Quote from: teenagecheese on February 03, 2015, 07:35:12 pm

On a related note, I am getting nervous. I am seriously questioning the management and organization of the bitshares team. Your idea was so great, but it really seems like you are failing to execute. You need better personnel, scheduling, and task management.

I can't really give you any reassurance because so far everything you have said is correct and they have proven to be incompetent at meeting a deadline or getting a product out in time.  We are now approximately 2-3 months behind where we were initially promised this summer, we were supposed to get a release and marketing in November, lol!  That was eventually revealed to be nothing but empty promises.

I believe that many of the paid delegates are very competent, and could get viral growth going in time, but they are all currently stymied by the lack of a viable product, which they have been waiting on the dev team for. 

The main problem is that rather than getting a good idea and then executing on it full force, they just come up with another idea, and another, and split time among all of these wonderful ideas, when what we really need first is a usable product.  Some of these ideas have even been harmful, such as whatever idea Bytemaster apparently had for making VOTE be able to murder Bitshares, which then resulted in a huge dilution and breaking the hearts of the whole chinese community, especially those who had bought DNS.  This essentially killed the one thing that was going well for bitshares, which was that it was catching on in China.  The chinese marketing team (which is actually competent!) has been working hard to overcome the bitshares team shitting all over their efforts, and looks to be building momentum again, (but only if we can ever get a stable product released, and dont destroy their efforts yet again by adding gambling to the client which they have said will make all their chinese business partners flee from it).


So you should probably sell all your shares and walk away, unless you want to continue to invest in this product of idealist dreamers who have the potential to create something amazing that will change the world, but probably will never succeed because they cannot focus on priorities and they keep shooting themselves in the foot.


Paid delegates are the hope of Bitshares, because if we can ever manage to get a stable client out, then some people who are actually good at promoting things can do their magic and promote it, and get some viral growth.  And as Bitshares grows, paid delegates will attract more and more capital and businesses to ally with it for delegate positions.

I just hope it doenst die first.



(Apologies to everyone who is working hard on Bitshares, with this depressing and critical post.  I have been feeling a lot like Teenagecheese, given that its February and I dont see a lite client or release version yet.  There ARE a lot of positive things going on and we should not minimize them.  Its also been several months now since the broken promises of november and we havent seen improvement in some areas.  One begins to get skeptical that the current promises might be broken as well).

Quote from: sschechter on February 03, 2015, 03:47:01 am

Who was it that said controversy is a good thing?  Was it the guy who no longer works here because most of the community was not satisfied with his work? I believe so...

-Controversy is a good thing if we are unified in our message

-Controversy is POISON if it divides the community

At the time of this message, 68% of voters think Bingo is a bad idea.  Please don't make the wrong decision.  If it will only take 80 hours to implement, instead, try using those hours on tooltips, help messages, a help section in the menu bar.  Even something simple like a link to the bitshares wiki would be useful.  Better yet, link context based help messages to appropriate section in the wiki.  What the hell do all those voting options means?  Well gee, how about a link to voting explained section in the wiki? This ISNT rocket science....

Imagine if BitShares was TurboTax.  Do you think Intuit would take a dump without any help messages and expect to keep their customers?  Surely you can do your taxes from the command line, why wouldn't anyone want to do that? You can Google your way to the answer, if you don't get distracted by a competitor along the way.

I'm a few versions back, so some of these points may be out of date.  But last I checked, the market was still....how do you say 'not sexy.'  Like a fat old toothless hag.  I want a smooth seamless trading experience like Bter. That alone will bring more gamblers to our system than some shitty bingo game.  I like bingo.  But I don't want it on BitShares when basic functions are lacking.  Where are multi-tabbed markets??  I can't trade GOLD, EUR and USD at the same time.  Where is the common panel where I can see all my feeds? Traders need to trade in multiple markets at once - and they need to see when prices move in one common dashboard type panel that's available from everywhere in the app.  Traders need to get in on the action as soon as the price moves.  They can't (and they wont) be bothered clicking back and forth all day.  If it takes 5 clicks to go from one market to another, no one will do it except the religious.  Online poker players don't play on one table at a time, and neither do traders. Multi-tabbed markets will bring move volume than some controversial gimmick. Minimizing the amount of button clicks needed to perform functions is UI design 101.

We are getting sharedropped by PLAY.  Why disrespect their community with this idea? Let them handle gaming.

Its quite amazing all these brilliant ideas that went into BitShares, while the basics keep getting fucked up.  It doesn't matter how far ahead of the curve it is, as long as BitShares can't get the basics right, it will remain a toy for overgrown children, and not a serious investment for mainstream adoption.  If its not easy, no one will use it except the people already using it.

All very well said. 

Your suggestions to improve the client are great too. I say yay to all that.

There needs to be a third option...discuss again in 6 months.

It wont be the lack of features that prevent people from using BitShares...

Mainstream adoption will NEVER EVER EVER EVER EVER happen if the product is clunky, buggy, and looks like shit.  If you think I'm wrong, point me to an example.  THIS SHOULD BE PRIORITY NUMBER 1.  Trading in the decentralized market should be as smooth, clean, and simple as trading on Bter.  Looks matter. CLI functions, even if can be used by power users, should be considered as non-existent, and never advertised.  If its not easy to use, for all practical purposes, it doesn't exist. Who do we want to attract, upper class business folks, or degenerate gamblers looking for their Bingo fix??

This kind of thing is better addressed by Play.

Grim on the outside, but better than ever from my perspective of what is actually happening.

Quote from: milkmeat on January 29, 2015, 01:34:33 pm

Is there a technical solution to such scam from happening again?

As Bill Gates mentioned when asking why bitcoin is not good enough ( https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/bill-gates-bitcoin-bitcoin-alone-not-good-enough/ )

“There’s a lot that Bitcoin or variants can do to make moving money between countries easier and getting fees down pretty dramatically. But Bitcoin won’t be the dominant system. When you talk about a domestic economy, [you must have] the idea of attributed transactions, where if you sent it to the wrong person you could actually get the transaction reversed. [And a traditional system] doesn’t have this huge fluctuation where the value of your account is going up and down by a factor of two. We need things that draw on the revolution of Bitcoin, but Bitcoin alone is not good enough.”

BitAsset fixed the problem that the fluctuation is changing too much. And we need to address the case when user really want to reverse a transaction. I can think of two solutions suppose you are transfering a large amount to others:

1. use multi-sig to protect the transfer. The exchange can hire an auditing people to review and approve any transfers. It's difficult for a person to make both destination address and auditing address wrong.

2. allow the transaction to be in "holding" state until  certain blocks later. Such as bitcoin can do. The sender can withdraw the transaction during this period. But this doesn't seem to be helpful for careless people.

toast, what are the thoughts from the developer team?

If all transfers are "escrow" transfers then you can send the funds, "verify receipt", then release the funds.