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General Discussion / Cabinet Hosted Meeting #1 on BitShares-wide topics
« on: September 27, 2019, 10:18:06 am »
The Cabinet, @permie, @Cryptick1, @Don-gabriel, @Kimchiking, @Markopaasila and @Cryptokong123 have begun hosting meetings with pairs of community members to discuss an agenda on the topic of that BitShares situation, the bts price, the WP system, and compromise towards good governance.
Permie hosted this meeting, and transcribed the 11,000 words of the meeting-minutes for everyone in the community to read. Permie aims to host the same meeting with multiple different pairs of community members and collate all the responses to each section of the agenda so we can see where everyone agrees, and where there are compromises needed to be made.
This is about improving the unity of the community and moving forward to a clear vision.
Permie tries not to take sides in any debate and to just fasciliate the conversation and make sure everyone understands eachother.
Interested People in future meetings so far:
Bench
Bitcoinfacilcom
Thule - 90m Proxy - Eastern Europe
Jam PR - US eastern timezone
Kencode - anarchooulco UTC-5
============================================
Cabinet Hosted BitShares Meeting #1
Date: 21/09/19
Time: 13:00UTC
Discord Channel: “Cabinet Hosted Meeting”
Host: Cabinet, @Permie
Attendees:
@fractalnode
@AmmarYousef
Foreword/Introduction:
This is the first of a planned series of Cabinet-hosted meetings between small groups of BitShares supporters to discuss particular BitShares-wide issues and communicate a vision for the future. Multiple small-group meetings each discussing similar topics will help each other to see other perspectives and co-operate to reach a negotiated shared vision with some compromises. A compromised but united vision is superior to a variety of disjointed “purist” visions when it comes to BitShares voter governance.
Worker Proposals getting in and out of the funding zone due to competing visions does not make stable governance. Successfully implementing a subjectively “inferior” negotiated (but still positive) plan is more beneficial than starting and subsequently abandoning a subjectively “superior” un-negotiated plan.
Points to discuss:
BitShares is owned and operated by the community of bts holders. What is the goal of the BitShares community?
What does BitShares offer the world?
How can this community push the bts project forward?
How to enhance BitShares’ value proposition?
What challenges is BitShares facing? Describe your perspective on:
Governance
Voter Apathy - most bts stake does not vote.
Public Relations and Branding
Cascading SmartCoin Margin Calls. (Large topic)
DEX Liquidity
What should BitShares do next? Describe your perspective on:
Uniting the bts community behind a shared vision.
A rising bts price. Why does it rise? Speculators buying on technical analysis? Increased PR? Fee income?
Short term planning vs long term planning.
How important is the focus on the price and key Technical Analysis price-points in encouraging new-holders; for speculators? For long term holders?
Is BitShares out of “startup mode” yet? - Should bts be a profitable DAO as soon as possible? Or should it be spending now to create profitable income for the community in the future?
Introduce yourself:
Fractalnode: 5-10 mins to outline a brief summary of your perspective on what you think is the biggest problem for BitShares currently.
Ammar: 5-10 mins to outline a brief summary of your perspective on what you think is the biggest problem for BitShares currently.
Main discussion:
As a group going through the above list 2 to 2.3.3.2 and discussing each perspective and discussing points that can be compromised to reach a goal that is acceptable to the most bts holders. If only some of these topics can be discussed that is ok.
Meeting Minutes:
Permie read through the Agenda to make sure everyone starts on the same page and then fractalnode started discussion with a brief summary of his perspective on what he thinks is the biggest problem for BitShares currently.
Fractalnode: We need to recreate awareness of BitShares’ capabilities in the crypto space. Holders - Spreading awareness and teaching about BitShares on social media and among friends. By submitting suggestions for improvement and conducting constructive discussions on further development directions. With regards to development; implement new features and improve existing ones and with regards to the committee and developers together aggregate community perceptions on further development and provide funding for this development.
Permie: So hopefully with more meetings like this we help with that.
Fractalnode: How to enhance BitShares’ value proposition; I think the value of the bts project is high enough today that if compared to the competition bts should be in the top 10 cryptos. The problem is awareness of the bitshares offer we are at the moment like a pearl at the bottom of the ocean. In my opinion the value bitshares has does not actively participate in the game for a high place in the overall crypto market capitalisation. A new large proportion of investors are only following the top 10-20 cryptos and BitShares was not there when new investors appeared and that is why they do not know bitshares. People who know of bitshares often speak about it in the past tense. They talk about a project that failed due to a lack of funding for development that Dan Larimer was supposed to get in 2015/16. Few people know that bitshares is a precursor of Delegated Proof of Stake, the fastest chain from 2015-2018, a token factory, a peer to peer DEX that 16 exchanges (gateways) have been created using BitShares since Bytemaster left. But the number of transactions has increased many times since then that we have moved to version 3.0 and version 4.0 is not far away. Now we are experiencing similar threats balancing on the brink of another winter (low price and slow development). In addition, it is very difficult to get knowledge about BitShares, it is very advanced and it is difficult to talk about it, it takes a lot of time.
All involvement in PR should start with the preparation of training materials in the form of a Video Tutorial. I think it should not be less than 5 hours. All PR should start with this tutorial.
Permie: Thanks fractalnode. Ammar I think it would be good if you could respond with your thoughts on what fractal has just said before we move on.
Ammar Yousef: Thank you so much fractal for your time. Thank you so much guys. I would like to start my thoughts about BitShares with trying to describe bitshares as it is. I'm not gonna draft a vision and say this is what bitshares should be but instead I would like to talk about what bitshares actually is now and how can we describe bitshares? In simple terminology BitShares is simply a database, a decentralised database, that is running across multiple nodes to perform particular functions and to support a particular business and user use cases such as exchange and creating ICO’s, creating particular tokens that can be used as a security or commodity. So far the community is divided, some are saying that this platform has to be regulated while some are saying it should not. Some say we should not address ourselves as a particular entity when it comes to the community itself. So this is one of the things that is so important is to be able to describe the network and be able to identify its current structure and communicate this structure to the masses. Unfortunately it is so complicated and I agree with you, fractal, that to actually describe bts to ordinary people is difficult but it is a job that can be done. We can have a simplified drafting, we can have particular videos which talks about the community and what it is and what kind of purposes that are going to be performed at the top of this blockchain. One of the things that me and people with me are trying to do is organise the community. The community is not well organised. Nobody knows what other people are doing, you find people writing information, sometimes inaccurate information, in the forums and telegram while some of them are not writing at all here or there while they are doing good things for the network. The investors and the community are not aware of what is going on behind the scenes. We need a particular organising tool or software which we (Ammar and his team) are currently designing. Which will let every entity of the community know what the others are doing so we evolve together. Now the network itself, bitshares, is so unique. According to my belief and according to my experience in the cryptocurrency community. BitShares is actually a big network which has a lot of investors involved in it and at the same time it has a dynamic structure, it has a dynamic management, it has a very dynamic potential and so on. Its one of the main reasons why we believe bitshares is one of the biggest blockchains in the world. When it comes to the features that its offering to the next generation. We are aware that a couple of blockchains are doing some work on competing decentralised exchanges but so far bts are the leaders when it comes to the exchange functionality. Every blockchain would have actually a development curve. We believe that the development curve is being driven in a good direction now. We are taking care of our developers, the core developers, taking care of our channels; which are the user interface channels (Telegram and bitsharestalk). We are taking care of the dynamics of the markets when it comes to the votes and the enhancements that are going on with the bitAssets and how the deals are being managed within the platform.
I’ll stop here when it comes to describing bitshares and now let's carry on with the next subject.
Permie: Ok great. I agree with what both of you have said about how complex it is to explain BitShares to new people and to get them to consider that spending so many hours learning about it would be worth doing.Things like video tutorials and everything really needs to come together. And like you say fractal all PR should start with videos like this.
Fractalnode: I spent 2 weeks in 2015 to learn BitShares.
Permie: Me too. Yes it does take a long time and still only just starting to understand the margin call mechanism properly, after 4 years!
Fractalnode: I think the current BitShares documentation takes too long to read.
Permie: Yes we do need a video tutorial.And I really like, Ammar, your https://bitshares.management website which is like a place to organise people like you can on github but for general bitshare tasks so that everyone can see what’s going on and what there is to help with. I think that’s really good.
Ok so, I think if we go to Point 2 on the agenda: “Points to discuss: BitShares is owned and operated by the community of bts holders. What is the goal of the bitshares community? I’ll put that question to both of you. Fractal let’s hear from you first. Actually let’s start with “What can BitShares offer the world?”
Fractalnode: Low entry barrier - the user only needs to select the account name and securely store password
Pure P2P trading
Any to Any Trading Pairs
UIA Token Factory
CPD Token Factory (aka Smartcoins)
Stable Coins - USD, CNY, …..
HERO - USD deposit
APR since FED
Permie: So if I remember correctly HERO has a price feed that tracks +%5 APR since the FED started printing USD bills.
Fractalnode: Trade Anything
Hertz - Algorithm Based Asset (ABA) - price feed following a sine wave.
Permie: So Algorithm based assets, that are predictable like the tide times of the sea.
Fractalnode: BTCSHA - BTC SHA256 hashpower
Permie: So trading hash power as a UIA on BitShares.
Fractalnode: TEMP Temperature in (...) - does not yet exist
square meter of housing (...) - does not yet exist
hectare of land in (...) - does not yet exist
Permie: So are you talking about a SmartCoin with a price feed of the temperature in particular location and another for the average cost per square meter of housing?
Fractalnode: Yes. And hectare of the forest in location) - does not yet exist
BitShares offers: Binary Prediction Market Token Factory
Investment funds eg. TWENTIX / BTWTY
Permie: So that’s an index fund that tracks the value of the top 20 cryptos.
Fractalnode: Exchange Backed Assets
Permie: I think that’s where the trading fee of an asset is used to buy-back the Exchange-backed-asset. Or “Fee backed assets”
Fractalnode: Decentralized Order Book of 16+ exchanges (gateways) such as:
wallet.bitshares.org
openledger.io
market.rudex.org
gdex.io
crypto-bridge.org
ex.xbts.io
exchange.easydex.net
wallet.escodex.com
deex.exchange
bit.btsabc.org
citadel.li/wallet
dex.bitspark.io
dex.iobanker.com
hellobts.com
eubx.io
exchange.winex.pro
wallet.dynx.io
And Hashed Time-Lock Contracts (Atomic Swap, OTC - Over the Counter trades)
Permie: So trades with the BitShares blockchain being the only (trustless) counterparty.
Fractalnode: Free Trading Bot (DEXBot.info) funded by BitShares through the Worker Proposal System.
Permie: So that was all for the “What can BitShares offer the world topic”. Yes there’s a lot there that BitShares has to offer and when you do internet searches trying to find an easy place that tells you all this stuff is quite hard to find unless you know what to look for. So the PR around that can be improved.
Ammar do you have anything to add?
Ammar Yousef: Yeah let me talk here about what BitShares can offer and how we can come up with the idea behind what bitshares can offer. Now there are developers offering services through worker proposals and through BSIP’s in order to actually enhance the network in one particular direction. Now these directions are not actually based in a particular use case for BitShares. It is totally based on what the developer thinks is required. But what I believe the use cases must actually come through the businesses themselves or it must come from the user himself and that’s not happening. What is happening now is actually that very few use cases are on the platform apart from the gateway exchanges. These are the only source of btishares on the network. So bitshares in this stage according to my belief is still in the “startup phase” where investors are actually investing within the platform and waiting for a particular income which is not really happening so quickly. Some of these investors are holding on because they still have the belief that bitshares will enhance and that's what bitshares itself is a project which is aiming to target a permissionless transaction that would be facilitated through a particular front end and will lay the record on the decentralised database back end. The current situation is so complex but that's how the enhancement curve works. Every startup will start in this way and it will operate partially according to the aims and it will keep developing itself from the income that will come during the way. Currently you have centralised gateway exchanges holding bts and offering bts through their centralised services like API, website or a particular GUI and they control the value of bts through buying and selling it on the platform and on the gateways side. You don't have that huge use cases on the platform for bts except the gateways who are actually utilising the software to do a transaction on the platform while offering the bts to the people who want to invest in the system. What should we do in the future? We should actually come up with a solution to enhance how our gateways are working. And i believe the HTLC feature will open up very huge wide use cases for bitshares to enhance. Now the HTLC is in a very early stage we need a lot more work related to the front end to simplify the UX and at the same time communicating how this HTLC can benefit the users who need to know. We must utilise our current value which is being mis-utilised, we should utilise it in bringing use cases for bts itself. So companies or corporations or users can come and do their transaction on the platform while utilising the bts itself and buying it and holding it by investors.
Permie: I agree with a lot of what you’re saying. Talking about the Hash Time locked contracts which is like an atomic swap and the HTLC front end does need improvement but it does already work, there have been quite a few test transactions and it works as intended. You can already use it if you go to the “Spotlight” of the download light client or if you want to use a web wallet you can go to develop.bitshares.org and it’s up and running on there. When
Ammar, when you were talking about Centralised exchanges were you specifically referring to gateways on bitshares?
Ammar Yousef: Yes when i talked about CEX’s i am referring to gateways. Gateways are simply the centralized exchanges and some of them are having a particular website that is running and you can go there and deal on these CEX’s some with KYC and some of them don’t have a particular interface but offer assets to trade.
Permie: Ok, so you think there needs to be more use cases where the gateways provide more income to the DEX itself?
Ammar Yousef: Yes because when I see that an exchange feature itself I see it is a single feature, its one of the main features of bitshares but in the end its a feature. And this feature can be offered by Centralised exchanges but if we don’t have the use cases of the bitAssets for example or the User Issued Assets - that gateways offer - we are simply using a platform that has a particular native coin and facilitating transactions between centralised exchanges but the enhanced version of BitShares it would not be that at all.
Permie: At all? Are you saying BitShares would lose the gateways or that it will build on top of that as well?
Ammar Yousef: I am saying I think that centralised exchange gateways are very important at this stage and they are responsible for a lot of the investment behind BitShares but at the same time they are the ones behind the developers because simply they are the ones liquidating the bts for the end developers in order to improve the application. So CEX’s are important but the aim of humanity should be aiming towards disconnecting the network even from the CEX’s because that is what we are currently ending up with. You have CEX’s trying to actually get the value out of bts and they have the competition to deal with. The competition is actually using the features of the platform and every one of them is trying to enforce his game on the other. And this is totally unhealthy. You are ending up with the fractured community. And if the community is trying to impose what ideologies that they have on the others. Definitely now you have the East/West division in the network. These people are saying something… and these people are saying something else. Definitely enhancing the area of centralised exchanges influence on BitShares has to have this as a top concern for the community so as not to be reliant on them.
Permie: So that would be Hash Time Lock Contracts?
Fractalnode: Gateways are temporary in my opinion. IBC will change everything. Inter-blockchain-communication. So if you've got bitcoin on the bitcoin chain and you want a bitcoin gateway issued UIA asset on the DEX IBC would allow you to trustless trade between chains. Able to trustlessly swap between the Bitcoin chain and the BitShares network.
Ammar: That is what we are simply trying to implement and would like to know something here. We should differentiate the HTLC feature and atomic swaps. HTLC feature is a feature that works one a single blockchain to facilitate trustless exchanges between particular addresses within this BitShares blockchain. But the atomic swap feature means to exchange between different blockchains. This would require a lot of work on how HTLC works with one of these outside blockchains.There are particular measures and requirements from these other blockchains in order to be able to do Atomic Swaps with these chains. We need to make sure our developers are actually including these measurements and requirements within the code in order to be able to do the Atomic Swaps with other blockchains. Currently we are working towards facilitating particular blockchains like XRP. Im talking about XRP because simply it is already operating the same way. They support public API and they do a lot of work when it comes to integrating with the current financial system as software. XRP is a software provider which built interfaces on the XRP blockchain. But Ripple is not the same as XRP. Ripple is a company on top of XRP. We need to name things as they are as there is a lot of misunderstanding out there when it comes to XRP and Ripple role. Atomic Swaps to XRP could be useful for BitShares. The latest findings on XRP are that some are saying XRP is a centralised blockchain and particular people has a large amount of XRP but the latest findings talking about Exchanges are having huge amount of XRP on their websites. This is one of the tricky things that XRP holders use to create their use cases. Which i actually would be recommending to BitShares community. To start giving particular bounties to big exchanges so that these big exchanges would be supporting particular use cases and that is what is happening now on Binance. This is totally good for the investors not just the developers.
Permie: So youre saying that BitShares should use some of its funds to pay desirable Centralised Exchanges…?
Ammar: To be able to gain more value and to get more popularity/
Permie: Do you mean to get listed or as a PR stunt?
Ammar: Getting listed… let me tell you something, it is basically getting listed but it shouldn't be that approach. We were talking about getting listed in certain areas where there will be bts use cases, such as using SmartCoins on CEX’s. But i wouldn't actually go with the people that we should start paying to get listed. This would be a total waste. But at least we should be listed in these big exchanges so we should encourage the big exchanges in order to demonstrate the capabilities of BitShares. And then work on our bts use cases which is much more important. Now during this time definitely we have to span big exchanges until we have the HTLC function working. If the user on BitShares would be able to be his own gateway through the HTLC or Atomic Swap.
Permie: Would you be able to list some of these use cases BitShares needs to get in to? You said CEXs that could help a particular use case should be paid to help us get the particular use case. What use cases are you thinking of?
Ammar: We must attract people who are into real use cases. Like somebody who does something there and we know that it is performing and they want to do an ICO, they can use BitShares software to create their ICO. I see many ICO’s these days and the more of them that come and use bts for transactions the more the bts network will have value and a healthy environment. But we have challenges now that need to be fixed now before we are able to attract these ICO owners because we have a big issue when it comes to how our current structure is working. You know that BitShares is suffering the price dumps and its suffering on the liquidity side because every WP gets paid in bts and some are dumping on CEX’s. This has to be controlled and our proxies proposing some mechanism to control this, such as division of funding per department. Different pools for different purposes. Different budgets. So a budget for enhancement/development and it could have it’s own committee to act on behalf of the network.
Permie: so youre saying instead of having individual WPS that get unvoted all the time you
Re saying we should have 4 or 5 different Worker Proposals that are for departments that can allocate funds to tasks as needed. So you’re saying these funds go to the particular department budget and that particular development committee decides how to spend it and tell the market what they want to do. It would be in that departments gift to allocate the funds as they see fit. To then allocate funding to contractors that prove they can do the work. BitShares would be more organised and able to say “We want this done, can you do it?” as opposed to waiting for contractors to offer ideas themselves. To help BitShares get the use cases.
Ammar Yousef: Exactly but that is not the case now. Now we are waiting for the developers to come and offer work which will be voted and you don't really know if this worker is the only one that is out there because you are not giving the developer the task to work. You are relying on the developer to design what work should be done. This is not how development works best. It should have a particular vision and mission and these missions should be tied with a budget and this budget is Capital Expenditure and Operating Expenses and we should not reinvent the wheel. These are known methods. These are the basics. We have workers that are doing good work and these should not be stopped. There needs to be better organisation in order to keep our important developers working to improve the network. Without continued development BitShares will have nothing. Currently we are unorganised. It’s normal, every startup is that unorganised in the beginning but we are moving forward.
Permie: I agree. And with that system of departmentalised worker proposals to allocate a budget to a particular area with a sub-committee for each department it allows compromise to take place on that level. If we are going to use the simplified East/West division we could have half of the sub-committees from the East and half from the West and there would only be approval if there was agreement, it makes it easier to put into action the vision that each group has but ensure that a compromised version where everyone is satisfied takes place. Compromising on the vision to get development moving in a single direction and not stop/starting all the time. Each individual department making a decision on how to spend from there makes it easier to negotiate.
Ammar: Of course, mostly you will be building utility for the competition around workers to do the work, keeping costs lower. There is currently no competition because there is no particular BitShares mission giving direction and getting the market to compete to implement it. Very few developers will know about BitShares and the work that is needed to be done. People are unaware, developers are now unaware. If we find new developers to come in they would believe looking at the current structure that everything is sold out and that they wouldn’t be able to get in. Which is unhealthy for the network.
Fractalnode: That's true, but developers are passionate and visionaries. Our developers built what we have now.
Permie: You’re right. We do need to keep the developers we have currently and who’ve been here for a long time as they are a big part of what we have and the knowledge that we need to retain. All the experience that they have.
Ammar: Our developers are the best in the whole world. I’ve seen their skills. I am not saying they are doing a bad job. They are doing a great job. But, again, the vision should not come from the developer. I am saying this because that would create a conflict of interest between developers and investors. The developers are paid by the investors. This is one cause of the unhealthy community environment now. We can see these scenarios are happening as the investors are in conflict and the developers are not getting paid.
Permie hosted this meeting, and transcribed the 11,000 words of the meeting-minutes for everyone in the community to read. Permie aims to host the same meeting with multiple different pairs of community members and collate all the responses to each section of the agenda so we can see where everyone agrees, and where there are compromises needed to be made.
This is about improving the unity of the community and moving forward to a clear vision.
Permie tries not to take sides in any debate and to just fasciliate the conversation and make sure everyone understands eachother.
Interested People in future meetings so far:
Bench
Bitcoinfacilcom
Thule - 90m Proxy - Eastern Europe
Jam PR - US eastern timezone
Kencode - anarchooulco UTC-5
============================================
Cabinet Hosted BitShares Meeting #1
Date: 21/09/19
Time: 13:00UTC
Discord Channel: “Cabinet Hosted Meeting”
Host: Cabinet, @Permie
Attendees:
@fractalnode
@AmmarYousef
Foreword/Introduction:
This is the first of a planned series of Cabinet-hosted meetings between small groups of BitShares supporters to discuss particular BitShares-wide issues and communicate a vision for the future. Multiple small-group meetings each discussing similar topics will help each other to see other perspectives and co-operate to reach a negotiated shared vision with some compromises. A compromised but united vision is superior to a variety of disjointed “purist” visions when it comes to BitShares voter governance.
Worker Proposals getting in and out of the funding zone due to competing visions does not make stable governance. Successfully implementing a subjectively “inferior” negotiated (but still positive) plan is more beneficial than starting and subsequently abandoning a subjectively “superior” un-negotiated plan.
Points to discuss:
BitShares is owned and operated by the community of bts holders. What is the goal of the BitShares community?
What does BitShares offer the world?
How can this community push the bts project forward?
How to enhance BitShares’ value proposition?
What challenges is BitShares facing? Describe your perspective on:
Governance
Voter Apathy - most bts stake does not vote.
Public Relations and Branding
Cascading SmartCoin Margin Calls. (Large topic)
DEX Liquidity
What should BitShares do next? Describe your perspective on:
Uniting the bts community behind a shared vision.
A rising bts price. Why does it rise? Speculators buying on technical analysis? Increased PR? Fee income?
Short term planning vs long term planning.
How important is the focus on the price and key Technical Analysis price-points in encouraging new-holders; for speculators? For long term holders?
Is BitShares out of “startup mode” yet? - Should bts be a profitable DAO as soon as possible? Or should it be spending now to create profitable income for the community in the future?
Introduce yourself:
Fractalnode: 5-10 mins to outline a brief summary of your perspective on what you think is the biggest problem for BitShares currently.
Ammar: 5-10 mins to outline a brief summary of your perspective on what you think is the biggest problem for BitShares currently.
Main discussion:
As a group going through the above list 2 to 2.3.3.2 and discussing each perspective and discussing points that can be compromised to reach a goal that is acceptable to the most bts holders. If only some of these topics can be discussed that is ok.
Meeting Minutes:
Permie read through the Agenda to make sure everyone starts on the same page and then fractalnode started discussion with a brief summary of his perspective on what he thinks is the biggest problem for BitShares currently.
Fractalnode: We need to recreate awareness of BitShares’ capabilities in the crypto space. Holders - Spreading awareness and teaching about BitShares on social media and among friends. By submitting suggestions for improvement and conducting constructive discussions on further development directions. With regards to development; implement new features and improve existing ones and with regards to the committee and developers together aggregate community perceptions on further development and provide funding for this development.
Permie: So hopefully with more meetings like this we help with that.
Fractalnode: How to enhance BitShares’ value proposition; I think the value of the bts project is high enough today that if compared to the competition bts should be in the top 10 cryptos. The problem is awareness of the bitshares offer we are at the moment like a pearl at the bottom of the ocean. In my opinion the value bitshares has does not actively participate in the game for a high place in the overall crypto market capitalisation. A new large proportion of investors are only following the top 10-20 cryptos and BitShares was not there when new investors appeared and that is why they do not know bitshares. People who know of bitshares often speak about it in the past tense. They talk about a project that failed due to a lack of funding for development that Dan Larimer was supposed to get in 2015/16. Few people know that bitshares is a precursor of Delegated Proof of Stake, the fastest chain from 2015-2018, a token factory, a peer to peer DEX that 16 exchanges (gateways) have been created using BitShares since Bytemaster left. But the number of transactions has increased many times since then that we have moved to version 3.0 and version 4.0 is not far away. Now we are experiencing similar threats balancing on the brink of another winter (low price and slow development). In addition, it is very difficult to get knowledge about BitShares, it is very advanced and it is difficult to talk about it, it takes a lot of time.
All involvement in PR should start with the preparation of training materials in the form of a Video Tutorial. I think it should not be less than 5 hours. All PR should start with this tutorial.
Permie: Thanks fractalnode. Ammar I think it would be good if you could respond with your thoughts on what fractal has just said before we move on.
Ammar Yousef: Thank you so much fractal for your time. Thank you so much guys. I would like to start my thoughts about BitShares with trying to describe bitshares as it is. I'm not gonna draft a vision and say this is what bitshares should be but instead I would like to talk about what bitshares actually is now and how can we describe bitshares? In simple terminology BitShares is simply a database, a decentralised database, that is running across multiple nodes to perform particular functions and to support a particular business and user use cases such as exchange and creating ICO’s, creating particular tokens that can be used as a security or commodity. So far the community is divided, some are saying that this platform has to be regulated while some are saying it should not. Some say we should not address ourselves as a particular entity when it comes to the community itself. So this is one of the things that is so important is to be able to describe the network and be able to identify its current structure and communicate this structure to the masses. Unfortunately it is so complicated and I agree with you, fractal, that to actually describe bts to ordinary people is difficult but it is a job that can be done. We can have a simplified drafting, we can have particular videos which talks about the community and what it is and what kind of purposes that are going to be performed at the top of this blockchain. One of the things that me and people with me are trying to do is organise the community. The community is not well organised. Nobody knows what other people are doing, you find people writing information, sometimes inaccurate information, in the forums and telegram while some of them are not writing at all here or there while they are doing good things for the network. The investors and the community are not aware of what is going on behind the scenes. We need a particular organising tool or software which we (Ammar and his team) are currently designing. Which will let every entity of the community know what the others are doing so we evolve together. Now the network itself, bitshares, is so unique. According to my belief and according to my experience in the cryptocurrency community. BitShares is actually a big network which has a lot of investors involved in it and at the same time it has a dynamic structure, it has a dynamic management, it has a very dynamic potential and so on. Its one of the main reasons why we believe bitshares is one of the biggest blockchains in the world. When it comes to the features that its offering to the next generation. We are aware that a couple of blockchains are doing some work on competing decentralised exchanges but so far bts are the leaders when it comes to the exchange functionality. Every blockchain would have actually a development curve. We believe that the development curve is being driven in a good direction now. We are taking care of our developers, the core developers, taking care of our channels; which are the user interface channels (Telegram and bitsharestalk). We are taking care of the dynamics of the markets when it comes to the votes and the enhancements that are going on with the bitAssets and how the deals are being managed within the platform.
I’ll stop here when it comes to describing bitshares and now let's carry on with the next subject.
Permie: Ok great. I agree with what both of you have said about how complex it is to explain BitShares to new people and to get them to consider that spending so many hours learning about it would be worth doing.Things like video tutorials and everything really needs to come together. And like you say fractal all PR should start with videos like this.
Fractalnode: I spent 2 weeks in 2015 to learn BitShares.
Permie: Me too. Yes it does take a long time and still only just starting to understand the margin call mechanism properly, after 4 years!
Fractalnode: I think the current BitShares documentation takes too long to read.
Permie: Yes we do need a video tutorial.And I really like, Ammar, your https://bitshares.management website which is like a place to organise people like you can on github but for general bitshare tasks so that everyone can see what’s going on and what there is to help with. I think that’s really good.
Ok so, I think if we go to Point 2 on the agenda: “Points to discuss: BitShares is owned and operated by the community of bts holders. What is the goal of the bitshares community? I’ll put that question to both of you. Fractal let’s hear from you first. Actually let’s start with “What can BitShares offer the world?”
Fractalnode: Low entry barrier - the user only needs to select the account name and securely store password
Pure P2P trading
Any to Any Trading Pairs
UIA Token Factory
CPD Token Factory (aka Smartcoins)
Stable Coins - USD, CNY, …..
HERO - USD deposit
APR since FEDPermie: So if I remember correctly HERO has a price feed that tracks +%5 APR since the FED started printing USD bills.
Fractalnode: Trade Anything
Hertz - Algorithm Based Asset (ABA) - price feed following a sine wave.
Permie: So Algorithm based assets, that are predictable like the tide times of the sea.
Fractalnode: BTCSHA - BTC SHA256 hashpower
Permie: So trading hash power as a UIA on BitShares.
Fractalnode: TEMP Temperature in (...) - does not yet exist
square meter of housing (...) - does not yet exist
hectare of land in (...) - does not yet exist
Permie: So are you talking about a SmartCoin with a price feed of the temperature in particular location and another for the average cost per square meter of housing?
Fractalnode: Yes. And hectare of the forest in location) - does not yet exist
BitShares offers: Binary Prediction Market Token Factory
Investment funds eg. TWENTIX / BTWTY
Permie: So that’s an index fund that tracks the value of the top 20 cryptos.
Fractalnode: Exchange Backed Assets
Permie: I think that’s where the trading fee of an asset is used to buy-back the Exchange-backed-asset. Or “Fee backed assets”
Fractalnode: Decentralized Order Book of 16+ exchanges (gateways) such as:
wallet.bitshares.org
openledger.io
market.rudex.org
gdex.io
crypto-bridge.org
ex.xbts.io
exchange.easydex.net
wallet.escodex.com
deex.exchange
bit.btsabc.org
citadel.li/wallet
dex.bitspark.io
dex.iobanker.com
hellobts.com
eubx.io
exchange.winex.pro
wallet.dynx.io
And Hashed Time-Lock Contracts (Atomic Swap, OTC - Over the Counter trades)
Permie: So trades with the BitShares blockchain being the only (trustless) counterparty.
Fractalnode: Free Trading Bot (DEXBot.info) funded by BitShares through the Worker Proposal System.
Permie: So that was all for the “What can BitShares offer the world topic”. Yes there’s a lot there that BitShares has to offer and when you do internet searches trying to find an easy place that tells you all this stuff is quite hard to find unless you know what to look for. So the PR around that can be improved.
Ammar do you have anything to add?
Ammar Yousef: Yeah let me talk here about what BitShares can offer and how we can come up with the idea behind what bitshares can offer. Now there are developers offering services through worker proposals and through BSIP’s in order to actually enhance the network in one particular direction. Now these directions are not actually based in a particular use case for BitShares. It is totally based on what the developer thinks is required. But what I believe the use cases must actually come through the businesses themselves or it must come from the user himself and that’s not happening. What is happening now is actually that very few use cases are on the platform apart from the gateway exchanges. These are the only source of btishares on the network. So bitshares in this stage according to my belief is still in the “startup phase” where investors are actually investing within the platform and waiting for a particular income which is not really happening so quickly. Some of these investors are holding on because they still have the belief that bitshares will enhance and that's what bitshares itself is a project which is aiming to target a permissionless transaction that would be facilitated through a particular front end and will lay the record on the decentralised database back end. The current situation is so complex but that's how the enhancement curve works. Every startup will start in this way and it will operate partially according to the aims and it will keep developing itself from the income that will come during the way. Currently you have centralised gateway exchanges holding bts and offering bts through their centralised services like API, website or a particular GUI and they control the value of bts through buying and selling it on the platform and on the gateways side. You don't have that huge use cases on the platform for bts except the gateways who are actually utilising the software to do a transaction on the platform while offering the bts to the people who want to invest in the system. What should we do in the future? We should actually come up with a solution to enhance how our gateways are working. And i believe the HTLC feature will open up very huge wide use cases for bitshares to enhance. Now the HTLC is in a very early stage we need a lot more work related to the front end to simplify the UX and at the same time communicating how this HTLC can benefit the users who need to know. We must utilise our current value which is being mis-utilised, we should utilise it in bringing use cases for bts itself. So companies or corporations or users can come and do their transaction on the platform while utilising the bts itself and buying it and holding it by investors.
Permie: I agree with a lot of what you’re saying. Talking about the Hash Time locked contracts which is like an atomic swap and the HTLC front end does need improvement but it does already work, there have been quite a few test transactions and it works as intended. You can already use it if you go to the “Spotlight” of the download light client or if you want to use a web wallet you can go to develop.bitshares.org and it’s up and running on there. When
Ammar, when you were talking about Centralised exchanges were you specifically referring to gateways on bitshares?
Ammar Yousef: Yes when i talked about CEX’s i am referring to gateways. Gateways are simply the centralized exchanges and some of them are having a particular website that is running and you can go there and deal on these CEX’s some with KYC and some of them don’t have a particular interface but offer assets to trade.
Permie: Ok, so you think there needs to be more use cases where the gateways provide more income to the DEX itself?
Ammar Yousef: Yes because when I see that an exchange feature itself I see it is a single feature, its one of the main features of bitshares but in the end its a feature. And this feature can be offered by Centralised exchanges but if we don’t have the use cases of the bitAssets for example or the User Issued Assets - that gateways offer - we are simply using a platform that has a particular native coin and facilitating transactions between centralised exchanges but the enhanced version of BitShares it would not be that at all.
Permie: At all? Are you saying BitShares would lose the gateways or that it will build on top of that as well?
Ammar Yousef: I am saying I think that centralised exchange gateways are very important at this stage and they are responsible for a lot of the investment behind BitShares but at the same time they are the ones behind the developers because simply they are the ones liquidating the bts for the end developers in order to improve the application. So CEX’s are important but the aim of humanity should be aiming towards disconnecting the network even from the CEX’s because that is what we are currently ending up with. You have CEX’s trying to actually get the value out of bts and they have the competition to deal with. The competition is actually using the features of the platform and every one of them is trying to enforce his game on the other. And this is totally unhealthy. You are ending up with the fractured community. And if the community is trying to impose what ideologies that they have on the others. Definitely now you have the East/West division in the network. These people are saying something… and these people are saying something else. Definitely enhancing the area of centralised exchanges influence on BitShares has to have this as a top concern for the community so as not to be reliant on them.
Permie: So that would be Hash Time Lock Contracts?
Fractalnode: Gateways are temporary in my opinion. IBC will change everything. Inter-blockchain-communication. So if you've got bitcoin on the bitcoin chain and you want a bitcoin gateway issued UIA asset on the DEX IBC would allow you to trustless trade between chains. Able to trustlessly swap between the Bitcoin chain and the BitShares network.
Ammar: That is what we are simply trying to implement and would like to know something here. We should differentiate the HTLC feature and atomic swaps. HTLC feature is a feature that works one a single blockchain to facilitate trustless exchanges between particular addresses within this BitShares blockchain. But the atomic swap feature means to exchange between different blockchains. This would require a lot of work on how HTLC works with one of these outside blockchains.There are particular measures and requirements from these other blockchains in order to be able to do Atomic Swaps with these chains. We need to make sure our developers are actually including these measurements and requirements within the code in order to be able to do the Atomic Swaps with other blockchains. Currently we are working towards facilitating particular blockchains like XRP. Im talking about XRP because simply it is already operating the same way. They support public API and they do a lot of work when it comes to integrating with the current financial system as software. XRP is a software provider which built interfaces on the XRP blockchain. But Ripple is not the same as XRP. Ripple is a company on top of XRP. We need to name things as they are as there is a lot of misunderstanding out there when it comes to XRP and Ripple role. Atomic Swaps to XRP could be useful for BitShares. The latest findings on XRP are that some are saying XRP is a centralised blockchain and particular people has a large amount of XRP but the latest findings talking about Exchanges are having huge amount of XRP on their websites. This is one of the tricky things that XRP holders use to create their use cases. Which i actually would be recommending to BitShares community. To start giving particular bounties to big exchanges so that these big exchanges would be supporting particular use cases and that is what is happening now on Binance. This is totally good for the investors not just the developers.
Permie: So youre saying that BitShares should use some of its funds to pay desirable Centralised Exchanges…?
Ammar: To be able to gain more value and to get more popularity/
Permie: Do you mean to get listed or as a PR stunt?
Ammar: Getting listed… let me tell you something, it is basically getting listed but it shouldn't be that approach. We were talking about getting listed in certain areas where there will be bts use cases, such as using SmartCoins on CEX’s. But i wouldn't actually go with the people that we should start paying to get listed. This would be a total waste. But at least we should be listed in these big exchanges so we should encourage the big exchanges in order to demonstrate the capabilities of BitShares. And then work on our bts use cases which is much more important. Now during this time definitely we have to span big exchanges until we have the HTLC function working. If the user on BitShares would be able to be his own gateway through the HTLC or Atomic Swap.
Permie: Would you be able to list some of these use cases BitShares needs to get in to? You said CEXs that could help a particular use case should be paid to help us get the particular use case. What use cases are you thinking of?
Ammar: We must attract people who are into real use cases. Like somebody who does something there and we know that it is performing and they want to do an ICO, they can use BitShares software to create their ICO. I see many ICO’s these days and the more of them that come and use bts for transactions the more the bts network will have value and a healthy environment. But we have challenges now that need to be fixed now before we are able to attract these ICO owners because we have a big issue when it comes to how our current structure is working. You know that BitShares is suffering the price dumps and its suffering on the liquidity side because every WP gets paid in bts and some are dumping on CEX’s. This has to be controlled and our proxies proposing some mechanism to control this, such as division of funding per department. Different pools for different purposes. Different budgets. So a budget for enhancement/development and it could have it’s own committee to act on behalf of the network.
Permie: so youre saying instead of having individual WPS that get unvoted all the time you
Re saying we should have 4 or 5 different Worker Proposals that are for departments that can allocate funds to tasks as needed. So you’re saying these funds go to the particular department budget and that particular development committee decides how to spend it and tell the market what they want to do. It would be in that departments gift to allocate the funds as they see fit. To then allocate funding to contractors that prove they can do the work. BitShares would be more organised and able to say “We want this done, can you do it?” as opposed to waiting for contractors to offer ideas themselves. To help BitShares get the use cases.
Ammar Yousef: Exactly but that is not the case now. Now we are waiting for the developers to come and offer work which will be voted and you don't really know if this worker is the only one that is out there because you are not giving the developer the task to work. You are relying on the developer to design what work should be done. This is not how development works best. It should have a particular vision and mission and these missions should be tied with a budget and this budget is Capital Expenditure and Operating Expenses and we should not reinvent the wheel. These are known methods. These are the basics. We have workers that are doing good work and these should not be stopped. There needs to be better organisation in order to keep our important developers working to improve the network. Without continued development BitShares will have nothing. Currently we are unorganised. It’s normal, every startup is that unorganised in the beginning but we are moving forward.
Permie: I agree. And with that system of departmentalised worker proposals to allocate a budget to a particular area with a sub-committee for each department it allows compromise to take place on that level. If we are going to use the simplified East/West division we could have half of the sub-committees from the East and half from the West and there would only be approval if there was agreement, it makes it easier to put into action the vision that each group has but ensure that a compromised version where everyone is satisfied takes place. Compromising on the vision to get development moving in a single direction and not stop/starting all the time. Each individual department making a decision on how to spend from there makes it easier to negotiate.
Ammar: Of course, mostly you will be building utility for the competition around workers to do the work, keeping costs lower. There is currently no competition because there is no particular BitShares mission giving direction and getting the market to compete to implement it. Very few developers will know about BitShares and the work that is needed to be done. People are unaware, developers are now unaware. If we find new developers to come in they would believe looking at the current structure that everything is sold out and that they wouldn’t be able to get in. Which is unhealthy for the network.
Fractalnode: That's true, but developers are passionate and visionaries. Our developers built what we have now.
Permie: You’re right. We do need to keep the developers we have currently and who’ve been here for a long time as they are a big part of what we have and the knowledge that we need to retain. All the experience that they have.
Ammar: Our developers are the best in the whole world. I’ve seen their skills. I am not saying they are doing a bad job. They are doing a great job. But, again, the vision should not come from the developer. I am saying this because that would create a conflict of interest between developers and investors. The developers are paid by the investors. This is one cause of the unhealthy community environment now. We can see these scenarios are happening as the investors are in conflict and the developers are not getting paid.
