Anyone having the same problem? Just wanted to check there's nothing wrong with current download from dacsunlimited as far as anyone knows. 

I lost access to my desktop on a restart the other day, and just in case it was virus related I ran an aggressive removal tool which removed BitShares, so it may be blocking subsequent downloads because of that.

 

I know everyone at I3 is putting in a massive effort every day to make the BitShares vision a reality...




Just in case, while working long days and in-between the input/criticism/venting & working with limited resources, it sometimes seems we don't appreciate the hard work you put in, what you have already achieved and how awesome BitShares is, I just want to say


THANK YOU! BitShares & the talent behind it is awesome! Your hard work, talent, innovation & dedication is appreciated! 

Edit: I was going to start a trivia competition (Thanks Gamey for the initial idea) as described below, but I've been advised that it might be best to wait a few more weeks before attempting something like this as well as a few other issues.  So I've updated the content to reflect that.

The competition would work something like this -

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The first person to register the answer as an account name on the BTSX blockchain wins!

So if you know the answer, you have to the register it on the BTSX blockchain (Cost 0.1 BTSX)  as an account name because that is where the prize will be sent.

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Example: 

Question: I'm looking for the character not actor name with the following clues...

(There will be a short time delay between each clue.)

Clue 1:  If he worked out a bit more he could have a body like mine.
Clue 2:  Wish I had a beard like that!
Clue 3:  A carnivorous mammal
Clue 4:  Wow look at those hands!
Clue 5:  His name is like a mix of  'marine' and 'wolf'
 
Up until someone registered the answer 'Wolverine' as an account name on the BTSX blockchain. (Yes I know that account name is already registered - I will make sure I ask questions where the answer has not already been registered which can be checked.)

If you have any ideas on improving the BitShares X main page please feel free to post them here.

Very soon BitShares X will be trading and lots of people will see it on coinmarketcap, maybe for the first time and also many people that are just interested in Bitcoin but don't do much alt-coin investing. Even though it is just version 1.0 with limited features they say 'You only have one chance to make a good first impression' so the page people see when they click through on the BTSX symbol could be very important for BitShares X & BitShares as a whole.

At the moment we have these options -

http://bitshares.org/industries/banking/
http://bitshares.org/banking-learn-more/
http://wiki.bitshares.org/index.php/Bitshares_X

Personally I think the information on the wiki is the best.

At the moment when I've been mentioning/introducing BitShares X on a forum, using the main paragraph below, if I had to think of a landing page of the top of my head it would look something like -

Very pioneering FreeTrade! I wish you luck with Lottoshares!

My honest opinion is that you will struggle getting traction with this format because of the

The Rake Problem - Because you don't have a big jackpot*, even though we are calling it a lottery, it will be viewed like playing dice. Except a much more expensive (higher rake), complicated, non-instant version & where if you win, the 'jackpot' is likely to be small & you may not even get a fair share because the market will not be able to absorb you cashing out.

Jackpots* - The main reason people are willing to pay a big lottery premium, (Higher rake), is for the chance to win a life changing sum of money.  At some point whether your odds are a fair 5 million to 1 or 10 million to 1, you don't care because you think it's so unlikely anyway, but it's nice to have that buzz of having a shot at the big one.

I think the first person to solve the Jackpot problem will have the biggest lottery chain, but I also have an idea for a distributed inflation lottery system, I kind of thought about a few months in the other forum, I've expanded on, that should be popular and be a very profitable investment for shareholders, especially early adopters. 

Zero-Rake Lottery Coin (Using distributed inflation)

Prizes are awarded in a lottery format using distributed inflation. (Like Bitcoin - but instead of inflation going to pay miners it goes back to shareholders in a lottery format.)

Q: How do shareholders make money if there is zero rake and their shareholding is being inflated away? 

A. Bitcoin prices surged over 2000% in 2013 more than offsetting the 12% inflation that was paid in new coins to miners. Similarly if the Zero-Rake coin is popular,  the coin price should increase far in excess of the inflation paid in new coins to lottery winners. (Plus of course shareholders might just win the lottery too themselves.)

Understanding the great appeal of 'Zero-Rake' as well as using inflation as the method to create the prize pool -

'Zero-Rake' - Almost every gambling game on the planet charges some rake. Lotteries especially often have very high rakes.
To be able to offer a 'Zero-Rake' Lottery is quite a selling point!

Inflation - The human mind for some reason is generally terrible at comprehending inflation, which is why bankers use it as one of the main vehicles for stealing the general populations wealth.

Example:

If you had a 100 Bitcoins at the beginning of 2014 you'd still have 100 Bitcoins at the end of the year but because of the inflation you would have a smaller % of the total Bitcoins. However the mining cost charged in that way does not seem to bother most users. 

Imagine if they had 100 Bitcoins in their wallet and there was no inflation, but instead every month, the miners removed one Bitcoin, so at the end of the month they only had 99 coins, and so on, so at the end of the year they only had 88 Bitcoins in their wallet.  How would the average user feel?

Even though both of these amount to the same thing. The psychological effect of losing those 10-12 Bitcoins is MANY times worse than being left with the same amount of Bitcoins that are a smaller sum of the total.

This inflation effect works in reverse when applied to Zero-Rake Coin vs. purchasing a normal lottery ticket 

Besides being the most fair, rake free way to gamble in history. It will even feel MANY times better than that!!

Normal Lottery: When you have to pay for a normal lottery ticket there is a clear cost associated with it, especially as if you want to play the lottery again the next week you would have to buy another ticket and so on.  Also your lottery ticket has no value if you didn't win. You certainly can't potentially sell it for a profit.

Zero-Rake Lottery Coin: Each token/ticket you own will get you 1 shot at the lottery prizes this week, and again the following week and so on. (It 'feels' like a bargain, even though your odds of winning are decreasing each week as there are more tokens in existence.) Now imagine the alt-coin/DAC is gaining in popularity too!

Then you would have a lottery ticket that may be becoming more valuable every week, should you choose to sell it, as well as giving you a shot in the lottery every single week and it is completely rake-free! The everlasting gobstopper!

Personally, I think the psychology of that is amazing.

Using Bitcoin as an example

If Bitcoin, which has 10%+ inflation, was instead of paying those new coins to miners, giving them to Bitcoin holders in a lottery format, then there would be over 15, $1 million prizes awarded every week! If every 0.1 BTC you owned counted as a token, you would have a 150 000-1 shot of becoming a millionaire over the course of the year! (10 BTC 1500-1 Shot)

Using Bitcoin as an example you can see how a popular coin can drastically rise in value, making shareholders wealthy, despite a fairly high inflation rate which can generate significant and frequent Jackpot size prizes if directed at prizes for coin-holders rather than paying miners.

It doesn't solve the Jackpot problem, until the CAP is quite large, but then again in this format there is 'zero-rake'

I've mentioned something similar in another thread a few months ago but I still think it's something to think about if your current model doesn't work.

This could easily be a terrible idea, & I guess in a sense BitsharesXT will be it's own coin, but I had the thought of a free stake DPOS Crypto-Currency only coin, with a non BitShares brand name, launched by a third party and done similarly to the way NEM went about things.

My thinking is that interest from the alt-coin investor market in Bitshares & DAC's is limited/already reached current saturation point until there are profitable, user friendly products on the market, so I think trying to generate any new real interest in the last few weeks of AGS is going to be a struggle. However this problem is not confined to Bitshares. XCP and Mastercoin which are in a sense next level investments have very low daily volumes and are not as popular as many 'crypto-currencies'.

As Marty Mcfly said in Back To The Future - "I guess you guys aren't ready for that yet."




The fact seems to be that what is still grabbing the markets attention at the moment is 'what is the next cool coin?'.

Now seeing as DPOS>POS>POW and TITAN etc. is pretty cool, if a third party announced a crypto-currency only coin where 20% goes to AGS & PTS but the rest is given as free stakes to people who post a DOGE/Litecoin/NXT address, with some non multi-accounting measures. (Something that brings in a few of the most popular other communities.) I have a feeling that will generate a lot of interest in DPOS and will be a great platform & thread to get people interested in BitShares & comfortable with the 20% social consensus and perhaps be a way to test Sharedrops without risking critical DAC's.

Cons:  It could be a huge can of worms, detract/confuse the BitsharesXT launch, reflect badly on Bitshares if there are major issues or problems & many other reasons. Just putting it out there, as it's the best way I can think atm to potentially generate quick massive indirect interest in BitShares as a whole in the next few weeks.

Thoughts?

 

I think the Bitshares ecosystem & the DAC world in general is going to take the world by storm in the next few years.

I think DAC's definitely warrant their own DAC-focused news site. Something like DACNews/DACWorld/DACcentric etc.

Bitshares already has a great forum and a website that is coming together. I believe our own news site could be the missing part of the puzzle.

If it was started by, affiliated to and at least partly owned by Bitshares, we could potentially have one of the most popular future news sites in the world!
What a great place that would be to showcase upcoming DAC's? It may even become one of the many reasons new DAC's may want to honour the Bitshares community.

DACWorld could have articles focusing on Bitshares developments, Bitshares DAC's as well as other DAC's and industry relevant news in general.

Possible Format

According to topbitcoinsites.com, The Bitcoin + alt-coin focused news site, http://www.coindesk.com/ is the third most popular Bitcoin site, behind Blockchain.info and Bitcointalk.org. so I would keep to that type of format as we know it's successful and there is a market for it. (Picture, title, first few lines of article or maybe a key passage to entice you.)

I would also have Bitshares price index (The way they have a Bitcoin price index) and I would also maybe list in a horizontal line underneath the top 5-10 DAC's by market caps and maybe the day's biggest movers.

Also a lot of the audience I think Brian is trying to target would use a Coindesk format type site a lot more often than they'd visit the Bitshares.org website or the Bitshares forum. (Personally I hardly visit the Bitcointalk forum these days, but I visit Coindesk almost everyday.)

On that note, having seen Brian in this Inside Bitcoins NY summary  http://vimeo.com/91758432 , I think he is very personable, speaks and comes across well. I think he would be great to present a 3-4 min weekly roundup of Bitshares and DAC-industry related news every week to webcam. (With BM occasionally doing pieces to camera on technical developments.) Something similar to the Bitcoin News roundup https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waT2mZhrX1U (The Bitcoin round up is a bit weak, but it is very investor & key news focused which I think is great. Personally @ 90 seconds I think it is a bit short and I would personally like to watch news on circa 5 minutes of the most relevant content each week.)

Starting it up

Obviously a fully fledged news site may eventually need it's own full time site focused person, but we could conceivably start something small now, however slowly.

BM & others have already written good summaries on key Bitshares developments which could be easily put into an article format to start to start up the content.

Other: I can also perhaps see a DACMarketcap type site specifically tracking DAC's becoming as popular as coinmarketcap. A site to track the value of all the Bitshares linked DAC's in one place could certainly be useful.   

POV or 'Power Of Volume' Shares

These are 0% inflation crypto-equities that derive a large part of their value from the fact the a specific community/group is directing a large volume of seperately derived funds into that crypto-equity on a consistent basis. eg. Blackcoin. These POV shares may well form the basis for the Stock Market 2.0 IMO

Stock Market 2.0

A completely separate stock market geared towards users & customers of a company/revenue earning communities as well as people who want to invest in them. Instead of earnings/loyalty programmes/bonuses being paid out in $, they will have the option to be paid out in POV shares. (Like BlackCoin.)

Market Cap

Unlike other crypto-equities, A POV shares minimum market cap will be a function of the minimum amount of volume that gets consistently directed into it.  Blackcoin was merely the first, but thousands of external companies and groups will soon want to create POV share systems, that can be traded on crypto-equity exchanges.

Potential Users

Company loyalty programmes - thousands of companies let customers earn 'points' however in the current system each new point issued doesn't increase the value of the old ones as they're not part of 0% inflation share systems. They're also not trade-able by people outside that community, so they're missing a large pot of potential funds.
Revenue earning communities - Blackcoin (A community of alt-coin miners) was the first but a consortium of Youtube/Itunes revenue generators will also choose in future to have their revenue directed into a POV Crypto Equity too.
(The more funds they direct and the more new people that join the more those shares will be worth.)
Gambling sites will start using their own currency/shares, the more users choosing to play and store their their funds in that currency the more those shares will be worth. (Win-Win for players & the site)
Truthcoin: - they intend to let people bet in Bitcoin and take 1% in fees payable to Truthcoin holders. Why not also start a POV coin that people are required to bet in? It's value will be much higher than Truthcoin IMO and will be a missed opportunity if they don't 

Bitshares can help new communities/companies with large turnovers or existing virtual currencies transfer over to 0% inflation share systems that are trade-able on crypto-equity exchanges. (The only thing missing is a partnership with a large exchange Crypsty/Bter etc. who would agree to list the crypto equity in exchange for a fee or X% of shares. )

Bitshares would charge a fee in the form of shares for the developers, the exchange listing, and 10% for AGS & PTS. This way these communities can have their own 'BlackCoin' listed and being traded  in a matter of days for little work. 

The exciting part is the amount of companies & communities out there that already have huge volumes/loyalty programmes that can be directed into a Crypto-Equity option for their users virtually overnight, creating multiple $50 million + value crypto-equities which we can get shares in at the start.


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Sidenote: This also an explanation of why Bitcoin 2.0 will never work. The future is communites creating their own POV Shares where the beneficiary of not only the services offered by but also the value of that crypto-equity and the volume flowing through it is primarily the individual communities/companies not Bitcoin holders in general.