"The way Dan runs that company is it's a referendum on his political philosophy."

"We're not here to prove Ludwig von Mises right or wrong, we're here to build a company. So we kind of butt heads a lot and at the end of the day one of us had to go."

"By the way, Stan Larimer and Pam are some of the nicest people I have ever met in my life."

Fixed those quotes for you.

This removed the shorts from the order book, making the whole trading experience much more approachable for newcomers.

Have you seen versions of the interface with combined buy and sell tables?

The idea is that by default the trader doesn't need to care whether a BitAsset sell order is an actual sell order order (represented in that interface with red prices) or a short sell order (represented in that interface with blue prices). It seems like a normal market. Then they can look at the detailed short order table and the table of margin calls if they want.

It also removed the interest rate on shorts, which has been shown to be a gimmick because equilibrium rate is 0% (via the existing ability to self-short and take an unbounded portion of it for yourself at any time).

I think it is unfair to say the interest rate is a gimmick when only looking at market behavior during a bear market. Sure, in a bear market, shorts aren't going to offer interest, why should they? The interest mechanism is in place to prioritize shorts in a bull market.

Besides being a big change, was there a major downside to this approach?

The main downside of the approach is that it gets rids of the guarantee that BitAsset sell orders that are kept under the price feed will be matched in at most 30 days. If someone is allowed to self-short regardless of the state of the market, they can rollover their shorts indefinitely and never be forced to buy the BitAsset sells in the market. A way to resolve this is to prevent self-shorting when there is any BitAsset sells under the price feed, but in my opinion this is a less elegant solution than the system we already have.

I'm not claiming its flawed, but maybe you're comment was a general one.

Yeah, sorry, I meant it generally and didn't mean to imply that you are suggesting the current design is flawed.

I was merely suggesting that beyond the quick fix, its a useful time to consider whether there is an improved way of handling this aspect of shorts, as we should do from time to time with all aspects of bitAssets.

By the way, I have some additional thoughts that I will post shortly on your BitCurrency thread. Actually, on second thought, I decided that the various corner cases made the new approach that I was thinking of more complicated for users to understand than our current BitAsset system. So nevermind, I still hold the position that the current BitAsset design is the best I've seen so far.

I am slightly shocked how much the developers ignore the severity of this bug.

How are they ignoring it?

If you want a safe quick fix, reduce the 50% max APR to something like 5%. This is one single variable and surely can not break anything else.

And what happens if that safe quick fix somehow breaks consensus. There is a process in place now to prevent bigger problems from occurring due to a fix being rushed. The last time a fix was rushed for an even bigger bug, the "fix" ending up forking the blockchain and the real fix required rolling back many hours worth of blocks (thankfully there were apparently no double spend issues). Let's avoid having a situation where the cure is worse than the disease, and follow proper testing procedure.

The devs are taking it seriously, it seems that there is already a patch being prepared, however these things still need to be properly reviewed and tested before release.

By the way, to the people with shorts expiring in the next few days (which is actually not a lot of money by the way), you do know you can sell your spare BTS (which you should always have if you are shorting) for BTC and then use the BTC to buy BitUSD via an outside exchange or a bridge like metaexchange, and then use the BitUSD to cover the short, right? That does add some fees due to the various spreads, but I bet it is much less than 10%. Just something that might be worth looking into.

"Nobody can short." How is that not an absolute emergency ? If nobody took advantage of the bug until now, that's fine, but now, it's over. Nobody can short. When shorters will have to cover, they will have to buy at the price someone is willing to sell, or lose the 10%. I don't understand how the market peg can hold.

I'm just saying it's a matter of perspective. It is a serious bug that should be fixed as soon as possible. But shorts not working and even the market peg breaking is not as bad as actually having your funds stolen.

Are we sure that the expired cover orders will buy up to 10% higher than the BTS/BitAsset price feed or not? I haven't seen a conclusive answer to this. But if it is true, I wonder if shorts and forced covers can be temporarily shut down by the delegates not publishing price feeds? If so, I think it would make sense to do that to buy shorts time until this bug is fixed.

Or actually, the delegates could offset the price feeds by 10% so that the expired cover order is limited to the real price feed. The call price being at a slightly lower BTS/BitAsset price temporarily is not a big deal, and shorts can't short now anyway.

Link?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UT3OZySRcA

Quote from: kenCode on March 20, 2015, 10:47:06 pm

Hey gamey if you haven't already, please hook up with robrigo so he can get you into the slack and mumbles.
I think he's settin something up for this weekend so we can coord this.
Thanx

 This post made my day 

 

 

Mine too.   

Great, more concerns are being mixed into delegates. They are becoming a catch-all for every role. We need to separate concerns.

The best person to be a block producer is not the best person to act on the PR board or make decisions about the future of the blockchain (a board of directors) who is also not the best person to execute those decisions (developers, marketers).

To separate concerns we will need stake-based proposal voting on the blockchain. It is an acceptable hack to add these roles to the delegates for the time being until such a proposal voting system is built. But I think it is essential to eventually build proposal voting support into the client and I think it is a mistake to keep overloading the tasks of the delegates for too long.

I would like to see the delegates eventually only act as block producers and the authority to submit binding proposals / dynamic parameter changes (some of which may require a quorum of stakeholders to approve before they become ratified).

Generalized BitAssets would allow the creator of the BitAsset to specify a name, margin call limit, collateral asset type, expiration period, initial description, initial feed price definition, and initial authority. If a certain quorum of the current authority agrees, they could change the description, authority, or feed price definition.  The feed price definition could be a mathematical expression dealing only with multiplication and division operations and terms that are either constants or price feed sources. The authority can optionally be set to the dynamic set of top 101 delegates. Anyone could create a price feed source which defines an initial authority, the initial feed providers, and some additional parameters governing price feed aggregation. If a certain quorum of the current authority of a price feed source agrees, they could change the authority or the feed providers of the source. The feed providers regularly publish prices into the price feed source and a median of those provided prices is used to determine the latest price of the price feed source (there are other details left out such as how a price feed source determines if a price is stale and should be ignored). Either the authority or feed providers of the source or both could optionally be set to the dynamic set of top 101 delegates. Until generalized BitAssets are built, the price feed of BitAssets can be hard-coded to come from the median of the delegate price feed submissions as they do today.

Binding proposals submitted by a majority of the delegates would allow for changing certain dynamic parameters in the blockchain (e.g. minimum transaction fee, asset registration fee, etc.) as well as hiring and firing workers (who would not necessarily be delegates) or changing their salary. If the new total pay of all workers is within the current budget limit, these "worker change" binding proposals become ratified by only a super majority approval of the delegates (who will typically merely act as a proxy for the decisions of the board of directors, to be discussed below, who in turn are guided by the wishes of the shareholders via non-binding proposals). If the budget limit needs to be increased, a "budget limit change" binding proposal can be submitted by a majority of the delegates and ratified by approval from the necessary quorum of shareholders. Until such functionality is enabled, workers will just use helper delegates and get paid from a fraction of their delegate pay (as is done today), and other parameters of the blockchain can only be changes through hard forks (as is done today).

Finally, non-binding proposals would allow the stakeholders to add and remove members (they don't have to be delegates) from the board of directors group (by add and remove, I mean conceptually, since these are non-binding proposals and so the set of board members is not actually known to the blockchain itself). This board of directors would be privy to the internal discussion of key workers (such as the core developers) and future plans for the BitShares ecosystem. They would approve of the release of PR-vetted information out to the public. They can delegate the task of PR vetting to another PR review board better suited to handling that task (which can include a subset of the board of directors as well as other trusted members outside the board) but at the end of the day each board member is the one who has to put their seal of approval (or not) on releasing information to the public (so the shareholders can know who to vote out if necessary). Also, some of the internal deliberations surrounding the decision that was made public should also be publicly released (potentially redacted if necessary) so the shareholders can better know who to vote out of the board and who to keep. Finally, some decisions that are more controversial, but that the board nevertheless agrees is important to reach a consensus on, can be released as an official proposal (not an official final decision) to the public, and they should rely on non-binding proposal voting by the shareholders to determine whether the proposal is ratified (thus becoming an official decision) or not.

In this system, as long as the delegates do a good job at producing blocks (and potentially also providing price feeds) and also follow the chain of command when submitting and potentially approving binding proposals (such as worker-related changes or changes to dynamic parameters on the blockchain like transaction fees), they can be fairly confident that they won't be voted out. By following chain of command, I mean that they keep track of who the members of the board of directors are and how much quantitative influence each has in decision votes (to be determined by following the results of related non-binding proposals that have the necessary approval by shareholders) and that they follow the public final decisions made by the current board of directors that have some predefined quorum of their approval. Shareholders provide a check and balance on the board of directors through the use of non-binding proposals to replace board of director members if necessary. Also certain significant binding changes to the blockchain, such as "budget limit change" proposals and eventually "hard fork" proposals, would require enough of the shareholders' direct approval votes in order to be ratified and actually make the change happen on the blockchain. If some delegates are not respecting the changes to the board of directors made through the non-binding proposals, the shareholders can always vote out those delegates and replace them with delegates who will follow the official chain of command.