There was a donation period like Bitshares Music has now (in fact you can see it on http://www1.agsexplorer.com if you scoll down), called AGS. There was snapshot that gave 50% of BTSX to AGS users proportional to there donations and 50% given to PTS the same way. This accounted for the full 100% distribution of BTSX at genesis.

Thanks, I do recall seeing that. When you say 50% in "proportion to" does that mean 50% of all contributions made to the PTS|AGS fund, so that if I put in $1000 and there was a total of $5,000,000 invested, I would get 0.0002% of BTSX (0.0002% of 2 billion total shares = 400,000 shares) ?

Quote from: bytemaster on November 04, 2014, 04:27:34 pm

We are in favor of separating block signers from delegate accounts.

A block signer can be appointed and paid by a delegate and can be fired/reassigned at any time by a delegate. 

We cannot have more than 101 elected positions, it simply doesn't scale.

so marketer delegates don't have to know about server/vps...etc and still can be paid by a network ? That would be nice ...

I've been wondering about this ever since I heard MeTHoDx should be a delegate. Don't get me wrong, I really like the guy, but does he have the technical chops to run a delegate node with the level of reliability that competes with 100 other delegates?

This is yet another thread (and I now have the strong impression they are numerous) where rather important issues related to DPoS are not yet settled. BitShares is an experiment after all, and these discussions promote evolutionary refinements, and that's a good thing.

PoW has been around for a very long time compared to DPoS, so I am wondering for those of you who are PoW veterans how the DPoS state of the art compares with where Bitcoin was after it was in the wild and had a $25M - $70M marketcap.

I jumped into crytocurrencies directly with BitShares, so I would love to hear a comparative analysis from someone like BM or Andreaus Antonopolis to see whether our learning curve is faster, slower or about the same as it was for early PoW.

That is also an important question to help with our marketing, as well as it is for people deciding whether to get involved with BitShares. Sometimes I have a hard time thinking of our marketing as being directed to early adopters, tho that is the reality of where we're at currently.

It seems to me we still have some important questions to figure out about the practicalities of DPoS operation. I kindof wonder if BM in retrospect thinks having an earlier focus on building infrastructure to support choosing and maintaining delegates might have been a wise investment of developer time, infrastructure such as a reputation system and voting options.

And that brings to mind how difficult finding info is here on this forum. It has already been suggested we need a new forum structure, to separate major areas of concern such as core development, principles and philosophy, marketing, new users, investors, legal and regulatory. 

When I look at the forum hierarchy it isn't that bad, but most of the discussions take place here in the general category rather than under more appropriate sections. It would probably take a lot of dedicated effort to monitor the discussions and move posts / threads around to keep things organized. I host a SMF forum for a very small community so I'm familiar with the database structure it uses. I would say a day or two of writing SQL queries would be adequate to create some tools to make moving things around pretty quick and easy. It still would require a human to make the judgment of how posts should be moved, so keeping the forum organized would require regular monitoring and moderation.

It is not silence. That is a lot of questions & they are both busy especially Bytemaster to be able to answer such long questions all the time.

I totally agree. There are may others in the community that can answer these questions, and I'm grateful for all that help do. Most of these have been addressed, and I'll probably have more as I go down the rabbit hole.

There's no need for heavy weights like BM, Stan, toast, xeroc ... to spend their time in this thread. Many of these questions are pretty basic. I was actually surprised when BM responded in the BitAsset thread I posted.

emski's answers prompted a few more questions I'll ask about tomorrow concerning the BTSX genesis block. I am reading some of the bitcoin developer docs first to see if I can get more info on the genesis block and the nature of the transactions that go into it.

In a similar vain to my BitAssets questions, I have a few about delegates I can't seem to find answers for, or don't understand the info I've found. Some of my confusion stems from the various contexts I've heard the term delegates used. And if my understanding presented below is incorrect please do let me know where I've missed the mark.

Since DPOS relies very heavily on delegates, it's a fundamental concept of the BitShares ecosystem, so everyone needs to understand them thoroughly.

1. Delegate Roles and Responsibilities

Delegates sign blocks of transactions and enter them into the blockchain ledger
The particular delegate that signs a block is chosen from the 101 in (random | round robin)? order.
This is analogous to bitcoin PoW mining, but instead of a computationally difficult task being performed by many nodes in a race, the winner of which is awarded 50/25/... BTC to sign a block, the signer of DPoS blocks are chosen from the pool of 101 delegates and rewarded with only transaction fees, which is far cheaper than the PoW process.

Q1: Does every delegate do this, or only some of the 101?
Q2: Is this signing process accomplished by just running special delegate client node software, and if so is the process fully automated? i.e. when that node is called on (out of the 101 delegate nodes) to sign a block the software does so as it runs without human intervention.   
Q3: Is it true that the only human intervention required to run a delegate node is to handle problems like hardware failures, network outages and software upgrades?

2. Delegates and Voting

Delegates are voted in / out by owners of BTS, and the strength of their vote is (proportional | directly related)? to (the number of BTS owned | size of BTS transaction the vote is submitted with)?

Is voting only accomplished when a transaction is performed? So the way to vote simply for the sake of voting would be to send BTS to yourself.

What is a "vote"?
Q1: Is it provided as information with each BTS transaction?
Q2: How is the analog / gray scale value for vote strength correlated to whether a delegate is in or out, a binary state?
Q3: If votes are provided by BTS owners with each BTS transaction, are delegates then subject to be voted in or out in real time with every transaction that takes place in the BTS ecosystem?
Q4: How is the voting calculated?
Q5: What about BTS that haven't been sold yet? i.e. if there are a total possible 10 billion BTS, but when an owner trades BTS for something 9.5 billion BTS have never been bought (marketcap of 500 million, right?), then the total voting power of all BTS in play is 500 million, right?
Q6: If 400 million BTS are (offline | in cold storage | owner destroyed his wallet / keys), then total voting power is actually only 100 million, correct?
Q7: How are the votes provided with an owner's transaction summarized over time with other owners votes they may have offered months ago, and in terms of whether a delegate "is in the top 101 delegates" and hence active in the pool, and how does an owner's voting "strength" factor into this (similar to Q4 above)?
Q8: If there were 100 million BTS in the wild, and each owner held only 1 BTS, then there are essentially 100 million votes, and everyone has the exact same voting power. In that case would the 101 delegates be chosen simply by the top 101 votes (i.e. top 101 in a histogram list)?
Q8a: histogram list of what: (transactions? Latest transactions )

I haven't even considered questions related to voting slates yet.

Calculating...

Trying to get my head around the answers Kisa & Empirical provided, to which I'm grateful.

Thanks for your reply BM, but your definition for price feed is circular, you use "feed price" in your definition.

What is the source of the price info? Does each delegate rely on different sources? Does the source originate from distilling info from the blocks of transactions each delegate "publishes" to the blockchain?

Very VERY well done, fantastic!

Can't wait to see this hit the crypto world!

I'm not keen on either belief system or ideology.