Quote from: bitsapphire on March 28, 2015, 05:14:40 pm

Saturday 28.03.2015 Update

Dite, one of our team members is with the Music/Peertracks team at the Texas Bitcoin Conference.

You can now watch the initial UI/UX of the Moonstone wallet on YouTube! This is an earlier version which we deemed stable for presentation purposes. The market interface will be presented in a more lengthy video in 1-2 weeks as it requires some more polishing.

Very nice!

   Looks great!!!

Quote from: Troglodactyl on March 27, 2015, 12:56:50 am

I would suggest a simplified and softened version with no protocol level enforcement.

Currently the minimum fee is 0.1 BTS and the default is 0.5.  Some of the light wallets are already boosting this fee slightly to pay for their development.  I suggest that some wallets could support defaulting to add an additional 0.1-0.5 BTS fee for every transaction, payed to the account that payed the registration fee for that wallet installations first account.  The idea here is that our grassroots marketers introduce people to BitShares, set up their wallets and register them, and receive transaction fees until the new user either stops using the network or changes the default settings.

This way there's no controversial protocol level enforcement pushed by the network as a whole, and marketers are incentivized to get legitimate users, because they're only rewarded if the user transacts.

I dont mind this option... Its a lot safer but a lot less powerful for a bunch of reasons.   But I am confused by this term "legitimate users"  What is a legitimate bitUSD user if it is not someone who holds bitUSD. Earns interest on bitUSD. Receives his income in bitUSD. Purchasers products with bitUSD, and trades in and out of bitUSD for fiat with his network of fellow bitUSD holders?   I don't think it gets any more legitimate than that.

An interesting mental exercise.  Imagine John Q Public clones bitshares and builds bitsharesMLM. He honors 100% bitshares holders so you have the same stake. He has a built in marketing system as described in the OP and limits the number of 100% delegates to 5 as that is ample to support the tech requirements of the chain.  which chain are you more excited about?

Yeah adding that functionality to the wallet is a good alternative.  You can even build a bisharesMLM wallet to see how it fares with other wallet providers that use a different approach.   It may be good to test with various wallet providers and see how it works and maybe consider a protocol change down the road.

bitmarket I think the idea of using transaction fees is brilliant because it is the main revenue source for the ecosystem and I think a referral system is the key to crypto success.  We'd effectively be turning users into miners who earn transaction fees by growing the network.   Transaction fees are also a fantastic proxy of value creation because you can't just create fake accounts and earn referrals.  People have to use the system.  Recruiting businesses that have much higher transaction volumes will be more valuable and a greater value-add to the network.  I definitely think a system like this could be amazing.

Note we can do a quick present value calculation of transactions fees (no inflation).  We can use Paypal as a comp and just sum the estimated transaction fees for 20 years.  Paypal has 162 million active users and they generate 11.5 million tx per day or .071 tx per person per day or roughly 26 transactions per year.  If you get 0.5 BTS in fees for 20yrs for each referral and the ecosystem grows to the size of Paypal, you'll get 13BTS per year or 260BTS over 20yrs for one referral.  Currently that's ~$1.68 per referral, but at a current market cap of $16 million.  At $160 million it would be $16.8, at $1.6B it would be $168.... not bad at all....the numbers work out pretty well.
https://www.paypal-media.com/about

The only thing I would avoid is the multi-level part of it... upline/downlines/matrices etc.  Not convinced this is any good and I've avoided MLM programs precisely because I thought simple referral programs were more properly aligned with people's value creation.  Why should upline members get so much for getting lucky and  having some superstars downline?  How does the upline generate it's excess returns?  It's either from his downline or future members and it gets skewed way too heavily towards the top of the pyramid at the expense of those below. 

Anyways I am a huge fan of referral programs in general so I'm glad you are leading the charge with this idea. 

Quote from: kenCode on March 26, 2015, 07:16:52 pm

As long as we stay away from MLM "downlines" and just do one-off rewards, ref= links and qr codes, that should be sufficient.

I agree with this.  Referral systems and giving a reward for getting a referral (a percentage of fees of your referee, and maybe a bonus), is great.  We have all read the story of how Paypal went into massive growth with its referral program.

Making it multi-level and rewarding for referrals of your referrals screams 'scam' and 'stay away' to EVERYONE. 

Please do not all hastily rush to turn Bitshares into an MLM scheme, lose the following of most of our remaining die hards, and cause yet another 75% price drop.  Just because some initial posts on the forum go "yay, this is great!   Bitshares will go up and I will make money!".  We made this mistake already in november, and it lost us most of the support of the chinese community.

You really need to realize that if Bitshares goes MLM, there are going to be 1 million people screaming in every thread in bitcointalk that it is a scam, and every single person is going to see the MLM scheme, and pattern match it to other scams, and think "yep, Bitshares is now confirmed to be a scam".

In fact, I am surprised that NewMine and DecentralizedEconomics havent ALREADY made posts saying this, even though it is just people talking about it.


Please consider just doing a referral plan and rewarding people for referring their plans, and not going full pyramid scheme and turning Bitshares from a wonderful idea into the spawn of evil.

   I'm with Ander on this.  Although I am not opposed to MLM programs in theory and they can be effective, I was never sold on MLM benefits over simple referral systems.  The complex structures/tiers and negative associations that come with MLM is something I'd avoid.  Simple referral systems are great.  I'm not sold on multi-tiers.  If I'm a downline person.  Why should an upline be compensated so much for what I do.  It's like just being first is of ultimate importance and then you wait for everyone else to actually do work.  That's how I always felt and that's how MLM is often sold to people.  Shouldn't this be something the NXTers should be doing?  Or maybe give the idea to Paycoiners so they can last a bit longer before going to zero. 

I'm 100% behind simple referral systems and designing an appropriate % is crucial to balancing the incentives of referrers with perceptions of referrals.

Quote from: merivercap on March 09, 2015, 09:06:54 am

Hey Starspirit & Bitsapphire,
Just following up on my comments about unit of account and reference points of value.  I was thinking about Bitcoin the other day and came to realize that Bitcoin does in fact have a discrete unit of account or reference point.  It's actually the computational time required to mine/hash a new block. (Roughly 10 minutes of computational time).  The computational time in the 'proof of work' process is the 'unit of account' that can be a reference point to judge all goods & services against.  Fascinating to think about.

I used to think money required something to back it, but now my view is that money is the unit of account. Its value derives from the integrity of the monetary system, and how much confidence people can have that the ledger system as an effective and fair way to record where goods and services have been provided and are owed in society. Gold did not need anything to back it, apart from durability and scarcity, but that's what provided the integrity in the system. Now I think the block-chain technology can achieve the same function. So I'm not sure we need to identify an underlying unit of account anymore to call something money. Not sure though.

The security provided by PoW might add value to a crypto-money, but the cost of production (as in any industry) has no direct influence on the demand for or valuation of the money, so I don't see this cost as a unit of account to compare the price of goods and services. I still think the value of the money itself does that. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding what you mean though.

I agree commodity money (digital or real) doesn't need anything to back it.  Money has a unit of account based on a piece of itself in anyway you want to slice it (Bitcoin/satoshi or silver/dollar/sterling/shekel/drachma), but I was mainly referring to a real world reference point to compare the 'slice' of money to for the average person to subjectively compare its value.  BTW the grains in my previous posts refer to grains of silver/gold so it didn't refer to the # or barley/wheat grains.  I may have confused the ideas earlier.  So a grain of silver in medieval times would be worth maybe a certain # of grains of barley ....let's say 1,000 grains for example.  1 troy oz of the silver Spanish dollar coin (451 grains) would be let's say would be roughly equal to 451,000 grains of barley.  The silver/gold/grain price would fluctuate of course... A grain of gold would be worth roughly 16x a silver grain (based on the free-market ratio which I've heard was generally around 16:1 a very long time ago)   In the agrarian countryside, the reference point of grains was a good one.  However, in cities and towns with more service-related occupations,  'Nick Szabo' describes how accounting for time & sacrifice, time-wage rates, & clocks improved the economy and working relationships: http://szabo.best.vwh.net/synch.html
BTW read this paragraph gave me a chuckle:
"The most valuable property of the bell tower time was not its accuracy, but its fairness.    Even if it broadcast the wrong time, it broadcast the same wrong time to everybody.   An employer, even if he was colluding with the Church to bias the sometimes subjective ringing of the canonical hours, couldn’t tell his favorite employees that it was time to go home, while making other employees work extra, and pretend that it was the same time.  (In contrast, on our computer networks such “Byzantine” attacks are possible, without advanced safeguards, when “broadcasting” time or other information)."   

To your second point about cost, I agree and I mentioned that from an Austrian point of view value is the primary driving factor.  However 'Nick Szabo' addresses this as well in all his other writings on 'Origins of Money', collectibles, sacrifice&time, unforgeable costliness etc.  (You should read all his stuff.)  So craftsmen in antiquity would not really make anything of immediate functional value in creating beads of money.  So why would they sacrifice so much time and effort making beads when every day would have been about survival from an evolutionary standpoint?  'Nick Szabo' would call this unforgeable costliness and another way that a money can originate and he cites many examples.  Even Adam Smith brought up the Cost of Production Theory of Value.  From a logical Austrian perspective you can dismiss that theory,  however from a human standpoint there seems to be a perception of value primarily based on cost & sacrifice.  'Nick Szabo' discusses how people value collectibles oftentimes for it's unforgeable costliness like for example an intricately weaved Native American basket.  It's a human instinct.  So Bitcoin is exactly that experiment.   The use of Bitcoin for it's immediate functional use as money is clearly lacking, but the potential future use as money seems to be growing.  The promise and capability of being a global secure ledger, the unforgeable costliness of mining, the network effect etc seems to be driving Bitcoin to be accepted as such in a fascinating real world experiment. 

The human reference point of computing time for a Bitcoin block or Satoshi would be its relative value to human time.  So 10 minutes of computing time would fluctuate around X hours of human time, just as a grain of silver would fluctuate around X amount of barley grains.  Whether the inventor designed Bitcoin to have computing time as a point of reference or he just needed to have a way to control inflation over time using automatically-adjusting difficulty I'm not sure.  It's probably by design if you read 'Nick Szabo'.  Anyways it's just interesting to ponder.

BTW the idea that the unforgeable costliness of the Bitcoin POW can be used as a unit of account does not necessarily make it have value.  Bitcoin, from a typical Austrian economist point of view, must show value first as a global ledger/payment system/digital commodity before the computational time unit of account can be used. 

Over time if the demand and value of Bitcoin is there, the computational time 'unit of account' can be the reference point when the actual value of an Bitcoin is used more for it's exchange value, rather than it's subjective use value (as a payment system/ledger/collectible etc.)

For example gold is first used as jewelry or for industrial use, but over time because of its other qualities (divisibility, durability, relative portability, fungibility) it became the primary commodity for exchange and its monetary value became dominant over it's subjective use-value.

Quote from: jabbajabba ༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ on March 08, 2015, 05:45:55 pm

Quote from: TurkeyLeg on March 08, 2015, 06:27:23 am

Quote from: islandking on November 26, 2014, 01:16:30 am

I feel like $10 is far to high. How about $0.50 or $1?

Who is picking up their mouse for $1?

agree, that is not enough

I think 5 bitUSD would be good.

It seems Square cash is giving $5 for sign up and $5 for referral now.  I remember before it was $1.  We have to remember that Paypal & Square had or have incredible amounts of VC capital so we have to do more with less.

 

This is big, and I think bitShares is a better fit. 

The backend is Bitcoin and I think when you're recruiting tellers it requires knowledge about Bitcoin:  https://medium.com/first-round-insiders/abra-innovation-in-remittance-b011d6a66ef6
The growth of tellers may be limited somewhat because they would have to know and understand Bitcoin. (I think it's just a Bitcoin wallet with hedging features. I'd have to find out the exact details.)   However, it may also just be widely adopted by Bitcoin users in general and used in place of localBitcoins.  Remittance would just be an extension of that.  It says Abra can guarantee home currency value for '72hrs'....Anyways I think this may be the next big VC-backed Bitcoin company (after Coinbase/Bitpay).  Great to hear. 

I was hoping to recruit a team to build a mobile wallet app designed so that the user would not even know what Bitcoin/BTS was but would learn to use bitUSD (or bitEuro/bitGold/bitCNY) etc.  The geolocation feature to find local money exchangers would be a huge additional feature.  It's really the best way to decentralize the gateway function for mass adoption.  Let me know if anyone is interested in working on something like this. 

Overall I think this opportunity is huge.