We live in exciting times! As I write this we are only hours from the BTSX -> BTS hardfork that will usher in a new era for Bitshares. As we all know this brings about a change in the delegate pay structure, and it will now be possible to properly reward delegates for their hard work which should help push BTS to the next level! I hope to be one of those delegates!

As discussed in this thread: https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=10949.0 , I will be launching a new delegate to support my work on BitsharesBlocks.com as well as future projects in the Bitshares universe. The payrate will be set to 100% as this was the general consensus in the above-mentioned post. The new delegate will be a sub-account of the bitsharesblocks account:

• dev.bitsharesblocks

I will also provide a free 0% payrate delegate that will be hosted on a separate server and reliably provide feeds and stay up to date. It will be called:

• free.bitsharesblocks

I’ve been running delegates since launch, so by now I have plenty of experience doing so and aim to remain one of the most reliable delegates out there.

My mission
If I am elected I commit to making the BitsharesBlocks front-end code open-source by the end of the year. This will allow you to help me improve the code and add features, and also importantly it will allow you to track the work being done.

If you want a feature added you simply create an issue on github, and track its progress there. This has the added benefit of providing another “in” for aspiring delegates to prove their worth, as they will be able to propose commits to the site and you can easily judge the quality of their submissions.

I also commit to keeping BitsharesBlocks always up to date, and to do my best to make it as awesome as possible!

Short-term Development Plans
I’ve recently updated the site for the BTS hardfork. Below is a list of things/features that I want to work on next:

• Preparing the code for open-sourcing
• Add a translation framework to easily integrate translations
• Post bounties for major translations: Chinese, German, Spanish (French I’ll handle myself)
• Post a bounty for a logo/icon set for BitsharesBlocks
• Add transaction search by transaction type (cover, short etc..)
• Add inflation tracking for BTS
• Squash bugs!
• Cover tracking

Long-term Development Plans
I plan to work with Cass on a delegate presentation site, where delegates will be able to create accounts to easily present their work and make the case of why you should vote for them. I would like to make this open-source as well. More info will be available on this project when we get started for real.

I also want to make an Android version of BitsharesBlocks. The easy way out for this is to simply provide a web viewer wrapped in an app, something I’ve already done and could be launched once I have the necessary icons. Ideally though the app would be a native implementation with it’s own feature set. I could do this myself, or if we see the rise in market-cap we’re all hoping for I could even hire someone to do this for me.

Finally, if I ever find myself short of work (not likely!), I would like to port RippleCharts to Bitshares.

Conclusion
I’ve been delighted with all the support I’ve gotten so far from the community and hope you will keep believing in me! If you like what I’ve been doing and would like to see more, please vote for me!

I just installed the wallet on my Windows 7 64 partition and I get a strange error immediately after the splash screen:



I say strange because obviously there isn't another instance running.. Anyone seen this before? Anyone have a fix?

I tried uninstalling then re-installing, same thing. Oh and uninstalling just removed my wallet and all blockchain data with no warning, kind of annoying..

You might've seen this coming, but now that DNS is live here's the announcement: BitsharesBlocks will shortly be available for Bitshares DNS. While I already have a dedicated thread for BitsharesBlocks in the BTSX forum, I prefer to keep a thread per DAC to keep everything nice and separate.

Toast has been kind enough to vote in a delegate for me with 1% payrate, the proceeds of which will go to servers/seed nodes/development as usual.

I've got all the basics working so far for DNS: block explorer, delegates overview, charts and the homepage. The conversion was fairly straightforward, it's great having that shared core, but it also made me aware of some bugs that I've since fixed on both BTSX and DNS sites!

I will push it to a live server tomorrow most likely, and I've got some free time over the weekend so will look to improve on it shortly. I haven't really had time to look into what's new yet compared to BTSX, but I imagine there will be some kind of auction info that should replace the assets pages, but I have a feeling there's more to this DAC than that DNS features will be worked on this weekend.

For those of you who've missed me talking about my block explorer website, here's an official announcement. I'll take feedback and suggestions in here, and try to keep a list of things people ask me to implement.

The site can be found here: http://www.bitsharesblocks.com

In the block explorer currently you can check incoming blocks, search for any block and check the transactions for that block.

In the delegates listing you'll get a list of all delegates with votes for > 0, and you can search the list by delegate name. You can also click on a delegate to take you to a page with some more info on that delegate, more info will be coming but right now you'll get a list of all votes for that delegate, by block.

Current issues:

• Performance of the delegates list is not that good, it's an angularjs issue with big lists, might need to do it differently.
• Delegate info page layout isn't great due to time constraints!
• Latencies are objective and can be affected by my server, take the values with a grain of saltFound a bug that was impacting syncing and therefore latencies, fixed

Requested improvements:

• Graphics of delegates performance: Still want to do this, might get to it this week (W36)
• Trend info for delegate's ranking: Done
• Filter active feeds

I've been playing around with my block explorer and noticed a lot of negative votes going out, and I've been wondering about the logic behind them, so I decided to test it with some transactions. I started with two 1000BTSX transaction, giving these results:

http://bitsharesblocks.com/#/block/116824
http://bitsharesblocks.com/#/block/116834

All those delegates are approved on this account, but for some reason my own main account is getting negative votes from the transaction fees and no votes from the transaction.

I then set delegate.svk31 to false and tried again, giving this:

http://bitsharesblocks.com/#/block/116842

I now get negative votes from the transaction as well.

What I'd like to know is, why in the first transactions was delegate.svk31 getting only negative votes?