BitSpace Delegate ProposalBy Christian Lains and Manuel LainsBitSpace is a project by Christian and Manuel Lains that aims to improve financial and political freedom for the individual, leveraging novel technologies for full transparency and accountability. BitSpace will engage a Norwegian community on the benefits of blockchain based solutions, hosting workshops and making presentations as well as consulting with comsumers, developers and investors. The first business-oriented plan by BitSpace is to launch BitGate, a gateway for Norwegians onto the BitShares’ decentralized exchange.Who are we?Manuel and Christian both live in Oslo, Norway. We are brothers who have been enthusiastic about cryptocurrencies and blockchain based solutions for the past 3 years.
Manuel Lains (‘Spectral’) is an electronics and computer engineer by profession. He is a strong believer in the sovereignty of the Internet, decentralized power, and the possibilities that cryptocurrency technology bring to the world. Back in 2012 he took part in starting up the Norwegian Pirate Party. Recognizing the “soft transition” opportunity towards Internet Sovereignty that the party represents, he is still actively involved. Lately, his focus has been on figuring out how blockchain technology can help the Pirate Party and vice versa.
Christian Lains (‘CLains’) is a philosophy major and futurist who tends to notice global cultural trends as they emerge. This foresight led him into Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies at an early stage. He has been obsessively active in the BitShares community since late 2013, along the way being trusted with access to the Bitshares website, managing community bounties and writing for the BitShares wiki. Christian is currently transcribing the weekly dev. hangouts and evangelizing.
For a closer look at who we are, please read our biographies at
bitspace.noWhat have we been doing?We decided to start BitSpace back in January 2015 and have been working on various things since then.
Manuel set up a DevShares delegate (
dvs1.bitspace) in February, and has been working to understand BitShares on a technical level. Manuel has been working with Adam Ernest of Follow My Vote to see if their voting solution can be used for the Pirate Party in Norway or other countries. The Norwegian Pirate Party invited Adam in March to their annual assembly, and in the future we might see a collaboration between the Pirate Party and Follow My Vote. See our BitSpace
blog for more information.
Manuel and Christian jointly wrote a proposal on Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies for the Pirate Party National Assembly that was voted in close to unanimously. This proposal was a call to action for the Pirate Party to increase their focus on Bitcoin, Cryptocurrencies and other blockchain based solutions to help work for a sensible regulatory environment that promotes blockchain based innovation. An English translation of the proposal is available for download
here, and Manuel’s original presentation of the proposal at the assembly is available at BitSpace’s YouTube
here.
We have also made a couple of presentations on Crypto. The first presentation was held during a Bitcoin meetup, where Manuel discussed the recent cryptocurrency-related development at the Pirate Party, and Christian discussed the BitShares platform and DACs as a potential for future innovations. The
second presentation was held at the Open Source Developers Conference Nordic. We talked about Bitcoin/Bitcoin 2.0, BitShares as a platform/exchange, and Peertracks. The presentation is up on BitSpace’s Youtube
here.
Christian has been learning about marketing and webdesign and has set up various websites to get the BitShares word out. Apart from the BitSpace website,
bitspace.no, Christian is operating
libertymotive.com, a website and that mixes and ties motivational literature to the crypto revolution, and
freebitgold.com which aims to draw in people searching for all BitGold alternatives and highlight BitShares as the most decentralized and free alternative. Check out the
FreeBitGold facebook page! Christian is also just finishing up the Norwegian translation of the book ‘BitShares 101’.
What will we be doing?We have a number of plans going forward, and we list four of them here.
First, we will provide value to BitShares and the ecosystem by participating actively, evangelizing where we can and making the right connections in meatspace. These are all default services that it can be hard to quantify, except when breakthroughs happen, such as getting invited to OSDC or getting Adam invited to Norway.
Second, we will be working for and with the local Norwegian scene, which includes hosting meetups, launching
BitGate/BitPortal and communicating with users, developers and potential investors. When BitShares is ready, converting developers, users and investors may be as little as a phone call and a coffee away, and we will be ready for those opportunities.
Third, we will produce content to serve as inbound marketing - articles and videos primarily. Christian and Manuel are learning quickly what it takes to communicate the right ideas to get people hooked and involved, and we aim to do things that scale to a larger audience. The BitShares community is a high output machine of great ideas and we need people to package and repackage these ideas to the right audience both globally and locally.
Finally, we will do “community services” like running up-to-date Witnesses with price-feeds for DevShares and BitShares, having an up-to-date slate with our best suggestions and sharing tips, connecting with potential partners, sharing our points of view on the forum and sharing successful marketing strategies. We will also be in talks with the other workers to help organize the BitShares ecosystem, and pledge at least 10% of our delegate pay to a BitShares commons fund (see section on "Worker Pay").
Witness and DecentralizationOur witness is running on a dedicated Virtual Private Server hosted by a local Norwegian service provider. The hardware is physically located in Norway and managed by BitSpace. By maintaining our servers in the same jurisdiction as ourselves, we hope to help maximize decentralization for BitShares as a whole.
We also think alliances with political parties (e.g. The Pirate Party) that value internet freedom will help bring public awareness in the event authorities try something unethical in the future.
Our witness is running the BitShares Client compiled on and for the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS operating system.
The technical specs of our server is currently:
- Single Core CPU
- 2GB RAM
- 50GB SSD
When the demand for hardware resources increases we have a server on standby with higher specs:
- Dual Core CPU
- 4GB RAM
- 100GB SSD
We believe that ‘bitspace-clains’ will satisfy the core demands that witnesses should be trusted, transparent, and decentralized.
TransparencyEverything we do at BitSpace will be posted at the Blog on the website. The witness server will provide real-time feeds of relevant statistics, and interesting network events will be posted here and on the BitShares forums.Each week we will give full reports on BitSpace activities, what has been working, what has not been working, and what we are going to do the next week. This will be posted on the BitSharesTalk forums as well as on
http://bitspace.no/bitspace-weekly-updates/AccountabilityWe will keep track of prominent metrics on how we are doing, including the server status of the witness, numbers of hits on our articles, videos, websites, and social media, as well as how many leads we are getting, and how many go on to sign up for BitShares. We’re open to community input and will answer any questions the community might have on the forums.
Long Term Business PlanWe aim to create a self-sustainable business based on expanding
BitGate/BitPortal, marketing efforts, and our ability to guide people and consult businesses through this new, emerging sector. We will position ourselves as the leading BitShares hub here in Oslo, Norway, and get in contact with VCs and aspiring young entrepreneurs who are considering blockchain technology as an option. Having a worker in place will give us further weight to pitch BitShares as the next level, sustainable blockchain platform.
Worker PayWe will not sell or spend the worker pay, but keep it locked up in the expectation that BitShares grows to what we believe it can be. This provides an incentive for us to work hard, without causing any downward pressure on the BitShares market cap. Every month we will short bitUSD to increase our exposure to BitShares which will further diminish the available supply. We will remain committed to this payment structure until BitShares reaches a market cap of at least $100 million.
We will also take the initiative to build a BitShares Emergency Fund funded by workers. The thought is that participating workers set aside a percentage of the worker pay to create a fund dedicated to address urgent issues in the BitShares ecosystem. These funds can be released by shareholder vote to resolve issues for the common good.
FeedbackWe welcome feedback from the community! We are both resourceful people who have a lot of time on our hands now to make things happen. So please reply here, send us a PM or reach out to us via
email if you have any questions, concerns or suggestions. Feel free to get in contact via Skype ('clains', 'antakeli') or FB (
Christian,
Manuel) as well!