I'd like to hear his thoughts about the pressure being put on him from chinese whales considering the 30m FMV stake
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What have Toast been doing?He is doing MUSIC (phun intended 8) )
Will this be available for download?
Thank you fuzzy for organizing this.
M
Great, more concerns are being mixed into delegates. They are becoming a catch-all for every role. We need to separate concerns.+5%
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.
I think it is a perfect hack for v the time being though. I share much of your thinking, but I also believe that people need to start realizing the optimum delegate team would have multiple people for this reason.Voting for teams to perform a range of services can never be as optimal as voting on who performs each service. The latter gives much more flexibility to manage the quality of any specific service provided. It would be like trying to do your grocery shopping if your choices were limited to hampers with a mix of products, and you tried to get the right mix of hampers to get close to your list.
Ultimately every delegate should probably have a PR representative for this task. I'll dig more into why when I get to a computer.
I think it is a perfect hack for v the time being though. I share much of your thinking, but I also believe that people need to start realizing the optimum delegate team would have multiple people for this reason.Voting for teams to perform a range of services can never be as optimal as voting on who performs each service. The latter gives much more flexibility to manage the quality of any specific service provided. It would be like trying to do your grocery shopping if your choices were limited to hampers with a mix of products, and you tried to get the right mix of hampers to get close to your list.
Ultimately every delegate should probably have a PR representative for this task. I'll dig more into why when I get to a computer.
Staff Meeting Notes
Here is a summary of yesterdays developer staff meeting. I just got assigned the job of taking notes and publishing them in advance of the Friday Mumble session with Bytemaster. Hopefully this will give everyone more time to get Fuzzy your questions where he can organize them rather than trying to respond to Bytemaster's opening statement in real time.
This week was spent continuing to harden and polish the system and squashing bugs. James and Valentine continued to refine the user interfaces and add market functionality to their new wallets while Vikram and Ben completed some urgent market bug fixes and released version 0.8.0. Meanwhile Dan and Nathan continue to work on refactoring the code to improve maintainability and enhance performance. Check out the new database back end they just committed to github.
One of the coming updates will add features to help users avoid fat-fingering the wrong accounts. The UIs will display an account number with every account to serve as another form of visual check sum and additional help in distinguishing between registered and unregistered accounts will be provided.
Meanwhile SynaptiCAD been working on adding support for "registered users" to http://blocktrades.us (currently the site only supports anonymous users). Registered users will be able to track their transaction history, get reports on realized gains/losses, and generally be able to trade in a more organized fashion. On the backend of the gateway, they have improved their purchasing algorithms, which in turn allows them to offer better conversion rates between asset types. In addition, they're offering a near zero fee on Bitcoin to BitShares conversions to encourage new users to enter the BitShares ecosystem. On the BitShares client side of things, they've been assisting in the analysis of the recent shorting bugs, the design of algorithms to correct them, and building/testing a new Windows and Linux binary that incorporates the fixes.
Adam has been in Scandinavia meeting with some people interested in his voting solutions. Expect a report from him when he gets back later this week.
Business development is also proceeding at a brisk pace. I just jotted down a list of fourteen different efforts I am currently tracking with outside entrepreneurs. We have ongoing Skype meetings with more than a handful of them each week. You already know (or have had hints) about some but many have not yet been announced by these partners. It's great to see so much stuff happening behind the scenes!
Do not let our new, more careful communication strategy fool you. Every minute of each long workday is jam packed with activity to build up the value of the BitShares ecosystem.
Please send Fuzzy your questions for Bytemaster on Friday.
This needs its own thread.Oh yes ..it DOES!!
.....I think it is a perfect hack for v the time being though. I share much of your thinking, but I also believe that people need to start realizing the optimum delegate team would have multiple people for this reason.Voting for teams to perform a range of services can never be as optimal as voting on who performs each service. The latter gives much more flexibility to manage the quality of any specific service provided. It would be like trying to do your grocery shopping if your choices were limited to hampers with a mix of products, and you tried to get the right mix of hampers to get close to your list.
Ultimately every delegate should probably have a PR representative for this task. I'll dig more into why when I get to a computer.
I am not entirely certain I understand your point. I never said that we should have delegates that have multiple people performing a range of services. I mean that we ultimately should hope to have delegates that have a team of people working to provide services.
Now don't get me wrong. I think there should be a person where questions, comments, complaints, suggestions...etc can be directed. But a team working for a single delegate's pay brings many benefits and flexibility that we otherwise would not have. If everyone has their own unique skills, it only makes sense to combine all those skills and pay them with a delegate as opposed to giving them all a separate delegate. Let's remember....a delegate team can always fire someone and hire a replacement if someone isn't pulling their weight.fuzzy, I am also for the idea of delegates being able to form teams and businesses to provide services. In my opinion, the Bitshares system should be agnostic to the organisational structure that sits behind any participant in any role. What I was really trying to say is that we can't elect a set of 101 delegates on the basis of their provision of many different services (even if they specialise in different areas of expertise) and expect this slate of delegates to provide an optimal outcome for any service. The latter can only be achieved if there is voting on a separate slate of specialists for each service. This is a theoretical perspective - how this is achieved in practice is the challenge.