If you look at the current state of our 101 delegates I have to ask if DPoS is working very well.

Here are a few facts:

• 25% of delegates don't even publish price feeds
• 29% of the 100% pay rate delegates don't publish feeds
• Three of the 100% pay rate delegates ranked in the top half run software at least 2 revisions out of date
• Ten of the 100% delegates have questionable reliability (less than 98% reliability rating)
• The majority of the delegate pool earns 3% pay rate (65=3%, 35=100% 1=10%)
• 80% of the top 10 delegates (see below) earn 100% pay rate

I have to ask, do BitShares delegates take their role seriously? Do the shareholders? On the positive side, we have seen action taken rather quickly to remove poorly performing delegates, once they are brought to the attention of the community.

I am rather concerned however of the very limited discussion surrounding the heart & soul of the BitShares ecosystem, DPoS. Although full disclosure of DPoS 2.0 has yet been revealed, neither have the details about BitAssets and yet that topic is being discussed at length. Why?

This leads me to believe the majority of our community is focused on trading and profit rather than the underlying facilities that allow that to occur. It makes me wonder if the voter apathy and overall lack of concern about the fundamentals of DPoS indicate an inherent weakness in its viability as a mechanism to sustain an effective and efficient crypto ecosystem.

I am however grateful to BM & the dev staff for their dedication to thinking about the underlying infrastructure and the innovation that will hopefully balance out the tradeoffs between a reliable and high performance blockchain network and the elements of it that will attract people to use it. So I remain cautiously optimistic.

Based on the following criteria: -

• Software version 0.9.2
• 99% or greater reliability
• Number of votes 15% or more
• No change to voting rank in last 7 days
• Number of active feeds at least 19 (all but 1 are 23)
• Feed update frequency at least 27 (once per hour > 24?)
here are the top 10 delegates:

[/list]

Just heard about this from listening to Anarchast #182 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JT7P9P7kig), followed up by BBC (Aurthor Falls) interview of "Cassius", a NXT writer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhWJvkzwg5I

I also took 2 minutes and scanned their forum, which doesn't seem to have much content (6574 Posts in 441 Topics by 444 Members).

I have done only a superficial observation of supernet, which raised one eyebrow due to the discussion of privacy and TITAN concepts. It was an important topic in the interview.

It  sounds like their community values cooperation, and their core values appear to embrace synergy, but I am skeptical due to their playing up the whole "mysterious" side of things and being closely tied to NXT. Not sure if their code is open source, but that would be a major question worth asking given their stated goal of encouraging cooperation among altcoin communities.

Still, I heard enough to be intrigued, and I wonder if they have any tech worth looking at.

Anyone here know much about SuperNet? I saw a question from "wasthatawolf" back in October asking about SuperNet holdings. He was pointed to their newsletter.

delegate.verbaltech is running on an 8 core, 2GB vps (linux OS) with a 6GB swap file. I updated the client to v0.8.1 within a couple of hours of Vikram's announcement that it was available, however it managed to get off on the wrong fork.

Getting it back up & running on the correct fork took a lot of time & effort. It was harder than when I updated the client b/c it was only obtaining info from liondani's chainserver rather than 30 - 40 peers. I started by removing the exceptions, logs and peer.leveldb folders to insure data was coming only from the chainserver.

As swap utilization approached the limit (twice) I stopped the client and decided to reboot the vps to make sure all memory was freed, then resumed the sync process immediately after the reboot was complete.

Once synced I rebooted one last time. Before starting the client after rebooting the vps there was 1880MB out of 2GB free. The OS uses very little as it's configured. After starting the bitshares_client, tmux, 2 bash sessions with bts_tools (python virtualenv, one for the client the other for the monitor processes which are very lightweight):

tmux client:

(bts_tools)mike@vps:~$ free -m
total                used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:                 2001       1926         74          0          2
buffers/cache:       1193-/+     730       1270
Swap:                6143          0       6143

tmux monitor:

(bts_tools)mike@vps:~$ uwsgi --ini ~/.bts_tools/uwsgi/bts_tools.ini >> ~/.bts_tools/monitor.log 2>&1

Almost no change was observed.
A screen shot of the status info from the monitor shows only a little more than 700MB of memory consumption, but I'm not sure what that is reflecting. It sure doesn't reflect overall system memory utilization. If I'm not mistaken, I seem to recall the info for the status tab comes from the ps command obtained by the python code. Perhaps wackou might enlighten us about this.

Just watched this, which CH mentions BitShares, Etherium and responds to question about his involvement with I³ and why he departed. Some useful info on several topics in this Google Hangout.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UT3OZySRcA

OK I know the voting is done by transferring your stake to yourself, but where do you specify who you're voting for if you want to vote for a specific delegate? I see the 4 choices in the drop down list of the transfer form (all | none | random | recommended), but there must be a way to only for for one?

This is actually the first time I've attempted to vote, and it's far from obvious. This really needs to change.

If there were a sticky post with simple stuff like this it would really help newbies.

Perhaps I've figured it out, or possibly one way to do it:

1) on the wallet's delegate page click the un-approve all button
2) find the delegate you want to vote for and click the thumbs up icon on the right

Then just transfer your stake to yourself and you've voted. Of course you can approve more than one delegate this way too

Does that about cover it?

Linking C static library libeasylzma_static.a
make[2]: warning:  Clock skew detected.  Your build may be incomplete.
[ 24%] Built target easylzma_static
Scanning dependencies of target fc
make[2]: Warning: File `libraries/fc/CMakeFiles/fc.dir/depend.make' has modification time 2.2 s in the future

I tried this at the top of the build tree: find . -type f | xargs -n 5 touch but it still occurs. I googled the issue but can't find the actual cause. Most say they resolved the problem with a clean / touch.

This post is about the wallet UI / UX as well as marketing.

If we are going to market BitShares to people that want to use it as an interest bearing bank account my first question is, what level of knowledge about derivatives and investing are we expecting them to have?

When I think about a bank account I think about withdrawals and deposits, not bid  / ask & feed prices. If I have 10,000 BTS I wish to "deposit into savings" to earn interest, the steps required are completely different from a bank deposit.

You can see this by reviewing the http://www.aboutbts.com/2014/12/video-how-to-buy-bitusd-in-bitshares-wallet.html video. In a nutshell, here's what you have to do to make a "savings deposit", assuming you have already jumped through the USD --> BTC --> BTS hurdle and wish to move the resulting BTS into BitUSD:

1) select account with BTS funds you wish to deposit.
2) select market on left hand side of wallet.
3) Select the specific market (BitUSD:BTS)
4) Select the account to use (again) to make purchase (same account as step 1)
5) Scroll down to the Buy BitUSD tab
6) Enter the quantity you wish to buy and the price you are willing to pay for it.

It's not as simple as just specifying how many BTS you wish to "deposit" (convert from BTS to BitUSD), you must "invest" in the BitUSD derivative and understand what that means, including bid / ask and feed prices.

So when we make statements on BitShares websites and marketing materials and promote BitShares as a replacement for a checking or savings account it strikes me as somewhat of a "bait & switch" pitch. There are many bitcoin early adopters that may not be familiar with futures trading (derivatives) and all the associated jargon. Our UI / UX does not currently help such users feel comfortable.

Another thing this exercise has brought to my attention is the built in spread that this type of UI encourages. The UI does indicate the minimum ask price, but in the video example that was not used. If you have ever bought securities you know you typically have to exceed that minimum to facilitate a quick trade, depending on the direction the market is heading of course. Presumably that's where a "market" price comes into the picture.

What are the tradeoffs to be considered if the wallet provided a type of "market" purchase in order to streamline this process?

If you just want to "convert" one asset into a BitAsset (BitUSD, BitCNY, BitGold etc.) and all you had to do was specify the source account and the target BitAsset type (and perhaps an optional conversion cost parameter and time allowed for the order to live, say 1%, 2% or possibly even a fixed cost like 0.5 BTS) and the wallet executes that request (or not if the market won't accept it). Wouldn't that be easier for users that aren't so securities / investment savvy to use? Even that is quite a bit different than a simple deposit.

I suspect the current UI / UX is designed that way to be very familiar to that of an exchange, but I'm wondering if that's best for broadest appeal, even within the early adopter demographic.