2.0 to 2.1

When rate limited free transactions feature is implemented, we should change the version number to 2.1 because it really is a major change on how Bitshares works.

In cryptoworld people love new things, whether you like it or not. Change of version number is easy way to signal that we are doing new things here and get people's attention.

It's also easy way to get Bytemaster to interviews.
- "Hey, we made a big change! You should interview Dan about it!"
- "Oh, cool! Thanks for the tip, we will!"

Website update

We need to completely check the website and update it where necessary. Especially the technology page doesn't reflect the current status of development. We need descriptions and/or tutorials for:

- Stealth transfers (explanation that satisfies cryptoexperts and tutorial that newbies can understand)
- Referral program (seriously, how you think people start utilizing this feature if nobody knows how to use it?)
- Fee backed assets (explanation for developers and businesses how they can use this feature to make money)

Blog on the website hasn't been updated for a long time. This is bad because it gives the impression that the whole project is dead. @Akado you have been active and also did some time ago the weekly hot topics update, could you take some responsibility to write something in there? Weekly hot topics and updates is a good format. Of course other people can help too, we could collect all relevant topics and news into a googledoc and publish it regularly.

Intellectual framework: Bitshares as a DAC

DAC point of view differentiates us from other cryptocurrencies. We should emphasize it. BTS is not a currency, it's a share.

I'm not sure how well this will be recieved, but I want to try and see what happens. I think it has a lot of potential, but it's always possible that people just don't get it.

We need early adopters

Especially we need high quality early adopters. People who really get excited about how Bitshares can change the world. I've been thinking mostly libertarian groups and communities. They are already align with our thinking, we just have to convince them that Bitshares is a worthwhile project.

We can also try to get people onboard from other cryptocommunities. There are lots of failing projects, which means there are lots of people willing to change their focus on something better. A good persuasion technique is to point out some real or potential problems and tell how Bitshares has solved them, and let other people realize that their project is inferior compared to Bitshares. Do not tell directly that to people (it will create negative reaction), it's much better to let them understand it themselves.

Another potential group: cryptocompanies. I'd like to see more companies as witnesses, because it's good to have witnesses that are not dependent on one person. We should have at least some witnesses that are maintained by reputable companies. It shouldn't be too difficult to advertize this: "hey, you can make some money by this running software and updating it regularly". Once they do that, we have good chances that they will get more involved in Bitshares.

Timeline

When rate limited free transactions feature is coming out? Most of marketing efforts should come right after that. Stealth is coming out very soon, so we should start with that but not with full speed.

Focus will be on rate limited free transactions, stealth transfers and fee backed assets.

Stealth is out in a month, right? We'll start by making some noise about it. Can we get free transactions feature ready and tested in two months? As far as I understood, implementation is almost ready. After it comes out, everybody should be ready to do whatever they can.

I know that it's probably impossible to get marketing worker proposal approved so we have to do this with our own money and time. So please think of ways that are as effective as possible so that we can get most bang for the buck and not have to spend too much time in stuff that really doesn't matter.

And remember, all communication is marketing! When newbies find this forum, please be polite for them and for everybody else.

You may use samupaha as a proxy. I try to keep up what's happening on the forum and Bitshares blockchain and update my votes regularly. Not going to campaign to get lots of votes, but if you find yourself agreeing with my posts here on the forum, I am available to be used as a proxy.

My current voting slate can be seen here: http://cryptofresh.com/u/samupaha

Nick Szabo's newest blogpost: Two Malthusian scares

"For in reality, post-gold-standard prices for industrial commodities are not driven purely, or often even mostly, by industrial demand being met by appropriate changes in material supply.  Instead, both supply and demand curves have been warped by a new role for the major industrial commodities -- they are no longer purely commodities; the are in part also money."

"During the Bretton Woods era the U.S. dollar, pegged to gold at $35 an ounce, served the entire free world as a common and reliable standard of value.  The transition from Bretton Woods to floating rates left the world with no common and reliable standard of value by which to guarantee future real returns on contracts or investments.  As a result the most commonly traded commodities, and especially geopolitical commodities such as oil and phosphates, became Mengerian intermediate commodities, with a price premium as a store of value that waxed and waned with the weighted expected inflation among the world's various floating currencies. As a result, the prices of these commodities are much more volatile since 1970 than they were during the Bretton Woods era. Epochs of increasing inflation expectations have led to rapid, broad-based commodity price rises, where the market gives out false signals of scarcity, leading to Malthusian anxieties and panics that we face a future of diminishing natural resources."

It seems to be a pretty good consensus here that prediction markets will be a big thing for Bitshares. I agree on a theoretical level, but in practice it's not so simple.

First of all, Augur has a big lead. They have millions of funding. They have a big group of developers and good marketing. So far we have nothing of those.

Question is: if we build the technology, will the funding, devs and users come?

We haven't seen any meaningful interest in building a PM business on top of the Bitshares blockchain. I would consider a team that is serious about PM business to be a requirement for developing it. It's useless to waste scarce resources to a technology that nobody is ready to use yet.

Bytemaster offered his vision for the next year in a blog post. It wasn't exactly what I was hoping for, so this is my attempt to offer an alternative.

While I don't want to exactly oppose the idea of Mutual Aid Societies (MAS) that will be Bytemaster's focus on the 2016, I consider it to be highly risky. The biggest reason is that I predict that it will require an enormous amount of work until it can bring any meaningful profit for Bitshares. In my opinion, MAS project should be delayed for at least a year or two.

Secondly, I don't find the hippie style rhetoric very convincing. I don't oppose helping people and spreading peace and love to the world – but first and foremost we are trying to do business here.

So what is my vision?

Bitshares has always been to me a way to do a profitable financial revolution.

I don't propably need to warn you that the next financial crisis is lurking behind the curtains. You already know that, you've been waiting for it for a while now. It may or may not hit in the 2016, but we have to be ready for it.

Millions of people are going to be betrayed by their banks and governments. They will crave for better, fairer and more transparent banking and financial institutions that can replace the old and corrupted ones. But are governments going to make them? Of course not, they will just bail out the old ones.

I firmly believe that Bitshares can offer powerful financial tools for average person. We can be the platform where people can come to find help when their national money systems start to shake.

For all of you compassionate hippies, doesn't this sound good? Mutual Aid Society might give you brief relief when you suffer from economic crisis. But in the long run it's much more important to get the economy running again, this time preferably with more stable and secure foundation.

For all of you greedy bastards, doesn't this sound good? You'll have an unrestricted financial platform where you can make money by serving all these people looking for better services that will help them to keep on going with their lives. Make a new useful financial instrument, market it well and you can become filthy rich.

We all are both of those. We want to help other people, but we also want to get rich. Bitshares will enable you to do both at the same time.

This requires focusing on profitable services that common people can use. I can't stress enough that profitability should be the guiding principle here. If we are not making money, we are not offering a good service.

Why for a common people and not for the banks, you may ask? Because in reality banks are not interested in open blockchains that they cannot control themselves. It's useless to keep wishing that some day a big bank will come and move all their financials to our blockchain. Not going to happen.

That's why we have to think how we can create services and financial instruments that are useful for ordinary people.

We can help them to make business with price stable currencies, webwallets, point-of-sale systems, stealth transfers, etc. We can let anybody be a trader – no questions asked, just open the wallet and start trading. We can offer saving instruments for people who are afraid that their national currencies will fail, but aren't ready to invest in highly volatile cryptocurrencies.

Why Bitshares, then? What is our "unfair advantage"?

We have the best blockchain at the moment. Because of formalized governance model we can actually make all kind of changes quite painlessly. We can adapt and add new features. Just look at Bitcoin right now – they have been fighting about blocksize for months without any progress. With committee and workers we can implement any changes to the blockchain very easily. Fee Backed Assets will give more flexibility to the funding, no need to do everything as charity.

And we don't even have to fight over blocksize. Why? Because we have the fastest blockchain already. We are ready to welcome millions of users.

The Bitshares exchange will be the centerpiece of all this.

Let's embrace the fact that Bitshares exchange is a derivatives exchange rather than try to change it to be something else.

If we use the exchange only as a platform to trade other cryptocurrencies, I agree that it will not be very profitable (we have been discussing this on the forum lately). But the whole global derivatives market is HUGE. We should be going that direction rather than trying to capture the small niche market of altcoins.

Our exchange is very versatile platform that can be used to create and trade basically any kind of derivative. Let's focus on that and think how we can create markets that don't exist at the moment in the cryptosphere.

On a sidenote: I think that we should stop using the term "decentralized exchange" or DEX. Decentralization isn't really that good selling point for the exchange. Most people don't give a crap if the exchange is decentralized or not, they just want to know if they can make money by using it. That's why I suggest that we use just "Bitshares exchange" or BEX. Of course it still is decentralized and we can tell that to potential customers if they ask, but let's not emphasize it as the most important feature of the exchange. The point is all those hundreds of financial instruments that already exist or can be created easily.

So what should we do?

Anything that will bring paying customers. Focus on all projects that look promising. Our main objective should be getting out as many useful products and services as possible, as fast as possible. Many of them will fail, but with continuous trial and error I believe we can find something that will bring profits.

When evaluating business ideas, ask first how fast they can bring real users and real profits. I would rather see many small products that make money from the day one, rather than big ideas that might be very profitable someday far in the future.

Don't expect big banks or corporations getting interested in our products and services. Develop and market them for common people and small businesses.

Our market cap has been falling for too long. Time to get it up again.

I'm not a developer or a rich person who can fund all of this. This has been my attempt to inspire you all to build a better, profitable and useful blockchain for 2016.

Who is with me?

Now that we have two FBAs on presale it is a good time to think how to decide how much value an FBA might have. This is to help you to decide how much you should bid if you want to invest in FBA.

Let's take STEALTH as an example.

STEALTH will get 80 % of transaction fee for stealth transfer. Fee will be three times normal transfer. If we keep the $0.20 fee for normal transfers, it will mean that stealth transfer fee is going to be $0.60 (but this could obviously change if the committee decides otherwise). Owners of STEALTH will get 0.8 * $0.60 = $0.48 per every stealth transfer.

Let's say somebody wants to buy 100 000 STEALTH, which will be 10 % of total amount of one million. Every time a user makes a stealth transfer, this person will get 0.1 * $0.48 = $0.048.

How much he should pay for the 100 000 STEALTH? It depends how much he expects people will use stealth transfers and how long the feature will be used until it is replaced with something else.

Let's say that the risk being replaced will rise significantly after three years. Three years is a long time in cryptoscene and propably during that somebody will invent something better than stealth transfers and it will be accepted in the Bitshares blockchain. So the investment should be made back in that time.

How much people will use this feature? First it'll be only a few transfers per day, but eventually it might be tens of thousands. Let's say it will be on average 3000 transfers per day during the first three years.

Now we can calculate the value of the investment: $0.48 * 0.1 * 3000 * 365 * 3 = $157680

If the investor can get 100 000 STEALTH for less than $157680 (1.5768 USD/STEALTH), this will be profitable investment.

Cryptonomex will produce the stealth transfer feature for $45000 so we can calculate the starting price. $45000 / 1000000 STEALTH = 0.045 USD/STEALTH

Original investor will get all one million STEALTH. If this example is close to what will happen in the future, he will get big profits from this. He could sell 10 % for $45000 for somebody and break even instantly. Everything after that will be profit without any risk. Buyer of the 10 % stake will have risk, but the expected profit is still very big.

So far all presale bids have been made to STEALTH:BTS markets, but this has one negative side: you have to keep an eye on price of BTS and change your bid accordingly. Because BTS is still very volatile, it's better to calculate the value of an FBA in some fiat currency such as USD. This is why I recommend that bidding for an FBA should be made in USD (or CNY or EUR) markets. It will be simpler to calculate potential profits. Of course, if you have a bot that will make the bidding for you, it doesn't matter what currency you use because the bot can change bids instantly when prices change.

FBA is finally coming so wouldn't it be best if we had dedicated subforum for it?

The thread for markets of FBAs and their presale should be there (and preferably pinned so that everybody can find it). I'd link it to every friend who's interested in investing cryptos. There are at least two already: MAKER and STEALTH. We need to collect info of all of these in the same place.