You make some good points here luckybit. But my prime directive and goal is freedom, from which wealth will come, not the other way around.
And from what I know of history it's mighty tough to hold to your principles once you start to compromise them. A little grant from the gov here, favorable legislation there, and before you know it you can't say no to their requests lest you loose your shareholders.
Of course it's about freedom but you don't effectively increase freedom by bucking the state. Bucking the state will put all the shareholders in jail and then the state will not even learn anything about how to run a better state.
States are going to exist in some form and the debate is what form it will be. If there are people within the state who value freedom, who respect the blockchain, what it represents, and the sovereignty of it, the where is the problem? Is that not what we want? Or would you rather it get banned completely like it is in China and Russia so you can be a true rebel?
They don't have to fully understand what we do right now. They don't have to understand our principles or technology. All they have to do is not interfere with our goals and in exchange we shouldn't interfere with theirs. If a mutually beneficial partnership allows both parties to accomplish their goals together I don't see how that is irrational but it's up to the community to decide case by case which is why I favor a Bitshares Cooperative so that if a partnership does happen the community as a whole can benefit rather than just a few individual delegates.
Now that I think of it, if the majority of shareholders embrace the state and forget the very reasons crypto was invented just to make a buck I'll have to find another community that won't lose sight of that.
If a few individuals form partnerships with big corporations in the private sector and those few individuals happen to be delegates then none of those benefits would be shared with the community. If a Bitshares Cooperative forms a partnership then the entire community shares in the benefits. Which scenario would you prefer?
The whole VOTE effort with California gives me the willies. My only hope is that BM & the dev team will be very very VERY careful and insure there are rigid walls or strong options to preserve MY control over my privacy.
I don't understand why you'd be against the VOTE initiative in California. From my perspective I would want future initiates like that with the private and public sector and for the Bitshares community to benefit from them. I don't think everything government does is bad but I do think some of the ways they do things are unnecessarily violent. If you have a better way of solving a problem then perhaps it is mutually beneficial to solve the problem as a service.
Maybe I am close minded about being involved (at all) with the gov, but it is just very clear how fundamentally anti freedom and violence promoting it all is, and it sickens me to be a part of that machine of evil.
Not every action of the government is anti freedom or violence promoting but I can understand why you would think so. I myself have moments where I feel as you do about governments in general but in the end I don't think we have much of a choice because if you rebel against all governments then they could all label you a terrorist organization. It's important to at least try to play by the rules when you can accomplish your agenda while doing so.
Forgive my rant and harsh attitude, I'm struggling to survive with my principles in a society where the majority are statists who seek to take from me through the fiction of gov authority rather than getting to work themselves. Gov is a parasite and produces nothing but only takes from those that do.
I understand your principles. I think you can be very selective with these partnerships and if each partnership came up for a vote in a Bitshares Cooperative then the community could decide. I think the idea of not having any partnerships at all is very silly and short sighted. Human beings get things done through partnerships, through relationships, through deal making, and you cannot make any deal if you rule out certain individuals or entities based on ideology.
So I would say you should look at what you each have to gain by working together and weigh it against what you each have to lose not working together. If you have more to gain in the long term than you have to lose then perhaps it's in your long term self interest to work together. Relationships can be formed with anyone, who works anywhere, as long as they can help the Bitshares ecosystem it wouldn't matter if they work for the biggest bank, for the local university, for the non-profit foundation with billions in resources, it only matters what they want to bring to the table.
I can accept that we disagree on strategy here. I don't see how success is possible in this competitive environment without partnerships. If you're partnering with Overstock that is still a partnership.