Quote from: merivercap on April 15, 2015, 05:05:02 am

To me slashes that cut all the way through lines or letters reminds me too much of 'slashing' or violence... like slashing/cutting something... or slashing/cutting prices or marking mistakes/misspellings.. etc.

Just think of it as a tilted hat 

 

Quote from: robrigo on April 15, 2015, 02:57:35 am

Quote from: werneo on April 15, 2015, 12:46:12 am

Quote from: liondani on April 15, 2015, 12:10:55 am

I like "bitshares" , and it makes more sense due our bitshares logo that is a "b" ...  (and not a "B")

Sent from my ALCATEL ONE TOUCH 997D

yup. capitalization is so 20th century. 

Agreed. IMO we should have "Bitshares" to refer to the DAC and "bitshares" to the shares themselves. I suppose it is too late for that? Camelcase for written words (as opposed to variables in a program) is just weird to me.

Also while we are on this topic, anyone opposed to declaring a bitshares symbol?

Latin lower case b with stroke for BTS currency symbol: ƀ

Append to market pegged asset: ƀUSD, ƀGOLD, etc.

I like this idea better, day by passing day
It just looks cool and unique!


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

   Nice!  It's funny because I was just scribbling and playing around with symbols just a moment ago... and came up with just a short line at the top of the 'b' that goes to the left .. it looked ok..... anyways the one you have looks nice and there is already a unicode for it with all the various fonts: https://medium.com/down-the-hashrabbit-hole/to-or-not-to-4e952961f41
The design firm in that article suggests the lower & upper case versions of that symbol for the Bitcoin logo.  It looks pretty good to me.  Not sure how much traction it's getting in the Bitcoin world. 

I also was playing around with other ideas to represent  bitCurrencies.  Just trying to keep it simple.  I was thinking of making use of dots around the currency symbols:
1)  one dot above & below the vertical line or slash for the US dollar
2) one dot on both sides of the horizontal line for the Pound
3) dots at both ends of the curve for the Euro
4) dots below the vertical and on top of the two slanted lines for the Yen and Yuan...

Easy to write with pen and paper..... but you guys might have forgotten how to use a pen and paper....   What do you guys think?

bitUSD is not much more useful than paypalUSD. From the  shopper's perspective, bitUSD is much slower and harder to obtain. Some merchants have a lot to gain, but these merchants are not offering big discounts for using bitUSD, so why would the customers bother obtaining bitUSD? Getting a 20% discount by using bitUSD would do a lot for adoption, but we can't force merchants to offer discounts.   

Yes bitUSD is hard to obtain right now because it's a new asset.  I even have trouble getting it.  You can't expect it to take over the world overnight.  It takes work.   Why do you think payment startups like Stripe & Braintree & Dwolla exist if it is 'not much more useful than paypalUSD'?  Why would Square start Square Cash?  Why do you think Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft (who is getting MSB licenses in 50 states btw) are all getting into the payments space?   Why do you think Bitpay has raised the 2nd most VC funds after Coinbase who's also in the payments space.  Is this all for giggles?  It's nearly a $100B/yr market.  The big advantage with crypto compared to the other solutions is you bypass the banking system inefficiencies and fees.  (BTW we should really go after BitPay.  Once the bitShares platform is stable and has a strong level of merchant/user adoption they might consider supporting bitUSD.  Also there are other Bitcoin hedging solutions that are popping up they may lean towards.)

If that's the core value proposition, then it looks like we're fucked. Large companies like amazon.com have negotiated much better deals than 3%. More like 1%.
I would hope that the core value proposition for cryptoassets would be as a stores of wealth, like gold. Transactional use is only helpful for establishing a baseline value. Bitcoin's transactional use couldn't support an even 1 billion dollar market cap. The velocity of money is too high.

Did I mention Amazon has Amazon Payments that is 'not much more useful than paypalUSD'?   Also people do shop at other places other than Amazon. 

Store of wealth and why?   What makes cryptoassets a store of anything?  Why is Bitcoin not worth zero?  I have my own answers, but it would be interesting to know your perspective. 

BitShares can do what other platforms can't:
A big advantage is that BitShares allows you to trade anything. I'm American. If I could, I'd trade some Chinese stocks with BitShares that are not available in America. Chinese people would like to trade some American stocks that are not available in China. Those are just two examples.

BitShares will be the best way to let everyone trade everything.

Counterparty risk: It's common for brokerage accounts to be locked, disabled, or seized for some legal reason. BitShares will never lock your account.

Good point about securities access.  That is another advantage.  I wrote about how people should be able to create exchanges on top of the Bitshares blockchain/market engine here: https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,15248.msg199016.html#msg199016
If people want to build an E*Trade/Think or Swim/Tradestation/Schwab/Interactive Brokers on top of the blockchain with various UI/UX I think that's a good model and one of the businesses I planned to help build anyways. 

Currently, trading on bitshares is not attractive because 20x-50x margin is not available. If I trade bitEUR:bitUSD, how much money can I make? Think about it.

Fair point about leverage in Forex.  I do think the 'legalized gambling' nature of trading and speculating is an attractive selling point.  A majority of speculators will lose money to trading costs, but the assets they trade will get more liquidity which is a positive to the ecosystem.  Most people are focused on opportunity and less on probability so the subjective value for speculating differs from any objective measure.   (I would expect 95%+ of speculators to lose money to trading costs over the long run in traditional brokerages compared to a buy/hold strategy.)  Anyways.

1) "A referral program alone won’t get users to share your product. Your product has to solve a painful problem that the customer would naturally want to talk about even without the incentive." 

Problem: Bitcoin volatility and confirmation times for mass merchant/user adoption for payments
Solution: bitUSD (save 3% on credit card transaction fees just like Bitcoin without volatility or slow confirmation times.  Note: credit cards account for well over $3 Trillion out of $8.5 Trillion total payment processing volume.)  Focus everybody.  We need focus.

2) "Once you have a great product, make referrals as natural and effortless as possible."

From: The 2 Things You Need to Make Your Referral Program a Hit
https://blog.rjmetrics.com/2015/01/27/the-2-things-you-need-to-make-your-referral-program-a-hit/

Dropbox Example -

How Referrals Built The $10 Billion Dropbox Empire
http://www.referralcandy.com/blog/referrals-built-dropbox-empire/

3) Their product cost:  $99.   Cost of Acquisition: $238-388

4) 2-sided referral program - Both referral and referred got extra space.  Why not do the same with BTS?

5) Great Dropbox product + great referral = 100k to 4 million users in 15 months. 

I agree with all the comments on the thread. 

Also it's hard to measure traction when the webwallet is still in beta. 

We have a well thought out referral program that will be game changing and that cannot be gamed.

 

You know another thing is Adam and the Follow My Vote guys should really piggyback off the Rand Paul campaign.   During the Ron Paul campaign in '08 and '12 there was a lot of talk of vote rigging and fraudulent voting machines.   The Republican primaries start with the first major Straw Poll in Iowa in the summer.  I used to be very active in politics.  You can publicize Vote by getting one of the local GOP groups to use the system for a Straw Poll or just do even post-vote audit surveys using the system.   This presidential campaign season is probably the best time to get publicity for Follow My Vote.  You can recruit a lot of former Ron Paul supporters to promote the system because  a fair number of them will support Rand as well.

Let's pump up the value of Vote...and spin it off for $100 million soon... 

Rand Paul Accepts Bitcoin for Presidential Campaign
http://www.coindesk.com/rand-paul-presidential-campaign-bitcoin-donations/

"During a 2014 interview, Paul suggested that the concept of digital currencies could be improved if they were backed by stocks."
Hey isn't he really describing Bitshares?   

I don't believe delegate dilution has much to do with lower prices.   We are in a general bear market for crypto.  The demand side for crypto hasn't been that strong AND the shift from current investor's allocation from alt-coin to Bitcoin is increasing slightly.  Since Bitcoin dominates with 85% of  total market cap of crypto a small shift in favor of Bitcoin will suck a significant amount of the marketcap from the altcoin market.  It's analogous to when sentiment goes from small cap stocks to large cap stocks.  Furthermore I'm a firm believer in selling equity for growth.  That's how all startups and growth companies work. 

Furthermore delegate pay not only brings value to the system, it also gets new people involved as employee/owners and also releases more shares to the public so new investors can come in.  There's already a preception of a 'pre-mine' and the idea that original investors and whales want to just sit on their shares, do nothing and get rich off the technology is not a good business strategy or good for perception.  If that's the plan someone can probably quip: 'Might as well stick a fork in you cuz you're done.'  They would mean this figuratively and literally. 

All companies dilute.  From a seed/angel round to an A-B-C-D round of founding...and then an IPO.  You give up equity for cash in all these stages to grow.... I don't mean you should do it aimlessly, but it's standard practice.   There's also usually a good balance between business & operations/ product & technology/ sales & marketing. 

 

Quote

If there were a real marketing initiative, they would've picked up on the current controversy with the Bitcoin Foundation and how Bitshares solved the primary concern and original intent of the BF, how to fund core Devs? Bitshares should've been mentioned in every single thread I read on reddit over the past few days on the issue. I scrolled through most of the comments and saw replies from some of the bitcoin celebs concerned about how Devs would get funded and who would administrate those funds. Not a single Bitshares reference. Missed opportunity with a majority of the 100's being marketing delegates.

  The scarcity of reddit (and hackernews) forum comments  these days is quite noticable. Nul- street would have been on top of that in the past.

I agree that this would be a perfect opportunity to highlight the DAC model after the whole Bitcoin Foundation debacle.  Of course we probably should work out the kinks a bit and more heavily promote our DAC when operations are humming.  In any case I am fascinated with this DAC experiment and think it can work out very well.   I don't think operations have been that inefficient and relative to traditional startups the cash burn rate has been below average.  However we can always improve and direct resources that will provide the most value in the long run.  I do think product & tech development should be paid more. 

With that said maybe we can put a website together that highlights the delegates & responsibilities and have another section where we can expect weekly progress reports and have some accountability (we can keep this open or private to members).  Eventually I think we need to put a delegate team page with pictures for the bitShares DAC delegates.  I know some may be uncomfortable so it shouldn't be required, but whenever you look at a company you want to know who is behind it.  It brings the human element to the project.  Just like the Peer-to-Peer tour, Stan, Bytemaster etc bring a human element to bitShares.  You gain trust much faster from others that way.  That's an advantage Bitshares will always have over the anonymous guys from NXT, Darkcoin etc.  It would be good to recruit more females and global talent because money is universal and we want everyone involved.   It's great we have a strong Chinese contingent. 

Anyways you can link up a delegate website to the Bitshareblocks.com's delegate page, but keep it running seperately.  It can have real-time financials totally transparent for everyone to see.  When you think about the level of transparency you can have with the DAC compared to regular corporations & governments, this system is definitely revolutionary.  I can grab the domain: btsdac.org if people like that domain?  I can even set up a simple Wordpress site, but we have to have someone build a data feed of delegate info to it.  The website page can read:  BitShares DAC, 'The World's First Decentralized Autonomous Company'...  anyways what do you all think?