The soon to arrive UIA features will allow whitelisting and recall of UIAs which will allow companies to legally IPO on BitShares saving them huge costs associated with traditional IPOs.  This feature could be more useful than BitAssets, which this stage are limited by low liquidity and lack of gateways.  IPO in a box is an in demand service and its birth may call for a change of marketing strategy. 

Questions (some are quite specific, others open for general discussion):

1.  To buy shares in an IPO people need their identity verified.  Who will do the identify verification?  (itnom from moonstone mentioned on mumble they are looking being an identity verifier, is that for IPO whitelisting purposes and what's the ETA?).
2.  In the US do you need to be an 'accredited investor' or can anyone buy in providing they are verified?
2.  Is an animated explainer video for the IPO feature (directed at businesses) of more value than an animated explainer for BitAssets?
3.  Should IPOs on BitShares be the focus of marketing, moving BitShares into a B2B service, away from targeting the consumer with BitAssets?
4.  How do investors buy issued shares directly with fiat?  Will this feature also be limited by onramps?  (the income from the IPO is from the short-name UIA registration fee, so buying directly with fiat by passing BitAssets is ok, the DAC still makes a profit).
5.  As shares will only be able to be purchased by verified buyers, after purchase can the shares only be re-sold to other verified buyers or can the verified buyers sell them to anyone? 
6.  Is it the share that is whitelisted after selling to a verified buyer (giving freedom to be re-sold to anyone) or the buyers account that is whitelisted? (allowing transfers only to other whitelisted accounts).
7.  DACx is functioning as an identity verification service for China, could it expand to allow identity verification from the US + elsewhere? 
8.  How does this work internationally?  If a UK company wanted to IPO in BitShares, who will do their investor identity verification?  The more countries the investor pool can be drawn from the better (more IPOs will happen on BitShares if more investors can take part, due to the proposition then being more attractive to businesses).
8.  Aren't dividends a required feature for this to be useful at all?  When will that be implemented?
10.  Who will consult with the business clients? 
11.  The whole process needs to be streamlined and intuitive for businesses doing an IPO and for investors.  Is there a IPO primer document for businesses?
12.  What else needs to be ready for IPO's on BitShares be ready to be marketed (B2B)? (e.g. gateways, identity verification services, dividends feature, web-wallet market activation, primer doc?)
13.  Which other cryptos can do this?

Edit:  Adding another:
14.  Should actual IPOs have a separate (and higher) UIA fee?  There is an identity verification cost with the service provided to them which is not present in other UIAs, so perhaps the other short letter UIA issuers should be charged less and a new fee introduced for those that do official IPOs with compliance features?

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2wwdep/we_are_edward_snowden_laura_poitras_and_glenn/

Edit:  looks like its over.  Good read though.

Will recurrent payments be able to be set up from the light wallet and/or mobile wallet?

The use case I'm thinking of is for mobile phone contracts paid for with bitUSD from the mobile wallet

Rate your user experience for the full client.

Wishing a warm welcome to students from Duke University who may be checking out bitsharestalk for the first time after attending Dan's lecture.  Do say hello and feel free to ask any questions here.  You may also be interested in attending the live dev hangout on mumble today at 10am EST.  These happen every Friday.

Welcome!



-matt608
BitShares Marketing Delegate

A quick mention of BitShares alongside ethereum and ripple:
http://venturebeat.com/2015/01/27/colu-raises-2-5m-to-use-the-blockchain-for-something-other-than-bitcoin/

Also I noticed that Google of BitShares shows a "news" section now, which is good.

These are really good news reports on economics + global politics:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2H4B1dqSYw&feature=youtu.be

Delegate creation could be time-stamped.  After x blocks vote power for a new delegate decreases, and more again after x more blocks.  This encourages voters to vote more quickly which results in greater hiring efficiency, which is a weakness at the moment.

This has the effect of giving active voters more voting power, which could be seen as centralisation, but the slow voters aren't having their power taken away, they still have it so long as they vote in a timely manner.  Why should someone who takes 2 months to cast a vote have the same influence as someone who bothers keep up to date and to do it within 2 weeks?  We are a decentralised organisation, we can't wait for the slumbering long tail to vote on every hiring decision. 

A problem would be that if enough people don't start voting faster, then a smaller amount of stake would influence the vote more which makes it easier to vote in malicious delegates.  This would be another reason to separate block producers form employees so block producers can be voted in more slowly while employees get say a 2 week window after which its harder to vote them in.  There's also no reason to make employees have to wait 2 weeks to get their fee back, the block producers could inflate by default and the funds could be held in an escrow account which the voters control.  If the employee is voted in they could get access to the fee funds straight away and then have the rest released gradually as a vesting balance.  Having the voting as well as waiting to recoup the fee makes for a very slow and inefficient recruitment process.

Not to mention that having people pay a big fee to come onboard is not sustainable because it limits the talent pool we can grow form greatly, it will turn many skilled people away.  This could be solved by having no fee and instead having a recruitment delegate who is paid to vet the submissions.  He would transparently discard spam submissions and very weak applications and puts them in a viewable trash bin.  The applicants that make it past his basic appraisal can be voted on to become DAC employees.  This way there is no application fee.  We don't want an application fee because it deters talent.  The DACs income source should be its products not its recruitment mechanism, the fee beings a very small short term gain for a much bigger long term loss.  Again the block producers must be separated for this to work otherwise this is making it easier to become a block producer which is making it easier to attack the network by removing the fee and getting put into the 'fast track' voting channel with boosted fast votes. 

Having block producers + employees tied together means by making it more efficient to get hired you also make network attacks more efficient.  It may be hard for voters to keep up with with an extra layer of decision making, but not all voters are required for employee hiring.  Just those who want to be active in the DACs recruitment process would vote for employees.  Also that extra layer of decision making is already happening, just in a more muddled up way.

It could also allow people who just want to do a small project to apply for a specific amount of bitUSD.  Their application could be attached to a payrate so the escrow account controlled by voters releases only the amount of funds they applied for if they are voted in, allowing freelancers to do small jobs without having to pay an application fee.

I know focus needs to be kept on bringing stability to the client and not adding new features, but the current process very inefficient to the point of unsustainability.  A decentralised hiring process is an entirely new area BitShares is pioneering.  BitShares is in danger of innovating in too many areas at once.  I'm dependant on Riverhead for my delegate to run, most of the employees are dependent on other delegates running their delegate for them.  We may not like it but imo to thrive long term the process needs to be streamlined and separated out.  Perhaps something like this this could be tested out on Devshares in coming months and have a hard fork scheduled 6 months down the line to have a big upgrade to the recruitment system?

A potential employee should be able to just set their desired pay rate, make their application and press 'Go!'.  There should be no (big) fee, and no requirement to secure the blockchain.  It's not a top priority right now but I do think this needs improving.  We've got an amazing product with bit of an ugly 'internal corporate' structure, and we always should attend to our weaknesses.  I've heard that the Chinese aren't becoming delegates because a lot of them want to do just 1 project.  That's a lot of talent going to waste.  Lets cut the waste by empowering people to work for BitShares much more easily.  I know all of these suggestions together add up to a huge undertaking but its too important an issue to brush under the rug imo.  I think we're fine for the next 6 months-ish by using mainly in-house BitShares talent, but for longer term growth it needs to evolve.

This is just from the top of my head, feel free to shoot me down.