Would anyone else be interested in a "privacy-first" Bitshares fork?   As I see it, privacy oriented features have languished with Bitshares.  I'm not sure there's much desire on the part of the current community to support better privacy protections.  Given Daniel Larimer's recent pronouncements, I don't expect proper privacy protections with EOS either.    Therefore, a privacy-centric fork might be the best path forward. 

Here's some of the features I'd like:

1.  Monero-level privacy protections:  sender, receiver, amount, IP address.
2.  All transactions private by default. (Like Monero)
3.  Privacy-centric communication channels (such as Riot.im).
4.  Regularly scheduled hardforks (every 6 months). 
5.  100 trillion total supply with tail emission (0.5%/year).  (100 trillion USD is roughly equivalent to the global broad money supply, which includes coins, banknotes, money market accounts, savings, checking). 
6.  Daily Dutch auctions for the first 10 years (to insure a widespread, fair distribution).   Similar to EOS token distribution, but extended over 10 years instead of 1 year. 
7.  10% of the total supply reserved for investors, development team, marketing, governance, testing, lobbying (similar to Zcash)
8.  Governance by a non-profit foundation  (similar to Zcash Foundation)
9.  All code open source, under same license as Bitshares (MIT)
10.  Share drop to existing Bitshares owners
11.  Steempower-like token which give long-term HODL'ers greater influence over the governance of the ecosystem.
12.  Fee Backed Assets fully implemented
13.  Social policy bond like bounty system:  https://www.socialgoals.com

Any chance we could allow numbers into the symbols for UIA's, smartcoins?  For example, if there were an MPA pegged to the S&P500, it would be nice if it could be given the symbol "SP500". 

To buy one bitUSD will cost about $1.00 (the actual cost will fluctuate above or below this about, depending on how well the peg is holding).

To short sell one bitUSD, you first have to put up at least $1.75 worth of BTS as collateral.  The BTS network then issues you one bitUSD, which you can then sell.   You have to maintain your collateral above a certain level (currently 175% of the value of your bitUSD short positions), or you will face a margin call.

You buy bitUSD when you want a currency whose value and volatility will closely follow the dollar.

You short sell bitUSD when you're bullish on the prospects of Bitshares, and you think that BTS will be worth more in the future--relative  to the dollar--than it is now.   

To illustrate, let's suppose that you borrow one bitUSD from the network, and put up $2 worth of BTS as collateral.  Once issued, you sell that bitUSD for $1.  Now suppose that BTS rises in price so much that a dollar is now worth only 1% of the BTS it was worth before.  You can buy back bitUSD to close out your short position using only $0.01 worth of BTS.  In other words, you've bought low ($0.01) and sold high ($1.00), thereby making $0.99 for each bitUSD you shorted. 

There is a developers telegram channel but only by invitation, not hard to get in,  hang around in BitsharesDEX channel, describe your project/issue/interest  and you will get invited by some of the devs.

Okay, thank you!

FBA is a lot more complicated to implement and requires additional work on top of the integration of Smart Assets in both bitshares and openbazaar. So I think it will cost much more to shareholders, and from fav answer I suppose we are not ready to pay a lot for that. I'm not convinced this complexity worth the effort. We should Keep It Simple, Stupid (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KISS_principle).

I suppose you don't have the developper in charge of the implementation yet. So what we need is to be able to go to the OB community and say, "Bitshares is ready to give you X  (bit)USD and help you integrate SmartAssets". This is what I call a bounty and is a special type of worker: a worker with a multisig escrow account, that will release the funds when the implementation is finished.
In your worker proposal you can spread the "bounty" in mulitple tasks: specification, implementation,  management.

* nods *  Yeah, a bounty / worker as you described seems to be the way to go for right now.  I thought FBA's actually existed as they were originally spec'ed, with a working example (the STEALTH token).   
"

I was told that the committee needs to update it.

I submitted a github request to make the LTM fee adjust dynamically.    Consider giving it a thumbs up:

https://github.com/bitshares/bitshares-core/issues/545

I'm less convinced by the Fee Backet Asset idea.

Why not offering a bounty paid by the reserve fund for the integration of Smart Assets in Open Bazaar?

If a bounty can get it done better that's cool with me.  I suggested a FBA because that seemed like it would be more appealing to the people putting up the money.   Why do you think bounties rather than FBA's would work better?

Thanks for the response!  If not bitshares, what would you recommend instead?