I'd like to help out here too. It seems like the message is too complex (for many reasons) and needs to be filtered down to attract a wider audience. Toast, if you're interested, please reach out to collaborate.
(As a reference, here's an old FAQ article on Bitshares: http://btcgeek.com/bitshares-guide/)

Quote from: bytemaster on January 06, 2014, 07:06:48 am

Quote from: SpeedDemon13 on January 06, 2014, 06:55:40 am

Quote from: NineLives on January 06, 2014, 02:07:35 am

Quote from: que23 on January 06, 2014, 01:55:24 am

What's the best ETA for Bitshares? I heard bytemaster say he's going to go in a cave for two weeks, but the change from POW to POS would mean a complete rework of the system. AngelShares gives them some money to get more coders, but all those people will need to be trained or caught up. I'm figuring we might be looking at around 6 months to a BitShares release. Especially since the security people still have to comb through everything. Does anyone have better estimates?

Bump.  Same, Estimated ETA would be great.

I concur. What is the approximate release date, tentatively?

I will have a working command line alpha wallet + blockchain algorithm this month.  I just checked in code that generates bids and short positions as well as transfers and builds a block chain.   I have to implement the bid/ask matching engine which I will have roughed in this week.   Now that I am focused entirely on this I hope to make rapid progress and will report in to this thread every day with my progress.

I'm asking mainly for two reasons:

1,  Gives me time to buy more PTS and plan ahead
2,  Setup more hardware for mining BTS.

Even if you said 6 month or 1 year then its something for me to work towards?

Ta

BTS won't be mined, just so you are aware. It's just AGS and PTS now.

I wonder how a digital asset could be created without a central trust where the real assets are stored.

A very simple mechanism for a digital asset is to set up a trust that  associates for each asset, e.g. shares IBM, a digital Bit Certificate that establishes the link with the IBM shares.

So in essence for each real asset a digital currency is issued which must be backed up by the real asset for 100%. The only advantage is that you can exchange this currency without brokers and store it decentralized.

Once the companies itself start to issue Bit Certificates for their shares the need for the trust disappears.

To organize a derivative market their is always a market coordinator needed between the buyer and holder of derivative contracts.

The colored coins initiative is trying to do exactly this, where the fungibility of Bitcoins is destroyed and instead you can track individual Bitcoins/satoshis through the chain.

Quote from: coolspeed on January 04, 2014, 12:32:00 pm

Quote from: bytemaster on January 03, 2014, 10:09:30 pm

Quote from: smiley35 on January 03, 2014, 09:46:47 pm

Quote from: toast on January 03, 2014, 09:42:51 pm

Quote from: smiley35 on January 03, 2014, 09:25:28 pm

Why would anybody short fiat at a 5% tax? It may be that volatile in the future but that seems crazy right now. If no one shorts it how is bitusd created?

You can short against any asset, 5% may not be so unreasonable if you think USD will fall against oil/bts/btc/gold/silver. That said, I think you have a point given how much of an emphasis on currencies there is in the current root chain plan.

That is awesome.

One more question. That is 5% a year right?

Yes

Why the 5% should be hard-coded? And how can we reach the consensus that 5% is not too much?

5% may even be too little.

It would be a payoff.

What % fee is reasonable to charge someone to short a currency. (5% is rather cheap compared to the fees you would pay to other services to short order.) But here we need to get allot of people to short order so we can lend bitAssets into existence. So theres the first payoff.

Next we need to make a reasonable return for clients who want to store their money in as bitassets for the 5% return.

Here 5% may be too low. I am able to get between 4.9 and 8% annual return at my national bank's super safe, backed up, conservative money market account that doesnt require new understanding of technology or to stomach perceived risk.

That's not the right perspective to look at this, IMO. Different asset classes have different interest rates. I doubt USD money markets would give you 8% return. I also doubt any bank in the world would give you 5% interest on gold deposits, denominated in gold. Bitcoin too, should have a very low interest rate, if at all, in the free market.

Also, 5% isn't much when you put a collateral against which you're loaning money. The cheapest brokerages, for instance, let you borrow USD at less than 1% against your stock portfolio.

From a saver's perspective, this seems like a good deal. I am not so sure about this from the speculator's perspective. The open market, with all its flaws, might yield better results.

I am not sure how this could be made better though. Can interest rates themselves be floating, as in market determined by some mechanism?

Quote from: ruletheworld on December 31, 2013, 02:40:23 am

I can help with the blog too. You can check out my current blog in my signature.

That's a terrific article - very clear and well explained. I think we should get it out to Reddit and HackerNews.

Thanks! I shared it on Twitter and a few of my followers asked me about it. Give it a try for Reddit and HN - I tried but didn't garner too much interest yesterday (at least on HN, it depends a lot on the initial votes). I would be happy to help with the marketing/blog efforts of MemoryCoin.

As someone who does cross-platform development, C++ is by far the best choice.  You discover your bugs at compile time and have the power to easily tweak things for each target.  With other systems you discover your bugs at runtime and often are helpless to fix the platform specific quirks that result.

Quote from: ruletheworld on December 30, 2013, 01:37:41 am

Quote from: bytemaster on December 30, 2013, 12:26:25 am

Quote from: ruletheworld on December 29, 2013, 09:46:02 pm

Thanks for putting that exchange to light. I realized Cryptsy doesn't seem to know how this works. However, their last support email that I received, after BigVern's reply above, was
"I promise you that we don't want to steal anyone's coins...

I'm talking to Vern about this now, and will let you know the solution.
"
(I realize steal was a strong word, but I don't think there was any other way to get their attention!)
Even though exchanges might have to go through an additional step, I think it is only fair that they make the distributions to their users (yes, I agree holding the coins yourself is the best way). Same goes with other PTS exchanges like Bter. I don't see a terrible cost to the exchange, honestly. The procedure should be fairly straightforward. Worst case, they could take a fee of 5% of MMC and give the rest to the users.

It would require some significant effort on the part of the exchange to track every possible distribution.  Until the value of these distributions becomes quite large I would suggest that the exchange should keep the distributions as part of their standard fee.  When they see people starting to withdraw all of their funds prior to a snapshot they will get the idea that they should do something.

Why would they do something when they see people withdrawing funds? They get the withdrawal fees from it.
The only way exchanges would "do something" would be when one of the exchanges honors a distribution and another doesn't, in which case the users will move to the one that does.

Well, they would loose transaction fees from trading while the funds are out of the exchange.

Right, but if I want to sell my PTS, it is not like I have too many options other than to list them back on the exchange. Only, now I had to do an additional withdrawal step, which makes it good for the exchanges because of the fees.

Thanks for putting that exchange to light. I realized Cryptsy doesn't seem to know how this works. However, their last support email that I received, after BigVern's reply above, was
"I promise you that we don't want to steal anyone's coins...

I'm talking to Vern about this now, and will let you know the solution.
"
(I realize steal was a strong word, but I don't think there was any other way to get their attention!)
Even though exchanges might have to go through an additional step, I think it is only fair that they make the distributions to their users (yes, I agree holding the coins yourself is the best way). Same goes with other PTS exchanges like Bter. I don't see a terrible cost to the exchange, honestly. The procedure should be fairly straightforward. Worst case, they could take a fee of 5% of MMC and give the rest to the users.