, 2014, 08:45:47 pm
I think it is not fair of us to be bashing Brian, Adam, etc, when they havent been allowed to unleash their main marketing campaign yet because the development is not yet to version 1.0. 
We need to give them a chance to show us all what they have done, once 1.0 comes out.  THEN if nothing happens, you can criticize them.  (And if the marketing campaign works well, you should praise them).

This. Maybe we need to distinguish "pre- st. martin" vs "post st.martin" marketing efforts. The game completely changed but there were no changes visible to the public.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: donkeypong on November 29, 2014, 08:50:08 pm
I think it is not fair of us to be bashing Brian, Adam, etc, when they havent been allowed to unleash their main marketing campaign yet because the development is not yet to version 1.0. 
We need to give them a chance to show us all what they have done, once 1.0 comes out.  THEN if nothing happens, you can criticize them.  (And if the marketing campaign works well, you should praise them).

This. Maybe we need to distinguish "pre- st. martin" vs "post st.martin" marketing efforts. The game completely changed but there were no changes visible to the public.

Yes. Well said. Have a little patience, people. We will see results soon.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: Method-X on November 29, 2014, 09:11:35 pm
My Skype has been going off the hook with people asking if this post was me. It's not me... whatever that's worth.

That said, legitimate questions were raised. The only thing I disagree with is Adams value. I've looked into him and I think he would be a WICKED addition to our marketing effort if he were allowed to participate in an official manner.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: Gentso1 on November 29, 2014, 09:56:44 pm
Freezing funds is a slippery slope.

Frustration with marketing is nothing new, but things have only been improving. Adam is legit and CAVO is a huge opportunity, Brian's crew is legit but cannot execute until we give them the go-ahead with a nice wallet and protocol v1.

I agree with this, we cant just freeze funds as much as I would like to. It will make people lose confidence in the system.

Adam and co have received a large stake but even a quick look at his linked in profile will show he has experience in internet marketing.

Brain and co should be producing by the end of this month according to mumbles and thread posts. He has had time to prepare and is hopefully just literally waiting for a nod to hit us with the "marketing blitz".

Their will always be more features that need to be added but this idea that we need to be feature complete before launching a campaign is getting weaker by the day. Methodx and the board members over at null street have come up with some very solid marketing ideas. These guys are working with a marketing budget of $2500 a month(methodx's delegate) and I believe will start putting the money to work in the immediate with results.

I understand if you do not want to go the Ethereum route and create a ton of hype before anything has been released BUT to not create any hype is foolish. 
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: mitao on November 29, 2014, 10:06:52 pm
So Brian is paid if BitShares market cap increased, even if 95% of the volume is CNY? I don't think this is reasonable. The USD volume should be the judge.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: hadrian on November 29, 2014, 10:08:31 pm
..The only thing I disagree with is Adams value. I've looked into him and I think he would be a WICKED addition to our marketing effort if he were allowed to participate in an official manner.

Here, 'wicked' means 'very good'. Just to avoid any confusion :)


edited to add:

So Brian is paid if BitShares market cap increased, even if 95% of the volume is CNY? I don't think this is reasonable. The USD volume should be the judge.

This is worth bearing in mind. It's been acknowledged that the Chinese marketing has done well...


Freezing funds is a slippery slope.

Frustration with marketing is nothing new, but things have only been improving. Adam is legit and CAVO is a huge opportunity, Brian's crew is legit but cannot execute until we give them the go-ahead with a nice wallet and protocol v1.

I agree with this, we cant just freeze funds as much as I would like to. It will make people lose confidence in the system...

A slippery slope indeed. Part of the reason people will come into the BitShares ecosystem is to avoid their money being effectively or literally taken from them (or devalued) by 'the system'. This will be hindered if the BitShares ecosystem has demonstrated that it's done exactly this.

It wouldn't be such a disaster if BTS were to be taken back contractually 'off chain' though (rather than being frozen).
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: Stan on November 29, 2014, 10:24:03 pm
I feel that the 'official' markting team has actually been doing business development activities (forging relationships and partnerships with potential business partners), and not as much 'marketing'.

This was the biggest, most delightful surprise to me when I learned that the Four Marketeers were potent business developers not just clever communicators.  (Not that there is anything wrong with being a clever communicator.)

These guys don't just communicate our message - they help shape it. 

But that's not all they do!


Better than that, they provide feedback to our development process to change our product to make it more marketable - so that they can shape an even better message and communicate that.

But that's not all they do!


They then engineer automated marketing tools (funnels) to help lead potential customers to take some action that moves them one step at a time closer to being one of us.  These are not static web pages, they are loaded with stuff that does stuff to help make the sale.

But that's not all they do!


They are creating tons of content and educational materials and news releases to help people understand what we have to offer.  You've seen a few samples of Max's videos and there are at least 9 more (that I know about) in his queue.   

But that's not all they do!


At the flick of a switch they can reach out and touch hundreds of thousands of email contacts with the specific message targeted to each individuals' demographic group(s) in a way that will lead them into the web of funnels they are constructing.

But that's not all they do!


Then they've gone out and develop key partnerships with other companies that have skills and resources to provide a full service experience to newcomers.  We are building core technologies.  They are literally wiring up the ecosystem around us.

That might be all they do, but I wouldn't bet on it.


Obviously, you don't start driving the herd into your web of funnels until everything is ready to receive them. 

Otherwise, you are not just wasting ammo, you are wasting targets.

As for the alleged "secrecy", there's really no secret - there's just respect for the other partners they have been lining up and negotiating deals with.  Anybody who's done this knows that you don't talk about a deal until its signed - and then you let your partners choose when they are ready to announce it. 

Given that you have agreed to respect that, you can't really talk much about all the other activities that leverage those deals and partnerships and promotions.    You just have to work away behind the scenes on all the moving parts while the engineering team works at changing everything they prototyped from geek-ready to consumer-ready.

And pray that Bytemaster doesn't have another Invictus innovation in the mean time.

:)
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: Stan on November 29, 2014, 10:41:40 pm
So Brian is paid if BitShares market cap increased, even if 95% of the volume is CNY? I don't think this is reasonable. The USD volume should be the judge.

Eastern Operations received its business development budget in advance with no strings attached - nothing to prove, based on nothing but our confidence that the Chinese team would do well.  We have not been disappointed.   :)

Details have been posted here since before the grant was made:

https://docs.google.com/a/invictus-innovations.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AtRmp4NraeAydHlTd1VnaWF3SXA5Q20wUU9NTFN6UkE#gid=0 (https://docs.google.com/a/invictus-innovations.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AtRmp4NraeAydHlTd1VnaWF3SXA5Q20wUU9NTFN6UkE#gid=0)
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: Ander on November 29, 2014, 10:41:48 pm
I agree with this, we cant just freeze funds as much as I would like to. It will make people lose confidence in the system.

We really cant freeze any funds, ever.  Doing so completely destroys the foundation of what bitshares is built upon, forever.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: ripplexiaoshan on November 29, 2014, 10:43:21 pm
It seems Q1 of 2015 is the due day to check the marketing teams's assignment. :D
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: islandking on November 29, 2014, 10:45:45 pm
Freezing funds would destroy the whole concept of Bitshares. The point of a blockchain is to decentralize. We should NEVER intervene.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: zerosum on November 29, 2014, 10:48:36 pm
I feel that the 'official' markting team has actually been doing business development activities (forging relationships and partnerships with potential business partners), and not as much 'marketing'.
...
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That's all good Stan, but what makes me uneasy is that, we've been hearing this story for quite sometime now. And it seams that the deals have not been sealed yet.

To say nothing about the need to go 'The Sparkly Route'... not that it is not a good idea, but man... this is a long road and makes your post above.... well empty promises, if it is indeed needed.


PS
Please spare me the third party DAC/project narrative, will you?
Cause I really do not have to  learn 'Why  should I  Stop Worrying' or 'Why should I Love Sparkle'.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: Mysto on November 29, 2014, 11:03:17 pm
I can understand people's impatience but I really hope it doesn't cause the marketing team to rush when things are not in place. In the end it should be up to the marketing team to determine when everything is ready (easy enough) for the masses. It is of critical importance that people's restlessness doesn't cause a rush in the marketing campaign. I'm just saying this because there has been so much pressure on them from people who want to see "results".
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: Stan on November 29, 2014, 11:03:54 pm
We never get things done as fast as we want to.
And we are getting quite used to people reminding us of that.

:)

It's hard to believe how much has been accomplished
(and how much we have been re-reminded)
since I last bumped this classic from Teddy Roosevelt.

https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=171.msg44054#msg44054

There are a lot more doers down in that arena with us now.
The lions are still stalking about, but they are looking a bit worried.

Patience.

Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: Ander on November 29, 2014, 11:05:51 pm
I think that in a week or two, the price will have gone up significantly (again), and people here won't be acting so impatient. ;)
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: Gentso1 on November 29, 2014, 11:11:30 pm
Will the official marketing team be allowed to start before the end of this month, as has been quoted so many times in the past?
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: Ander on November 29, 2014, 11:20:03 pm
Will the official marketing team be allowed to start before the end of this month, as has been quoted so many times in the past?

Sadly I think we have to wait for 1.0, which bytemaster said might be out by the end of the year (optimistically), but more realistically will be January.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: Mysto on November 29, 2014, 11:22:09 pm
Will the official marketing team be allowed to start before the end of this month, as has been quoted so many times in the past?

A better question to ask is...
"Will a nice wallet and protocol v1 be done before the end of this month?"
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: toast on November 29, 2014, 11:24:27 pm
Will the official marketing team be allowed to start before the end of this month, as has been quoted so many times in the past?

A better question to ask is...
"Will a nice wallet and protocol v1 be done before the end of this month?"

Not a chance. Unless you mean december.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: Mysto on November 29, 2014, 11:32:46 pm
A better question to ask is...
"Will a nice wallet and protocol v1 be done before the end of this month?"

Not a chance. Unless you mean december.

I'm assuming he meant December.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: ripplexiaoshan on November 30, 2014, 12:29:11 am
A better question to ask is...
"Will a nice wallet and protocol v1 be done before the end of this month?"

Not a chance. Unless you mean december.

I'm assuming he meant December.

The wallet will never be perfect, it shouldn't be an excuse not to start the marketing.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: Ander on November 30, 2014, 12:32:16 am
A better question to ask is...
"Will a nice wallet and protocol v1 be done before the end of this month?"

Not a chance. Unless you mean december.

I'm assuming he meant December.

The wallet will never be perfect, it shouldn't be an excuse not to start the marketing.

Bytemaster wants to finish up the core features so he can put out a 1.0 release and then not hard fork it for 6 months.  That way the new adopters brought in by the marketing can see a ready product and not have to download a new version over and over any more.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: toast on November 30, 2014, 12:44:23 am
A better question to ask is...
"Will a nice wallet and protocol v1 be done before the end of this month?"

Not a chance. Unless you mean december.

I'm assuming he meant December.

The wallet will never be perfect, it shouldn't be an excuse not to start the marketing.

Wallet won't be, but the protocol needs to stabilize so that wallet updates can be optional.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: merlin0113 on November 30, 2014, 12:48:01 am
A better question to ask is...
"Will a nice wallet and protocol v1 be done before the end of this month?"

Not a chance. Unless you mean december.

I'm assuming he meant December.

The wallet will never be perfect, it shouldn't be an excuse not to start the marketing.

Bytemaster wants to finish up the core features so he can put out a 1.0 release and then not hard fork it for 6 months.  That way the new adopters brought in by the marketing can see a ready product and not have to download a new version over and over any more.

We are all aware of the "sector" we are in is change rapidly, right? In this case, one month delay of major marketing moves is necessary but also a luxury. Thus if this is a smart delay or stupid one yet to be see.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: hadrian on November 30, 2014, 01:06:56 am
A better question to ask is...
"Will a nice wallet and protocol v1 be done before the end of this month?"

Not a chance. Unless you mean december.

I'm assuming he meant December.

The wallet will never be perfect, it shouldn't be an excuse not to start the marketing.

Bytemaster wants to finish up the core features so he can put out a 1.0 release and then not hard fork it for 6 months.  That way the new adopters brought in by the marketing can see a ready product and not have to download a new version over and over any more.

We are all aware of the "sector" we are in is change rapidly, right? In this case, one month delay of major marketing moves is necessary but also a luxury. Thus if this is a smart delay or stupid one yet to be see.

It can't be necessary and a luxury simultaneously. On balance it seems to be necessary. Therefore it has to be done.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: Rune on November 30, 2014, 10:54:37 am
A better question to ask is...
"Will a nice wallet and protocol v1 be done before the end of this month?"

Not a chance. Unless you mean december.

I'm assuming he meant December.

The wallet will never be perfect, it shouldn't be an excuse not to start the marketing.

Bytemaster wants to finish up the core features so he can put out a 1.0 release and then not hard fork it for 6 months.  That way the new adopters brought in by the marketing can see a ready product and not have to download a new version over and over any more.

The bitUSD market also needs more liquidity before we can market to average users. So we need to start getting new users even before the official 1.0 launch. Bitmarket, who is a member of the "official marketing team" knows this, his marketing efforts have already started, so clearly the idea that we shouldn't be doing marketing now is something only Brian thinks, and IMO just seems like an excuse.

I think the real problem is that bytemaster gave Brian a bunch of BTS up front with the expectation that Brian would use it to pay marketing expenses, including salary. However Brian correctly identified that this BTS will soon skyrocket in value, so he doesn't want to sell or spend any of it, his objective is simply to keep as much as possible for himself. I don't blame him for this, it's just natural human behaviour.

What I don't like is that it is Dan, Stan and Toast who have to spend their time coming to this thread to defend Brian. He doesn't post here himself, because he has probably not even seen this thread. He's not an active member of our online community... Is that really the person we want as our "marketing director" (also why on earth does that title exist in a DAC, are we also going to get a CEO?)
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: graffenwalder on November 30, 2014, 11:26:43 am
A better question to ask is...
"Will a nice wallet and protocol v1 be done before the end of this month?"

Not a chance. Unless you mean december.

I'm assuming he meant December.

The wallet will never be perfect, it shouldn't be an excuse not to start the marketing.

Bytemaster wants to finish up the core features so he can put out a 1.0 release and then not hard fork it for 6 months.  That way the new adopters brought in by the marketing can see a ready product and not have to download a new version over and over any more.

The bitUSD market also needs more liquidity before we can market to average users. So we need to start getting new users even before the official 1.0 launch. Bitmarket, who is a member of the "official marketing team" knows this, his marketing efforts have already started, so clearly the idea that we shouldn't be doing marketing now is something only Brian thinks, and IMO just seems like an excuse.

I think the real problem is that bytemaster gave Brian a bunch of BTS up front with the expectation that Brian would use it to pay marketing expenses, including salary. However Brian correctly identified that this BTS will soon skyrocket in value, so he doesn't want to sell or spend any of it, his objective is simply to keep as much as possible for himself. I don't blame him for this, it's just natural human behaviour.

What I don't like is that it is Dan, Stan and Toast who have to spend their time coming to this thread to defend Brian. He doesn't post here himself, because he has probably not even seen this thread. He's not an active member of our online community... Is that really the person we want as our "marketing director" (also why on earth does that title exist in a DAC, are we also going to get a CEO?)

Do we know this for a fact, or is it speculation?

2 months ago we were complaining that every thought of BM and others were instantly posted here.
Now they keep a radio silence on the marketing campaign.
Everyone would really like to know what is planned, but if it gives the competition a chance to run with it, please don't even give us a glimpse.

I think Brian's hands are tied at the moment, the planned marketing campaign, will probably need some of the new features. On/off ramps etc...

So before we start asking for Brians head, let's just wait a bit longer and see what they have planned for us.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: Method-X on November 30, 2014, 11:49:37 am
I think the future of bitShares and every other DAC that comes after it, is a community driven marketing hive mind. With the advent of a completely self funding company, there isn't any need for "insiders" and "outsiders". It's all just the Will of the blockchain. Everything is kept out in the open so shareholders will know who to vote for. Otherwise they will eventually get voted out after long periods of time pass without any tangible results.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: Rune on November 30, 2014, 12:04:41 pm
Quote
Do we know this for a fact, or is it speculation?

2 months ago we were complaining that every thought of BM and others were instantly posted here.
Now they keep a radio silence on the marketing campaign.
Everyone would really like to know what is planned, but if it gives the competition a chance to run with it, please don't even give us a glimpse.

I think Brian's hands are tied at the moment, the planned marketing campaign, will probably need some of the new features. On/off ramps etc...

So before we start asking for Brians head, let's just wait a bit longer and see what they have planned for us.

The marketing has ALWAYS been radio silent, it's not something new. The only evidence we have of work Brian has done so far is the botched website, which weeks later still says "why bank when you can bitshare" and has a stock photo of a life buoy on the front page (it's a wordpress theme so anyone could fix that in less than 10 minutes).

I have simply not seen any evidence that Brian is worth the AGS funds we've paid him (and that we inflated BTS 25% to get control of). I form my opinions only based on evidence, so all the "be patient" doesn't work on me at all. I realize BTS will be extremely successful no matter what, but that doesn't make it any less unfair that someone should get a huge stake for nothing, and the fact that brian isn't even defending himself here is seriously annoying me.

The truth is that if there actually was some big push planned by him we would have already known details of it. People have been complaining about marketing for months, and he would have gone public with parts of his plans long ago, to protect his own interests and secure his bonus. The only scenario where it makes sense for him to keep everything silent is if he has got nothing. I want to give him the benefit of the doubt (and I already have), but this is the only logical conclusion I arrive at from the evidence we have seen.

If we're lucky he has actually been hiding a plan from us this entire time. In that case now is the time for us to force him to reveal it.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: merlin0113 on November 30, 2014, 12:28:51 pm
Quote
Do we know this for a fact, or is it speculation?

2 months ago we were complaining that every thought of BM and others were instantly posted here.
Now they keep a radio silence on the marketing campaign.
Everyone would really like to know what is planned, but if it gives the competition a chance to run with it, please don't even give us a glimpse.

I think Brian's hands are tied at the moment, the planned marketing campaign, will probably need some of the new features. On/off ramps etc...

So before we start asking for Brians head, let's just wait a bit longer and see what they have planned for us.

The marketing has ALWAYS been radio silent, it's not something new. The only evidence we have of work Brian has done so far is the botched website, which weeks later still says "why bank when you can bitshare" and has a stock photo of life buoy on the front page (it's a wordpress theme so anyone could fix that in less than 10 minutes).

I have simply not seen any evidence that Brian is worth the AGS funds we've paid him (and that we inflated BTS 25% to get control of). I form my opinions only based on evidence, so all the "be patient" doesn't work on me at all. I realize BTS will be extremely successful no matter what, but that doesn't make it any less unfair that someone should get a huge stake for nothing, and the fact that brian isn't even defending himself here is seriously annoying me.

The truth is that if there actually was some big push planned by him we would have already known details of it. People have been complaining about marketing for months, and he would have gone public with parts of his plans long ago, to protect his own interests and secure his bonus. The only scenario where it makes sense for him to keep everything silent is if he has got nothing. I want to give him the benefit of the doubt (and I already have), but this is the only logical conclusion I arrive at from the evidence we have seen.

If we're lucky he has actually been hiding a plan from us this entire time. In that case now is the time for us to force him to reveal it.

Can some one detail the job description of our Marketing Director? Before we putting any blames on someone, we should know what he is responsible for. Which is more important this JD clarification will make employee have no excuses as well as make employee have the right to make decision. I just don't see any Director STYLE when BM have the total control of marketing moves at all. BM is much appreciated to give his instructions, of course, but the marketing director should have the final call anyway which certainly is not the case right now.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: mf-tzo on November 30, 2014, 12:32:19 pm
I am not sure how to feel about the concerns and questions of this thread...

In the past the devs and marketing people were discussing openly everything and others were coming here copying their ideas. I don't want this anymore.

I know I fully trust by now BM and his economics so I don't want him to put him on the line every time the price is not going well to explain how he spends the funds etc etc..and whenever BTS shoots up no one is asking any questions anymore... We gave him funds so he can spend them however he feels more appropriate. I don't think he is an idiot spending money around for no reason and ofcourse he will not always be correct in all his decisions because believe it or not...he is a human being....so let him be...

Regarding marketing and Brian I feel that these guys could have done a lot more with their huge salaries. I think they aimed too high and things may not have worked as planned and some more basic marketing techniques should have already been implemented a looonnnggg time ago.. However, it is too soon to ask for their head and I definitely don't want them to reveal ANYTHING that could hurt us.

Let everyone do what they know how to do and things will work as planned eventually..
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: Rune on November 30, 2014, 12:49:33 pm
Quote
In the past the devs and marketing people were discussing openly everything and others were coming here copying their ideas. I don't want this anymore.

Do you have an example of marketing ideas that were openly discussed and copied? It was before my time, so would be interesting to see. Even if that was the case then I don't think we currently have any real competition, so the benefits of transparency highly outweighs the risks in our current situation, IMO.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: mf-tzo on November 30, 2014, 01:15:28 pm
ok to be fair marketing was never really transparent so I have no examples... I have also issues with marketing but my point is that there is no reason for negativity and putting off current and potential new investors..Think positive and hold and great things will eventually come...
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: Helikopterben on November 30, 2014, 02:06:47 pm

Quote from: MeTHoDx link=topic=11865.msg156121#msg156121


Freezing funds is a slippery slope.

Frustration with marketing is nothing new, but things have only been improving. Adam is legit and CAVO is a huge opportunity, Brian's crew is legit but cannot execute until we give them the go-ahead with a nice wallet and protocol v1.

I agree with this, we cant just freeze funds as much as I would like to. It will make people lose confidence in the system...

A slippery slope indeed. Part of the reason people will come into the BitShares ecosystem is to avoid their money being effectively or literally taken from them (or devalued) by 'the system'. This will be hindered if the BitShares ecosystem has demonstrated that it's done exactly this.

It wouldn't be such a disaster if BTS were to be taken back contractually 'off chain' though (rather than being frozen).

The fact that this is even being discussed as possible is very worrisome.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: Rune on November 30, 2014, 02:11:23 pm

Quote from: MeTHoDx link=topic=11865.msg156121#msg156121


Freezing funds is a slippery slope.

Frustration with marketing is nothing new, but things have only been improving. Adam is legit and CAVO is a huge opportunity, Brian's crew is legit but cannot execute until we give them the go-ahead with a nice wallet and protocol v1.

I agree with this, we cant just freeze funds as much as I would like to. It will make people lose confidence in the system...

A slippery slope indeed. Part of the reason people will come into the BitShares ecosystem is to avoid their money being effectively or literally taken from them (or devalued) by 'the system'. This will be hindered if the BitShares ecosystem has demonstrated that it's done exactly this.

It wouldn't be such a disaster if BTS were to be taken back contractually 'off chain' though (rather than being frozen).

The fact that this is even being discussed as possible is very worrisome.

If you read through the thread it's pretty obvious that no one took the stupid idea to freeze funds even remotely seriously, exactly for the reasons people are mentioning.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: Gentso1 on November 30, 2014, 02:53:04 pm
Will the official marketing team be allowed to start before the end of this month, as has been quoted so many times in the past?

A better question to ask is...
"Will a nice wallet and protocol v1 be done before the end of this month?"

Not a chance. Unless you mean december.

Yes December.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: eagleeye on November 30, 2014, 03:41:11 pm
Quote
In the past the devs and marketing people were discussing openly everything and others were coming here copying their ideas. I don't want this anymore.

Do you have an example of marketing ideas that were openly discussed and copied? It was before my time, so would be interesting to see. Even if that was the case then I don't think we currently have any real competition, so the benefits of transparency highly outweighs the risks in our current situation, IMO.

 +5%
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: ticklebiscuit on November 30, 2014, 03:57:24 pm
Quote
Do we know this for a fact, or is it speculation?

2 months ago we were complaining that every thought of BM and others were instantly posted here.
Now they keep a radio silence on the marketing campaign.
Everyone would really like to know what is planned, but if it gives the competition a chance to run with it, please don't even give us a glimpse.

I think Brian's hands are tied at the moment, the planned marketing campaign, will probably need some of the new features. On/off ramps etc...

So before we start asking for Brians head, let's just wait a bit longer and see what they have planned for us.

The marketing has ALWAYS been radio silent, it's not something new. The only evidence we have of work Brian has done so far is the botched website, which weeks later still says "why bank when you can bitshare" and has a stock photo of a life buoy on the front page (it's a wordpress theme so anyone could fix that in less than 10 minutes).

I have simply not seen any evidence that Brian is worth the AGS funds we've paid him (and that we inflated BTS 25% to get control of). I form my opinions only based on evidence, so all the "be patient" doesn't work on me at all. I realize BTS will be extremely successful no matter what, but that doesn't make it any less unfair that someone should get a huge stake for nothing, and the fact that brian isn't even defending himself here is seriously annoying me.

The truth is that if there actually was some big push planned by him we would have already known details of it. People have been complaining about marketing for months, and he would have gone public with parts of his plans long ago, to protect his own interests and secure his bonus. The only scenario where it makes sense for him to keep everything silent is if he has got nothing. I want to give him the benefit of the doubt (and I already have), but this is the only logical conclusion I arrive at from the evidence we have seen.

If we're lucky he has actually been hiding a plan from us this entire time. In that case now is the time for us to force him to reveal it.

This is 100% right.  Our community has given him many good reasons to be upfront with them about what he is doing.  He has a forum to frequent and even other places like mumble sessions / google hangouts that would create content, show he is active in the community, and also provide outreach for recruitment.

You dont have to market the product during the marketing Buzz phase.  You market the product when you are ready, but that doesnt mean the public shouldnt know about the philosophy.  I heard from somewhere here he has 5 million shares. Another post said 15million. I wonder what is true.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: donkeypong on November 30, 2014, 04:06:58 pm
Quote
Do we know this for a fact, or is it speculation?

2 months ago we were complaining that every thought of BM and others were instantly posted here.
Now they keep a radio silence on the marketing campaign.
Everyone would really like to know what is planned, but if it gives the competition a chance to run with it, please don't even give us a glimpse.

I think Brian's hands are tied at the moment, the planned marketing campaign, will probably need some of the new features. On/off ramps etc...

So before we start asking for Brians head, let's just wait a bit longer and see what they have planned for us.

The marketing has ALWAYS been radio silent, it's not something new. The only evidence we have of work Brian has done so far is the botched website, which weeks later still says "why bank when you can bitshare" and has a stock photo of a life buoy on the front page (it's a wordpress theme so anyone could fix that in less than 10 minutes).

I have simply not seen any evidence that Brian is worth the AGS funds we've paid him (and that we inflated BTS 25% to get control of). I form my opinions only based on evidence, so all the "be patient" doesn't work on me at all. I realize BTS will be extremely successful no matter what, but that doesn't make it any less unfair that someone should get a huge stake for nothing, and the fact that brian isn't even defending himself here is seriously annoying me.

The truth is that if there actually was some big push planned by him we would have already known details of it. People have been complaining about marketing for months, and he would have gone public with parts of his plans long ago, to protect his own interests and secure his bonus. The only scenario where it makes sense for him to keep everything silent is if he has got nothing. I want to give him the benefit of the doubt (and I already have), but this is the only logical conclusion I arrive at from the evidence we have seen.

If we're lucky he has actually been hiding a plan from us this entire time. In that case now is the time for us to force him to reveal it.

This is 100% right.  Our community has given him many good reasons to be upfront with them about what he is doing.  He has a forum to frequent and even other places like mumble sessions / google hangouts that would create content, show he is active in the community, and also provide outreach for recruitment.

You dont have to market the product during the marketing Buzz phase.  You market the product when you are ready, but that doesnt mean the public shouldnt know about the philosophy.  I heard from somewhere here he has 5 million shares. Another post said 15million. I wonder what is true.

The marketing will be worth every penny. They just need a product first!
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: mint chocolate chip on November 30, 2014, 04:31:13 pm
Quote
Do we know this for a fact, or is it speculation?

2 months ago we were complaining that every thought of BM and others were instantly posted here.
Now they keep a radio silence on the marketing campaign.
Everyone would really like to know what is planned, but if it gives the competition a chance to run with it, please don't even give us a glimpse.

I think Brian's hands are tied at the moment, the planned marketing campaign, will probably need some of the new features. On/off ramps etc...

So before we start asking for Brians head, let's just wait a bit longer and see what they have planned for us.

The marketing has ALWAYS been radio silent, it's not something new. The only evidence we have of work Brian has done so far is the botched website, which weeks later still says "why bank when you can bitshare" and has a stock photo of a life buoy on the front page (it's a wordpress theme so anyone could fix that in less than 10 minutes).

I have simply not seen any evidence that Brian is worth the AGS funds we've paid him (and that we inflated BTS 25% to get control of). I form my opinions only based on evidence, so all the "be patient" doesn't work on me at all. I realize BTS will be extremely successful no matter what, but that doesn't make it any less unfair that someone should get a huge stake for nothing, and the fact that brian isn't even defending himself here is seriously annoying me.

The truth is that if there actually was some big push planned by him we would have already known details of it. People have been complaining about marketing for months, and he would have gone public with parts of his plans long ago, to protect his own interests and secure his bonus. The only scenario where it makes sense for him to keep everything silent is if he has got nothing. I want to give him the benefit of the doubt (and I already have), but this is the only logical conclusion I arrive at from the evidence we have seen.

If we're lucky he has actually been hiding a plan from us this entire time. In that case now is the time for us to force him to reveal it.

This is 100% right.  Our community has given him many good reasons to be upfront with them about what he is doing.  He has a forum to frequent and even other places like mumble sessions / google hangouts that would create content, show he is active in the community, and also provide outreach for recruitment.

You dont have to market the product during the marketing Buzz phase.  You market the product when you are ready, but that doesnt mean the public shouldnt know about the philosophy.  I heard from somewhere here he has 5 million shares. Another post said 15million. I wonder what is true.

The marketing will be worth every penny. They just need a product first!
Interestingly, that is exactly what was said in May/June/July before BitShares was first released.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: ticklebiscuit on November 30, 2014, 04:52:50 pm
Quote
Do we know this for a fact, or is it speculation?

2 months ago we were complaining that every thought of BM and others were instantly posted here.
Now they keep a radio silence on the marketing campaign.
Everyone would really like to know what is planned, but if it gives the competition a chance to run with it, please don't even give us a glimpse.

I think Brian's hands are tied at the moment, the planned marketing campaign, will probably need some of the new features. On/off ramps etc...

So before we start asking for Brians head, let's just wait a bit longer and see what they have planned for us.

The marketing has ALWAYS been radio silent, it's not something new. The only evidence we have of work Brian has done so far is the botched website, which weeks later still says "why bank when you can bitshare" and has a stock photo of a life buoy on the front page (it's a wordpress theme so anyone could fix that in less than 10 minutes).

I have simply not seen any evidence that Brian is worth the AGS funds we've paid him (and that we inflated BTS 25% to get control of). I form my opinions only based on evidence, so all the "be patient" doesn't work on me at all. I realize BTS will be extremely successful no matter what, but that doesn't make it any less unfair that someone should get a huge stake for nothing, and the fact that brian isn't even defending himself here is seriously annoying me.

The truth is that if there actually was some big push planned by him we would have already known details of it. People have been complaining about marketing for months, and he would have gone public with parts of his plans long ago, to protect his own interests and secure his bonus. The only scenario where it makes sense for him to keep everything silent is if he has got nothing. I want to give him the benefit of the doubt (and I already have), but this is the only logical conclusion I arrive at from the evidence we have seen.

If we're lucky he has actually been hiding a plan from us this entire time. In that case now is the time for us to force him to reveal it.

This is 100% right.  Our community has given him many good reasons to be upfront with them about what he is doing.  He has a forum to frequent and even other places like mumble sessions / google hangouts that would create content, show he is active in the community, and also provide outreach for recruitment.

You dont have to market the product during the marketing Buzz phase.  You market the product when you are ready, but that doesnt mean the public shouldnt know about the philosophy.  I heard from somewhere here he has 5 million shares. Another post said 15million. I wonder what is true.

The marketing will be worth every penny. They just need a product first!
Interestingly, that is exactly what was said in May/June/July before BitShares was first released.

There are projects that are doing very well marketing themselves with nothing but a whitepaper.  Why is bitshares so constrained when others are not? 

I understand playing it safe and not giving specifics about a product that isnt yet done, but that doesn't mean the public should not be drawn into content that gets them hungry for details.  Our community has more than just a product.  We have many awesome things going on here and a founding philosophy that is well established internally. These are points ready to be marketed. Saying otherwise is wrong.

For instance, we cant market the difference between the sharedropping model over the models employed by bitcoin and literally all other competitors? That is a huge selling point being completely ignored...

We should have at least 2-3 videos traveling around teaching people that they should be buying bts/pts instead of bitcoin.  Why would they want to do that? Because it is the first innovation that protects token holders and gives them a stake without any of the risk that is required to get a stake in new projects in other competitors markets.

There is so much else to market that this seems more an excuse.


Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: Empirical1.1 on November 30, 2014, 06:23:07 pm
I think their big idea a month/two ago was an attempt at PayPal style network effect targeted at a mainstream audience.

I think they've since realised unless you have a pot of funds set aside, most sharedrops will end up eating into the share price a lot short term. As far as I can tell those $100 suggested bonuses are being majorly curtailed to <$10 and they've realised the need to target the next phase of early adopters before mainstream.

I think they'll end up having to be even more measured with both Sharedrops and the markets they target. Even a few $ is really eating into NXTTY imo.. https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=10589.0

I think most of the network effect will be driven by the community marketing team via social media, creative advertising & small very well strategised Sharedrops that are closely monitored, as well as us the community sharing and gifting BitAssets ourselves.

I'm very bullish on BitShares, I don't see any competitors yet and we win hands down on the development side. (Everybody else will be copying BitShares developments and seeing if they can market them better.)

I know it's hard to put a date on these things but there's a big difference between Jan 1st and March 1st.

Existing investors can push BTS past LiteCoin right now,  if they have a clear date everybody is aiming for and a strategy they can evaluate.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: Gentso1 on November 30, 2014, 06:53:00 pm
Quote
Do we know this for a fact, or is it speculation?

2 months ago we were complaining that every thought of BM and others were instantly posted here.
Now they keep a radio silence on the marketing campaign.
Everyone would really like to know what is planned, but if it gives the competition a chance to run with it, please don't even give us a glimpse.

I think Brian's hands are tied at the moment, the planned marketing campaign, will probably need some of the new features. On/off ramps etc...

So before we start asking for Brians head, let's just wait a bit longer and see what they have planned for us.

The marketing has ALWAYS been radio silent, it's not something new. The only evidence we have of work Brian has done so far is the botched website, which weeks later still says "why bank when you can bitshare" and has a stock photo of a life buoy on the front page (it's a wordpress theme so anyone could fix that in less than 10 minutes).

I have simply not seen any evidence that Brian is worth the AGS funds we've paid him (and that we inflated BTS 25% to get control of). I form my opinions only based on evidence, so all the "be patient" doesn't work on me at all. I realize BTS will be extremely successful no matter what, but that doesn't make it any less unfair that someone should get a huge stake for nothing, and the fact that brian isn't even defending himself here is seriously annoying me.

The truth is that if there actually was some big push planned by him we would have already known details of it. People have been complaining about marketing for months, and he would have gone public with parts of his plans long ago, to protect his own interests and secure his bonus. The only scenario where it makes sense for him to keep everything silent is if he has got nothing. I want to give him the benefit of the doubt (and I already have), but this is the only logical conclusion I arrive at from the evidence we have seen.

If we're lucky he has actually been hiding a plan from us this entire time. In that case now is the time for us to force him to reveal it.

This is 100% right.  Our community has given him many good reasons to be upfront with them about what he is doing.  He has a forum to frequent and even other places like mumble sessions / google hangouts that would create content, show he is active in the community, and also provide outreach for recruitment.

You dont have to market the product during the marketing Buzz phase.  You market the product when you are ready, but that doesnt mean the public shouldnt know about the philosophy.  I heard from somewhere here he has 5 million shares. Another post said 15million. I wonder what is true.

The marketing will be worth every penny. They just need a product first!
Interestingly, that is exactly what was said in May/June/July before BitShares was first released.


 +5%

The no product argument is rubbish. Also saying look what we have achieved with no marketing is just silly. 
We have now merged.So the message is much simpler.
The market cap has for the most part settled.
BitUSD now has hit the million dollar milestone.
The platform has (at least for me) been very stable and preforms exactly as described

To say their is no product is completely discredited by everyone that has been trading on it and moving 100's of thousands of bts and bitUSD safely and securely.

I am completely bull/rocket ship to da moon but marketing needs to start.If it doesn't start in the time frame that has been mentioned so many times(nov,dec) investor's confidence will be rattled yet again in what has always been our weakest area.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: Mysto on November 30, 2014, 09:40:53 pm
+5%

The no product argument is rubbish. Also saying look what we have achieved with no marketing is just silly. 
We have now merged.So the message is much simpler.
The market cap has for the most part settled.
BitUSD now has hit the million dollar milestone.
The platform has (at least for me) been very stable and preforms exactly as described

To say their is no product is completely discredited by everyone that has been trading on it and moving 100's of thousands of bts and bitUSD safely and securely.

I am completely bull/rocket ship to da moon but marketing needs to start.If it doesn't start in the time frame that has been mentioned so many times(nov,dec) investor's confidence will be rattled yet again in what has always been our weakest area.

I have a $2,500 pc and the wallet takes at least 5 minute (just timed it and it took 14 MINUTES to launch), it take ~2 minute to open the marketing tab, it takes up way too much memory and processing power, it take hours to rescan and as we speak the wallet froze and all of a sudden stopped syncing (so now I have to do another rescan). Remember we are dealing with people's MONEY! If you log into your wallet one day and it says you have a 0 balance that is scary and leaves an undesirable scar (even if it's a simple fix). I remember how much I panicked the first time that happened to me. That should NEVER happen to a new user. I have seen many threads where people leave bitshares because of this problem alone. The wallet is extremely slow, very buggy, which in turn makes is very frustrating at times.

If you think this is a marketable product then you are in for a shock.

Also from what I understand Brian is targeting a different audience from what MeTHoDx is going after. The audience that Brian is going after will not be as patient with the wallet.

No offence to the dev team but I wouldn't even call this an alpha product. At this stage I am not even willing to recommend it to family and friends for fear that the wallet will turn them off for good.

Edit: As I was writing all that the wallet crashed and I sent a report.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: oco101 on November 30, 2014, 09:43:06 pm
Interestingly, that is exactly what was said in May/June/July before BitShares was first released.

+1
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: kisa on November 30, 2014, 09:50:44 pm
agree with Mysto...
Wallet not stable and fast enough for marketing to non-tech crowd yet.
Tech folks should please take a main street or merchant user perspective, who would have to run to a programmer friend with any questions if something takes too long, crashes or balance doesn't add up.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: ripplexiaoshan on December 01, 2014, 01:12:16 am
+5%

The no product argument is rubbish. Also saying look what we have achieved with no marketing is just silly. 
We have now merged.So the message is much simpler.
The market cap has for the most part settled.
BitUSD now has hit the million dollar milestone.
The platform has (at least for me) been very stable and preforms exactly as described

To say their is no product is completely discredited by everyone that has been trading on it and moving 100's of thousands of bts and bitUSD safely and securely.

I am completely bull/rocket ship to da moon but marketing needs to start.If it doesn't start in the time frame that has been mentioned so many times(nov,dec) investor's confidence will be rattled yet again in what has always been our weakest area.

I have a $2,500 pc and the wallet takes at least 5 minute (just timed it and it took 14 MINUTES to launch), it take ~2 minute to open the marketing tab, it takes up way too much memory and processing power, it take hours to rescan and as we speak the wallet froze and all of a sudden stopped syncing (so now I have to do another rescan). Remember we are dealing with people's MONEY! If you log into your wallet one day and it says you have a 0 balance that is scary and leaves an undesirable scar (even if it's a simple fix). I remember how much I panicked the first time that happened to me. That should NEVER happen to a new user. I have seen many threads where people leave bitshares because of this problem alone. The wallet is extremely slow, very buggy, which in turn makes is very frustrating at times.

If you think this is a marketable product then you are in for a shock.

Also from what I understand Brian is targeting a different audience from what MeTHoDx is going after. The audience that Brian is going after will not be as patient with the wallet.

No offence to the dev team but I wouldn't even call this an alpha product. At this stage I am not even willing to recommend it to family and friends for fear that the wallet will turn them off for good.

Edit: As I was writing all that the wallet crashed and I sent a report.

I am using a 800$ laptop, i5 CPU, 500G SSD HD, Windows7. It usually takes about 3 minutes to open the wallet, and 30 seconds to open the market. Better than yours, but still far from satisfying.

BTW, the above description is the common case. If I don't open my wallet over 3 days, it sometimes takes over 10 minutes to open the wallet, and no connection. I have to restart many times to resolve the no connection issue.

However, my point is that, although the current windows wallet is not good enough, the linux wallet is quite stable, and the security and functionality of system can be guaranteed. For enterprise-level application, usually linux version wallet is used. So I don't understand why the wallet stability affects the marketing...
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: bytemaster on December 01, 2014, 02:30:18 am
If you make a bad first impression then it will cost 3x as much to get an opportunity to make a second impression.   

The current wallet is functional, works reasonably well on Mac but is terrible on windows.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: santaclause102 on December 01, 2014, 10:25:55 am
If you make a bad first impression then it will cost 3x as much to get an opportunity to make a second impression.   

The current wallet is functional, works reasonably well on Mac but is terrible on windows.
+5%
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: merockstar on December 01, 2014, 11:43:48 am
This thread is jumping the gun.

The story has consistently, for as long as I can remember there being a marketing director, been "chill out peeps, the wallet isn't even shiny yet, brian is working on top secret plans in the background."

A few months back there was all manner of hints pertaining to what he had up his sleeve. Without being open, they still managed to keep those of us who made the effort to research vaguely aware of what has been going on.

Patience.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: Gentso1 on December 01, 2014, 03:22:20 pm
I run win7 64 bit
first gen core I7
12gig ram
ssd hard drive
internet is slow here(I live in the country) @ 15mb/s

The wallet takes ,wait let me time it 6secs to get to the log on screen and another 6 secs from the time I hit enter until I am in the client. Last block was synced 17 hours ago, 2 network connections showing, took 1 min to snyc.I can't remember the last time my client crashed. It should be noted I don't short but I do buy/sell and vote on a regular basis. I have made backups and done complete restores with little problem once I understood how to do it.

My electrum wallet takes 25 secs to load and about 5 to snyc for comparison.

Maybe my view is a little off because my Bitshares experience has been pretty positive. 
If you make a bad first impression then it will cost 3x as much to get an opportunity to make a second impression.   

The current wallet is functional, works reasonably well on Mac but is terrible on windows.

You seem very firm for some time to not start marketing until the wallet is up to your standards BUT many of us in the community have spoken up and said lets talk about this, do our voices just fall on deaf ears? Is their a way to get you to change your mind or consider a change or should we just sit quietly and wait?
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: fluxer555 on December 01, 2014, 03:35:08 pm
ssd hard drive

Perhaps this is what is making your experience much better than most Windows users? Try running the client with the data directory on an external hard drive.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: Crossover on December 01, 2014, 03:45:57 pm
The current wallet is functional, works reasonably well on Mac but is terrible on windows.
very very slow.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: islandking on December 01, 2014, 04:15:16 pm
The Linux wallet seems to be running quickly. I have not tried the windows or mac wallet though.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: CalabiYau on December 01, 2014, 04:51:56 pm
WIN7/64, i7, 8GB, SSD,   Wallet v. 0.4.24 

Setup was tricky, the specific folders in ./bitshares had to be deleted but:

Runs stable since weeks on 8 connections now, no more issues so far, opens quick and voting is no more scary - balance shows up after seconds  :)   
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: Ander on December 01, 2014, 04:55:33 pm
I think they'll end up having to be even more measured with both Sharedrops and the markets they target. Even a few $ is really eating into NXTTY imo.. https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=10589.0

Wow, NXTTY is getting destroyed.  That giveaway just looks like a complete failure now.

We should definitely avoid giving away BTS, and instead should give bitUSD as rewards in any upcoming promotions!  After all, did paypal give away paypal stock in its viral growth promotion?  No, they gave USD.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: roadscape on December 01, 2014, 05:05:45 pm
Wow, NXTTY is getting destroyed.  That giveaway just looks like a complete failure now.

We should definitely avoid giving away BTS, and instead should give bitUSD as rewards in any upcoming promotions!  After all, did paypal give away paypal stock in its viral growth promotion?  No, they gave USD.

From what I saw, NXTTY quietly increased their supply by 500% in the run-up to their app launch. Seems shady.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: Empirical1.1 on December 01, 2014, 05:28:44 pm
I think they'll end up having to be even more measured with both Sharedrops and the markets they target. Even a few $ is really eating into NXTTY imo.. https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=10589.0

Wow, NXTTY is getting destroyed.  That giveaway just looks like a complete failure now.

We should definitely avoid giving away BTS, and instead should give bitUSD as rewards in any upcoming promotions!  After all, did paypal give away paypal stock in its viral growth promotion?  No, they gave USD.

Yeah the PayPal case study is very misleading because PayPal blew through a huge pile of money short term and it was a huge drain and burden that took a while to generate positive returns. Applied to Crypto and having give-aways directly eat into the share price is very different and pretty much every sharedrop case study has shown that it's not an effective network technique in this space.

I'm not against them, they just have to be very specific and targeted. Start small & evaluate. Even $10 can be expensive.

An example is, if it was possible to give $10 BitUSD to existing customers of Bitcoin exchanges in Argentina who have reasonable balances, then that might be something worth attempting. As Argentina could be huge for BitUSD and getting it into the hands of people that already understand crypto and can communicate it to family and friends would be ideal. (I would prefer to recruit potential marketers like that. People or businesses that have the ability or platform to advertise and promote BitAssets to a much wider audience if they like it.) Generally though I think you get more bang for your buck with advertising and publicity than give-aways in this space.


Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: Mysto on December 01, 2014, 09:31:15 pm
I am using a 800$ laptop, i5 CPU, 500G SSD HD, Windows7. It usually takes about 3 minutes to open the wallet, and 30 seconds to open the market. Better than yours, but still far from satisfying.

BTW, the above description is the common case. If I don't open my wallet over 3 days, it sometimes takes over 10 minutes to open the wallet, and no connection. I have to restart many times to resolve the no connection issue.

However, my point is that, although the current windows wallet is not good enough, the linux wallet is quite stable, and the security and functionality of system can be guaranteed. For enterprise-level application, usually linux version wallet is used. So I don't understand why the wallet stability affects the marketing...

I don't open my wallet everyday that's probably why it takes so long to launch. I have a FX-8350, 32 GB of memory, and a 480 GB SSD, running on windows.

It effects marketing because we are not exclusively marketing to linux users. If we put out a marketing campaign some windows users are bound to see it, download the wallet and have a bad taste left in their mouth. Even if you are talking about marketing it to merchants it's still a bad idea. Merchants are not going to want to implement something that works flawlessly for them (if they are using linux) while the customers who are using windows don't have a similar experience.

Unless you are talking about something completely different, in that case please do elaborate.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: Mysto on December 01, 2014, 09:39:52 pm
An example is, if it was possible to give $10 BitUSD to existing customers of Bitcoin exchanges in Argentina who have reasonable balances, then that might be something worth attempting. As Argentina could be huge for BitUSD and getting it into the hands of people that already understand crypto and can communicate it to family and friends would be ideal. (I would prefer to recruit potential marketers like that. People or businesses that have the ability or platform to advertise and promote BitAssets to a much wider audience if they like it.)

 +5% +5% +5%
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: NewMine on December 02, 2014, 10:58:31 pm
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.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: gamey on December 02, 2014, 11:09:20 pm
I think they'll end up having to be even more measured with both Sharedrops and the markets they target. Even a few $ is really eating into NXTTY imo.. https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=10589.0

Wow, NXTTY is getting destroyed.  That giveaway just looks like a complete failure now.

We should definitely avoid giving away BTS, and instead should give bitUSD as rewards in any upcoming promotions!  After all, did paypal give away paypal stock in its viral growth promotion?  No, they gave USD.

Yeah the PayPal case study is very misleading because PayPal blew through a huge pile of money short term and it was a huge drain and burden that took a while to generate positive returns. Applied to Crypto and having give-aways directly eat into the share price is very different and pretty much every sharedrop case study has shown that it's not an effective network technique in this space.

I'm not against them, they just have to be very specific and targeted. Start small & evaluate. Even $10 can be expensive.

An example is, if it was possible to give $10 BitUSD to existing customers of Bitcoin exchanges in Argentina who have reasonable balances, then that might be something worth attempting. As Argentina could be huge for BitUSD and getting it into the hands of people that already understand crypto and can communicate it to family and friends would be ideal. (I would prefer to recruit potential marketers like that. People or businesses that have the ability or platform to advertise and promote BitAssets to a much wider audience if they like it.) Generally though I think you get more bang for your buck with advertising and publicity than give-aways in this space.

I think the culture of the internet has changed signficantly since whenever PayPal did that.  You have those fatwallet type sites.  When I was a kid on the internet, I'm sure the IQ level was easily 15 points higher in general. (Which far predated paypal) Now every scrub ass kid is on the internet in some capacity.  I'm not sure giveaways would target the right demographic at this point unless they are specifically targeted.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: bytemaster on December 03, 2014, 12:30:01 am
Fmv is little more than a couple full pay delegate slots over 2 years. 

Noise.

Fmv is the cornerstone of my marketing strategy.   
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: Ander on December 03, 2014, 12:41:40 am
Fmv is the cornerstone of my marketing strategy.

Thats a big statement! :)


Its pointless for us to complain about the shares to FMV.  That commitment was made long ago.

In the future, we will be able to look back and either say it was an effective or ineffective use of funds.  For now, we dont have the details of the I3 marketing plan.   All we can do is work on making the community marketing efforts as good as possible, and elect good devs and marketers.  We need at least one of the community marketing and the I3 plan to be successful.  Only one of those is under the community's control.  The best result is if both campaigns are successful and we grow the fastest.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: arhag on December 03, 2014, 12:42:08 am
Fmv is little more than a couple full pay delegate slots over 2 years. 

I think you are off by an order of magnitude (https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=(2+year+%2F+1010+seconds)+*+50+*+2) there. It would take two 100% delegates 10 years to make 30 million BTS (actually that isn't accounting for the pay halving every 4 years), or 10 100% delegates 2 years.

P.S. If you account for the pay halving every four years, it is impossible (https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=(4+year+%2F+1010+seconds)+*+(50+%2B+50)+*+2) to make 30 million BTS with just two 100% delegates.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: Ander on December 03, 2014, 12:55:32 am
Lets do math:

Follow my vote got 30% of VOTE, which became .9% of BTS.  Thats 22,500,000 BTS.

One full pay delegate = 1,561,188 BTS per year.

FMV is 14.4 years of paid delegates.
FMV is equivalent to 7.2 paid delegates over 2 years.

Will we get 7 paid delegates of value from it?  I have no idea.

Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: zerosum on December 03, 2014, 01:05:13 am
Fmv is little more than a couple full pay delegate slots over 2 years. 

I think you are off by an order of magnitude (https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=(2+year+%2F+1010+seconds)+*+50+*+2) there. It would take two 100% delegates 10 years to make 30 million BTS (actually that isn't accounting for the pay halving every 4 years), or 10 100% delegates 2 years.

P.S. If you account for the pay halving every four years, it is impossible (https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=(4+year+%2F+1010+seconds)+*+(50+%2B+50)+*+2) to make 30 million BTS with just two 100% delegates.

In other words, BM will never get paid that much for working on the BTS...ever. Not even half of it.  :(

And we are not even discounting for the time value of money...
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: arhag on December 03, 2014, 01:07:53 am
In other words, BM will never get paid that much for working on the BTS...ever. Not even half of it.  :(

Well to be fair the 22.5 million BTS (or whatever the exact number is) is not just for one person but for a team of people.

Still, I would love to have more transparency on what and who those funds are being spent on.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: bytemaster on December 03, 2014, 01:10:06 am
Lets do math:

Follow my vote got 30% of VOTE, which became .9% of BTS.  Thats 22,500,000 BTS.

One full pay delegate = 1,561,188 BTS per year.

FMV is 14.4 years of paid delegates.
FMV is equivalent to 7.2 paid delegates over 2 years.

Will we get 7 paid delegates of value from it?  I have no idea.

FMV is a team of people so....   7 slots is nothing especially at todays pay rate and with our plan for them.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: Stan on December 03, 2014, 01:11:37 am
Believe me, BTSX would not have wanted to face VOTE as a competitor!

Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: zerosum on December 03, 2014, 01:12:53 am
Lets do math:

Follow my vote got 30% of VOTE, which became .9% of BTS.  Thats 22,500,000 BTS.

One full pay delegate = 1,561,188 BTS per year.

FMV is 14.4 years of paid delegates.
FMV is equivalent to 7.2 paid delegates over 2 years.

Will we get 7 paid delegates of value from it?  I have no idea.

FMV is a team of people so....   7 slots is nothing especially at todays pay rate and with our plan for them.

In other words, BM will never get paid that much for working on the BTS...ever. Not even half of it.  :(

Well to be fair the 22.5 million BTS (or whatever the exact number is) is not just for one person but for a team of people.

Still, I would love to have more transparency on what and who those funds are being spent on.

I know it is a team and I will be happy with just a teaser ...

[edit] Never mind, I got one from Stan.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: arhag on December 03, 2014, 01:23:31 am
Believe me, BTSX would not have wanted to face VOTE as a competitor!

You mean BTSX wouldn't want bytemaster as a competitor. The merge resolved that conflict of interest (on how he should spend AGS funds) for him so that he can focus on BTS only.

Otherwise, BTSX could have in theory just avoided the merge (and the 25% dilution as part of it), implemented delegate dilution (which supports a lot more value per year than any of the other DPOS chains could because of its larger market cap), and poached the core devs and Follow My Vote team away from the other DACs they were working on with superior pay. Then DNS and VOTE could just die due to lack of interest, and AGS and PTS would continue as sharedrop instruments like they already are anyway despite the merge.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: Ander on December 03, 2014, 01:52:20 am

FMV is a team of people so....   7 slots is nothing especially at todays pay rate and with our plan for them.

Yes this seems very reasonable to me.

I think the problem is that most people have no idea what it is or what its going to do.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: bytemaster on December 03, 2014, 02:01:32 am

FMV is a team of people so....   7 slots is nothing especially at todays pay rate and with our plan for them.

Yes this seems very reasonable to me.

I think the problem is that most people have no idea what it is or what its going to do.

We have significant plans for it starting Q1 2015
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: gamey on December 03, 2014, 02:11:39 am
Believe me, BTSX would not have wanted to face VOTE as a competitor!

You mean BTSX wouldn't want bytemaster as a competitor. The merge resolved that conflict of interest (on how he should spend AGS funds) for him so that he can focus on BTS only.

Otherwise, BTSX could have in theory just avoided the merge (and the 25% dilution as part of it), implemented delegate dilution (which supports a lot more value per year than any of the other DPOS chains could because of its larger market cap), and poached the core devs and Follow My Vote team away from the other DACs they were working on with superior pay. Then DNS and VOTE could just die due to lack of interest, and AGS and PTS would continue as sharedrop instruments like they already are anyway despite the merge.

What if he just let the developers do what they wanted and if they reneged on agreements then make it known.  Bytemaster could have just taken their code and put it back into BTSX with a smaller team.  Let a different chain dilute itself. 

There were likely many options and who knows what all the true considerations were when making the decision we see today.

A lot of the problem is there is only a relatively small group of people who know the codebase with no comments.  Months ago there was talk of developer's training developers.  Maybe that already happened?

This way maximized the chances bts/btsx success but it isn't apparent at all that is maximizes chances of success in general.  No one really knows that answer except time.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: NewMine on December 03, 2014, 07:08:25 am
You guys are avoiding the 500 pound gorilla in the room.  You think you can create an open source voting system, show a couple people how cool it is and then make money off it? You are entering a world you know nothing about and, FMV knows nothing about based on their résumé.

EAC, HAVA, Secretary of State, election like load testing, 3rd party testing and County acceptance are huge hurdles I don't see Bitshares clearing.

Oh, and don't think for one second that Dominion or ES&S won't jump on your open source code if it even looks like we are the slightest of competition and beat us to the punch. You are entering a world were real world money is on the line and believe me, those companies are not of the altruistic types. With cryptocurrency, you are going after states whose egos will let the little guy try there thing. But a companies earnings on line is a whole different game.

You also have nobody involved in real politics consulting or guiding you. This is your biggest mistake. In politics, things happen through and because of who you Know or because who you know is owed a favor, not because of what you think you know or what you think you can offer will change the world.

The sharedrop will turn out to be a huge mistake in hindsight as VOTE will never be what you think it's going to be unless you hire a Consulting firm, aka a lobbyist, or a seasoned insider with connections to begin pulling weight.

You could also start telling us your plans. So far, no plan that was kept secret here had ever needed to be a secret to begin with after the revelation. Saying there is a plan, or über secret stuff to come most likely means there is no good plan or stuff to come yet.

Or, I would like one reason anything on an open source project should remain a secret to the people floating your meal ticket.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: Rune on December 03, 2014, 11:27:30 am
You could also start telling us your plans. So far, no plan that was kept secret here had ever needed to be a secret to begin with after the revelation. Saying there is a plan, or über secret stuff to come most likely means there is no good plan or stuff to come yet.

Or, I would like one reason anything on an open source project should remain a secret to the people floating your meal ticket.

This is what's really important, and it's the one thing I think drives many of us crazy when thinking about the huge sums of our collective funds that have been gifted away with no legal strings attached. Why aren't we at allowed to know what our money is being spent on? Why are the people entrusted with these massive stakes not even active members of our community?

From experience, I think once someone like Brian or Adam have received these massive no-strings-attached gifts, they will instantly internalize the money as their own property (which it de jure is), and will now be highly disincentivized towards spending any of it on anything other than their own "salary". When they are not even members of our community and thus have no loyalty towards any of the other people involved in this project, they won't feel like they are screwing us all over, they'll just be doing what makes most sense from their point of view. Maybe I'm wrong and just "need to be patient", but the total silence and lack of info or transparency of any kind is driving people mad.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: bytemaster on December 03, 2014, 01:49:31 pm
You guys are avoiding the 500 pound gorilla in the room.  You think you can create an open source voting system, show a couple people how cool it is and then make money off it? You are entering a world you know nothing about and, FMV knows nothing about based on their résumé.

EAC, HAVA, Secretary of State, election like load testing, 3rd party testing and County acceptance are huge hurdles I don't see Bitshares clearing.

Oh, and don't think for one second that Dominion or ES&S won't jump on your open source code if it even looks like we are the slightest of competition and beat us to the punch. You are entering a world were real world money is on the line and believe me, those companies are not of the altruistic types. With cryptocurrency, you are going after states whose egos will let the little guy try there thing. But a companies earnings on line is a whole different game.

You also have nobody involved in real politics consulting or guiding you. This is your biggest mistake. In politics, things happen through and because of who you Know or because who you know is owed a favor, not because of what you think you know or what you think you can offer will change the world.

The sharedrop will turn out to be a huge mistake in hindsight as VOTE will never be what you think it's going to be unless you hire a Consulting firm, aka a lobbyist, or a seasoned insider with connections to begin pulling weight.

You could also start telling us your plans. So far, no plan that was kept secret here had ever needed to be a secret to begin with after the revelation. Saying there is a plan, or über secret stuff to come most likely means there is no good plan or stuff to come yet.

Or, I would like one reason anything on an open source project should remain a secret to the people floating your meal ticket.

Lets get one thing straight.  Vote was 60% AGS/PTS so you are really only talking about .9% of BTS.   With that we get a team of people helping us market BitShares by reaching an audience through an alternative motivation, voting.

If you think for one second our plan depends upon governments accepting what we are doing or 3rd parties not copying us then you have completely misjudged our strategy.   We do not care *if* governments accept our voting solution.   Our business model for VOTE is independent of government acceptance. 
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: xeroc on December 03, 2014, 02:09:53 pm
We do not care *if* governments accept our voting solution.   Our business model for VOTE is independent of government acceptance.
That is good to hear .. I was concerned about this and IMHO we should communicate this accordingly
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: GaltReport on December 03, 2014, 02:15:31 pm
You guys are avoiding the 500 pound gorilla in the room.  You think you can create an open source voting system, show a couple people how cool it is and then make money off it? You are entering a world you know nothing about and, FMV knows nothing about based on their résumé.

EAC, HAVA, Secretary of State, election like load testing, 3rd party testing and County acceptance are huge hurdles I don't see Bitshares clearing.

Oh, and don't think for one second that Dominion or ES&S won't jump on your open source code if it even looks like we are the slightest of competition and beat us to the punch. You are entering a world were real world money is on the line and believe me, those companies are not of the altruistic types. With cryptocurrency, you are going after states whose egos will let the little guy try there thing. But a companies earnings on line is a whole different game.

You also have nobody involved in real politics consulting or guiding you. This is your biggest mistake. In politics, things happen through and because of who you Know or because who you know is owed a favor, not because of what you think you know or what you think you can offer will change the world.

The sharedrop will turn out to be a huge mistake in hindsight as VOTE will never be what you think it's going to be unless you hire a Consulting firm, aka a lobbyist, or a seasoned insider with connections to begin pulling weight.

You could also start telling us your plans. So far, no plan that was kept secret here had ever needed to be a secret to begin with after the revelation. Saying there is a plan, or über secret stuff to come most likely means there is no good plan or stuff to come yet.

Or, I would like one reason anything on an open source project should remain a secret to the people floating your meal ticket.

...
If you think for one second our plan depends upon governments accepting what we are doing...then you have completely misjudged our strategy.   We do not care *if* governments accept our voting solution.   Our business model for VOTE is independent of government acceptance.

Can you elaborate please on this part.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: bytemaster on December 03, 2014, 02:46:05 pm
We do not care *if* governments accept our voting solution.   Our business model for VOTE is independent of government acceptance.
That is good to hear .. I was concerned about this and IMHO we should communicate this accordingly

If you bring it straight to the people and hold a parallel election and offer them a compelling goal:  help us achieve higher voter turnout than traditional elections and restore integrity to the process then government will have no choice but to pay attention or fight it.    Either way it brings massive media attention to the cause.

Just 36.4 percent of the voting-eligible population cast ballots in 2014 which means the elected officials are operating on approval of less than 19% of the population (on average).   If you factor in that many of their votes were really "votes against" the other guy you have a situation where only about 10% of the voting population actually supports the people in office.   

So if we can petition the government directly and call for honest voting and gain over 10% voter turnout we can start to claim that we have a mandate from the people.   

So how can we get to 10% voter turnout without government mandate to use our system?   It is a multi step process but it involves making people believe they can have a greater impact for their cause by voting in our system than by going to the polls.

Some research suggests that over 10% of the population is not confident their vote is counted correctly.   Ron Paul scored support of 10% of the republican primary and most of his supporters are very much aware of how rigged the process is. 

So we can turn this into a campaign issue.  Does your candidate support or encourage honest voting.  Every time a voting controversy pops up it is an opportunity to win converts who decide to "opt out" of the official process (reducing official voter turnout) and "opt in" to our new process.

So each person we can convince to abandon the existing system (vote against it) and join our system (vote for it) gives us 2x bang for the buck.   Suppose we can score 3% of voters who opt-out today, 3% of voters who use both systems, and 3% of voters who switch?  Voter turnout would fall to 30% and our turnout would be 9%. 

The key here is to make voting so easy and provide some alternative benefits to encourage participation and referrals that it spreads.    It is much easier to market voting than BitShares.   But once you get them hooked on voting, the conversion to BTS is much easier. 

Anyway, we have a solution that costs governments (taxpayers) nothing provides "free voting" and saves lives.   We have a very compelling pitch for voting (we haven't revealed it all yet).   So politicians can gain a lot of political capital by supporting our efforts but it will be very costly to attack a provably fair, private, and honest election process.

After all voting is 90% about expressing your opinion for everyone else to see and 10% about actually selecting a candidate.   We are selling people a "voice" where the current system leaves people powerless to express it. 

 
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: matt608 on December 03, 2014, 02:50:55 pm
^  +5% Yeah baby. 
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: Gentso1 on December 03, 2014, 02:53:48 pm
I think this thread highlights a real need for more transparency which had been brought up before but sadly nothing has ever come to light. I for one would like to see

How much each person was gifted and what their task or overall objective is, past and present.

What are each persons incentives and what goals must they reach to get said incentives.

How can we as a community try to understand the value of someone if we don't know their pay or what their actual role is?
Brain is the best example of this, He was hired as a marketing director. We start complaining and it turns out his role is actually not marketing at all but more of a talent scout and making connections.

I am sure you can see from our end how this can be rather confusing and frustrating.

It does not impact strategy 1 bit to be transparent about where money was and is being spent.

I want to point you to your own post bytemaster https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=4958.45 (https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=4958.45) 
I have asked Stan, Brian, and Arlen to work extra hard to clear up this and provide increased transparency on when, how, what, and why funds are being used for.    If they live up to my vision for it then you all will be very happy. 

If not I will hammer them until I get want I want to see....   just trying to avoid getting side tracked by these kinds of issues so I can focus on release.

This post is dated   June 14, 2014. At that point we at lest got a few google spread sheets now we don't even get that.
(http://i.giphy.com/11rIergnpiYpvW.gif) 

 
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: islandking on December 03, 2014, 02:55:16 pm
I agree I think we more transparency on where the money is going. The shareholders have a right to know. Although we can't give away all of our ideas to our competitors either. So it needs to be balanced for now at least.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: xeroc on December 03, 2014, 02:57:02 pm
If you bring it straight to the people and hold a parallel election and offer them a compelling goal:  help us achieve higher voter turnout than traditional elections and restore integrity to the process then government will have no choice but to pay attention or fight it.    Either way it brings massive media attention to the cause.

Just 36.4 percent of the voting-eligible population cast ballots in 2014 which means the elected officials are operating on approval of less than 19% of the population (on average).   If you factor in that many of their votes were really "votes against" the other guy you have a situation where only about 10% of the voting population actually supports the people in office.   

So if we can petition the government directly and call for honest voting and gain over 10% voter turnout we can start to claim that we have a mandate from the people.   

So how can we get to 10% voter turnout without government mandate to use our system?   It is a multi step process but it involves making people believe they can have a greater impact for their cause by voting in our system than by going to the polls.

Some research suggests that over 10% of the population is not confident their vote is counted correctly.   Ron Paul scored support of 10% of the republican primary and most of his supporters are very much aware of how rigged the process is. 

So we can turn this into a campaign issue.  Does your candidate support or encourage honest voting.  Every time a voting controversy pops up it is an opportunity to win converts who decide to "opt out" of the official process (reducing official voter turnout) and "opt in" to our new process.

So each person we can convince to abandon the existing system (vote against it) and join our system (vote for it) gives us 2x bang for the buck.   Suppose we can score 3% of voters who opt-out today, 3% of voters who use both systems, and 3% of voters who switch?  Voter turnout would fall to 30% and our turnout would be 9%. 

The key here is to make voting so easy and provide some alternative benefits to encourage participation and referrals that it spreads.    It is much easier to market voting than BitShares.   But once you get them hooked on voting, the conversion to BTS is much easier. 

Anyway, we have a solution that costs governments (taxpayers) nothing provides "free voting" and saves lives.   We have a very compelling pitch for voting (we haven't revealed it all yet).   So politicians can gain a lot of political capital by supporting our efforts but it will be very costly to attack a provably fair, private, and honest election process.

After all voting is 90% about expressing your opinion for everyone else to see and 10% about actually selecting a candidate.   We are selling people a "voice" where the current system leaves people powerless to express it.
wow .. that's quite a good plan ..  +5% +5%

Eagerly awaiting what comes next!
Exciting times ahead

I guess you won't tell us the secret sauce on how to achieve 1 person ->1 vote without government interaction (free voting)?!
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: abit on December 03, 2014, 03:13:33 pm
On my new laptop with Win7/64, i7, 8Gb, but no ssd, the experience is positive. Terrible on my old pc though, dont want to talk about it any more..
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: Ben Mason on December 03, 2014, 03:14:43 pm
We do not care *if* governments accept our voting solution.   Our business model for VOTE is independent of government acceptance.
That is good to hear .. I was concerned about this and IMHO we should communicate this accordingly

If you bring it straight to the people and hold a parallel election and offer them a compelling goal:  help us achieve higher voter turnout than traditional elections and restore integrity to the process then government will have no choice but to pay attention or fight it.    Either way it brings massive media attention to the cause.

Just 36.4 percent of the voting-eligible population cast ballots in 2014 which means the elected officials are operating on approval of less than 19% of the population (on average).   If you factor in that many of their votes were really "votes against" the other guy you have a situation where only about 10% of the voting population actually supports the people in office.   

So if we can petition the government directly and call for honest voting and gain over 10% voter turnout we can start to claim that we have a mandate from the people.   

So how can we get to 10% voter turnout without government mandate to use our system?   It is a multi step process but it involves making people believe they can have a greater impact for their cause by voting in our system than by going to the polls.

Some research suggests that over 10% of the population is not confident their vote is counted correctly.   Ron Paul scored support of 10% of the republican primary and most of his supporters are very much aware of how rigged the process is. 

So we can turn this into a campaign issue.  Does your candidate support or encourage honest voting.  Every time a voting controversy pops up it is an opportunity to win converts who decide to "opt out" of the official process (reducing official voter turnout) and "opt in" to our new process.

So each person we can convince to abandon the existing system (vote against it) and join our system (vote for it) gives us 2x bang for the buck.   Suppose we can score 3% of voters who opt-out today, 3% of voters who use both systems, and 3% of voters who switch?  Voter turnout would fall to 30% and our turnout would be 9%. 

The key here is to make voting so easy and provide some alternative benefits to encourage participation and referrals that it spreads.    It is much easier to market voting than BitShares.   But once you get them hooked on voting, the conversion to BTS is much easier. 

Anyway, we have a solution that costs governments (taxpayers) nothing provides "free voting" and saves lives.   We have a very compelling pitch for voting (we haven't revealed it all yet).   So politicians can gain a lot of political capital by supporting our efforts but it will be very costly to attack a provably fair, private, and honest election process.

After all voting is 90% about expressing your opinion for everyone else to see and 10% about actually selecting a candidate.   We are selling people a "voice" where the current system leaves people powerless to express it.

A peaceful legitimacy transition....beautiful  +5%
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: matt608 on December 03, 2014, 03:17:33 pm

I guess you won't tell us the secret sauce on how to achieve 1 person ->1 vote without government interaction (free voting)?!

If it's using facial recognition software to reference databases of personal info (which I don't know how FMV would have access too...) then it could theoretically allow "illegal" immigrants and prisoners (who have their vote taken away) to register and have their vote counted.  If they don't have info in the data base they could sign up by adding their info right then and there when voting.  They can't duplicate it or the software would recognise their face.  An election that includes the voices of these silenced millions will be the biggest news in years.  I would love to write the copy for that.

What does concern me is the security of the voters info. 
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: Rune on December 03, 2014, 03:40:30 pm
We do not care *if* governments accept our voting solution.   Our business model for VOTE is independent of government acceptance.
That is good to hear .. I was concerned about this and IMHO we should communicate this accordingly

If you bring it straight to the people and hold a parallel election and offer them a compelling goal:  help us achieve higher voter turnout than traditional elections and restore integrity to the process then government will have no choice but to pay attention or fight it.    Either way it brings massive media attention to the cause.

Just 36.4 percent of the voting-eligible population cast ballots in 2014 which means the elected officials are operating on approval of less than 19% of the population (on average).   If you factor in that many of their votes were really "votes against" the other guy you have a situation where only about 10% of the voting population actually supports the people in office.   

So if we can petition the government directly and call for honest voting and gain over 10% voter turnout we can start to claim that we have a mandate from the people.   

So how can we get to 10% voter turnout without government mandate to use our system?   It is a multi step process but it involves making people believe they can have a greater impact for their cause by voting in our system than by going to the polls.

Some research suggests that over 10% of the population is not confident their vote is counted correctly.   Ron Paul scored support of 10% of the republican primary and most of his supporters are very much aware of how rigged the process is. 

So we can turn this into a campaign issue.  Does your candidate support or encourage honest voting.  Every time a voting controversy pops up it is an opportunity to win converts who decide to "opt out" of the official process (reducing official voter turnout) and "opt in" to our new process.

So each person we can convince to abandon the existing system (vote against it) and join our system (vote for it) gives us 2x bang for the buck.   Suppose we can score 3% of voters who opt-out today, 3% of voters who use both systems, and 3% of voters who switch?  Voter turnout would fall to 30% and our turnout would be 9%. 

The key here is to make voting so easy and provide some alternative benefits to encourage participation and referrals that it spreads.    It is much easier to market voting than BitShares.   But once you get them hooked on voting, the conversion to BTS is much easier. 

Anyway, we have a solution that costs governments (taxpayers) nothing provides "free voting" and saves lives.   We have a very compelling pitch for voting (we haven't revealed it all yet).   So politicians can gain a lot of political capital by supporting our efforts but it will be very costly to attack a provably fair, private, and honest election process.

After all voting is 90% about expressing your opinion for everyone else to see and 10% about actually selecting a candidate.   We are selling people a "voice" where the current system leaves people powerless to express it.

So this is the secret VOTE trick! I guess its a decent idea, and I imagine it could give results. However I would be much happier if it was Adam coming here and filing questions on this and explaining the strategy. It's frustrating that him and Brian are the ones being complained about and asked for transparency, yet the responsibility of defending them falls on you and other developers who have much more important stuff to do.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: Stan on December 03, 2014, 04:26:56 pm
I think this thread highlights a real need for more transparency which had been brought up before but sadly nothing has ever come to light. I for one would like to see

How much each person was gifted and what their task or overall objective is, past and present.

What are each persons incentives and what goals must they reach to get said incentives.

(http://i.giphy.com/11rIergnpiYpvW.gif)

Our transparency efforts are all around you.

Look at the answers we have provided to questions in this thread alone.

Look at the Google spreadsheets that document every expenditure.

Look at the mumble session answers - taking questions from around the globe.
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=10526.msg138542#msg138542 (https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=10526.msg138542#msg138542)

Look at our responsiveness here on the forum - we spend at least an hour here every day.

Brian has been on multiple mumble sessions describing his team's plans.

I've most recently summarized what his team is doing here:
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=11865.msg156156#msg156156 (https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=11865.msg156156#msg156156)

I've summarized all the marketing initiatives here:
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=11955.msg157631#msg157631 (https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=11955.msg157631#msg157631)

We explain our strategic plans and detailed thinking in blogs and newsletters here:
http://bitshares.org/bitshares-reloaded/ (http://bitshares.org/bitshares-reloaded/)

We described our spending strategy this year in terms even a rocket scientist could understand:
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=11351.msg150054#msg150054 (https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=11351.msg150054#msg150054)

We are even transparent about some of the reasons we can't be fully transparent:
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=11044.msg146487#msg146487
 (https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=11044.msg146487#msg146487)
All the while dealing with people demanding that we "please stop" being so transparent:
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=11129.msg146503#msg146503 (https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=11129.msg146503#msg146503)

Over and over and over again...
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=10866.msg143067#msg143067 (https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=10866.msg143067#msg143067)

Meanwhile we have been engineering the next generation of transparency where every consumer of resources is a delegate who must provide sufficient accountability and transparency just to stay employed.  Even the I3 team will be moving onto this new maximally open and transparent mode of operations.

So I believe that the only way to achieve more transparency would be to have someone spend full time doing what I just did for an hour above - researching, examining, refining, condensing and curating all the transparent information that is already out there.  If the community wants that kind of service, we have built in the mechanism for them to hire the best person they can find for that job.


Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: CLains on December 03, 2014, 04:36:02 pm
You are pretty good at that Stan :D

But yes, it is getting to be a full time job just linking together all the information that is scattered everywhere. The wiki was a brief effort to unite everything, but a return to the wiki and related work is soon a necessity to help everyone navigate effectively. I am happy to say that Delegate pay is the special sauce required to get others interested in this system, and I think we will see the fruits of this within a couple of months as tons of new, awesome Delegate teams compete to get elected.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: santaclause102 on December 03, 2014, 04:41:28 pm
Transparency plays a role in two different aspects:
1) Stating how the AGS donations are allocated: Who gets how much and for what? Meaning, did that person get it as pay for himself or is an obligation attached that those funds are solely there to grow the ecosystem? How many AGS donations are left?
2) Transparency in decision making: I say that it can harm Bitshares if important strategic decisions go back and forth (like allocations) on the forum. I would say that is is beneficial to be less transparent in the decision making process and first vet the proposal with all important players (in Virginia) and present a well thought out plan to the forum (only with respect to important strategic decision that can cause uncertainty for bts holders).
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: Stan on December 03, 2014, 04:43:57 pm
If you bring it straight to the people and hold a parallel election and offer them a compelling goal:  help us achieve higher voter turnout than traditional elections and restore integrity to the process then government will have no choice but to pay attention or fight it.    Either way it brings massive media attention to the cause.

Just 36.4 percent of the voting-eligible population cast ballots in 2014 which means the elected officials are operating on approval of less than 19% of the population (on average).   If you factor in that many of their votes were really "votes against" the other guy you have a situation where only about 10% of the voting population actually supports the people in office.   

So if we can petition the government directly and call for honest voting and gain over 10% voter turnout we can start to claim that we have a mandate from the people.   

So how can we get to 10% voter turnout without government mandate to use our system?   It is a multi step process but it involves making people believe they can have a greater impact for their cause by voting in our system than by going to the polls.

Some research suggests that over 10% of the population is not confident their vote is counted correctly.   Ron Paul scored support of 10% of the republican primary and most of his supporters are very much aware of how rigged the process is. 

So we can turn this into a campaign issue.  Does your candidate support or encourage honest voting.  Every time a voting controversy pops up it is an opportunity to win converts who decide to "opt out" of the official process (reducing official voter turnout) and "opt in" to our new process.

So each person we can convince to abandon the existing system (vote against it) and join our system (vote for it) gives us 2x bang for the buck.   Suppose we can score 3% of voters who opt-out today, 3% of voters who use both systems, and 3% of voters who switch?  Voter turnout would fall to 30% and our turnout would be 9%. 

The key here is to make voting so easy and provide some alternative benefits to encourage participation and referrals that it spreads.    It is much easier to market voting than BitShares.   But once you get them hooked on voting, the conversion to BTS is much easier. 

Anyway, we have a solution that costs governments (taxpayers) nothing provides "free voting" and saves lives.   We have a very compelling pitch for voting (we haven't revealed it all yet).   So politicians can gain a lot of political capital by supporting our efforts but it will be very costly to attack a provably fair, private, and honest election process.

After all voting is 90% about expressing your opinion for everyone else to see and 10% about actually selecting a candidate.   We are selling people a "voice" where the current system leaves people powerless to express it.
wow .. that's quite a good plan ..  +5% +5%

Eagerly awaiting what comes next!
Exciting times ahead

I guess you won't tell us the secret sauce on how to achieve 1 person ->1 vote without government interaction (free voting)?!

This is a great opportunity to draw a General Conclusion:

There are tons of other potential strategies that could work just like this.
Find a large group of people who care passionately about something, anything.
Talk to them about their passions.
Show how what we have can benefit what they care about.

Then, oh, by the way, you can earn 5% or more on your savings and checking account...

(https://encrypted-tbn3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQbV9cddYJJ-jGZUK2ApEgYjP0dKNiOw9j8NaDQzK9osN8cg65Llw)
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: gamey on December 03, 2014, 05:00:55 pm
Complaining about transparency at this point seems fairly pointless unless people believe that the large majority of the funds have not in fact been spent.

Also telling the community what is expected out of everyone just gives people a ton of reasons to complain when things aren't done.  This doesn't seem productive in general.  It may appeal to someone's selfish need to know everything, but I don't think it would be an overall positive for the community.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: donkeypong on December 03, 2014, 05:34:22 pm

There are tons of other potential strategies that could work just like this.
Find a large group of people who care passionately about something, anything.
Talk to them about their passions.
Show how what we have can benefit what they care about.

Then, oh, by the way, you can earn 5% or more on your savings and checking account...

(https://encrypted-tbn3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQbV9cddYJJ-jGZUK2ApEgYjP0dKNiOw9j8NaDQzK9osN8cg65Llw)

Well said. Here's another way to imagine it. Everyone is watching his/her own TV station. Instead of doing what they're all doing, turning up the volume and trying to get others interested in their TV station, you can try a different approach. Rather than talking about your TV station, tune in to theirs first. Relate to them, see where they're coming from and what their needs/interests are, and THEN slowly give them some new content to add to their station. And it becomes their idea, so they help promote it as well. That's much more effective than simply turning up your own volume.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: NewMine on December 03, 2014, 06:22:35 pm
The political ignorance and naivety is quite alarming. Did you read anything about how a voting system is implemented?  There are laws and procedures. Read them, abide by them, and maybe voters will take you seriously. To get there is a path that you are not equipped to travel at this point. Don't take my words as trash talk or nay saying, take them and analyze what realistic steps need to be taken and implement them beyond a bar stool and high fives about what a cool idea you all had.

The sooner you realize that you have to work within he laws of the land were you wish to succeed, the sooner the dreams will come to fruition. I am sick of the constant pie in the sky view of a lot of people here who think the are going to somehow circumvent the government. It would be ignorant to think that your back door idea will somehow prevail. See any political Party not Republican or Democrat and look at where they are.

Look at the laws. Please. A grassroots campaign will blossom within about 1/1000% of the people you wish to reach and die a slow death. 
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: bytemaster on December 03, 2014, 06:40:06 pm
The political ignorance and naivety is quite alarming. Did you read anything about how a voting system is implemented?  There are laws and procedures. Read them, abide by them, and maybe voters will take you seriously. To get there is a path that you are not equipped to travel at this point. Don't take my words as trash talk or nay saying, take them and analyze what realistic steps need to be taken and implement them beyond a bar stool and high fives about what a cool idea you all had.

The sooner you realize that you have to work within he laws of the land were you wish to succeed, the sooner the dreams will come to fruition. I am sick of the constant pie in the sky view of a lot of people here who think the are going to somehow circumvent the government. It would be ignorant to think that your back door idea will somehow prevail. See any political Party not Republican or Democrat and look at where they are.

Look at the laws. Please. A grassroots campaign will blossom within about 1/1000% of the people you wish to reach and die a slow death.

NewMine we know EXACTLY how the voting system is implemented in CA and had someone THERE during the November election with the the registrars and given a step by step inside view on HOW it is done today.   We know the entire existing process inside and out (for CA).   We are talking to the people responsible for buying voting systems and hearing EXACTLY what they want and need.  To say that we are ignoring the laws and procedures is very far fetched.

We happen to KNOW that the Laws and Procedures are hopelessly broken.  IE: you cannot have a honest voting system while fully complying with the letter of the law.   The laws will have to change. 

But thats OK we are not trying to FORCE our system on anyone because that is 100% against what BTS is about.    We are creating an ALTERNATIVE approach and demonstrating that it is cost effective and viable.   This ALTERNATIVE will give people the ability to actually know in real time what their fellow citizens think without having to rely on the media.  This ALTERNATIVE gives the people a VOICE even if the government ignores it, everyone will hear it.

So a grassroots effort is appealing to people that want a VOICE, that want CHANGE, and that want the government to adopt what we have produced.

You claim voters will not take it seriously and I agree that many voters will not, but you better believe that "non-voters" will take it more seriously.   After all I don't VOTE because the system is rigged.  I don't take polls or trust polls because they are easy to ballot stuff with fake IDs.   I don't sign petitions because I care about my privacy.   But I would use FMV because I can maintain my privacy while signing petitions and expressing my opinion on political candidates or other issues.   

Every election LewRockwell.com has article after article asking people to send a message by "not voting" and remove legitimacy from the voting process.   Now we can offer an alternative, "Don't vote at the polls, file a protest vote at FMV".   
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: speedy on December 03, 2014, 06:50:32 pm
Sorry for noob questions, but what does FMV stand for, and how does voting benefit from a blockchain ?
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: Stan on December 03, 2014, 06:58:58 pm
...AND think of the places where we can drop bait to direct search engines to us!  Every single controversy of the day, every political action committee, every special interest group will have those who are interested in better ways for their voices to be heard.  Every election has its close-calls where the losing side is convinced there was foul play.  Every one of those is a chance for a headline:  "This wouldn't have happened to us if the system wasn't corrupt!"

Everyone with a grievance (who isn't) will be given a chance to express it in relevant ways with our technologies.  Just sign up and make your voice heard!  Real petitions with certified signatures!  Auditable tracking polls!  Parallel elections!

And while your at it, "Did you know you can earn 5% or more on your checking and savings?"
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: onceuponatime on December 03, 2014, 07:03:21 pm
Sorry for noob questions, but what does FMV stand for, and how does voting benefit from a blockchain ?

FMV stands for "Follow My Vote". It was a DAC concept that is being folded into BTS.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: Empirical1.1 on December 03, 2014, 07:04:01 pm
We do not care *if* governments accept our voting solution.   Our business model for VOTE is independent of government acceptance.
That is good to hear .. I was concerned about this and IMHO we should communicate this accordingly

If you bring it straight to the people and hold a parallel election and offer them a compelling goal:  help us achieve higher voter turnout than traditional elections and restore integrity to the process then government will have no choice but to pay attention or fight it.    Either way it brings massive media attention to the cause.

Just 36.4 percent of the voting-eligible population cast ballots in 2014 which means the elected officials are operating on approval of less than 19% of the population (on average).   If you factor in that many of their votes were really "votes against" the other guy you have a situation where only about 10% of the voting population actually supports the people in office.   

So if we can petition the government directly and call for honest voting and gain over 10% voter turnout we can start to claim that we have a mandate from the people.   

So how can we get to 10% voter turnout without government mandate to use our system?   It is a multi step process but it involves making people believe they can have a greater impact for their cause by voting in our system than by going to the polls.

Some research suggests that over 10% of the population is not confident their vote is counted correctly.   Ron Paul scored support of 10% of the republican primary and most of his supporters are very much aware of how rigged the process is. 

So we can turn this into a campaign issue.  Does your candidate support or encourage honest voting.  Every time a voting controversy pops up it is an opportunity to win converts who decide to "opt out" of the official process (reducing official voter turnout) and "opt in" to our new process.

So each person we can convince to abandon the existing system (vote against it) and join our system (vote for it) gives us 2x bang for the buck.   Suppose we can score 3% of voters who opt-out today, 3% of voters who use both systems, and 3% of voters who switch?  Voter turnout would fall to 30% and our turnout would be 9%. 

The key here is to make voting so easy and provide some alternative benefits to encourage participation and referrals that it spreads.    It is much easier to market voting than BitShares.   But once you get them hooked on voting, the conversion to BTS is much easier. 

Anyway, we have a solution that costs governments (taxpayers) nothing provides "free voting" and saves lives.   We have a very compelling pitch for voting (we haven't revealed it all yet).   So politicians can gain a lot of political capital by supporting our efforts but it will be very costly to attack a provably fair, private, and honest election process.

After all voting is 90% about expressing your opinion for everyone else to see and 10% about actually selecting a candidate.   We are selling people a "voice" where the current system leaves people powerless to express it.

So this is the secret VOTE trick! I guess its a decent idea, and I imagine it could give results. However I would be much happier if it was Adam coming here and filing questions on this and explaining the strategy. It's frustrating that him and Brian are the ones being complained about and asked for transparency, yet the responsibility of defending them falls on you and other developers who have much more important stuff to do.

My concern when I first saw this, is that it could affect Voter privacy. Provided the system doesn't make it possible to determine who you voted for very easily though, it could be quite good.

Otherwise it may be a non-starter. Only X% of voters want their vote publicly disclosed. To see how this issue effects results, we only have to look at the recent Scottish referendum. There was 85% voter turnout, which is pretty incredible! You hardly ever see that these days and so we know, bar any major rigging the outcome really reflects the will of the people.

In the referendum, you could either vote YES for an independent Scotland or NO to keep a united Britain. Few NO voters wanted to publicly disclose their vote as they would be seen as anti-Scottish, some admitted to putting up YES posters in their windows etc. due to neighbourhood peer pressure. If you went by the people that were publicly willing to have their vote known, it would have shown the YES had a huge majority.

Yet the NO Camp, referred to as the silent majority, who wished to maintain their privacy, was the voice of the people. While vote rigging was possible, the NO Campaign won by a clear margin, 55-45%. Any system that took privacy away from voters would have created a very different result that was not a reflection of the will of the people at all.

http://mobile.bloomberg.com/news/2014-09-11/scottish-independence-opponents-pin-hopes-on-silent-no-.html

Quote
  If all visitors had to go on were flags and posters in windows, they’d assume Scotland is on the point of voting overwhelmingly for independence. Blue signs saying simply “Yes” far outnumber the “No, thanks” of opponents. 

Quote
... attributed the gap between the polls and the posters to the “silent No vote” -- people he said are intimidated by nationalists.
“I canvassed a woman today out in west Edinburgh,” Carmichael, 49, said in an interview in his office in the Scottish capital yesterday. “She whispered to me: ‘I’m voting No.’ She was that concerned that somebody might hear her say. There’s an extent to which our support is solid and determined, but does feel hindered from expressing it publicly.”   


Edit: FMV looks like it will be fairly private, great :)

(I thought I remembered earlier discussions where it would be less so.)

So a grassroots effort is appealing to people that want a VOICE, that want CHANGE, and that want the government to adopt what we have produced.

You claim voters will not take it seriously and I agree that many voters will not, but you better believe that "non-voters" will take it more seriously.   After all I don't VOTE because the system is rigged.  I don't take polls or trust polls because they are easy to ballot stuff with fake IDs.   I don't sign petitions because I care about my privacy.   But I would use FMV because I can maintain my privacy while signing petitions and expressing my opinion on political candidates or other issues.   

Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: Ander on December 03, 2014, 07:08:17 pm
My concern when I first saw this, is that it could affect Voter privacy. Provided the system doesn't make it possible to determine who you voted for very easily though, it could be quite good.

Isn't the whole idea that the voting is anonymized, but you can use your private key to look up who you voted for and verify that it was counted correctly, or something like that?

This way both privacy and accuracy are assured?

Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: donkeypong on December 03, 2014, 07:09:56 pm
We do not care *if* governments accept our voting solution.   Our business model for VOTE is independent of government acceptance.
That is good to hear .. I was concerned about this and IMHO we should communicate this accordingly

If you bring it straight to the people and hold a parallel election and offer them a compelling goal:  help us achieve higher voter turnout than traditional elections and restore integrity to the process then government will have no choice but to pay attention or fight it.    Either way it brings massive media attention to the cause.

Just 36.4 percent of the voting-eligible population cast ballots in 2014 which means the elected officials are operating on approval of less than 19% of the population (on average).   If you factor in that many of their votes were really "votes against" the other guy you have a situation where only about 10% of the voting population actually supports the people in office.   

So if we can petition the government directly and call for honest voting and gain over 10% voter turnout we can start to claim that we have a mandate from the people.   

So how can we get to 10% voter turnout without government mandate to use our system?   It is a multi step process but it involves making people believe they can have a greater impact for their cause by voting in our system than by going to the polls.

Some research suggests that over 10% of the population is not confident their vote is counted correctly.   Ron Paul scored support of 10% of the republican primary and most of his supporters are very much aware of how rigged the process is. 

So we can turn this into a campaign issue.  Does your candidate support or encourage honest voting.  Every time a voting controversy pops up it is an opportunity to win converts who decide to "opt out" of the official process (reducing official voter turnout) and "opt in" to our new process.

So each person we can convince to abandon the existing system (vote against it) and join our system (vote for it) gives us 2x bang for the buck.   Suppose we can score 3% of voters who opt-out today, 3% of voters who use both systems, and 3% of voters who switch?  Voter turnout would fall to 30% and our turnout would be 9%. 

The key here is to make voting so easy and provide some alternative benefits to encourage participation and referrals that it spreads.    It is much easier to market voting than BitShares.   But once you get them hooked on voting, the conversion to BTS is much easier. 

Anyway, we have a solution that costs governments (taxpayers) nothing provides "free voting" and saves lives.   We have a very compelling pitch for voting (we haven't revealed it all yet).   So politicians can gain a lot of political capital by supporting our efforts but it will be very costly to attack a provably fair, private, and honest election process.

After all voting is 90% about expressing your opinion for everyone else to see and 10% about actually selecting a candidate.   We are selling people a "voice" where the current system leaves people powerless to express it.

Thanks for illuminating us on this strategy. I'm not convinced that getting people to vote is any easier than getting them interested in BitUSD. The latter, I think, has many more applications. But I agree that this is the right way to promote the VOTE aspect of BitShares. It's okay; don't bother giving me any credit for coming up with it (or at least predicting what you guys were developing). I'm humble!  :)

https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=10057.msg131417#msg131417

Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: speedy on December 03, 2014, 07:17:54 pm
FMV stands for "Follow My Vote". It was a DAC concept that is being folded into BTS.

Thanks!
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: Empirical1.1 on December 03, 2014, 07:23:34 pm
My concern when I first saw this, is that it could affect Voter privacy. Provided the system doesn't make it possible to determine who you voted for very easily though, it could be quite good.

Isn't the whole idea that the voting is anonymized, but you can use your private key to look up who you voted for and verify that it was counted correctly, or something like that?

This way both privacy and accuracy are assured?

Yeah it seems that way, which is great. I haven't looked into it much. I was recalling earlier discussions about Vote selling and effects on voter privacy - https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=10057.msg131114#msg131114

I just remembered that when I saw the VOTE discussion here, none of that may be particularly relevant now.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: Tuck Fheman on December 03, 2014, 07:38:51 pm
Just 36.4 percent of the voting-eligible population cast ballots in 2014 which means the elected officials are operating on approval of less than 19% of the population (on average).

Yep, I blogged about this back in 2012. Obama was 18.x% if I remember correctly.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: oco101 on December 03, 2014, 08:22:15 pm
I could see that plan working. Making people vote in a parallel transparent, anonymous and trustless system it is exciting. Giving back their power and trust is priceless. New Mine questions are very good and raise valid issues  but I think the FMV strategy has a very fair probability that it will work  because they not gonna fight the system they offer a alternative as an experiment. I think making people vote on FMV that's Adam power and his marketing experience will come in handy.
 
I agree with Bytemaster is  much more easy to market Voting that Bitshares  simply because everybody get it and is affected by it and they know that they have a voice, money in the other hand, everybody use it but very few understand it and people believes they have no power to change nothing.

I'm not sure  that's a good strategy to reveal the plans in advance. There  are organisation and companys that have the legal and financials resources to just crash about anything in sight very easily, the only way to beat them is to be clever. Think at how many startup are in stealth mode, because if they don't do it that way, someone more powerful and resourceful will steal the idea and run with it.

If Vote will work then transition to Bitshares will be a piece of cake. If people trust Vote they will trust Bitshares, if this plans come together this the sure  way to make Btshares whatever we all dream it up to be.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: donkeypong on December 03, 2014, 10:20:20 pm
This ALTERNATIVE gives the people a VOICE even if the government ignores it, everyone will hear it.

So a grassroots effort is appealing to people that want a VOICE, that want CHANGE, and that want the government to adopt what we have produced.

Now we can offer an alternative, "Don't vote at the polls, file a protest vote at FMV".   

I hope it works. I really do. But I see VOTE's primary utility as being a trustworthy system that is easier for people to use than traditional voting methods. And I think it will take some media spotlight to really highlight that. In the U.S., the next real opportunity would be the U.S. Presidential primaries in Spring 2016. If California is a test case, where I happen to live and work, then ballot initiatives provide another opportunity to test this out, but again that test will not come until the Fall of 2016, since every interest group in this state is waiting until then to run its next round. I think BitShares VOTE is a longer term proposition.

Your suggestion that FMV can be a protest vote instead of real voting is dangerous. Anyone who opposes us will feed that line to the media and they'll eat it up alive. Also, if you think politicians will listen to votes here, when someone has given up voting at the polls, that's an approach I cannot support. How is that different from ~70% of young people being in favor of legalizing marijuana (according to national public opinion polls in the U.S.), but few of them bothering to vote in elections that count? That's EXACTLY what the corrupt politicians who have passed all these voter ID laws want younger people to do: pack it in and stop participating. Advocating that is wrong.

Encourage people to do BOTH (vote here and there) and you'll end up with more votes here. I think will happen longer term, since VOTE will be more user friendly, and still trustworthy. And there you have a winner: this is a better system that can produce a higher turnout. THAT's what this has going for it.

As for politicians taking note of growing numbers of people making their opinions known through BitShares VOTE, we have public opinion polls for that, and they still don't care, because the half of those people who want things different don't vote anyway. I don't think that the added reliability of a blockchain is going to add that much weight in most peoples' minds to what could just as easily be surveyed (by pollsters who account for demographic variations and produce a pretty accurate snapshot).

Very few politicians have national constituencies anyway. They are looking at voters in the state/province or population-based district they represent. A candidate for the U.S. Senate seat in Georgia doesn't care what I think in California, just as a member of the House of Representatives in Texas is going to listen only to the people in the few counties that are in his/her district (which, by the way, is drawn by a politically motivated crowd and probably skewed so that the politicians already knows he/she represents an extremely liberal or conservative set of constituents). They'll discount it anyway unless they know who is making the votes (down to the age, gender, party registration, and all that). If it's mostly oyunger voters, then that's a very partial snapshot. Are BitShares VOTE voters going to be demographically broken down to that point?

Listen, I want you guys to go for it. I'm rooting for success here. I have high hopes for the VOTE feature. But without understanding the thing very well (which I admit), I think the best prospects are long term and I don't see that as a primary way to get people into BitShares DAC.

As a "cornerstone" of marketing, I think those BitShares TV videos are a far better use of time.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: Empirical1.1 on December 03, 2014, 10:28:53 pm
My concern when I first saw this, is that it could affect Voter privacy. Provided the system doesn't make it possible to determine who you voted for very easily though, it could be quite good.

Isn't the whole idea that the voting is anonymized, but you can use your private key to look up who you voted for and verify that it was counted correctly, or something like that?

This way both privacy and accuracy are assured?

Yeah it seems that way, which is great. I haven't looked into it much. I was recalling earlier discussions about Vote selling and effects on voter privacy - https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=10057.msg131114#msg131114

I just remembered that when I saw the VOTE discussion here, none of that may be particularly relevant now.

Oh wait. I remember now. If you can look it up, it means other people can ask you to look it up too.
So like in my Scottish example, https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=11865.msg157931#msg157931

loads of people were putting up YES posters, submitting to neighbourhood and community pressure, luckily the ability to prove who they voted for is put out of their hands, so their freedom & privacy is greater protected. Not that the current system is great but had there been a mechanism where you could verify to the community who you voted for, then there would be neighbourhood/community pressure to do that and just pretending to support YES wouldn't have sufficed and the outcome of the election would have been different.

So for me, I don't see a big market or future for vote atm, in the political process. I think BitAssets are still going to be huge though.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: NewMine on December 03, 2014, 11:14:40 pm
The political ignorance and naivety is quite alarming. Did you read anything about how a voting system is implemented?  There are laws and procedures. Read them, abide by them, and maybe voters will take you seriously. To get there is a path that you are not equipped to travel at this point. Don't take my words as trash talk or nay saying, take them and analyze what realistic steps need to be taken and implement them beyond a bar stool and high fives about what a cool idea you all had.

The sooner you realize that you have to work within he laws of the land were you wish to succeed, the sooner the dreams will come to fruition. I am sick of the constant pie in the sky view of a lot of people here who think the are going to somehow circumvent the government. It would be ignorant to think that your back door idea will somehow prevail. See any political Party not Republican or Democrat and look at where they are.

Look at the laws. Please. A grassroots campaign will blossom within about 1/1000% of the people you wish to reach and die a slow death.

NewMine we know EXACTLY how the voting system is implemented in CA and had someone THERE during the November election with the the registrars and given a step by step inside view on HOW it is done today.   We know the entire existing process inside and out (for CA).   We are talking to the people responsible for buying voting systems and hearing EXACTLY what they want and need.  To say that we are ignoring the laws and procedures is very far fetched.

We happen to KNOW that the Laws and Procedures are hopelessly broken.  IE: you cannot have a honest voting system while fully complying with the letter of the law.   The laws will have to change. 

But thats OK we are not trying to FORCE our system on anyone because that is 100% against what BTS is about.    We are creating an ALTERNATIVE approach and demonstrating that it is cost effective and viable.   This ALTERNATIVE will give people the ability to actually know in real time what their fellow citizens think without having to rely on the media.  This ALTERNATIVE gives the people a VOICE even if the government ignores it, everyone will hear it.

So a grassroots effort is appealing to people that want a VOICE, that want CHANGE, and that want the government to adopt what we have produced.

You claim voters will not take it seriously and I agree that many voters will not, but you better believe that "non-voters" will take it more seriously.   After all I don't VOTE because the system is rigged.  I don't take polls or trust polls because they are easy to ballot stuff with fake IDs.   I don't sign petitions because I care about my privacy.   But I would use FMV because I can maintain my privacy while signing petitions and expressing my opinion on political candidates or other issues.   

Every election LewRockwell.com has article after article asking people to send a message by "not voting" and remove legitimacy from the voting process.   Now we can offer an alternative, "Don't vote at the polls, file a protest vote at FMV".   

Well you certainly implied you intend to skirt the laws and procedures by side election mandate here:
Quote
If you bring it straight to the people and hold a parallel election and offer them a compelling goal:  help us achieve higher voter turnout than traditional elections and restore integrity to the process then government will have no choice but to pay attention or fight it.    Either way it brings massive media attention to the cause.

Then you also reinforce the fact in your second paragraph above.

Also encouraging voters to not vote in the official election and instead vote at Bitshares VOTE is dangerous and would counter anything VOTE is to stand for and backfire as the official elections have real world consequences/results and Bitshares VOTE is just a protest du jour hat the "cause heads" will soon forget before the next election.

Nothing is going to change. This I know. We just wait and see, I guess.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: arhag on December 03, 2014, 11:18:16 pm
Oh wait. I remember now. If you can look it up, it means other people can ask you to look it up too.
So like in my Scottish example, https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=11865.msg157931#msg157931

loads of people were putting up YES posters, submitting to neighbourhood and community pressure, luckily the ability to prove who they voted for is put out of their hands, so their freedom & privacy is greater protected. Not that the current system is great but had there been a mechanism where you could verify to the community who you voted for, then there would be neighbourhood/community pressure to do that and just pretending to support YES wouldn't have sufficed and the outcome of the election would have been different.

I think the only way to combat that is by building the tools to provide reasonable plausible deniability and having a culture where asking someone to prove their vote is simply taboo.

The client can be designed so that the private key that authenticates the ballots submitted under a pseudonym is randomly generated. This means that if the private key is erased, there is no way to get it back and thus no way to update the ballot (before the election ends) or to provide a challenge-response proof to someone that a particular ballot belongs to you. The private key would be securely stored on the user's computer as long as the user still wants to be able to update the ballot before the election ends. After the election ends, the client could automatically erase the private key (prior to this point the client would have already verified that the user's latest ballot was counted in the blockchain). However, the user would have the option of committing to the latest ballot manually before the election ends by pressing a button in the client, which would essentially just erase that private key.

That option to commit their votes prior to the election ending provides plausible deniability. If someone demands that you prove that you voted a particular way, you can simply claim that unfortunately you already committed your vote (even if this is not true) and therefore it is impossible for you to provide proof. If we have a culture where many people actually commit their votes after submitting their ballot but before the election ends, then this claim seems plausible. More importantly, it is impossible for the person demanding the proof to prove otherwise.

Now, someone could of course demand prior to the election even opening that you prove to them how you voted before erasing the private key. I think the only solution to this is for the person to just ignore that request, submit their ballot, erase the public key, and simply state that although they did vote the way the person wanted (whether true or not) they deleted the private key anyway because they refuse to provide proof since it is morally wrong (it creates an environment in which other people who vote the way society does not like can be extorted to vote against their will). Society should value the right for people to vote without being extorted to prove how they voted far more than whether they voted favorably on any particular issue.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: gamey on December 03, 2014, 11:24:15 pm
Well you certainly implied you intend to skirt the laws and procedures by side election mandate here:
Quote
If you bring it straight to the people and hold a parallel election and offer them a compelling goal:  help us achieve higher voter turnout than traditional elections and restore integrity to the process then government will have no choice but to pay attention or fight it.    Either way it brings massive media attention to the cause.


What specific law would you break saying "Protest the elections, vote using our non-binding voting system instead".   What laws are you referring to? 

I think this is a very interesting conversation and you act like you know more about such things than anyone else present.

I do somewhat doubt that FMV should frame it as a protest.  As in "do this and not the real election".   It seems like a subtler approach would be better received.  Tons of novel angles though with this whole thing.  Digital citizens etc.  So many issues one can raise as a protest that is a problem with both parties.  Then you have electoral college bullshit that disenfranchises people.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: donkeypong on December 03, 2014, 11:37:47 pm

What specific law would you break saying "Protest the elections, vote using our non-binding voting system instead".   What laws are you referring to? 


I do somewhat doubt that FMV should frame it as a protest.  As in "do this and not the real election".   It seems like a subtler approach would be better received.  Tons of novel angles though with this whole thing.  Digital citizens etc.  So many issues one can raise as a protest that is a problem with both parties.  Then you have electoral college bullshit that disenfranchises people.

It's not illegal, but it's a hideous way to market this. The media's whole pitch during elections is voter turnout. If someone feeds them a line that 'BitShares is encouraging people to vote online instead of voting where it counts' then we're done. Screwed. F*** the rest of the good work, f*** the product, f*** all the hard work and the money people have put into this. Stick a fork in it 'cause it'll be done. I also won't support anything that's marketed this way.

The better approach is to encourage using both (real voting + BitShares Vote) until this one gains enough use to become considered as a plausible alternative.

In the long term, I think VOTE has real possibility. In the short term, it's a referral/sharedrop for BTS.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: gamey on December 03, 2014, 11:43:25 pm

What specific law would you break saying "Protest the elections, vote using our non-binding voting system instead".   What laws are you referring to? 


I do somewhat doubt that FMV should frame it as a protest.  As in "do this and not the real election".   It seems like a subtler approach would be better received.  Tons of novel angles though with this whole thing.  Digital citizens etc.  So many issues one can raise as a protest that is a problem with both parties.  Then you have electoral college bullshit that disenfranchises people.

It's not illegal, but it's a hideous way to market this. The media's whole pitch during elections is voter turnout. If someone feeds them a line that 'BitShares is encouraging people to vote online instead of voting where it counts' then we're done. Screwed. F*** the rest of the good work, f*** the product, f*** all the hard work and the money people have put into this. Stick a fork in it 'cause it'll be done. I also won't support anything that's marketed this way.

The better approach is to encourage using both (real voting + BitShares Vote) until this one gains enough use to become considered as a plausible alternative.

In the long term, I think VOTE has real possibility. In the short term, it's a referral/sharedrop for BTS.

I agree with you, but you are being a bit dramatic.  If these same people were not going to vote it doesn't matter.  Any press is good press.   One could argue that they are being part of the process by voting somewhere else. 

Abstaining from voting is just as much of a right as voting.  The problem is you can't tell people from Bytemaster from people like me.  I don't vote because I'm lazy and the odds of it mattering are not worth the effort required. 
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: donkeypong on December 03, 2014, 11:56:15 pm

What specific law would you break saying "Protest the elections, vote using our non-binding voting system instead".   What laws are you referring to? 


I do somewhat doubt that FMV should frame it as a protest.  As in "do this and not the real election".   It seems like a subtler approach would be better received.  Tons of novel angles though with this whole thing.  Digital citizens etc.  So many issues one can raise as a protest that is a problem with both parties.  Then you have electoral college bullshit that disenfranchises people.

It's not illegal, but it's a hideous way to market this. The media's whole pitch during elections is voter turnout. If someone feeds them a line that 'BitShares is encouraging people to vote online instead of voting where it counts' then we're done. Screwed. F*** the rest of the good work, f*** the product, f*** all the hard work and the money people have put into this. Stick a fork in it 'cause it'll be done. I also won't support anything that's marketed this way.

The better approach is to encourage using both (real voting + BitShares Vote) until this one gains enough use to become considered as a plausible alternative.

In the long term, I think VOTE has real possibility. In the short term, it's a referral/sharedrop for BTS.

I agree with you, but you are being a bit dramatic.  If these same people were not going to vote it doesn't matter.  Any press is good press.   One could argue that they are being part of the process by voting somewhere else. 

Abstaining from voting is just as much of a right as voting.  The problem is you can't tell people from Bytemaster from people like me.  I don't vote because I'm lazy and the odds of it mattering are not worth the effort required.

I'm as cynical as you are, even though I do vote, and I believe the system can be much better. I'm dead serious about my earlier critique, though. It's really unethical to encourage people not to vote and "vote" here instead. And it kills this in the court of public opinion. Better to encourage both kinds of voting publicly, knowing full well that some people (like yourself, unfortunately) may stay home and just push a few buttons online instead.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: bytemaster on December 03, 2014, 11:59:30 pm
My personal opinion is that you should never vote in a system that is rigged/unprovable on the principle that your "vote" may or may not actually be counted but your participation is certainly counted on to give the result legitimacy.    You say voting in current elections matters but the whole message of VOTE is actually that "you cannot prove that it matters" and in fact the current system effectively facilitates "vote theft" where we prevent "vote theft".   You shouldn't vote in a system that allows your vote to be stolen without you even knowing it.  By stolen I mean counted differently than you intended or not counted at all.

I think FMV should simply focus on the positive (vote where you can count it) and let others (LewRockwell) recommend not voting in the official system.  The good thing is that once the technology is out there people can and will campaign to abandon/shun the old system and this is GOOD for FMV. 

A controversy highlights the problem with the current system and the benefits of the new system.



Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: bytemaster on December 04, 2014, 12:03:58 am
Quote
It's really unethical to encourage people not to vote and "vote" here instead

I claim it is unethical to vote in a rigged system and thus unwittingly give your support to a corrupt system.   So as long as we are going to be judging people, I think supporting a rigged system is far worse than encouraging people to shun a rigged system. 
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: donkeypong on December 04, 2014, 12:08:32 am
Quote
It's really unethical to encourage people not to vote and "vote" here instead

I claim it is unethical to vote in a rigged system and thus unwittingly give your support to a corrupt system.   So as long as we are going to be judging people, I think supporting a rigged system is far worse than encouraging people to shun a rigged system.

Whether I agree with you or not doesn't matter. Popular media would crucify you on this.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: bytemaster on December 04, 2014, 12:11:11 am
Quote
It's really unethical to encourage people not to vote and "vote" here instead

I claim it is unethical to vote in a rigged system and thus unwittingly give your support to a corrupt system.   So as long as we are going to be judging people, I think supporting a rigged system is far worse than encouraging people to shun a rigged system.

Whether I agree with you or not doesn't matter. Popular media would crucify you on this.

Which is why it wouldn't be promoted as official recommendation but you better believe the grass roots should call for it.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: donkeypong on December 04, 2014, 12:16:53 am
Quote
It's really unethical to encourage people not to vote and "vote" here instead

I claim it is unethical to vote in a rigged system and thus unwittingly give your support to a corrupt system.   So as long as we are going to be judging people, I think supporting a rigged system is far worse than encouraging people to shun a rigged system.

Whether I agree with you or not doesn't matter. Popular media would crucify you on this.

Which is why it wouldn't be promoted as official recommendation but you better believe the grass roots should call for it.

If that's the result you want (that people use VOTE and stay home from the polls), then you don't even have to utter those words. It's a lot safer if you don't. All you have to do is promote the heck out of VOTE. There will be enough people like Gamey who don't bother with real voting, or maybe even think naively that they've done their civic duty by pushing a few buttons, and thus VOTE will gradually have plenty of users who are not real voters. If it's easy to use and fun, then that will happen naturally; no one needs to say it.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: bytemaster on December 04, 2014, 12:20:26 am
Quote
It's really unethical to encourage people not to vote and "vote" here instead

I claim it is unethical to vote in a rigged system and thus unwittingly give your support to a corrupt system.   So as long as we are going to be judging people, I think supporting a rigged system is far worse than encouraging people to shun a rigged system.

Whether I agree with you or not doesn't matter. Popular media would crucify you on this.


Which is why it wouldn't be promoted as official recommendation but you better believe the grass roots should call for it.

If that's the result you want (that people use VOTE and stay home from the polls), then you don't even have to utter those words. It's a lot safer if you don't. All you have to do is promote the heck out of VOTE. There will be enough people like Gamey who don't bother with real voting, or maybe even think naively that they've done their civic duty by pushing a few buttons, and thus VOTE will gradually have plenty of users who are not real voters. If it's easy to use and fun, then that will happen naturally; no one needs to say it.
This is why FMV is Adam's thing.  He actually believes in the democratic process and thus can market and promote it honestly.   I on the other hand would be dishonest to encourage voting in the official elections and in the event VOTE became the official system I would encourage everyone to vote "NO ONE" for every position as a protest vote.    That is me being honest.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: Vizzini on December 04, 2014, 12:47:08 am
Quote
It's really unethical to encourage people not to vote and "vote" here instead

I claim it is unethical to vote in a rigged system and thus unwittingly give your support to a corrupt system.   So as long as we are going to be judging people, I think supporting a rigged system is far worse than encouraging people to shun a rigged system.

Says a reporter who comes calling
I would write about this Bit Shares
Replies Byte Master to the reporter
Your national TV network is but a sham
A tool of a government I can not recognize

Unethical it is for me to promote my cause
In your wrap of a fish, your agent of tyranny
Propaganda for a system of violence to control the masses
In my life, there are no banks, no kings, no armies, and no stations
How can we discourse if your existence is ethereal?

Oh wait, I've just dismissed all the institutions
No way remains for me to grow my dream
But say no more, I've made my choice
Standing on principle, I'll close my eyes and see the world as I wish it
Far better I should starve and swing my fists in peace

Aw, maybe I should have swallowed my pride yet again
And played by those rules just a wee bit longer
I could have been king, had I played the contender
The system, it could have crashed down on terms I dictated
Gawd, I sure hope the devs and 'investors' won't mind...me standing on my own behind

Fortunately, he woke up and realized it was all a bad dream. He wiped away the sleep, dismissed it as a cautionary tale, and went forth unto the world with fork in hand. Another chance, thought he. I can still make this happen. 
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: CryptoPrometheus on December 04, 2014, 12:50:29 am
Quote
It's really unethical to encourage people not to vote and "vote" here instead

I claim it is unethical to vote in a rigged system and thus unwittingly give your support to a corrupt system.   So as long as we are going to be judging people, I think supporting a rigged system is far worse than encouraging people to shun a rigged system.

Whether I agree with you or not doesn't matter. Popular media would crucify you on this.


Which is why it wouldn't be promoted as official recommendation but you better believe the grass roots should call for it.

If that's the result you want (that people use VOTE and stay home from the polls), then you don't even have to utter those words. It's a lot safer if you don't. All you have to do is promote the heck out of VOTE. There will be enough people like Gamey who don't bother with real voting, or maybe even think naively that they've done their civic duty by pushing a few buttons, and thus VOTE will gradually have plenty of users who are not real voters. If it's easy to use and fun, then that will happen naturally; no one needs to say it.
This is why FMV is Adam's thing.  He actually believes in the democratic process and thus can market and promote it honestly.   I on the other hand would be dishonest to encourage voting in the official elections and in the event VOTE became the official system I would encourage everyone to vote "NO ONE" for every position as a protest vote.    That is me being honest.

Vote For "Nobody" - 2012 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-N7TRvStu0
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: carpet ride on December 04, 2014, 03:21:03 am
Quote
It's really unethical to encourage people not to vote and "vote" here instead

I claim it is unethical to vote in a rigged system and thus unwittingly give your support to a corrupt system.   So as long as we are going to be judging people, I think supporting a rigged system is far worse than encouraging people to shun a rigged system.

Says a reporter who comes calling
I would write about this Bit Shares
Replies Byte Master to the reporter
Your national TV network is but a sham
A tool of a government I can not recognize

Unethical it is for me to promote my cause
In your wrap of a fish, your agent of tyranny
Propaganda for a system of violence to control the masses
In my life, there are no banks, no kings, no armies, and no stations
How can we discourse if your existence is ethereal?

Oh wait, I've just dismissed all the institutions
No way remains for me to grow my dream
But say no more, I've made my choice
Standing on principle, I'll close my eyes and see the world as I wish it
Far better I should starve and swing my fists in peace

Aw, maybe I should have swallowed my pride yet again
And played by those rules just a wee bit longer
I could have been king, had I played the contender
The system, it could have crashed down on terms I dictated
Gawd, I sure hope the devs and 'investors' won't mind...me standing on my own behind

Fortunately, he woke up and realized it was all a bad dream. He wiped away the sleep, dismissed it as a cautionary tale, and went forth unto the world with fork in hand. Another chance, thought he. I can still make this happen.

Anecdotic and enlightening.  Worthy of being cast into some great rock 
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: Troglodactyl on December 04, 2014, 04:40:20 am
My personal opinion is that you should never vote in a system that is rigged/unprovable on the principle that your "vote" may or may not actually be counted but your participation is certainly counted on to give the result legitimacy.

...

I respect this position, but I think it's flawed.  The issue is the implication that higher participation can somehow give the result legitimacy or moral weight.

I would argue that it can't, and thus that voting is an amoral act of self expression.  Certainly a very limited form of self expression, and one that's frequently taken out of context by those claiming it grants them extra moral rights, but the fact that others misquote you and take your words out of context is not an evil act on your part.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: vegolino on December 04, 2014, 12:13:46 pm
Quote
I claim it is unethical to vote in a rigged system and thus unwittingly give your support to a corrupt system.   So as long as we are going to be judging people, I think supporting a rigged system is far worse than encouraging people to shun a rigged system
  +5%  +5%
Quote
This is why FMV is Adam's thing.  He actually believes in the democratic process and thus can market and promote it honestly.   I on the other hand would be dishonest to encourage voting in the official elections and in the event VOTE became the official system I would encourage everyone to vote "NO ONE" for every position as a protest vote.    That is me being honest.
  +5%  +5%

Unfortunately many people are afraid to even imagine something like this. I used to be one of them, until I found this forum. Now I can imagine different future without fear.
Thanks bytemaster  :)

Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: CLains on December 04, 2014, 01:05:16 pm
Saying things that put you at a disadvantage later is no different from these martyrs who rest content in their hope to create a fair world by a ceremonious burning of BTC that drains all their power.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: bytemaster on December 04, 2014, 01:37:37 pm

Saying things that put you at a disadvantage later is no different from these martyrs who rest content in their hope to create a fair world by a ceremonious burning of BTC that drains all their power.

True power is the ability to honestly express what you believe.  Otherwise you give power to your opponents view by allowing others to think you agree with it.  This is why I don't like rand Paul.   It is also why I liked Ron Paul.   

You think you gain support by compromising your position, but instead people stop trusting you because you are playing political games. 
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: sparkles on December 04, 2014, 02:19:27 pm
My personal opinion is that you should never vote in a system that is rigged/unprovable on the principle that your "vote" may or may not actually be counted but your participation is certainly counted on to give the result legitimacy.

...

I respect this position, but I think it's flawed.  The issue is the implication that higher participation can somehow give the result legitimacy or moral weight.

I would argue that it can't, and thus that voting is an amoral act of self expression.  Certainly a very limited form of self expression, and one that's frequently taken out of context by those claiming it grants them extra moral rights, but the fact that others misquote you and take your words out of context is not an evil act on your part.

A vote is an expression of an opinion and is amoral.

An election is the aggregation of everyones opinion which is then used to justify some action, usually government coercion of some kind.

The legitimacy of the aggregation of everyones opinion depends upon the number of people who contributed their opinion to the aggregate.

The corruption of societies ability to assess the aggregate opinion results in abusive immoral power derived from fraud.   Fraud is immoral.

Participating in a system designed to facilitate corruption means you are not actually casting a vote, you are supporting a fraud.  Your opinion cannot be provably expressed, but as byte master said, your participation can.

An opinion that supports coercion when publicly expressed by voting ends up enabling coercion and is not a passive act.   If no one voted then no one could claim they had public consensus on the use of coercion.  If you have ability to file an active protest vote against coercion then that would be the most moral thing to do.    In this case you can simultaneously reject the system and help project public consensus that voting is not a means by which coercion can be justified. 

So I agree with Bytemaster that voting in any system that allows your voice to be stolen and reprojected is irresponsible toward your fellow citizen and gives your power away to someone without your consent.    Expressing your opinion in a system such as VOTE will allow you to be responsible for standing up for what is right.   

So it really comes down to an assumption on the part of those who say you should vote in the current system.  That assumption is that the current system actually works as intended.  If the entire premise of your product is that the current system does not work as intended then the only logically consistent conclusion is to be pro-active in your stance that the current system should be shunned entirely and that is the RESPONSIBLE thing for a voter to do.   It is a VOTE OF NO CONFIDENCE.

The purpose of voting is to make your voice and opinion known to all.   Bad things happen when good people don't speak out and silently consent to the evil.  So it is imperative for your own safety and wellbeing to publicly express your opinion in an honest voting system such as VOTE.    So the argument for VOTE is that you need to let your voice be heard and stop letting your voice be stolen and manipulated.

So everyone that says you have a moral obligation to vote may be right in principle, but that principle only applies when voting has integrity.  What they are really saying is that you have a moral obligation to contribute to the aggregation of public opinion.    This is what VOTE gives you.
 
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: CLains on December 04, 2014, 02:20:48 pm

Saying things that put you at a disadvantage later is no different from these martyrs who rest content in their hope to create a fair world by a ceremonious burning of BTC that drains all their power.

True power is the ability to honestly express what you believe.  Otherwise you give power to your opponents view by allowing others to think you agree with it.  This is why I don't like rand Paul.   It is also why I liked Ron Paul.   

You think you gain support by compromising your position, but instead people stop trusting you because you are playing political games.

Honest expression is a means to an end - truth. True power is living in the truth. What does it matter that people trust you? Trust is yet another means to an end. Truth is you contain an infinite number of potentially honest expressions, and only some of them are true, and only some of them will bring about the truth.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: bytemaster on December 04, 2014, 02:48:31 pm
My personal opinion is that you should never vote in a system that is rigged/unprovable on the principle that your "vote" may or may not actually be counted but your participation is certainly counted on to give the result legitimacy.

...

I respect this position, but I think it's flawed.  The issue is the implication that higher participation can somehow give the result legitimacy or moral weight.

I would argue that it can't, and thus that voting is an amoral act of self expression.  Certainly a very limited form of self expression, and one that's frequently taken out of context by those claiming it grants them extra moral rights, but the fact that others misquote you and take your words out of context is not an evil act on your part.

A vote is an expression of an opinion and is amoral.

An election is the aggregation of everyones opinion which is then used to justify some action, usually government coercion of some kind.

The legitimacy of the aggregation of everyones opinion depends upon the number of people who contributed their opinion to the aggregate.

The corruption of societies ability to assess the aggregate opinion results in abusive immoral power derived from fraud.   Fraud is immoral.

Participating in a system designed to facilitate corruption means you are not actually casting a vote, you are supporting a fraud.  Your opinion cannot be provably expressed, but as byte master said, your participation can.

An opinion that supports coercion when publicly expressed by voting ends up enabling coercion and is not a passive act.   If no one voted then no one could claim they had public consensus on the use of coercion.  If you have ability to file an active protest vote against coercion then that would be the most moral thing to do.    In this case you can simultaneously reject the system and help project public consensus that voting is not a means by which coercion can be justified. 

So I agree with Bytemaster that voting in any system that allows your voice to be stolen and reprojected is irresponsible toward your fellow citizen and gives your power away to someone without your consent.    Expressing your opinion in a system such as VOTE will allow you to be responsible for standing up for what is right.   

So it really comes down to an assumption on the part of those who say you should vote in the current system.  That assumption is that the current system actually works as intended.  If the entire premise of your product is that the current system does not work as intended then the only logically consistent conclusion is to be pro-active in your stance that the current system should be shunned entirely and that is the RESPONSIBLE thing for a voter to do.   It is a VOTE OF NO CONFIDENCE.

The purpose of voting is to make your voice and opinion known to all.   Bad things happen when good people don't speak out and silently consent to the evil.  So it is imperative for your own safety and wellbeing to publicly express your opinion in an honest voting system such as VOTE.    So the argument for VOTE is that you need to let your voice be heard and stop letting your voice be stolen and manipulated.

So everyone that says you have a moral obligation to vote may be right in principle, but that principle only applies when voting has integrity.  What they are really saying is that you have a moral obligation to contribute to the aggregation of public opinion.    This is what VOTE gives you.

Well said, but I would add that the legitimacy of the aggregation of everyones opinion depends not just on the number of people who contributed, but the distribution of the people who contributed.   If you got a million Jews and no Christians then a million votes is meaningless as anything other than the aggregate opinion of the sampled users.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: luckybit on December 04, 2014, 04:46:13 pm
My personal opinion is that you should never vote in a system that is rigged/unprovable on the principle that your "vote" may or may not actually be counted but your participation is certainly counted on to give the result legitimacy.

...

I respect this position, but I think it's flawed.  The issue is the implication that higher participation can somehow give the result legitimacy or moral weight.

I would argue that it can't, and thus that voting is an amoral act of self expression.  Certainly a very limited form of self expression, and one that's frequently taken out of context by those claiming it grants them extra moral rights, but the fact that others misquote you and take your words out of context is not an evil act on your part.

A vote is an expression of an opinion and is amoral.

An election is the aggregation of everyones opinion which is then used to justify some action, usually government coercion of some kind.

The legitimacy of the aggregation of everyones opinion depends upon the number of people who contributed their opinion to the aggregate.

The corruption of societies ability to assess the aggregate opinion results in abusive immoral power derived from fraud.   Fraud is immoral.

Participating in a system designed to facilitate corruption means you are not actually casting a vote, you are supporting a fraud.  Your opinion cannot be provably expressed, but as byte master said, your participation can.

An opinion that supports coercion when publicly expressed by voting ends up enabling coercion and is not a passive act.   If no one voted then no one could claim they had public consensus on the use of coercion.  If you have ability to file an active protest vote against coercion then that would be the most moral thing to do.    In this case you can simultaneously reject the system and help project public consensus that voting is not a means by which coercion can be justified. 

So I agree with Bytemaster that voting in any system that allows your voice to be stolen and reprojected is irresponsible toward your fellow citizen and gives your power away to someone without your consent.    Expressing your opinion in a system such as VOTE will allow you to be responsible for standing up for what is right.   

So it really comes down to an assumption on the part of those who say you should vote in the current system.  That assumption is that the current system actually works as intended.  If the entire premise of your product is that the current system does not work as intended then the only logically consistent conclusion is to be pro-active in your stance that the current system should be shunned entirely and that is the RESPONSIBLE thing for a voter to do.   It is a VOTE OF NO CONFIDENCE.

The purpose of voting is to make your voice and opinion known to all.   Bad things happen when good people don't speak out and silently consent to the evil.  So it is imperative for your own safety and wellbeing to publicly express your opinion in an honest voting system such as VOTE.    So the argument for VOTE is that you need to let your voice be heard and stop letting your voice be stolen and manipulated.

So everyone that says you have a moral obligation to vote may be right in principle, but that principle only applies when voting has integrity.  What they are really saying is that you have a moral obligation to contribute to the aggregation of public opinion.    This is what VOTE gives you.

Well said, but I would add that the legitimacy of the aggregation of everyones opinion depends not just on the number of people who contributed, but the distribution of the people who contributed.   If you got a million Jews and no Christians then a million votes is meaningless as anything other than the aggregate opinion of the sampled users.

Preference not opinion. People vote to express their preferences. People debate to express their opinions.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: bytemaster on December 04, 2014, 05:58:01 pm
My personal opinion is that you should never vote in a system that is rigged/unprovable on the principle that your "vote" may or may not actually be counted but your participation is certainly counted on to give the result legitimacy.

...

I respect this position, but I think it's flawed.  The issue is the implication that higher participation can somehow give the result legitimacy or moral weight.

I would argue that it can't, and thus that voting is an amoral act of self expression.  Certainly a very limited form of self expression, and one that's frequently taken out of context by those claiming it grants them extra moral rights, but the fact that others misquote you and take your words out of context is not an evil act on your part.

A vote is an expression of an opinion and is amoral.

An election is the aggregation of everyones opinion which is then used to justify some action, usually government coercion of some kind.

The legitimacy of the aggregation of everyones opinion depends upon the number of people who contributed their opinion to the aggregate.

The corruption of societies ability to assess the aggregate opinion results in abusive immoral power derived from fraud.   Fraud is immoral.

Participating in a system designed to facilitate corruption means you are not actually casting a vote, you are supporting a fraud.  Your opinion cannot be provably expressed, but as byte master said, your participation can.

An opinion that supports coercion when publicly expressed by voting ends up enabling coercion and is not a passive act.   If no one voted then no one could claim they had public consensus on the use of coercion.  If you have ability to file an active protest vote against coercion then that would be the most moral thing to do.    In this case you can simultaneously reject the system and help project public consensus that voting is not a means by which coercion can be justified. 

So I agree with Bytemaster that voting in any system that allows your voice to be stolen and reprojected is irresponsible toward your fellow citizen and gives your power away to someone without your consent.    Expressing your opinion in a system such as VOTE will allow you to be responsible for standing up for what is right.   

So it really comes down to an assumption on the part of those who say you should vote in the current system.  That assumption is that the current system actually works as intended.  If the entire premise of your product is that the current system does not work as intended then the only logically consistent conclusion is to be pro-active in your stance that the current system should be shunned entirely and that is the RESPONSIBLE thing for a voter to do.   It is a VOTE OF NO CONFIDENCE.

The purpose of voting is to make your voice and opinion known to all.   Bad things happen when good people don't speak out and silently consent to the evil.  So it is imperative for your own safety and wellbeing to publicly express your opinion in an honest voting system such as VOTE.    So the argument for VOTE is that you need to let your voice be heard and stop letting your voice be stolen and manipulated.

So everyone that says you have a moral obligation to vote may be right in principle, but that principle only applies when voting has integrity.  What they are really saying is that you have a moral obligation to contribute to the aggregation of public opinion.    This is what VOTE gives you.

Well said, but I would add that the legitimacy of the aggregation of everyones opinion depends not just on the number of people who contributed, but the distribution of the people who contributed.   If you got a million Jews and no Christians then a million votes is meaningless as anything other than the aggregate opinion of the sampled users.

Preference not opinion. People vote to express their preferences. People debate to express their opinions.

A preference is an opinion.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: hpenvy on December 04, 2014, 06:17:54 pm
I would love to hear more from Adam on what he's working on specifically to voting. 
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: mitao on December 04, 2014, 07:02:19 pm

You guys are avoiding the 500 pound gorilla in the room.  You think you can create an open source voting system, show a couple people how cool it is and then make money off it? You are entering a world you know nothing about and, FMV knows nothing about based on their résumé.

EAC, HAVA, Secretary of State, election like load testing, 3rd party testing and County acceptance are huge hurdles I don't see Bitshares clearing.

Oh, and don't think for one second that Dominion or ES&S won't jump on your open source code if it even looks like we are the slightest of competition and beat us to the punch. You are entering a world were real world money is on the line and believe me, those companies are not of the altruistic types. With cryptocurrency, you are going after states whose egos will let the little guy try there thing. But a companies earnings on line is a whole different game.

You also have nobody involved in real politics consulting or guiding you. This is your biggest mistake. In politics, things happen through and because of who you Know or because who you know is owed a favor, not because of what you think you know or what you think you can offer will change the world.

The sharedrop will turn out to be a huge mistake in hindsight as VOTE will never be what you think it's going to be unless you hire a Consulting firm, aka a lobbyist, or a seasoned insider with connections to begin pulling weight.

You could also start telling us your plans. So far, no plan that was kept secret here had ever needed to be a secret to begin with after the revelation. Saying there is a plan, or über secret stuff to come most likely means there is no good plan or stuff to come yet.

Or, I would like one reason anything on an open source project should remain a secret to the people floating your meal ticket.

Based on what I saw in the past 13 months, there was no marketing before, no marketing now. And there will be nahda in future, only one "big thing".



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Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: toast on December 04, 2014, 07:18:13 pm
The saving grace is that BM does not think getting governments to use this voting solution is required to make it an effective marketing move.

But yeah, Dan, given our marketing track record, your references to secret marketing plans are a sell signal.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: Ander on December 04, 2014, 07:31:14 pm
But yeah, Dan, given our marketing track record, your references to secret marketing plans are a sell signal.

Indeed.  Had I sold any time Dan or Stan mentioned secret marketing plans, and rebought 20% lower, I would have many more BTS now. :P

(At this point though, I think the time for selling and rebuying is over, unless you are selling a big rise.  After all, the COMMUNITY marketing has now begun, and it exists as more than a figment of the dev team's imagination). ;)
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: wasthatawolf on December 04, 2014, 07:52:05 pm
Secret marketing plans...

(http://i.imgur.com/Fhk1oLT.png)
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: bytemaster on December 04, 2014, 07:52:35 pm
Secret marketing plans...

(http://i.imgur.com/Fhk1oLT.png)

NOT ME... I told Brian those were a bad idea... he gets to own that one ;)
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: wasthatawolf on December 04, 2014, 07:54:16 pm
NOT ME... I told Brian those were a bad idea... he gets to own that one ;)

Hahaha, I couldn't help myself
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: Vizzini on December 04, 2014, 07:55:18 pm
Probably still in boxes.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: fuzzy on December 04, 2014, 07:56:51 pm
Probably still in boxes.

You should sell them at a steep discount for bitUSD.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: donkeypong on December 04, 2014, 08:03:50 pm
Probably still in boxes.

You should sell them at a steep discount for bitUSD.

Or offer them BitUSD to take the shirt!
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: bytemaster on December 04, 2014, 08:18:00 pm
Probably still in boxes.

You should sell them at a steep discount for bitUSD.

Or offer them BitUSD to take the shirt!

Believe it or not they were all given away :)
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: Ander on December 04, 2014, 08:31:42 pm
And now we know what the 22.5 million BTS was spent on.

All is revealed. :P
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: Brent.Allsop on December 04, 2014, 10:41:05 pm

I’m loving the stash of shirts I got.

And I get kind of nauseated by complainers and criticizers.  Most of this thread is very hard and painful to read.  Isn’t it better to propose and build consensus around better ideas, and more importantly do something to make them happen, than just try to destroy ideas at least some are doing a great job actually thinking of and working on?

I am a big fan of not just Follow My Vote and Adam Ernest, but in what they are trying to do.  And the plan to try to do a parallel vote sounds absolutely wonderful.  But, my gut wonders if such could work.  It seems to me it might be very hard to get people to change their behavior.  And what are the chances, really, that we can design a narrative, along the lines of what Dan is talking about, and make it go viral?  It seems scary to be dependent on that.

I’m trying to think what I (or any of us) could do to help out.  For example, would it help if I (or anyone in their local communities) tried to contact some of their local news reporters to see if we could get some stories started with this?  After all, the Mormons in Utah LOVE all things Bitcoin.  Patrick M. Byrne, and most of Overstock .com are Mormons.  Did you see how much mileage the Utah couple got that did their honeymoon living off Bitcoin?  You should have seen all the media attention they got in Utah!  If I could get some help, I bet we could help get something started at least in Utah.  Anyone else willing to help with such?  I’m not the best at authoring proposals for articles, but I could do some leg work and some contacting.  I bet there are ideas way better than this for every community all over the world.  How do we organize, and co-operate, so we can collaborate and get it all done?

I get so tired of people just complaining with 20/20 hindsight, and never offering (or attempting to build consensus around) any better ideas.

Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: Ander on December 04, 2014, 11:10:53 pm
I get so tired of people just complaining with 20/20 hindsight, and never offering (or attempting to build consensus around) any better ideas.

It was very easy for us all to be critical when we had no info at all on what the plan was, and hadnt been shown anything yet.


The community now seems hard at work on a variety of great projects, and I am glad they are starting to get monetary support (paid delegate positions) for this as well.

The upside of the fact that we all got impatient with the marketing efforts was that the community started doing it themselves. 

Now we will have a variety of different marketing projects going, and we dont need all of them to succeed, we just need some of them to succeed.  We no longer have all our eggs in one basket.  We dont have a single point of failure.

If the official marketing fails, the community marketing might succeed, and vice versa. 

Its a friendly competition now.  Will the official marketing programs bear fruit before the community efforts being lead by methodx, matt, and others?  We will see.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: merlin0113 on December 17, 2014, 07:03:16 am
I get so tired of people just complaining with 20/20 hindsight, and never offering (or attempting to build consensus around) any better ideas.

It was very easy for us all to be critical when we had no info at all on what the plan was, and hadnt been shown anything yet.


The community now seems hard at work on a variety of great projects, and I am glad they are starting to get monetary support (paid delegate positions) for this as well.

The upside of the fact that we all got impatient with the marketing efforts was that the community started doing it themselves. 

Now we will have a variety of different marketing projects going, and we dont need all of them to succeed, we just need some of them to succeed.  We no longer have all our eggs in one basket.  We dont have a single point of failure.

If the official marketing fails, the community marketing might succeed, and vice versa. 

Its a friendly competition now.  Will the official marketing programs bear fruit before the community efforts being lead by methodx, matt, and others?  We will see.

Now this competition is gone for good.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: gamey on December 17, 2014, 07:22:55 am
I get so tired of people just complaining with 20/20 hindsight, and never offering (or attempting to build consensus around) any better ideas.

It was very easy for us all to be critical when we had no info at all on what the plan was, and hadnt been shown anything yet.


The community now seems hard at work on a variety of great projects, and I am glad they are starting to get monetary support (paid delegate positions) for this as well.

The upside of the fact that we all got impatient with the marketing efforts was that the community started doing it themselves. 

Now we will have a variety of different marketing projects going, and we dont need all of them to succeed, we just need some of them to succeed.  We no longer have all our eggs in one basket.  We dont have a single point of failure.

If the official marketing fails, the community marketing might succeed, and vice versa. 

Its a friendly competition now.  Will the official marketing programs bear fruit before the community efforts being lead by methodx, matt, and others?  We will see.

Now this competition is gone for good.

While Brian Page has left there is still a marketing team.  Murderistic, bitsharesmarket, and then Adam's team.  Then the community marketing team led by HPEnvy and methodx.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: merlin0113 on December 17, 2014, 07:48:38 am
I get so tired of people just complaining with 20/20 hindsight, and never offering (or attempting to build consensus around) any better ideas.

It was very easy for us all to be critical when we had no info at all on what the plan was, and hadnt been shown anything yet.


The community now seems hard at work on a variety of great projects, and I am glad they are starting to get monetary support (paid delegate positions) for this as well.

The upside of the fact that we all got impatient with the marketing efforts was that the community started doing it themselves. 

Now we will have a variety of different marketing projects going, and we dont need all of them to succeed, we just need some of them to succeed.  We no longer have all our eggs in one basket.  We dont have a single point of failure.

If the official marketing fails, the community marketing might succeed, and vice versa. 

Its a friendly competition now.  Will the official marketing programs bear fruit before the community efforts being lead by methodx, matt, and others?  We will see.

Now this competition is gone for good.

While Brian Page has left there is still a marketing team.  Murderistic, bitsharesmarket, and then Adam's team.  Then the community marketing team led by HPEnvy and methodx.

Thank you. Longterm I see this as a positive.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: cass on December 17, 2014, 08:33:20 am
Secret marketing plans...

(http://i.imgur.com/Fhk1oLT.png)

NOT ME... I told Brian those were a bad idea... he gets to own that one ;)

ROFL - thank you BM for this statement :)
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: sumantso on December 18, 2014, 08:13:10 am
BM's plan regarding vote is intriguing, and I am not knowledgable enough to comment whether it will work or not.

What I can't understand is how was that supposed to be a competitor for 'Decentralized Bank and Exchange'. How exactly is a market pegged Asset needed to be on the same platform as voting? I could understand DNS being merged, even merging MUSIC makes more sense to me.
Title: Re: Hard Questions for Bytemaster
Post by: underwun on December 19, 2014, 07:49:59 am
BM's plan regarding vote is intriguing, and I am not knowledgable enough to comment whether it will work or not.

What I can't understand is how was that supposed to be a competitor for 'Decentralized Bank and Exchange'. How exactly is a market pegged Asset needed to be on the same platform as voting? I could understand DNS being merged, even merging MUSIC makes more sense to me.

Some thoughts:

Not specifically for market pegged assets but why, in my opinion, Votes should be part of the same platform

Voting doesn't just apply to politics but is inherent in business decision making, in the future we would like to see voting made possible for UIA as well as delegates consequently having it in the same code makes sense.

In addition the Bitshares tech/biz model depends on driving usage for BitAssets where the desire to create and lock in BTS using 'shorts' drives scarcity and price. With this in mind any usage model that drives consumption of a BitAsset is desirable. Consequently the voting feature could be and will be used in picking winners in gambling services where BitAssets will be used, so once again it seems to make sense.

There are other reasons that come to mind but we might want to consider the impact of answering questions in their entirety as they result in the sharing of plans that might not be obvious to other services