If you're lobbying for a worker proposal, the software you create should be open source AND, most importantly all the profits that are created must be given back to the BTS community by burning or similiar - expecting the community to pay for development though inflation and then not getting all the rewards and profits is a big nono, in my opinion.

If you do not lobby for a worker contract it looks different, and I would support your plan.

One other thing I noticed. 360K bts a day? Are you serious?? There are only 500k available for worker proposals each day, and your proposal would eat 72% of it. That leaves pretty much nothing for other big worker proposals and it looks like you may act very selfish.

At current rates, that's 1440USD a day or if you remove the weekend, it's 2016 USD per workday (Monday-Friday). 2 programmers and one designer do not cost that much on the open market, and I would expect you to take a big discount when you decide to work for BTS, since you're eating a big amount of the available budget anyway.

All in all, this looks like a private company/product to be built with the community paying - I urge the community to reject this proposal for the time being, as it does not fulfill the base requirements I would see for workers:

• Software created must be open source
• Potential profit generated must be burned or 100% given back to the community
• Rate must be reasonable, may not be at or over market rates, as we have a budget to look after. 2000USD for 3 people full time per DAY is outragous.

Open source is self evident.

The possible profits were planned to go to the community, see the feature/voting list. The 20% I want to put aside are because those who join the team after the fundraise wouldn't have a way to get hold of some control assets else.
I don't expect a lot of profits from the operations anyway. Signers need to get paid, and fees for deposits and withdrawals need to be low to attract users, especially with the high trading fees on BTS.

Using a worker proposal was suggested by Stan and fuzzy while I was still only considering crowdfunding.
I'm aware that the workers' combined amounts are a big part of what's available in that time. That's why I split it up into 6 instead of proposing one, so if something else is proposed there's a way to cut BTSCX funding down while supporting the other cause. There aren't any other big workers for now, and even if all of mine would get voted in there'd still be room for small others.
You're also underestimating the workload for that project. The workers should be running three months only instead of a year, because I'd want funding to be secured before work starts. Having more than three people would make a lot of sense too. So all your calculations on that side are just off.

But ok. I'm in no way dependend on doing this, I just figured BTS to be a great platform to continue with what I've been doing for a while now. And as a truely decentralized and nearly real-time exchange, to me it felt like the holy grail of dx.
Seems like the community really isn't interested in community-funded infrastructure development though, neither through their own pocket nor the blockchain. Instead, it's "expect[ing developers] to take a big discount when [they] decide to work for BTS", and inflation is a bigger worry than infrastructure.

I consider the proposal as rejected for now and will not create the workers.

UPDATE: Canceled. Not enough approval from stakeholders.

BitShares CryptoeXchange (working name)

BTSCX will provide a gateway for cryptocurrencies to a decentralized storage, backing assets tradable on the BTS network (comparable to NXT's SuperNET, but without static main nodes)

For a coin to be added there need to be at least three individuals, so called signers, who hold keys to multisig addresses to store coins and assets. Two of those keys are required for a transaction to get accepted in the blockchain. The signers watch each other and react to suspicious behaviour by locking out the malicious signer, and if possible replacing him.
A multisig address can be created with a variable number of signers and required signatures, so it can be raised per-coin when more individuals applied for signing and get voted in. The number of signers should be in some way proportional to the total deposited value for (obvious) security reasons.

When a coin is added (enough signers available + successful community vote), an asset representing that coin is issued by the signers (also multisig protected), which will be given out in return for deposited coins. The deposits are immediately sent to the multisig storage address.
Returning the asset to the issuer triggers a withdrawal of the respective amount of coins.

The gateway can sustain itself through fees taken from deposits and withdrawals.

The client will support adding new coins and applying as a signer for an added coin as well as voting, trading and community functions.
Like Graphene, the UI will be standalone and can work with remote BTSCX, BTS and coin nodes.
By connecting it to a local coin wallet it will support trading directly out of or into that wallet.

A control asset will be issued, which gives the community the possibility to vote on every variable that may be set, per coin.
Those variables are (list not necessarily complete):
- coins to add
- x-of-y multisig
- offline/dropout tolerance
- fees
- distribution of fees between asset holders, signers, and burning


80% of this asset will be given to the community, 20% will stay with me to be distributed amongst the people helping to create the gateway.

The team consists of 3 persons so far (2 coders, 1 designer). As a rough estimation it'll require about 6 months and at least 30k USD to develop a working product. This would only cover a very basic version though. Adding more features like a trollbox or margin trading will boost that up quite a bit, and if we want to include marketing and further development, even 300k USD could easily be spent in a year. There won't be a company in Switzerland though, promised!

There are 6 proposed workers, amounting to 60k BTS/day each, running for three months (Dec/Jan/Feb). With this setup and current prices having all 6 voted in for 1 month, or 2 for three months, secures the minimum funding.  Donations of BTC, BTS and BitUSD will be accepted when the initial 30k USD target is met through those workers, or during February if it's possible to fill an eventual gap.

In March 2016 the value in USD for everything that came in will be calculated, and 80% of the control asset will be given out proportionally, sharedropping the worker income's part on BTS accounts. Details on that sharedrop need to be discussed, I'm not sure if a proportional drop on everyone makes sense. Whoever holds that asset should participate in the voting.

Uhm, wait a second.
I announced the decentralized exchange a month ago, and the feedback was devastatingly low. I'm still working out the idea from time to time, but it didn't seem like the community is really interested in the crypto gateway, so it's nothing but a small maybe to me for now.

Are you guys saying all it needs for you to get interested is a possibility of it burning fees? That'd be pretty easy to add to the voting.

Or is it that nobody cares what kind of services will be created at the moment, as long as it's something influencing the supply? How sustainable is that approach in your opinion?

That's great. As 30k is the absolute minimum and the more the merrier, I have another idea based on that:

The worker proposal will be one way of getting funds, and we sharedrop whatever portion of the total it represents.
The total amount one can receive through a worker contract seems fixed though, would it make sense to set up multiple proposals to allow a more dynamic association?

I created a StartJOIN concept this weekend to get some more feedback, maybe even from outside the existing bts community https://www.startjoin.com/btscx

But it seems the admins are on vacation or something. It's not showing up on the front page, and they're not answering on facebook (last activity there was months ago...). Is that platform dead?

What then? Raise funds here? Judging from the current interested parties here I'm not sure we'd be able to hit the minimal goal if we don't reach out.
Should I try to get someone for marketing on the team (which would require even more money...), or do you think we could achieve it through word of mouth marketing starting here?


I surely like the idea of sharedrops, but how will that help to get funding?

Is there a way to do a worker proposal to get this funded, and Sharedrop increasing percentages on the community as it reaches various levels of funding? 

That's an idea which could be worked out. The current 80/20 proposal was taken out of thin air and can be changed of course. Maybe it'd make sense to reserve some of the assets for that purpose.

I still think there is more interest here than it seems, or at least I believe there *would* be if people could wrap their minds around this more fully.  So could you just walk us through what this would look like to the user?  You mentioned a standalone user interface.  So that would basically look like a wallet management utility, with deposit and withdrawal functionality allowing the user to move supported currencies into and out of the decentralized wallets, correct? 

Now this is where it gets hazy for me.  Would all trading then take place in this same interface, elsewhere, or both?  You mentioned possible margin trading and trollbox, so it sounds like in addition to decentralized wallets,. you also intend for this to be a full blown trading platform.  Is that correct?  If so, would users be *limited* to trading via this interface?  Or would they also be able to trade via the the Bitshares default trading interface and/or on an exchange participating in the Bitshares exchange network by somehow pointing their trading interface to the decentralized wallet(s)?  Please describe this in as much detail as possible.

Also, just to clarify, you're proposing an equity crowdfunder with 80% going to the backers in exchange for whatever amount they pledge beyond a minimum of $30k?  Is that how it would work?  Also, you mentioned extending the functionality to work with HZ and other non-Bitshares decentralized exchanges.  How would that get funded?  Thanks.

The BTSCX client will include its own trading interface, showing only the markets for its assets. But it will also be possible to trade them from the/another BTS interface, just like any other UIA.
Deposit-address-requests and withdrawals can be triggered from anywhere else too. To get a deposit address a message/memo needs to be sent to a specified account, to withdraw the assets needs to be sent with the user's wallet address in the memo. The standalone interface will only make it easier by hiding the details of those transactions in the background, providing the user with a button/form like on centralized exchanges.
It is intended to decentralize as much from the centralized trading world as possible. Leverage (probably) won't be possible, because we can't force-liquidate users. But short selling should be doable (using BTS/CORE as collateral).

The crowdfunding plan isn't finalized yet and ideas are very welcome. The only certainty here is that the asset won't be sold at a fixed price - did that with HZxchange, right after everything was sold the price surged to the moon and development was left with far less funding than it could have had, while the early investors didn't care for the project any more but took their profits and left it behind.

Porting to other decentralized exchanges is just an idea for later. BTSCX will be open source, and adapting it to other platforms will only require a rewrite of a couple of functions. Of course additional funding and/or voluntary dev work will be needed to realize it. Everything will be open source, so this can be done by anyone then.

That article is shady. Usually prosecutors don't give information about running investigations to some random blog.

There's also a statement from cryptsy regarding the licensing:
http://blog.cryptsy.com/