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Messages - arhag

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16
I haven't had time to read this whole thread, but Eric and I worked out a way earlier today to do a fully-decentralized version of sidechains that doesn't require multi-sig authorities, which from my limited reading would overcome the major objection originally expressed about sidechains in the OP. It wasn't prompted by this post, but by interest in linking graphene-based chains to ethereum (the original impetus being to link to ethereum as part of a move to get DAO support for peerplays). There's a fair amount of work involved in the implementation, but not an insurmountable amount by any means. So if peerplays is successful in getting DAO funding, it looks like we'll make this happen.

I find that very hard to believe, because I had convinced myself this is fundamentally impossible. Very interested to see what your solution is, what its limitations are, and whether it actually addresses any of the concerns of the OP.

17
By the way @arhag what do you think of the witnesses being able to do CoinJoins like Dash's masternodes?

There is a better way.

18
Instead of witnesses, any group of trusted personalities or companies could form a similar decentralized escrow business that would be better than a lone exchange if not quite as good as an unmanned service...

In fact, if all the businesses that are building on BitShares were to agree to add their reputations to the mix, it might be ideal.

Better yet, if we elected the Top 15 Most Trusted Businesses in the ecosystem to each run a sidechain interface node wouldn't that solve all issues?

Probably a better idea than top 15 witnesses given the temptation for thieves to exploit the current voter apathy and low market cap of BitShares in order to steal potentially large BTC or ETH reserves.

It is worth noting that from a technology perspective, the code that would need to be written to allow that approach of a sidechain (where I assume changes to the multisig group would be a manual process) is probably roughly 80% of the effort needed to build a sidechain system run by the dynamic set of witnesses.

19
I don't do clickbait. Could you copy and paste the content?

Man, you really hate Steem don't you?  :P


Unclickable clickbait.

I wish someone would fix the buggy @ mention implementation on these forums.

Edit: I finally found a workaround:
Original post on Steemit

20
TL;DR Don't know whether this be considered in the thread yet:
 If we want to automatically have top 15 witnesses multi-sig the BTC wallet, we need to improve voting participation first, otherwise for example btc38 would be able to steal the fund easily.

Another reason why only vested BTS should have voting rights. This would take away the voting power from exchanges because they would not be able to unvest fast enough to satisfy the possible withdrawal demands of their customers. So they would have to only hold and allow trading of the unvested liquid BTS (with no interest payments) which would not have any voting power.

21
It's ok that market orders are all public data (though if that could be improved, even better) since if stealth'd funds can be sent to/from these accounts for trading, then it is still possible to maintain privacy.

I don't trust the current stealth mechanism for hiding the metadata linking your various accounts (that send funds to one another) together. Blockchain analysis can easily reveal the link with high probability in most cases. In my view, using the current system would give users a false sense of privacy of their metadata. It is better to focus (in the short term) on the GUI enabling only transfers with blinded balances. That way users could trust that the amount you hold (not the amount you trade or have in orders) could be private as well as the amount you transfer to accounts (like to centralized exchanges). Stealth going beyond blinded amounts that hides metadata as well is a harder problem that I think should be left for later. IMO it requires on-blockchain decentralized coin mixing using something like RingCT. This could also allow you to actually have a secret trading account (with public balances in the order books) that is kept disassociated from your normal account which has fully blinded balances.

22
I nominate arhag as leader if xeroc isn't interested.

Thank you. But too much of a time commitment for me. So I have to reject that nomination.
couldnt you share the role with xeroc?....I follow you on steemit n you have a vision man

Happy to provide insight and ideas from the sidelines. But I think "community leader" should be a very dedicated position by a single individual.

23
I nominate arhag as leader if xeroc isn't interested.

Thank you. But too much of a time commitment for me. So I have to reject that nomination.

24
I could care less about the price of BTS, I got my buy orders already sitting there in BTC for the dump. What I don't want to see is the comete evaporation of what little smartcoin liquidity that currently exists in the world while the BTS haters point and laugh at our self induced blackswan

is sharedrop going to evaporate all BTS smartcoin liquidity as everyone looks to cover their short positions in order to make their BTS that are tied up in collateral eligible for scharedrop?

Very good reason why sharedrops should include assets in collateral IMO.

25
No doubt a sidechain or a kind of automatic multisignature wallet managment for btc be safe.btc should be a target to be truly decentrilised, of course i dont want to screw with openledger they have open asset n it works pretty good n.they help us to make things happen....probably n start a bull run n make 30x the nowdays value it will be easy to.funding.....

Don't get me wrong, OpenLedger is great and a wonderful ally to have in the BitShares ecosystem. And I do think the scenario of using centralized gateways like OpenLedger for UIA tokens on top of our decentralized exchange is slightly better compared to just using a pure centralized exchange. Specifically, there is less of an attack surface of the centralized party for hackers to exploit. The decentralized exchange is well-designed to be resistant to hacks.

However, my opinion is that in long-term, gateways like OpenLedger should focus on providing UIAs for tokens that are not possible to provide sidechains for, like fiat currencies. As far as I am aware, OpenLedger is already doing this with USD. They can of course also handle the niche of being gateways for cryptocurrencies that the DEX is not interested in supporting a sidechain for.


26
Ethereum has a big market cap because for years everybody was fantasizing about what this could become. but in reality it is not used for anything right now... and as there is almost no scalability I think it will never be used for anything but speculation...

I partially agree with this, but I also think it is foolishly too confident of a statement. I have my own problems with Ethereum's design. But it is important to remember that Ethereum is a moving target. They are actually spending funds to innovate (admittedly that is easier to do when their holders aren't dumping their asset to oblivion). The Ethereum devs are doing research on improving scalability, and they currently have the capital to sustain that. I think it is foolish to discount the possibility that they might succeed in changing their designs in the future to fix scalability problems.

Lisk is a lot smarter in several things than Ethereum and it might be used someday for something.

I have strong opinions on platforms like Lisk. They are doing it all wrong IMHO.
If you are interested, first read Dan's post: https://steemit.com/lisk/@dan/why-lisk-is-inferior-to-ethereum
and then read my comment on another similar project (Rise) here: https://steemit.com/crypto-news/@liondani/rise-crowdsale-is-open#@arhag/re-liondani-rise-crowdsale-is-open-20160602t145546425z

Also Bitcoin is on top because of its liquidity. Chinese cannot enter and exit Bitshares without moving the price at this point. They use it for protection from devaluation from CNY... but you cannot pump even a million USD in Bitshares without doubling the market cap. So for this type of usage they have to use Bitcoin until volume and market cap goes up for BitShares.

You are talking about liquidity of the BTS token. Sure that isn't very liquid but ultimately I don't think that liquidity is the main issue. The bigger issue is the lack of liquidity in the markets on our DEX for tokens like smartcoins and other UIA assets. So how do we bootstrap liquidity? First, the platform must be attractive enough for traders to use. Why are traders not using the DEX? That is something we need to figure out.

The truth is that, despite what people in the cryptocurrency crowd say, decentralization is not valuable enough to them to put up with a product that is not as good as what they currently use. We need to figure out what those deficiencies are from their point of view, and fix them. Is it the UI? I really don't know, I'm not a trader, but let's find out what actual traders do prefer and change it to that. Is the lack of margin trading? If we are confident that is the real reason for lack of adoption, then maybe we should adopt that feature. But we better be confident, because it is a lot of work to build that feature properly and I would rather leave that for much later (hopefully after some gain in marketcap). The product needs to be as nice to use for a trader as their current centralized exchange and ON TOP of that it needs to be decentralized. Otherwise, they will stick what what they know and are comfortable with.

Or maybe they recognize that the decentralization isn't really all that decentralized for their purposes. This goes back to the counterparty risk with UIA assets (like OPEN.BTC) that I talked about earlier. Sidechains are the technological solution to that problem.

But even if we fix all those problems, it is still not enough to pull them away from what they are comfortable with. You need to give them some incentive to take the leap. That is where subsidizing liquidity of some key markets comes in. This is necessary to motivate traders to move, in mass, passed that hump everyone experiences when trying something new and different from what they are used to. If many of them move to our DEX and start tightly trading assets to capture some of those rewards, the liquidity will greatly improve and so other traders will be more interested to use a DEX with liquid markets. Once the market is bootstrapped and there is liquidity, the subsidies are weaned off and reasonable market percentage fees are added in so the DAC can make some revenue. Hopefully inertia continues to keep liquidity fairly strong and people still continue to use the DEX because it has liquid markets and is decentralized. Of course to do this requires both implementing the liquidity features in the blockchain (not super difficult to do) and more importantly (and more difficulty) getting BTS holders to accept funding it from the reserve pool.

27
Besides first mover advantage it's because people want a lot stability & certainty from the pure digital currencies like BTC, LTC, PPC etc. so their lack of innovation (Change) is often a positive.

Good point.


The decentralized companies who aim to bring something to the market other than a limited, immutable crypto-currency have to be more innovative, with additional revenue generating (in future) products/apps in order to increase their value. (However for both, increased utility, accessibility and third party integration often adds more value than more expensive development work. eg. Payment processor/exchange/bank/Azure integration etc.)

Right. Yes third-party development is incredibly valuable. And it is important for any changes to the blockchain to not be such that they feel it is impossible to invest time and resources building on this platform and ecosystem. I think there is still a lot of innovation that can be added to BitShares to make it more appealing that doesn't conflict with the work of third-parties.

One is not really a change to the blockchain at all, so it can even be thought of as a third-party innovation I suppose. That is side-chains. To make the Decentralized part in DEX really meaningful, we shouldn't have the same counterparty risk for traders of BTC and other altcoins as centralized exchanges do. That is the situation we currently have with OPEN.X assets. Ideally such a sidechain mechanism would be integrated with the blockchain in the sense that the witnesses would be the dynamic multisig group holding the reserves backing each SIDE.X asset. Initially, it would be smart to support at least the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains.

The second innovation is margin trading. This one is a little difficult to implement (depending on how its done). But it would add a lot of value to our DEX.

There is lots to be done, the question is: can we get the funding necessary to do it? Perhaps this will be easier after November 5th when there is (presumably) less sell pressure from the merger to compete with sell pressure from worker proposals. Although, if someone was willing to defer selling until after November 5th (and say wanted to keep the majority of revenue in BTS), then BitShares already provides the ability to pay from the worker in vested form such that it cannot be sold prior to November 5th. So if a credible developer was willing to take such a deal for something that added value to the platform, there should be no reason to delay that work until after November 5th (other than anti-spending zealotry).



If I was a rich guy and wanted to park my money and assets somewhere safe, would I choose the BitShares blockchain? Or would I be a bit skiddish knowing that my assets and such would be visible on cryptofresh.com? Even sending money to people is easily visible.
 
edit: the only features we are going to add to BitShares right now is Stealth (as soon as we can afford it). Stealth is already done for the most part but it just needs an awesome gui plugged in and secure backups (we use IPFS/IPNS now). you want Whales? -give them some privacy.

I hope you focus first on getting GUI support for just blinded transfers. Hiding metadata as well is a trickier problem to do right. Focusing efforts first on just hiding the amounts makes the most sense. That approach means it is far less likely for funds to be lost, but you still need a good automated memo key backup strategy (I have written about this publicly before). After that is in place, better stealth (that hides sender metadata as well) can come later. I have ideas for how this can be done without risk of funds lost using on-blockchain decentralized coin mixing using the RingCT cryptographic primitive.

28
Bitcoin has not had any innovation for 7 years and look where it is...

You are comparing apples and oranges. Bitcoin is successful despite its lack of innovation. That is how powerful the first mover advantage is.

Counterpoint to your argument: Ethereum has innovated a lot and isn't stopping yet and look at its marketcap rise.

29
I nominate xeroc as community leader, now that Dan is busy with Steem.

Not sure about the rebrand. That is a pretty big change. And though I like the simplicity of the name DEX, but how does that affect SEO?

These changes however would require another pitch-fork, similar to that of 1.0 > 2.0, because the base functions are too radically different from our current code base. The steem experiment likely will reveal its potential successes/failures by September.. if what Dan offered previously is still at all feasible at that time, then I would list this as a pending 3rd event to coincide with a rebranding.

I don't think adding market liquidity subsidies (assuming funding comes from worker proposals) and rate-limited free transactions are big enough changes to warrant a version change to 3.0 (they are of course hard forking changes though).

And personally I don't agree with the Steem Dollar mechanism (the one change that really would be radical for BitShares) being used on BitShares (assuming BTS was the backing asset) as the new smartcoin implementation. Seigniorage can be an added mechanism to a smartcoins 2.0 to act as a last resort insurance to back the peg. But in that case each smartcoin would have its own token backing it (not BTS) that could be diluted to back the peg. The holders of the token are compensated for this inflation risk by receiving dividends (or buyback and burn) from profits made from the interest revenue paid by shorters. This is what MakerDao is doing with their Dai and MKR. There are valuable things to take from their approach for a smartcoins 2.0, including backing the smartcoin by more than one collateral type for greater diversity.

I suppose the only other radical change that can be borrowed from Steem and implemented in BitShares is the idea that only vested stake can vote, and they would be compensated for their lack of liquidity by a small but reasonable interest rate (see the post linked to in the footnote [1] for more details on a possible implementation). This is not radical or difficult to implement from a coding perspective, but it is socially radical because it changes the rules. That is a change that might perhaps require a "pitch-fork" (interesting term btw) to a 3.0 (or even a new rebranded blockchain). Or maybe the vast majority of stakeholders would think that is a really great idea and have no problem with it for a hard fork? Probably not.

[1]
https://steemit.com/bitshares/@xeroc/improvment-bitshares-workers-proposal-thedao#@arhag/re-xeroc-improvment-bitshares-workers-proposal-thedao-20160520t015315090z

EDIT: DAMN this forum for replacing the @ symbol followed by text with the member tag even when it clearly shouldn't (in a link for example). It makes it impossible to link to Steemit.

30
@bitcrab is going about this the proper way. I am impressed and pleased by his patience and professional behavior.

He created a worker, which is not free, and it received over 250M votes over a period of weeks. This is enough votes to replace half the committee with his own supporters, but instead he has allowed the committee to remain and vote as they see fit.

He then created the committee proposal, set to expire June 21. I think it's likely that @bitcrab he could have easily enacted this by June 1, but again, he provided another 3 weeks for discussion. We should appreciate his patience in this matter.

I agree this is the proper way to handle controversial changes to the blockchain by the committee: official BSIP, time to review and community discussion, committee proposal with expiration date set a reasonable amount of time in the future, and a zero-pay worker to get stakeholder opinion on the matter so that committee members have a basis for their official position prior to proposal expiration with less risk of retaliatory unvoting for going one way or the other.

For less controversial changes, the committee can go with the less costly approach of simply voting on the proposal.

@Chronos: voting against it is equivalent to voting for every other worker execpt this on ..

Not really. That doesn't gauge whether those voters are even aware of the new worker. Nor does it allow aware voters to take a neutral option.

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