Maybe someone could create a 100% delegate and fund a bot with a portion of the proceeds.  That way we could more directly compete with nubits.  You wouldn't have to risk your own money and you could help bootstrap these assets on the exchanges and get paid at the same time.  Perhaps you could even optimise this bot to be profitable over time.  As you get more and more capital, you could bootstrap other bitassets on the exchanges.  Maybe 50% of the pay could go to fund the bot and 50% pay kept by the delegate for her work in maintaining the bots.

I disagree with this quote from the blog post:

Quote from: bytemaster

    The US government has no realistic means of ever paying off [its] debt...

A country can always inflate its way out of debt.

In other words, the national debt is in nominal terms.  I.e. it is a certain number of dollars.  Bondholders have no guarantee about the real value of the goods and services represented by this nominal debt.

His statement is correct.  Inflating the money supply is not a REALISTIC means of paying off debt.

Maybe someone could create a decentralized exchange 

Quote from: Helikopterben on December 18, 2014, 01:50:29 am

Congratulations to the Ripple folks.  However, I prefer the security of a self-contained autonomous financial system such as bitcoin or bitshares.  As the fiat currency crisis deepens, defaults will inevitably occur with some ripple gateways IMHO.  Some gateways will be in need of a bailout and may or may not get them.  The only true flight to safety will be inside systems that are not subject to counterparty risk such as bitcoin and bitshares.  Ripple provides a much needed patch for the legacy banking system but I believe the entire legacy system needs to be replaced completely.  Make no mistake, when you trust a ripple gateway, you are trusting someone else with your money, which has been proven to be a bad idea.  Of course, who am I to argue with the market.

You speak out of ignorance of mechanics of Ripple AND mechanics of the current Bitcoin/BitShares ecosystem.

Any current Bitcoin of BTS exchange issues "account balances" a.k.a. IOUs. 

What Ripple does in ADDITION to Bitcoin is formalize the role of such entities in the protocol.

However, even tho Ripple Gateways do cash-in / cash-out operations into and out of Ripple, UNLIKE current banks or crypto exchanges ALL their balances are tradable and once issued, cannot (in general with some exceptions) be frozen.

So there is absolutely nothing new here.

I personally NEVER hold any value in any IOUs inside ripple, but rather use them for what they are meant to be used:

Cash-in & Cash-out.

It's a whole huge discussion on weather or not Ripple is currently centralized or de-centralizable in the future.

And I can answer specific questions, but I see 9 out of 10 people criticise Ripple out of complete ignorance about what it is.

Just spend an hour reading the wiki and come out better informed next time: https://wiki.ripple.com/Main_Page

Ok.  Please explain how bitcoin and bts balances are fully contained within the ripple protocol with no third party risk.

Congratulations to the Ripple folks.  However, I prefer the security of a self-contained autonomous financial system such as bitcoin or bitshares.  As the fiat currency crisis deepens, defaults will inevitably occur with some ripple gateways IMHO.  Some gateways will be in need of a bailout and may or may not get them.  The only true flight to safety will be inside systems that are not subject to counterparty risk such as bitcoin and bitshares.  Ripple provides a much needed patch for the legacy banking system but I believe the entire legacy system needs to be replaced completely.  Make no mistake, when you trust a ripple gateway, you are trusting someone else with your money, which has been proven to be a bad idea.  Of course, who am I to argue with the market.

Google trends at an all time high.  It just broke above the august peak.

http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=bitshares&cmpt=q

Quote from: Gentso1 on November 29, 2014, 09:56:44 pm

Quote from: 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.

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.