To any developers who are watching the current fiasco unfold, I have a suggestion for creating a DAC that I believe has a decent shot at beating the superDAC with minimal effort and expense. The Bitshares superDAC has the following weaknesses:
* The threshold for inflation is too low. By allowing inflation of up to 8% perpetually in the protocol, you end up with a situation where large stakeholders are able to "write their own paycheck" for lack of a better term. The biggest stakeholders in the superDAC will be I3, and for all intents and purposes they will be setting their own pay. It would take an almost impossible amount of stake (if you consider the avg participation rate) to "disagree" with their payrate and to vote them out. Any currency (even Bitcoin) allows for inflation. The difference is that inflation is not baked into the protocol, and would therefore require a far greater "stake" to implement (by modifying the protocol). Bitshares has ignored one of the main principles of crypto community: that
scarcity should be (almost) inviolable.
* The second weakness of the superDAC is distribution. AGS distribution has already alienated a huge number of Bitcoin purists who are adamantly against "IPO coins". I don't necessarily agree with their philosophy, but there is a large segment of crypto users who will only invest in coins that have no IPO, no premine, and ONLY PoW distribution. The chaos that is unfolding with the superDAC has amplified the problem, possibly causing irreparable harm in PR and public distrust. I'm not speaking to intentions here. As they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions...
* The last weakness of the superDAC is what I call "abuse of the DAC analogy". Let's face it, the killer app in the crypto-space has always been and will always be one thing: currency. And to be a good store of value, any coin that maintains the sanctity of scarce supply
at the protocol layer, will be leaps and bounds ahead of the competition. What Bitshares gains in "marketing funds" they will lose in investor confidence (from the very investors they are "marketing" to). It is true that running a DAC like a business will result in a more agile and adaptive token. But I would argue that we should run our "business" with the aim of positioning ourselves as the best currency and store of value (the killer app). As I mentioned earlier, I believe the crypto-space is searching for a "unit of account" that will inevitably become something of a global reserve upon which everything else is built. The coin that wins this battle will NOT be Bitcoin (primarily due to the pitfalls of PoW) and it will not be the coin with the most advanced features (see Nxt). The coin that becomes the defacto world reserve must be appealing to governments and serious investors and must be perceived as (i) fairly distributed, (ii) scarce (non-inflationary), (iii) efficient (DPOS), and (iv) secure.
Any feature built on top of this coin cannot be done at the expense of these 4 things. The superDAC has failed in distribution/allocation and scarcity.
Here is my proposal:
Someone should fork the Bitshares Toolkit and create a new Bitshares PTS that launches on November 5th (the date of snapshot). The new PTS should have nothing but the core Toolkit functionality (DPOS+TITAN). With DPOS technology, no inflation, and pure proof of work distribution, I argue that the new Bitshares PTS has a shot at dethroning the superDAC.
This is an experiment that can be conducted with minimal cost. The new PTS can always benefit from improvements made to the Toolkit, and if PTS wins I am sure Dan and the rest of the devs from I3 will jump on board (since they will have a large stake in PTS as well). If it loses then nothing much is lost.
****Edit: To my surprise, this has generated a lot of interest. Please DM me if you'd like to contribute to making it happen.
****Edit2: Organizing a mailing list for those who are interested:
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=10540.0