Quote from: toast on March 15, 2014, 07:05:17 pm

Aww man I don't mean to shoot you down, was just trying to foster discussion =P. The more I think about it the more it seems like this *does* provide a benefit over a centralized solution. So ignore me and keep discussing the idea.

Here's my understanding for why the other DAC ideas could not be centralized:

BTS X: Having priviledged access to the price feed is a killer (trust)
BTS DNS: Regulation (seizure & MITM), profit
BTS Music: Same issues as with all centralized media, "the rich get richer" (more access to distribution points -> easier to lock others out)

Ha don't worry mate it's good you keep an eye on the forum and help people where you can, I'm not even sure myself if it's a DAC according to I3's rules but in my head it is :p

For what it's worth, toast's DAC criteria aren't the only way to look at the problem. I prefer to boil it down to a single main (oversimplified) pro/con for each of the D, A, and C:

Distributed Pro: Resilient to malice or corruption in ways that centralized systems can't be
Distributed Con: Distributed systems are intrinsically more difficult to build efficiently; since decision-makers don't have access to global information

Autonomous Pro: Efficiency, since you don't have to pay management, trading specialists, or oversight.
Autonomous Con: It is damn hard to build an autonomous system that also interacts with humans.

Corporation (meaning that shareholders profit) Pro: If all shareholders profit, you'll attract a large user/shareholder population.
Corporation Con: This one's an open question in my mind... Seems like some business models, like insurance, work better as a non-profit. But you could probably just say that for insurance, the policyholders are the shareholders, so of course they benefit.

Then the criterion for a DAC to be feasible is that the sum of all the pros have to outweigh the sum of the cons. That way you can explain why Bitcoin was successful even though its shareholders don't profit: Bitcoin did the D and A parts of DAC well enough that it was able to ignore C.

The "Watchmen DAC" seems to have a weak C, but it could have a very strong D and A.

Just my two cents.

And unlike Bitcoin, Bitshares wont be volatile. You can save your profits in such a way that it's safe even if the price of Bitcoin crashes. Bitshares is really the only coin anyone should want to store their value in and they just don't know it yet.

Let's make Bitshares the defacto cryptobank for miners to store their wealth.

What do you mean when you say Bitshares won't be volatile? Do you mean BitUSD won't be volatile? XTS itself will be extremely volatile at first while the markets are figuring out how powerful it is, which could take a couple years.

I think BitUSD has excellent potential to replace BTC and LTC to be the default base currency on the centralized exchanges. I think your mining pool (which is an excellent idea, btw) should pay out exclusively BitUSD. Fundamentally, demand for BitUSD will be the main driver for Bitshares value; if there's demand for BitUSD, then the value of XTS will climb as people buy into it to short BitUSD.

Imagine a world where BitUSD has taken over today's BTC market: $7B worth of BitUSD would mean that the market cap of XTS will be over $10B (at a 1.5x margin call threshold), which is $2500 per XTS. That is, simple back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that wide-scale acceptance of BitUSD would make us all rich (I realize this is obvious, I just really like simple calculations that make the potential profits look really stark). Thus, I suggest that the mining pool try to promote BitUSD acceptance as much as possible.

Thanks, this is great.

I have one slight cosmetic criticism: I found myself initially very uneasy about the concept of "voting" until I realized that it's just a word that means "every transaction that I send, my wallet automatically says which chain it thinks is the correct chain."

I think the problem is that "voting" conjures up images of human choice, and I initially felt like I was going to have to go in and personally cast a vote, which is really intimidating idea, though clearly absurd and not what you're talking about.

I wonder if there might be a friendlier word than "vote" that you could use here, just to avoid the connotations of human choice, and increase the intuitive clarity of the documentation. Or even just calling it an "automatic vote" here and there. Or since each transaction has a vote, call it a "tx-vote" or something un-pronounceable like that.

Ok, I'm done nitpicking. I really did appreciate the write-up!

General Fund now open for Shares.

NRS :- 9cViAqUd7AKKZY5UyJUQo6nXCVJGTar1F7
PTS :- Pv2FwmEsDcTYaCipdTUiC4kfPtSfYY84iP
BTC :-

Could you expound on this a little? I assume those are donation addresses? Are there minimum donations? Is there a website or forum post we can go to and find out more info?

Quote from: CLains on March 02, 2014, 05:21:26 pm

If you or Dan N. is a bottle neck then you're doing something wrong unless it's 100% unavoidable, as for instance it might be if only that person knows how to do the particular thing they are doing.

Dan L is literally the only person on the project capable of developing BTS. I keep making this point and nobody hears it.
I've tried building BTS on both ubuntu and osx from clean OS installs and all build instructions failed in one way or another.

A few of us hear it and grudgingly take it at face value. It's just hard for someone who hasn't worked on a project like this to understand why throwing money at the project and hiring more people isn't a helpful option.

Switching to Python, on the other hand... Now that would be awesome.

For me personally before investing in new DACs I'd like to see progress on BTS. It is an indication of how future DACs will progress as well. You guys are masters in writing proposals and raising funds. But I'm not particularly stoked about the execution yet. I understand the difficulties in software development perfectly well. However releasing a tradeable BTS should be your priority number one as it will raise confidence during the funding period. Counterparty was done in a month and yes it is still rough around the edge but it could pose a threat to BTS.

Just my 2 cents...



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Just a note, Counterparty might be a threat to Mastercoin, but since it's built on top of the bitcoin network, it will probably have some serious scalability problems. Counterparty is more of a custom asset management system - it generally solves different problems than BitShares X. I see BitShares X as a fundamentally unique thing in today's crypto-equity space; it's the first system in which altcoin derivatives are trustlessly built into the blockchain. It's certainly possible to construct derivatives in Counterparty, but probably not trustless ones.

I'd happily take 100 PTS (66%) if toast and MrJeans feel good about splitting the remaining 50.