Identabit Announces
Exclusively to the Bitshares Community

Introduction

We welcome the Bitshares Community participation in a new permission based distributed ledger to be called IDentabit. This will be a new blockchain based on DPoS and will offer ensured privacy and identity for every transaction.

Like Bitshares, IDentabit is an undertaking with a passion for its importance, combined with a belief that you need to cozy up to the beast in order to get close enough to deal a fatal blow.

Best to clarify, the beasts we are intent on slaying are the central facilitators and institutions taking advantage of those that cannot defend themselves, we are intent upon winning and won’t be satisfied with anything less than the establishment of a global currency that realizes the potential promised by Bitcoin.

This is a long game and in the near term won't make much difference, given the disdain the broad community has for acknowledging the need for compliance, and the widely held belief that a solution to a decentralized identity based chain was and is infeasible.

So be prepared for a long determined journey because we are convinced that the door is open, timing is perfect and the reasoning behind IDentabit is sound.

History

We became interested in Bitshares when looking for a suitable platform for Remitabit, close to a year ago.
However we became concerned that whilst anonymous currencies help to thwart government overreach, they empower theft of remitter assets and and we believe governments will never regulate in favor of anonymous cross border transactions or enable seamless integration with the financial gateways that remitters require.

A recent FATF report laid it out clearly, FATF are acting to influence banks to take a risk based approach, in essence giving banks the responsibility of choosing between high risk anonymity or lower risk [identity based] alternatives.

Against this backdrop and our passion for costless P2P transactions, we came to believe that if we were to act in the interests of remitters, there was and is a need for a decentralized identity based alternative to Bitcoin, one that offered the immediacy of P2P but the safety and accuracy of transfer that can be inherent in an identity ensured blockchain.

We believe if a community based, decentralized, open source identity based alternative to Bitcoin is not introduced, then we will see institutional alternatives define the future and the possibility of financial disruption and disintermediation will be cast aside. And therefore  Satoshi’s only lasting achievement will have been as a messenger that guided institutions to even greater profits.

With this as our objective, we began consulting with thought leaders in crypto-currencies, including Dan and Stan Larimer, to discuss how to solve various issues facing the implementation of an identity based blockchain that would serve as the basis for Remitabit.

A road to assured privacy was ultimately revealed by Adam Back, with “Confidential Transactions”, which offer a more practical solution to User Transaction Privacy than Peter Todd’s work on Zerocash, thus cementing the reality of a private but identity based alternative to Bitcoin.   

However, when faced with the realities of scaleable performance and our views on governance and sustainable funding, we came to believe in the the future of DPoS.  And how, with the support of the Bitshares community, we would lay the foundations for the attributes we consider essential for the future of adoption, remittances and the end game as we see it, decentralized banking.

To this end we are focused on defining IDentabit, a decentralized alternative to Bitcoin. This being one step along the way to introducing Remitabit, a unique remittance model that will sit as a related chain atop the blockchain ultimately adopted by IDentabit.

Note: We refer to DPoS as we believe it to be the common thread amongst all Bitshares born projects no matter their name or purpose. The more projects using DPoS the stronger the community network effect.

Market Factors

Influences that empower our belief in IDentabit’s future.

A lack of Bitcoin adoption at a consumer level due to a lack of institutional gateways

Institution's risk exposure should they contribute to counterparty anonymity

Consistency amongst regulators that AML/CTF must be part of the crypto future

Minimal network effect, if everyone on the network is anonymous, how is it possible to create a growing community of associated users, this inherent limitation leads to clumsy inaccurate transfer of value

Banks and IBM’s intentions to build institutional permission based chains

The reality and stigma of crime pervades digital currencies, once banks with the help of IBM introduce identity based alternatives that result in:
simplified user interfaces

• consequent viral adoption

• bank level security

• minimal fees

• P2P transfers

• P2P/AML/CTF

• <5 second transfer times

Why will consumers care who or what technology or philosophy lies beneath, regular consumers are primarily concerned with safety and convenience?

We may all enjoy hearing Andreas speak of the power of the Bitcoin network effect but in reality user driven network effect has failed to materialize and by keeping the anonymity torch burning he is buying the banks more time to develop their alternatives.

Finally, if we don’t build it, someone else will! Indicators include, Accenture and SETL, which are not currency competition but are speaking to permission based networks.

We believe the journey begins here with you, we have solutions to the issues of

• Transaction privacy

• decentralized governance

• AML/CTF compliance and institutional acceptance

• Sustainable funding and

• Absolute transparent governance

But we don’t have much time, if we don’t act now the decentralized currency movement will be killed by attrition and banks will win.

Request for Consideration

Positioning Constructs

Whilst, (as we point out below) we are long range fans of Bitshares’ comprehensive vision, in the near term we see the full feature set as distracting and intend to limit functionality to facilitate  an apples to apples comparison (by the media) with Bitcoin. You will see from branding and issuance denominations, our desire to benefit from a subliminal association with Bitcoin.

We also believe, that in order to become a viable alternative to Bitcoin, we must focus on attacking PoW, it was Dan’s attacks on PoW that drew us in and we believe they must continue. Where there are massive inefficiencies there are also massive opportunities.

Why we value Bitshares

Transaction speed and capacity - whilst irrelevant in the short term, success demands it is catered for.

An integrated vision - we see features that are valuable to our vision for various products and services.

Voting mechanisms - whilst not essential, addresses issues of decentralized independence and governance.

DPoS and its suitability for progressive release and sustainable funding.

Finally and most importantly, we believe in Dan and the team's capacity to deliver, software has been our life and we know what it takes !

Invitation

Following are the details of our plan for IDentabit and the Bitshares Community and hoping it leads to your interest and ultimately, enthusiastic support.

Objectives

To offer the first open source decentralized blockchain that ensures privacy from public scrutiny and precludes  forensic analysis.

To offer the first open source digital currency that enables institutional support and adoption as a consequence of enabled counterparty identification and AML/CTF reporting.

To offer transparent governance of all foundation planned (and actual) expenditure, where the originators are limited to 5% of the committed release.

Issuance

Sustainability

50% goes to sustainable funding, released via a method we refer to as Proof of Appreciation.

Genesis Allocation

50% of the remaining issuance would be share dropped as follows.

20% in honour of the existing Bitshares community.

10% to Developers

20% to those identified as constructive contributors to Bitshares betterment
Note: Vesting conditions will apply.

50% of the remaining issuance would be shared as follows

10% to the originators

10% to investment partners

30% to
Strategic Partners
Application Providers
Gateways
Marketing and Technology Partners

Issuance Table



Project Manifesto

Agreement that value is determined by adoption and use, not by tech or ideology. If we look critically at Bitcoin we witness the disregard of adoption fundamentals for revered tech and the ideology surrounding anonymity, when in fact anonymity is preventing adoption of decentralized technologies and disruption of financial networks.

Recognition that IDentabit’s objectives are clearly stated:

Adoption by institutions. Bitcoiners may continue to rave about anonymity, but pigs will fly before we see institution's risk exposure to counterparty anonymity.

Adoption by way of known user association. True network effect is not possible if you don’t know who can receive what you send.

Accuracy of transfer must also be achieved by way of user association, by matching user address books to members of the IDentabit community.

Recognition that banks love anonymity. The more time we spend defending the importance of anonymity the more time it gives them to build the inevitable alternatives.

We must set a course and remain consistent. Deviation, no matter how well intended will divide the community.

Our goal must be to establish consensus through adoption. True consensus comes not from votes but rather rejection of proposed hard forks, not only by miners (delegates) but also gateways (exchanges), merchant's web wallets and users.

As we are using DPoS we will attract the attention of trolls seeking to attack the potential of centralized wealth and influence. As a consequence we must focus on:

Divestment of influence through the progressive issuance

Governance is core, courtesy of Governance Councils where checks and balances are transparent and visible to the community.

Funding

We comfortably estimate the value of IDentabit based on an identity based chain, development to-date and community support to be between $50m and $200m.  As a consequence we intend to raise between $2.5m and $10m by way of investment partners. Investment partners being organisations with capital and potential material influence over the value of IDentabits. These  include known major institutional exchanges and technical partners seeking relevance in the payments industry.

Governance

We strongly believe in the consensus model and introduce Governing Councils, community shared budgets, notification periods and full wallet transparency.
Sustainable funding

With 50% of the genesis pool being allocated to sustainability, the main concern relates to progressive issuance, its transparency and predictability. To this end we introduce the concept of “Market Maker Auctions”. A semi-annual event that only occurs when market conditions permit. Such auctions, based on a published formula, will (once stable) be managed by code from inception through to disbursement of funds.

All funds will be allocated to those supporting the network and the IDentabit Foundation Council. ALL expenditure will be budgeted by operating councils for comment by the community.

Direction

IDentabit will reflect strategic thought, commitment and loyalty to its objectives.

Thank you for your consideration and we look forward to working with all of you that get behind, what is a serious and challenging objective.

Underwun - Out!

Hi Folks

Today's the day...2:30pm EDT.

Wow! Great news! Glad to see you back John. I can only imagine the regulatory dots that needed connecting in order to make your project work successfully. Good seeing you have conviction and tenacity to see this project thru. It's a beast of a task! Hope to hear some great news in the near future [emoji1]


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

One things for sure, it will stimulate discussion  Thank you for the encouragement, when revealed I look fwd to your feedback.

A pioneering technology will have dozens of these things. People drift in and drift out, talk about big plans, and maybe these happen or maybe they don't. For every ten of these you hear about, you're lucky if a couple of them follow through and stick. The rest won't and this is quite typical. ALso, in defense of potential partners, this has been a pretty long haul in terms of waiting for the basic technology to be created to a point where anyone could plug into it. We may see a few of these partners resurface when there's something they can actually use.

So right, in our case we never left, we just had to step back and rework our beliefs and challenge what could be done and then commence working through the issues as to how and what...so many projects have been started based on 70% hope, 20% substance and 10% digilgence.

We believe in the tech and as big project guys we believe in Dan's unique capacity to deliver.

When you look at the cock-up at Ethereum where unguided inexperienced brilliance, creates nothing but hope and disappointment, Dan's achievement are nothing but really impressive.

i hope there will be some solid thing not just some empty plan.

Hi a couple of questions

Where do you fit, are you,
   
A purveyor of doom, simply crapping on everyone and everything?

Tired of prolonged hope, when nothing seems to work?

A critical, skeptical analyst, keen to focus attention on weak arguments?

If you are a purveyor of doom, simply crapping on everyone and everything

• We will determine from your response whether this is your tag, if so we''' know to ignore you moving fwd.

If you are tired of prolonged hope, when nothing seems to work

• We understand the disappointment, we have watched and listened to lions of tech like Andreessen or huge egos like Andreas paint pictures of potential with no evidence of plausible paths to success.

• It's no surprise you are feeling dejected, so much was pinned on radical transformation. Transformation that might have worked but for Karpeles's ineptness and Lawsky's need for publicity.

• If this label sits well sits well, time will tell if we lift your spirits

If you are a critical, skeptical analyst, keen to focus attention on weak arguments

• We need you, if you are a serious analyst good at analysing deficiencies, then you are valuable and your objectivity is welcome.

Hopefully   

• You aren't a miserable fool envious of capable people  but someone that believes that we have a responsibility to see decentralised tech disintermediate greedy institutions.

I rarely step in whilst the duck is paddling because only results count but I'll speak up and say this post reflects Remitabit's beliefs and actions.

Timing, patience, pragmatism guided by principals and competent, consistent execution are every bit as important as brilliant technology, bring it all together and the ball won't only leave the park but will cross state lines and orbit those left behind.

In my quest to finish off the Version 1.0 protocol for BitShares I have spent a lot of time working on the feature set of User Issued Assets (UIA).  In particular I wanted them to be sufficiently flexible to be used by real companies to issue their shares.   When I was talking with Overstock one of their primary considerations was the ability for shareholders to vote with their stake.

Yesterday I added the necessary features to allow every UIA creator to generate proposals that can be voted on by the UIA holders.    This process leverages the same infrastructure as BTS uses to vote for delegates.   Every balance of a UIA can vote for up to 110 proposals by specifying a "slate" in the same way they specify a delegate slate.    Instead of voting for delegate it will now vote for proposals.

There is still a lot of work to be done to make this functionality available to the end users, but that kind of work can be done after protocol version 1.0 is finalized.  Specifically the format and representation of a proposal is merely an ID and its meaning is defined by an unspecified convention in the object graph.   

Other updates to UIA: 
   Issuers can freeze all markets in UIA (unless they revoke that permission)
   Issuers can freeze all balances of UIA (unless they revoke that permission)
   Issuers can cancel bids to buy the UIA returning the BitUSD/BTS to the bidder.

Some thoughts:

A ratio parameter be considered, meaning that BTS can be attributed to a shareholding as defined in the UIA, e.g.. 10 BTS for every 1 UIA

Consider an enforced link between the holding in BTS to the commensurate shareholding as defined in the UIA.

Along with the above it would be necessary to have a First Right of Refusal feature where the UIA would have to notify other UIA holders of the intent to sell supported by a time period parameter. The result being that if sold before the First Right of Refusal had expired then the UIA would be distributed pro-rata to existing shareholders.

The objective here being that, as new shareholders come onboard and BTS are allocated to the shareholder they would be locked in to the shareholding and if the shareholder were to sell their BTS they would in effect be selling their UIS. This would protect all shareholders from the selfish actions of an individual shareholder.

In addition to the above it might be desirable to attach new issuance conditions to include pro-rata allocation to existing UIS of the new issuance to protect, under certain conditions, the dilution of the shareholder's relative position in BTS.

Ultimately the suggestions above are designed to ensure relative relevance of the UIA and its association to the core asset.

This just in from the other side of the planet.

John Underwood's Latest Addition to our Trophy Shelf

Buying bread from a man in Brussels
He was six-foot-four and full of muscles
I said, "Do you speak-a my language?"
He just smiled and gave me a Vegemite sandwich
And he said

I come from a land down under
Where beer does flow and men chunder
Can't you hear, can't you hear the thunder?
You better run, you better take cover
Yeah

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfR9iY5y94s

You are now cultured.

Proud to be a part of this special place