Thanks monsterer, that's helpful.

If a DAC cannot control any form of capital apart from what it defines internally, what would happen in the case where a billionaire wants to contribute say USD $100m to the business to take a stake in it (via dilution) and fast-track the further development of bitshares?

This would be equivalent to increasing the supply of an asset after it was initially issued, and then selling those extra units to the new investor. I'm not sure this is currently possible, but the implementation ought to be trivial.

account somewhere, or as hardware investments and the like, that would be outside the control of the DAC and require trust in some sort of human authority to manage it. Would we disallow this? Or is there a better way the DAC can deal with this opportunity?

IPO and asset issuance are about the only things a DAC allows human intervention for, because although these change the economics, they don't change the business logic.

You mentioned atomic cross-chain transactions. Your examples suggest that this would allow a DAC to make use of multiple block-chains and potentially a common currency, is that understanding correct? Is this a theoretical idea or something nearing a practical solution?

Yes, that's correct. I believe this in on the internal wish list of the core devs, but I've no idea about when it's scheduled for implementation. IMO it's pretty important for all the reasons we've discussed here

Cheers, Paul.

Say for example we had many companies around the world, each restricted to operating on their own block-chain. How would they interact with each-other? How could they share a common currency, which would be an external DAC?

One way would be to issue an asset on the bitsharesX DAC which represented the value of this new DAC. The asset would be purchased with whatever currency (BTSX, bitUSD etc) that the bitshareX DAC supports.

Once atomic cross-chain transactions are supported, the new DAC can syncronise its operations with the bitsharesX DAC, so for example if the new DAC wanted to pay dividends, it must do this via bitsharesX, so it needs to sync and perform this operation. Or if the new DAC was for music downloads, the unlock of the music (contained in the new DAC) must be syncronised with payment which happens on the bitsharesX DAC.

Presumably if there were multiple new DACs, they'd communicate with each other in the exact same way.

How could they share other capital resources from the wider economy, such as real property or other assets, which could involve yet more DACs? How would they each enter into any kind of arrangements or agreements between them, when this relies on a joint consensus around property, rights and obligations?

The only way a DAC can hold actual value from an external entity (like USD, for example) is to create an in-DAC mirror of the entity that acts as an exact proxy holding the exact same value, such that a trade or exchange of the proxy is of the same value as a trade of exchange of the actual item. What you do to actual transfer something like deeds to a property, though is a much more complicated question.

I am presuming (perhaps wrongly) that there would need to be human bridges of some sort within and between these DACs, that allow human judgments to be exercised where trust is granted, and to protect against it when it is not. But would that then require companies to manage the use of multiple block-chains?

As soon as you need human intervention, that's a clear sign the business idea is not suited for a DAC. DACs are autonomous by design and must be able to run by themselves without intervention.

Cheers, Paul.

Since there is no bitUSD/USD market, how do you propose to tell when bitUSD is undervalued or overvalued?

I really don't understand the hate people have to the price feeds. They seem like an excellent mechanism to me. They currently work great, and in the future there will be massive incentives to improve them in ways that make them more transparent, faster and smarter. I don't see why we should ever remove them unless some major problem arises from them.

It's because they are an outside source; a potential point of failure outside the control of the blockchain.

Ideally, the information which is currently injected into the blockchain would just arrive there, indirectly, through arbitrage opportunity via the efficient market hypothesis.

I wish to improve my understanding of what a block-chain allows a DAC to do but also what it's constraints are, in the context of a belief that they could potentially replace and grow new industries. I'm not a programmer so just after some non-technical answers.

If you're familiar with what an altcoin is, here is a basic description of a DAC which might make these questions more clear:

A DAC is an altcoin which contains more business logic than just processing transactions.

Any state which is required to run the DAC (such as: cards down on table in a poker game, entrants into a lottery, assets held by account etc) must be stored inside the DAC's blockchain, because there is nowhere else this information can go, since there is no central server.  Likewise it doesn't make a lot of sense to rely on information outside your blockchain because that creates a failure point.

The DAC must 'run' on many individual user's machines, in the same way the bitsharesX client does, which means you have to find some way to incentivise this behavior - otherwise people will be asking what benefit they have for burning *their* CPU cycles just to run *your* business logic.

At the moment, there is no support for cross-chain atomic transfers in bitshares - what this means for your DAC is that you cannot easily launch an tradable Asset on the bitsharesX exchange to represent the value of the DAC (for IPO funding, or for paying dividends to investors) because you cannot ensure that actions inside your own DAC are syncronised atomically with actions inside the bitsharesX DAC.

Hope that gives you a better idea of what it means to run a DAC.

Cheers, Paul.

I actually think brain wallets are a nice idea, but I wouldn't ask the user to type in all that personal information.

Instead you could just ask for a username and password, then hmac them together to create the private key. The extra entropy of the user name will make it safer than the NXT brain wallet single password.

Cheers, Paul.

I take your point about the forum, but it still can't hurt to monitor both the landing page bitshares.com and this forum with google analytics. You can get real time stats using google, so that's not an issue.

It can work well be projects that benefit from massive parallelism. Stuff like SETI. Projects where the data chunks can be divided into small pieces and don't require real-time results.

Not quite. It works well in projects where the time spent wrangling the data into chunks for each worker is less than the time saved through parallel computation. Size does not matter, only time matters.