phoenix - thank you! 

That explanation truly progressed my understanding.

Quote from: evisu1 on November 16, 2013, 02:45:40 am

Over the past few days I've read exhaustively about protoshares, keyhotee, bitshares, domainshares, nameshares, etc etc. I've seen the videos, i've heard the podcasts, i've mined some proto... and while it all seems pretty cool, I do have a few concerns.

1) I'm just not understanding what the value is in holding protoshares, which to my understanding (and correct me if i'm wrong here) is the same as dividend paying stock in Invictus Innovations. Sure, I played along... and now I have a few protoshares, but truth is, I'm not even sure why: Who are the customers of this DAC? what is the revenue forecast? what is the product we are selling besides our own stock?! I'm reading a whole lot about the supposed dividends, but i'm not even clear on where the revenue is coming from.

2) Why are dividends paid out from transaction fees and not from profits? AP DAC example aside.. lets say we have online casino DAC that has revenues of 50BTC and needs to pay it out in full as a dividend. How does this possibly relate to revenues that shareholders should receive from transaction fees ? What happens if there is low transaction volume but high dividend payout? High transaction fees? 

3) Launching one project, even for a big company, is a hard enough task. How can Invictus possibly develop, manage, execute, market and support allllll these innovations/projects? open source and "the community" ? I would be (pleasantly) surprised to see all the projects executed successfully. Its ambitious, I will give you that...

Thanks,
A concerned protoshare holder

There are a number of key threads in this forum that can give you a lot of these answers.  Try these:

BitShares Forum »Development »ProtoShares »What is ProtoShares?

BitShares Forum »Development »ProtoShares »The Intrinsic Value of Protoshares (Update from Bytemaster)

BitShares Forum »Development »Keyhotee »Connecting Keyhotee and Protoshares

Ok that was the long answer.  Now for some very short answers:

1.  Holding ProtoShares is not holding stock in Invictus but it does give your rights to revenue streams from every DAC we release into the wild.  You wind up owning shares in our DACs not shares in Invictus.
2.  Each DAC has its own business model.  BitShares is a family of exchanges that let you do typical trading operations on between classes of crypto assets.  Our first lets you trade exposure to various common currencies.
3.  Each trade has a transaction fee which is split among all BitShareholders in the form of dividends, just like any corporation splits its profits with its shareholdes.  To the extent the Bitshares has value in the marketplace, you can convert your dividends into other crypto or fiat currencies.
4.  Customers are anyone who would like to save or trade without leaving crypto-space and incurring various costs associated with travel between "free space" and "fiat space".
5.  It will cost you a little of your stock as a fee to make a transaction and you get more stock when others pay similar fees.  Value is generated inside the DAC from the services it performs which people are willing to pay some of their hard earned or purchased shares to obtain. 
6.  DACs are by definition crypto currencies backed by the services they perform.  Even Bitcoin is a DAC performing the service of efficient money transmission.
7.  Transaction fees are the profits -- for services performed of value to its customers.
8.  As long as you are inside the DAC, the currency of the land is that DACs shares.  The more valuable the services it performs, the more desirable it is to hold that currency in order to obtain those services.
9.  Dividends are small if profits are small and large if profits are large. Each DAC publishes its distribution rules, which  distribute some of the transaction fees to the shareholders (owners) and the rest to miners (workers).
10.  There are several components that drive the market assessment of the expected value ProtoShares:

• An assessment of the predicted value of the idea/business model of the services it will provide
• An assessment of the developer(s) ability to implement the idea.
• An assessment of the likelihood that the developer (or somebody else) will honor the social contract
• The summation of the above expected value across all DACs currently in the pipeline.

Its up to the developers to convince the market that the above factors sum to great value.  To the extent that they do convince the collective community of experts, ProtoShares will increase in value and so will each DAC according to its established value proposition in the arena of ideas.

Look at what Invictus has accomplished since the Fourth of July.  Watch to see if we accomplish what we promise to do every step of the way.  Watch any competitors that join in the fray.  Then decide whether you want to buy or sell.

I'm in the same boat at evisu1.

I think the technical concepts could be explained in simpler language to gain broader evangelism for what is happening...  is it possible to use a metaphor? 

Would you be able to walk us through a "hypothetical DAC"? i.e. industry, how the entrepreneurs get involved; is this a platform for web tech companies only?  Say for example, I have an idea for a 'decentralized autonomous strawberry farm'; is it technically feasible for a 'physical goods' company to be a DAC?

I'd challenge Invictus Innovations to tell a story explaining DACs, protoshares, bitshares, et al; simply enough that a 5th grader could understand.

Thanks bytemaster, but still nothing for me. 

I even waited about 10 minutes, restarted wallet and re-entered nodes.

How can I determine if its an issue connecting to a node or something else?

Alright, well I spent the last couple of hours catching up through all the topics I could find on setting it up and I think I got it to work (?)... the terminal at least spits out:

Performing Benchmark...
HPM: 85.2285
logout

[Process completed]

I think now my "only" problem is my wallet says: "0 active connection(s) to ProtoShares network".

How do I fix that?