I would be fine with a legal defense fund, or an organization whose role is to help clear up the legal ambiguities involved in accepting crypto as specie, or complying with all of the other diktats of our overlords.

Preferably while the network itself is extending a big middle finger to the man.

  ^ THIS!

For right or wrong, whether there is justification or not, if the SEC or other regulator did come after one or more entities associated with bitShares, what power would they have to stop it? What are their control points?

Thats just speculation.

There was a thread Stan weighed in on a few weeks ago talking about a SEC muzzle. It was suggested a regular announcement be made daily denying I3 had received such an announcement.

Why wasn't that strategy ever put into practice? It was a good solution, a kind of dead mans switch to let the community know the SEC notified I3 and said not to say a word about it.

When you take on the big boys you better think it through before you piss them off.

Quote from: bytemaster on November 10, 2014, 02:14:45 pm

Quote from: FreeTrade on November 10, 2014, 02:12:56 pm

Off the top of my head too -

I think the 'Bitshares is to corporation as Bitcoin is to currency' is going to be a helpful paradigm for the press to explain Bitshares when the time comes. Keep DAC.

The last thing we want is for the press to say BitShares is a corporation.

Translation: you want to change up all the language used in BitShares because you realized you might get in trouble with the feds for using language like corporation, shares, interest, investment, securities etc and you are scared. Seems like a cop out to me, you should have just stayed anonymous man. All you are doing is just confusing people even more.
...
Yeah sure, until they change their mind spontaneously. What do you do when they come after people involved in BitShares even though you insist that it is purely "community" and not business and investment? Just shut the whole project down to prevent any harm to yourself? It sounds like this project is *very* prone to censorship and regulator interference if pre-emptive moves like this are being made. There is a good reason Satoshi is anonymous you know...

Actually with the SEC what you call it matters more than what it is... I originally adopted the company metaphor based upon the "duck is a duck" mentality... but sadly that is not the case with regulators.   They care about whether or not you are attempting to use terms the public places trust in to persuade others to part with their money.  If you can convince someone to part with their money for a stake in a community then it is very different than selling a share in a company despite the economic result being the same.

Why do we care about the SEC? Bitshares is a decentralized worldwide platform which they cannot really stop.
Why must we conform to their regulations?

if bitshares will be a threat they will fight us!

i agree to take this SEC etc. into our consideration, but if the old bankcartels feel threaten, they will attack us. But would this bad? i don't think so. Much publicity without 1 bitUSD spend - great!

C'mon bytemaster - are you telling us you never thought "they" wouldn't feel threatened if you succeeded in furthering satoshi's vision? Have you not thought through the ramification of what you started here?

I don't believe it, not for a second. But you really do make me wonder!

1) You decided to keep the name BitShareSZZZZZZZZZZZZ but are worried  about the ambiguous C of DAC??
2) Regulators will change language to suit their violent needs and your word games are powerless to theirs
3) Put fear in it's place and get back on track and in touch with your vision and don't be overly concerned with these word games - don't let your fear destroy your passion to end the violence!
 
If you hadn't before thought of when the financial powers would awaken to counter threats like blockchain technology you've picked a bad time to think of it now. The quotes above are very similar to my own sentiments.

You know you're doing something right when your adversaries begin to attack you. If you're at war what do you do when the enemy attacks? You fight harder! You find more effective strategies or you employ camouflage or flee to fight another day in another way.

Got your passport ready? Spoken to the team on these matters?  G e t  y o u r  d u c k s  b e h i n d  y o u !

Quote from: Thom on November 10, 2014, 07:23:51 pm

To YOU luckybit, you're really onto something here!

I haven't read all the posts in this thread, but I did read your OP and scanned many others.

I agree with the OP we should be looking at this philosophically. I would LOVE to see BitShares strongly consider this and move in this direction.

It will be difficult to implement and take many man hours to accomplish. Extensive testing will be required.

I would like to see a specialized "BOT" scripting language developed to express the rules of the BOT to act as a proxy. We could start with the D in DPOS, call it "Proxy Proof of Stake" if you like or PPoS. Would like to see BM weigh in on this thread, and comment on how these concepts might be employed with the coming "turing complete" scripting additions.

It would be a challenging effort, and a great amount of thought would have to be given to safeguards so we don't end up with a "SkyNet" that circumvents the fundamental purposes of the BitShares ecosystem.

All BOT rules must abide by some sort of "Prime Directive" which cannot be changed without a very large majority of Non-BOT human votes.

Anyway, you really struck a chord with this thread luckybit, hope it can gain some traction.

All that is needed is Turing complete scripting. Once you have that then the algorithm (smart contract) could have a policy, attributes, and the smart contract itself could be the algorithmic delegate. I explained a way to do it in one of my forum posts so it's not hard to at least do the initial algorithmic voting by simply using smart contracts to hire and fire delegates according to algorithm which would put the algorithms in control.

It would eventually lead to algorithmic democracy as smart contracts become better. A voting language would be necessary if you really want to do it right and then you could express your preferences in a way where all sorts of different branches of conditionals are mapped.

So you could use a voting language to create a voting agenda pattern for example which focuses on preventing climate change. You wouldn't have to analyze all the issues or anything like that because the algorithm would simply analyze data to figure out which decisions would be the most beneficial for achieving the agenda. Based on the reputation and voting records (attributes) of the candidates your voting power would automatically be delegated.

If you look at liquid democracy then you could delegate your voting power to any entity so you could delegate it to a team of climate scientists. You could delegate your vote to a DAC which is run by climate scientists specifically to act as a candidate or to anything else really. I'm not really pushing liquid democracy so much but an algorithm probably would just as easily be able to select the best human leaders or delegates for any issue.

I'm convinced this is all possible today. I don't think it's something which would have to wait for the future but I do admit it might take a considerable amount of developer time.

You may be right, but I think the concept deserves considerably more thought & discussion.

You didn't even address the "SkyNet" issue or seem to be concerned about what the power of BOT voting could do to destroy whole ecosystem.

This is an implementation as well as philosophical consideration. Should an aggregate of BOT rules be allowed to centralize the ecosystem such that we end up with a duplicate of the current financial (i.e. non crypto) structure? That's what I mean by a prime directive.

It could be argued that requiring a large majority of human votes to change the prime directive doesn't prevent the centralization scenario, but it slows down radical change that otherwise would be hyperfast with BOTs.

  To YOU luckybit, you're really onto something here!

I haven't read all the posts in this thread, but I did read your OP and scanned many others.

I agree with the OP we should be looking at this philosophically. I would LOVE to see BitShares strongly consider this and move in this direction.

It will be difficult to implement and take many man hours to accomplish. Extensive testing will be required.

I would like to see a specialized "BOT" scripting language developed to express the rules of the BOT to act as a proxy. We could start with the D in DPOS, call it "Proxy Proof of Stake" if you like or PPoS. Would like to see BM weigh in on this thread, and comment on how these concepts might be employed with the coming "turing complete" scripting additions.

It would be a challenging effort, and a great amount of thought would have to be given to safeguards so we don't end up with a "SkyNet" that circumvents the fundamental purposes of the BitShares ecosystem.

All BOT rules must abide by some sort of "Prime Directive" which cannot be changed without a very large majority of Non-BOT human votes.

Anyway, you really struck a chord with this thread luckybit, hope it can gain some traction.

Quote from: Thom on November 07, 2014, 04:28:32 am

I'm totally confused by this thread. Why "waste" anything to register new users? It seems totally counter intuitive since the point of BitShares is to eliminate waste. Fine, so that refers to mining waste but I'm totally confused why people just don't buy their account registration for what you seem to be saying here is only a few pennies anyway.

I feel like I'm missing something fundamental (yet again). Someone care to pls explain?

How could we allow people to register names without going through a central service like a faucet or forum?
And how do we prevent spam accounts?

Exactly what type of users are you targeting to register? Seems like if you have good functional value people will pay to register to get access to that functionality. Make it too easy & you'll get the spammers and nuisance registrations.

I'm still not sure I understand what the problem is you're trying to solve. I was looking the the BTSX account list a few days ago on BitsharesBlocks and noticed tons of names I highly suspect are abandoned and no longer active. Just garbage collect them.

In terms of registered names, well there may be a need for some type of fee, but not necessarily. They don't charge for gmail addresses, it's first come first served. If the account names are like DNS, some form of auction would be appropriate.

to emski for your patience with these newbie level questions and your very thorough response 

Thx speedy. Just asking as an example of the numbers, but forgot how complicated the original investment scheme was with the daily contributions and all.

Makes me really wonder why they did it that way.