I forgot to mention- if you happen to read this, please email me at danielgrover67@gmail.com. Thank you.

I have recently gotten a few different offers for purchasing BitShares.com, and it is possible that I will close a deal in the near future. I am posting here so that any individuals who are also potentially interested in purchasing know about this, as a kind of last-call. Please send any serious offers to danielgrover67@gmail.com. Domain transfer through escrow.com only, no exceptions.

Offers made in this thread will be ignored. Thank you.

BitShares community,

After contemplating the best way to use this domain, I have decided to allow the community to decide what it wants from BitShares.com. I will point the domain to a server of a trusted member, once a plan is set forth and a general consensus has been reached for what its purpose will be.

Here are some ideas I have for direction:

1- Comprehensive getting started guide; educational interface. I have been lurking here for quite a while now, and I believe to have a fairly well-rounded understanding of what BitShares is and is capable of. What I noticed is that an easily accessible new user guide is severely lacking. This should be a main focus on BitShares.com.

2- News and opinions articles. The quality of some of the posts here are fantastic, and these individuals could easily create quality articles to promote BitShares.

3- Bitshares statistics site, like SVK's bitsharesblocks.com. Perhaps if SVK is interested, we could join forces?

4- Online wallet, with the ability to purchase BTSX and BitUSD directly on the website. It was more difficult than it needed to be for me to obtain some BTSX, with purchasing BitCoin from Coinbase.com, transferring to Bter.com, downloading the wallet, creating an account, sending from Bter.com to my account.

5- Online interface for trading/shorting. I noticed member 'monsterer' is working on something like this, maybe we could also join forces?


In the end, my goal is for BitShares.com to be the one place you can always send someone for anything BitShares related.


Contributor Checklist:

* Hosting
We need someone to host the website.

* Project Manager
I will fulfill this role until a more qualified individual steps up. Even after this happens, I will want a hand in decision making.

* Designers, web developers
It seems like member 'Cass' is the resident designer here in the community. Cass, would you be interested in contributing your talents to this project?

* Content Creators, editors
We will need individuals to create the content for the new user guide, educational interfaces, and articles.


If you are interested in collaborating, please post here what you are capable of offering. If you are interested in this proposal at all, please post here and make your opinion vocal.

You seem like a pretty cool guy. Why don't you just join the community? You could make money (at least for now) off bitshares.com by developing it as an educational site explaining what Bitshares is and linking to exchanges. You make money by being an affiliate for those exchanges so when someone buys BTSX (BTS), you get a commission. Everyone wins.

PM me.

PM sent.

Correct, "we" don't. I do, however

Just received a 4 BTC offer from someone else at BitcoinTalk.org. In review:

smiley35: $35 (10 PTS)
[BST.org PM]: $100
donkeypong: $225 (.5 BTC)
[BST.org PM]: $262.5 (75 PTS)
[BCT.org PM]: $1560 (3 BTC)
[BCT.org PM]: $2480 (4 BTC)

(To clarify- offers in [brackets] are from PMs, so I have removed their handles to respect their privacy.)

Keep 'em coming!

Just some ideas...

1. Have a parallel, secondary pool of unpaid 'dugout' delegates that create test blocks on a side-chain, so they can build reputation and build stats about latency, etc.. Clients are aware of this side-chain and change their votes according to these stats.

2. Have an unlimited number of delegates. Only the top 100 with the most votes get paid. Block creation alternates between the top 100 and the rest.

3. Some combination of the above two-- have 100 paid delegates, and 200 unpaid 'campaigning' delegates, from the top 300. Block creation alternates between the elected 100 and the campaigning 200. In order to become a campaigning delegate, you need to be a top contender from the dugout delegate side-chain, which holds an unlimited number of delegates.

I would pay 0.5 BTC for it and then donate it to the community. People are using .io addresses and soon .p2p addresses, etc. Invictus simply creates open source software upon which others build DACs, so a .com site has limited utility. It is not worth any more than this.

I find it cute how people here are trying to undervalue this domain while at the same time are expressing interest in purchasing it. I love the comradery, however there is nothing traitorous about purchasing an asset with the intent to profit.

Just like anything else on the free market, at any given moment in time, a domain is worth as much as someone is willing to pay for it.

Invictus does not 'simply create open source software upon which others build DACs'. If they did, you should be very worried. From what I understand, Invictus puts profitability for their investors and shareholders at the #1 priority, and they make their decisions based on making sure PTS and AGS have enough incentive to be honored by third-party developers. Invictus' products have the marketing and funding backbone that other forks will have to honor to receive. Not to mention, forks that honor PTS and/or AGS are encouraged to use the Bitshares prefix or -Shares suffix for their DAC, further strengthening the BitShares brand awareness, and thus increasing bitshares.com potential valuation.

How does this increase the valuation, you ask? Traffic. When somebody hears of bitshares for the first time, they will Google it. Google gives search-exact one term domains a big ranking boost. If BitShares.com is a website with: 1. Quality, keyword-rich content about bitshares, or a blog, or a forum, or all of the above and 2. The content is engaging and informative, perhaps with a ticker and price graphs or even a wallet service or centralized exchange; then it could easily rank #1 for the term. Invictus could implement all of these things on the .org, however many people might prefer BitShares.com as an unbiased third-party information source/service provider. Invictus might like the setup too, because they could keep BitShares.org as their corporate, easily managed 'who we are, what we do' site, and let other people manage the living and breathing 'happening right now' BitShares.com website. The relationship between Invictus and a third-party owner of BitShares.com could be symbiotic indeed!

Ponder on this... If bitshares is successful especially BTS X and Bitshares DNS then domain names would not mean anything. So whether successful or not domain names are worthless.

If BitShares.com ranks 1 or 2 on Google, and BitShares is successful, and especially if the website is good enough and informative enough for someone to come back to, there will be millions of high-income investment visitors per month. That is worth a lot of money.

It will take a lot to reprogram internet users away from the .com paradigm. Probaby many years, 5-10 I'd guess. And if there is ever a serious threat to .coms, I wouldn't rule out at some point .coms adopting a decentralized archetecture, given the amount of investment currently in the .com industry.

Can you honestly tell me that BitShares.p2p has a nicer ring to it, or a stronger sense of authority, than BitShares.com?

When it comes down to it, BitShares.com is simply the most memorable iteration of a BitShares website address. Let's be real-- if Invictus could register the domain at registrar pricing, they'd be using it already.

(That's your queue to tell me I'm wrong, that BitShares is about 'community', that the non-profit .org is a perfect fit for the financial sector BitShares brand, and that BitShares.com has 'limited utility'...)

If he's trying to profit from their brand, they could in theory make that claim. But my point is that we need to shift the mentality as well as the technology away from patent/trademark wars. I believe they get in the way of progress and creativity.

The domain itself is indeed protected from the Anti Cyber-Squatting Protection Act of 1999 because of the 2003 registration date, and this will be as well for whomever purchases from me (as precedented by the ruling of GoPets Ltd. vs. Hise).

As for the usage of the website that this domain points to, it can be protected from trademark infringement by claiming nominative use. It just needs to be clear on the website that BitShares.com is a third party that is in no way affiliated with Invictus, Inc.

In any case, if the website serves accurate information and provides useful services, this would only help the health of the BitShares brand, and it would not make any sense for Invictus to pursue legal action against the website owner.

Indeed, what would you find an acceptable price  - $500? $1000?  $100,000?

Sure, if somebody offered $100k, I'd take it.


Here is a log of all the offers I've received so far:

smiley35:   $35 (10 PTS)
[PM respected]: $100
donkeypong: $225 (.5 BTC)
[PM respected]: $262.5 (75 PTS)

I'm confident that given this is a very small pool of potential investors, the right buyer will find me in due time. It may be after XT launches, after BitShares is on exchanges and has many more eyes looking this way. The reason I posted this here now was to see if any early core investors wanted to snatch this up before the BitShares market cap breaks 10 digits.

Keep the offers coming