Thank you iHashFury for raising this question.

At what point will "we" refuse to accept the terms imposed by an external entity? In the modern world I recognize virtually every business has something they want to keep private (non-public), but this secrecy tool can also bite us in the ass. Many NDAs are written like a boiler-plate house rental agreement - they provide maximum protection for one side only and that is usually the party asking for the NDA signature. I've signed enough of them to know that they can get you into obligations you didn't intend.

John F. Kennedy once said "secrecy is repugnant to a free and open society", and it also applies to a decentralized ecosystem like BitShares. I think Bytemaster was onto something when he discussed the idea of a "blockchain constitution". Issues such as who is allowed to speak or set policy for the entire ecosystem or sign documents on its' behalf could be defined there. However, just like in any form of "representative" governance, the representative can choose to neglect who they represent and go their own way. It's a real risk anytime a human is placed into a position of power. 

Even tho I have huge respect for Fabian (xeroc), I don't think it's good for ANY one individual to hold so much power. It also puts anyone with such power in a targeted position. Such power needs to be considered carefully, and should include at least one way to hold that power in check or remove it entirely and quickly if necessary.

So I ask you, when is it acceptable for any of the parties (witnesses, committee members, others) to sign an NDA? It may also be important to state when an NDA should NOT be signed by a witness, committee member or even "the spokesperson". If BitShares had a "blockchain constitution" it would be the ideal place to define the principles and mission statement that should guide the ecosystem's every decision. IMO no person should be able to obligate this ecosystem to do anything without a shareholder vote, and issues of this magnitude (that can obligate the ecosystem) should be publicized in advance of the vote for some minimum amount of time so as many shareholders as possible will be given the choice to approve or reject the proposal, or change their proxy to align with what they want.

These 2 proposals (spokesperson, foundation involvement) were proposed and "voted in" within a matter of only a few hours. They provided no background info for the people being placed in a significant role of power to sign NDAs and set policy regarding "compliance". If Xeroc wasn't involved I'd have to say it was the quickest coo I've ever seen. Even with Xeroc's involvement I still have reservations b/c I don't know those other people. They could be slick devils that tickle Xeroc's ear with sweet things to distract him from their agenda. OK, ok that's only speculation I know, but consider the level of faith you're being asked to have about these people. Should we really trust in one person (xeroc) that much? Unless you personally know the others that's what this comes down to, to trust young Fabian Schuh to accurately assess the motives of these others to be genuine and devoid of any hidden agenda that would compromise the integrity of BitShares to provide a safe alternative to the corrupt mainstream financial system.

There is too much power to centralize decisions in these roles and we simply MUST NOT loose sight of that fact. We need explicitly stated "rules of engagement" to define the limits on these roles. If "we" don't take responsibility and constrain these roles to explicit dos and don'ts we may wake up one day to find we're not in Kansas anymore and this is no longer the BitShares we want, no longer the "alternative", safe financial system it was invented to be.

What really disturbs me about your proposal is the unknown names vested with significant power to guide the direction of the ecosystem, all under the banner of increasing "compliance".

Regulatory COMPLIANCE Uhg! So contrary to Satoshi's original vision. I am concerned that "making the platform compliant" will gut the advantages of the platform for freedom. Freedom is contrary to what regulators want. They want control. If they get it what we're left with will not look like freedom to those who know what freedom is. There are just soooo many socialists and slaves that think they're free now and just want more convenience and an "easy way" to make $

This proposal and effort will be scrutinzed VERY carefully. I will lobby heavily for frequent reports from these people so the community will be informed all along the way, not only after this team of yours works out some battery of changes that the ecosystem must adopt to become compliant.

My skeptiscm might be less significant if the majority of this team of yours were longtime BitShares holders or were at least known by this community.

It seems to me you're asking for a high degree of "faith" these people are trustworthy.

I am particularly uneasy about how quickly this proposal gained acceptance. It definitely speaks to the lack of decentralization present in our ecosystem, an accusation often made against BitShares. This only serves to prove those claims are indeed valid.

Just not getting a good feeling things are moving in the direction of more freedom. It feels like just the opposite is taking place.

The centralization issue should be addressed. We've discussed vote decay at length which would help as well as resolve dead accounts. This needs to be elevated in priority and scheduled to be implemented by Alfredo / core workers.

Posted on Telegram:

Thank you Fabian for your work on the foundation.

My primary concern after reading these 2 proposals is they lack any statement concerning fundamental principles that guide your goals. The docs do well state the goals, mainly focused on improving adoption IMO, but not what motivates that goal.

We all want to make some money, take some profit. Some don't care how that is achieved and it becomes their top priority. Others such as myself DO CARE about the underlying principles that frame the Blockchain Prime Directive as a driving force for financial freedom which must back all our efforts.

As long as I always have a choice and am not REQUIRED to register a real world ID to hold an account and use the platform I will won't object.

There will be pressure by regulators to eliminate anonymous and likely psuedo-anonymous registrations as well. If the foundation or any of its' personel don't demonstrate their willingness to defend that basic right not to be tracked, my support for the foundation will quickly disapear.

It will be particularly interesting to see how the foundation will position and describe blinded transactions and future stealth functionality to regulators.

Will this ecosystem remain true to the original disruptive vision of blockchain technology invented by Satoshi Nakamoto or will it morph into an ecosystem the regulators will be happy with b/c they can turn it into weaponized money that tracks every transaction?

I fully agree, and always thought the "offsets" were counterproductive. Not sure the reason they were introduced.

I've always felt the BitShares governance model has lacked this essential capability. BitShares suffers from not having a way to easily and inexpensively obtain feedback on proposals and to build consensus on a set of priorities. We talk talk talk but never reach a conclusion on many worthy ideas.

Just look at how much effort has gone into the work @custominer has done for bringing back interest on BitAssets.

It all boils down to planing and getting buy-in from the shareholders to support that plan. It's not easy obtaining consensus in a decentralized organization like BitShares. An on-chain voting / polling method will help to address this, however some thought is needed to create a method that doesn't allow spamy polls to flood the system which would render the polling ineffective due to the "noise".

So my primary question would be, how is it decided who or what poll questions can appear?

Would a moderate fee be enough or too much to limit proposals to poll? If only a finite number of poll slots where available each month (and that would make it easier to design a wallet GUI to present the poll questions to sharehholders), could an auction be used to fill them? I'm just thinking out loud here. The idea deserves some thought to refine it into a useful addition to our limited governance capabilities. Some type of periodic (monthly) set of polls to review, so that people can know on a regular, scheduled basis when to tune in and be prepared to cast their vote in the proposal polls.

Perhaps a method like @fuzzy uses to decide the order of speakers on BeyondBitcoin. - use Steemit to gather support and decide ranking for a set of polls / proposals to be made formally on the BitShares blockchain. That can be used as a method of triage to weed out trivial or "this will just help me" polls. If the steemit article can't reach some type of predefined upvote threshold it isn't worthy of being included in the formal list of poll items.

n a mumble several weeks ago chris4210 claimed kencode did not have an agreement with his devs concerning the ownership of the IP their code represents. That was a serious allegation, and one I found difficult to believe as kencode has been a businessman who managed open source software projects in the past. Ken personally assured me he DOES have such agreements in place. The fact that kencode has control of the code repository of that IP which chris has been trying to obtain is strong evidence (not proof) of that.

This is the key issue. He said / she said. Get this on the table in public. I'm not just talking to you chris4210 but also kencode. Ken needs to step forward to show his developer agreement. Even a boiler plate agreement provides IP protection, so your allegation seems quite uncalled for. IMO the actions ken has taken are defensive in nature and triggered by your "bad faith" behaviors. Lawyers speculation that a loophole can be found. A phishing expedition looking for a weakness. Your very allegation might actually stimulate the devs to think, "Hmmm... maybe I could have a case here" when it never would have occurred to them otherwise. And would they have the resources to pursue it anyways.

Perhaps I am being misinformed. Only ken can answer that for certain. I do not believe he is deceiving me. I don't believe he is withholding key evidence. I don't know for certain. What I do know is you are not acting in an honorable way. If it turns out ken's agreements are not in place to protect the IP, that's on him and he will have to answer for that. Aggression is not the way to do so. But like I said, it would be more surprising if that were the case knowing his history of software management. It was a bold claim for you to make that the IP is not safely in the control of BitShares Munich. Well, maybe not so bold for an attorney's viewpoint.

Now it is typical of attorneys to  find loopholes in words. I've been told by several attorneys there is rarely a contract that can't be nullified or escaped with the right approach. We owe that to a corrupt legal system. Court rooms are not about finding truth or justice they're about persuading an ignorant jury or who has the most influence with the judge.

It wouldn't surprise me in the least if this takeover were orchestrated with this corrupt legal system in mind, as you have a strategic advantage there.

As for the need for thorough testing, of course, I completely agree. All of the technical issues you raise must be addressed. That is also true of the existing graphene codebase. Nobody has done a thorough and qualified security audit on the base system stealth is to be added to. It makes a lot of sense to do that after functional testing of the additions are complete. It needs to be done, clearly. It needed to be done before but no priority has been given to do so.

Quote from: JoeyD on May 24, 2017, 05:45:27 pm

Quote from: tbone on May 24, 2017, 02:56:08 pm

I got tired of wondering what's going on with stealth, so I asked @kenCode what the deal is and he said his team resumed work on it some time ago and the public testnet is probably less than a month away.  That was really great to hear! 

Not to mention, apparently libsnark has been replaced by Confidential Assets (CA).  This is fantastic because with CA, transactions are much faster than with libsnark (which apparently slow down transactions by at least 40 seconds).  Also, with CA there is no "trusted setup" issue like zcash and other libsnark implementations have.  Anyone who has followed the "trusted setup" controversy even a little bit knows that it's a big deal.  So this is a very positive development for Bitshares!

https://blockstream.com/2017/04/03/blockstream-releases-elements-confidential-assets.html

Quoted the entire thing because it's that important. Also is it time for a happy dance or do I need to reel myself in?

Why would blockpay, Ken, Chris, and whoever else is in charge over their leave investors completely in the dark about this?  They missed out at a massive opportunity to increase the value of the blockpay token... @Chris4210 mentioned in a previous mumble that the purpose of the blockpay token may be changing, what is the status with that?

While it's good to hear that Ken is still working on this, Blockpay investors shouldn't have to hear this "through the grapevine".

Why are shareholders being left in the dark? THAT is a VERY important question. I totally agree, they shouldn't be. In a mumble several weeks ago chris4210 claimed kencode did not have an agreement with his devs concerning the ownership of the IP their code represents. That was a serious allegation, and one I found difficult to believe as kencode has been a businessman who managed open source software projects in the past. Ken personally assured me he DOES have such agreements in place. The fact that kencode has control of the code repository of that IP which chris has been trying to obtain is strong evidence (not proof) of that.

I have been in contact with onceuponatime throughout this mess, who as you may know has been the original investor the FBA that STEALTH was to become the first implementation of. He has also been working very hard to resolve the issues between ken & chris, including asking @Stan to mediate the dispute (who did agree to do so) rather than involve attorneys. It is not surprising to me that Chris rejected that offer being the son of a rather high ranking attorney. By high ranking I mean has a Phd in jurisprudence or something along those lines, not just a typical Bachelors or Masters graduate.

I have also been in contact with kencode directly for at least a couple of weeks who has kept me informed. I was one of the parties onceuponatime chose to oversee the stealth FBA once it became operational, and he awarded me a block of those tokens to do so. So yes, for full disclosure I too have a direct vested interest in this matter. If you were present in mumble today you noticed both kencode and chris4210 were present, as were onceuponatime and myself. When chris was asked if the devs who are working on stealth for BitShares Munich under ken's management were being paid or not (a simple yes or no question), chris4210 declined to answer with anything other than "No comment". The community had the perfect opportunity to ask any of us questions but there didn't appear to be much interest in doing so. Why do you so readily accept a "No comment" response? Have politicians conditioned you so well that you no longer will hold anyone accountable to what they agree to do?

Ken had a broken mic (this is not a new problem for ken. It's just not a priority to spend money or time to fix) but assured everyone present via the mumble chat those devs have NOT been paid. I don't know about you but I put far more credibility in an affirmative answer directly from the dev's manager than a "No comment" from the accounting department (i.e. chris4210). In addition chris4210 has not accounted for the 50% pay that was agreed to by BitShares Munich to supplement the worker proposal. Has he kept that for himself? Why has he not paid that which he agreed to pay? That represents a violation of the worker proposal chris4210 published before it was approved to sweeten the deal to shareholders. Chris4210's remark in mumble several weeks ago concerning a reissue of a different BlockPay token are pretty strong evidence of a hostile takeover attempt. He is not being transparent in the least and it saddens me this community does not DEMAND accountability. It smells of THEFT to me, but that is just my opinion. For all who know about the NAP, THEFT IS A FORM OF AGGRESSION and I hate to see it infiltrate BitShares Munich, BlockPay and if it turns out to be true the BitShares committee as well by anyone that uses AGGRESSION.

This dispute arose shortly after ken turned over responsibility of accounting/payroll to chris4210, adding to chris4210's role of marketing. Ken trusted chris and it allowed ken to focus on development. He felt confident his 51% ownership in BitShares Munich protected him from loosing control of the company he worked so hard to create. It's important to note that ken has NOT relinquished control of his majority shareholder position. To this day that remains 49% chris4210 51% kencode. Ken sent me a copy of the document they both signed before it was posted on steemit. I may have been misinformed earlier when I said chris4210 gave some portion of his 49% to ridrigo to manage the marketing in South America / Mexico. That isn't important anyway. According to kencode, Rodrigo and Chris got into a heated dispute and Rodrigo emphatically told Chris to knock off the bullshit and stop trying to do an end run around ken by contacting his devs and requesting them to report to chris4210 rather than kencode. According to kencode his devs are not listening to chris4210 and remain loyal to him which is very apparent since they continue to work on stealth due to onceuponatime's continued generosity to fund their work.

Frankly this whole matter is very disturbing to me. I am also disturbed by this community's lack of interest in getting to the bottom of this. People seem to want to turn their heads and ignore the ugliness of what seems very clear to me is a hostile take over and coercion to gain control away from the rightful owner by withholding payments. Do you people have such lack of discernment that you can't see that, or at least question these actions?

Lastly I will comment on an aspect of kencode's management style I am not a big fan of, that being disclosure of specifications and design documents. The issue of specs was mentioned in today's mumble as well. This is also an area that xeroc has raised concern over. Ken & I have also had differences over his lack of disclosure concerning the roadmap to completion you may have read here in the forum, however I admit I am not in ken's shoes so I am willing to let him manage the project in his own competent manor. Doesn't mean I'm letting him off the hook, I am just giving him more time.

It's very important to note that I have raised similar concerns with the PeerPlays project about disclosure of witness duties, those related to reporting event results. @Taconator has hit the nail on the head in his steemit article to describe what is involved in that aspect of a peerplays witness responsibilities. I have also spoken with Jonathon about this in addition to bringing it up on the Friday mumble many times. The point I am trying to make is that the reason these people are not being transparent regarding such details, stealth specs / roadmap and peerplays witness event reporting details, is because BOTH ARE OPERATING IN A HIGHLY COMPETITIVE MARKET and they believe such disclosure would be detrimental to the success of the project. I was persuaded by Jonathon's rather lengthy but thorough explanation of the rationale for those decisions, and defer to his judgment now that I better understand some of the elements that went into it.

As to design docs & specs, I tend to take xeroc's perspective and believe those are extremely important. But when has ANYONE demanded that ByteMaster or Cryptonomex produce such documents, let alone to do so BEFORE their product was released? That is simply not reasonable. A roadmap is a different matter IMO, and is more a matter of PR and accountability than anything.

Quote from: Thom on May 19, 2017, 03:02:23 am

Will this be done before those who are attending Consensus 2017 return from NYC?

http://cryptofresh.com/p/1.10.2516

So once the approval weight climbs above the approval threshold, when does the rate go into effect?

I see it is still 3 bts / block but according to CF approval is 70% now.