Quote from: xeroc on April 09, 2018, 10:59:05 am

Your original worker clearly asked for 8k USD .. if the markets are weired and have a 10% premium on bitUSD, then so be it.
The BTS holders are free to take advantage of the weirdness of the markets too, the risk shouldn't be on your end.

So, I would recommend that you simply buy 8k bitUSD from the markets.

Else, thanks a ton for your contributions

!

That last sentiment for sure, +5

Bitcrab, you haven't voted for my witness for months, not sure why. I have been running 2 load balanced API servers for 8 months now, and I operate 6 full nodes including the testnet. I'm not perfect but I'm human.

With only a small amount of time to check and interest in what witnesses do, you would see I am highly active and tuned into the technical needs of this ecosystem. I write a report every month and publish it on steemit, how many witnesses even publish a regular report of what they are doing? How many witnesses receive feedback about their operation?

We all have specialties of expertise, some broader, some deeper. It is unreasonable to expect of anyone to be all things in all situations on a systems as complex as crypto, with it's politics, economics, technical, marketing and managerial aspects. You yourself were not tuned into the technical aspects of running a witness and you stepped away from that role to focus on other matters you felt you were better at or could better serve the ecosystem by. That was a wise move on your part.

I feel there are few recognized standard requirements for witnesses, and each proxy is free to choose what requirements they wish to support. You continue to state what your requirements are to support a witness, but I don't feel you vote according to them consistently.

We have identified a growing issue in our ecosystem that witnesses across the board (every witness is affected) misses blocks regularly now. It's very rare now to go to Roeland's witness log without seeing that every witness has missed at least 1 or more blocks with a 7 day period. Some of the highest ranked witnesses have missed block rates > 1 per day. It didn't used to be that way, and this trend has been increasing for some time. I mention this to suggest that the absolute number of blocks missed is less important than the rate they are accumulating for each witness. Something perhaps you might take into consideration and not focus only on the total number of blocks missed. witness.still holds the record for that, but look how stable he is now. It isn't fair to hold that against him now, tho it should serve as a stern warning to prospective witnesses to get your act together on the testnet first, to avoid such problems.

I submitted a pull request months ago to include my public API nodes as seeds, as at the time there was no convention for which nodes API would be included in the wallet UI. The wallet UI had undergone many changes in the area of improving connection reliability and it is proving to be a difficult issue to resolve.

You didn't list and of my API nodes for some reason. I am here to tell you, since you obviously aren't aware of them. Shouldn't you be? I don't operate in a vacuum, it isn't hidden information. Do you even look at my witness reports? It seems you don't. What you ask for in terms of vote support for  committee, are you yourself doing what you expect other committee members to do?

My 2 load balanced API nodes are:

• wss://bts.proxyhosts.info/wss
• wss://nohistory.proxyhosts.info/wss

I am due for another witness report, expect it before the weekend. I will describe how I plan to revise my approach to utilize docker to improve deployment of new nodes as well as increase their security. I hope that satisfies your request, and I hope you will revise your witness votes to include verbaltech2.

No disrespect to the lovely lady you used for your opening pic for these reports, but I laughed hard when I saw you replaced her with Evander Holyfield 

It is so apropos, at least for this report.

Keep up the outstanding work!

First let me apologize for the attitude you're facing here. @fav is one our trusted, long term ecosystem supporters but he doesn't pull his punches and is not afraid to tell you his opinion. I will not withhold my opinion either but will try to be constructive.

I disagree with fav's assessment of your website. Yes is is very simple, but it is modern and based on common single page layout. I also agree with you about the importance of the website working well with the widest number of browsers.

I am disappointed however that your announcement info is IMO, quite limited. You haven't described your team's political orientation, identity (not required but helps establish a rep; you can also do that thru providing quality services, but it will take more time to establish your competency and reputation to get established in the eyes of the community).

The founders of this ecosystem, as with most of the early crypto projects, had a highly libertarian perspective. They realize the impact cryptocurrencies will have on the world and are well aware of the opposition that will come when the financial oligarchs realize their power is being taken away by empowering individuals with peer to peer, censorship resistant blockchain technology.

In short my assessment is you seem to have good intentions but your efforts need refinement. Moreover you haven't described your plan in sufficient detail to provide confidence your team can pull this off or that you understand the market or have identified specific shortcomings and powerful features in the UI you will address. Have you identified your target audience specifically? "Mainstream" users is way to broad to know what features will be considered important. You have traders, holders, speculators and many other divisions within that "mainstream" definition, and IMO you will need to first identify the target user profile you will base your UI design on. I have always thought BitShares provides such a wide array of services and features it will require several wallet UI designs (or UI modes) to address the needs of a wider demographic will demand. Traders and savers (looking to find a safe haven for funds in the precarious mainstream financial institutions) have conflicting requirements; traders like volatility and savers don't for example. 

Although the mission and vision of the founders of this community were strongly libertarian and freedom oriented, we now see a lot of "mainstream people" coming to crypto that don't care about such principles. If this experiment in building an independent, alternative, freedom promoting economic system becomes diluted and dominated with mainstream thinkers who want mainstream adoption regardless of the cost to personal freedom and financial independence, we will become even more enslaved, controlled, monitored & regulated.   

Also, are you aware of the other efforts in progress as well as already deployed of other wallet designs that improve newbie onboarding? How will your efforts differ from those?

I for one truly appreciate your efforts. I believe your role is a very important one to achieve community consensus on this platform. China represents a large number of BTS believers and the language divide is a significant hurdle to overcome for almost everyone. I approve this witness proposal with the following concerns:

1) 8GB of RAM may be a bit on the low side to accommodate the growth we can see coming in BitShares adoption
2) I would like to see you publish a report each month of what you have accomplished, like the translations you make. Brief, nothing elaborate.
3) The world needs a place to get the latest news about BitShares you see in China - people, companies, projects, plus general attitude and sentiment of community leaders in China.

You say your translation work is 2-way, so I would very much like to see info about cryptos in China I can read in English.
Kudos & congrats to you for getting your testnet node running so quickly after xeroc suggested it.

I briefly reviewed the infrastructure proposal and am glad to see thought being put into this.

Please review @wackou's ideas on infrastrcture here: http://digitalgaia.io/backbone.html and give us your thoughts about that. It describes the network in terms of the roles servers have, and how seeds and block producers fit into an architecture that insulates block producers such that connections to the block producers are from seeds rather than public at large. He describes a "backbone" architecture that IMO would lead to a more robust network and safety for witness node operators.

i understand thomas concerns but i don't share them all. the short answer is to me bitshares is already fully open in regards to account history. 

and to me the most transparent and open the blockchain is, the best, it's an advantage against all traditional systems but that is just my view of it.

the best and more close shot  for privacy bitshares haves is the STEALTH development

anyways, @Thom i hope we can still be friends besides this small difference

Of course!

As I mentioned in Telegram when you first discussed ES, I admitted my position about easy access to historical data was not a strong one.

Presumably the ES functionality will provide a significant improvement in the publics ability to search historical BTS data, so in that regard provides access for some people that would not be able to pull it otherwise. In that respect it reduces privacy. I will readily admit for programmers and others higher up the technology food chain all the BTS blockchain data is available with some effort to code the query (assuming someone wants to try to report on multiple accounts).

Think about an explorer that only requires an account name (or a list of account name) as input and it dumps 100% of the history for that account(s). Although such info can be obtained from CF or your block explorer, it would take a lot of time to manually click-click to obtain it all.

I would greatly prefer such a tool did not exist as that improves my privacy to some degree. It does so by reducing the number of people capable of dumping all of my history. I don't see my privacy as a binary, all or none issue. Whatever I can do to make it difficult for others to see my bts history (require some minimal amount of effort to get it, pay a fee, pay a programmer, pay with the time to use CF etc) the more private my activities are. Privacy is a gray, not a binary scale.

BTW, does the API provide a way to determine which accounts have the greatest amount of transaction history?

Ryan R. Fox - BTS Witness: fox

As an independent consultant I am often required to sign a NDA prior to entanglement with a client or a given project. Many remain in force at this time. None of which I feel create a conflict of interest in my role of validating transactions for the BitShares network.

Thank you for your continued support,
Ryan R. Fox

Makes perfect sense, I fully understand that position. I too had to sign NDAs as a consultant or 3rd part developer.

Your statement concerning conflict of interest is the crux of the matter, as well as actions that could obligate BitShares in some way.  As a witness it should be easy to avoid such conflicts. As witnesses we are not given the duty or power to contractually commit BitShares to do or not do anything.

These 2 proposals are quite different in that they DO allow specified people to act in such capacities and that introduces new risks to the ecosystem's governance model.