After following the crypto-currency development for the past month, I find it important to surmise that bitshares will be more valuable if they can achieve the maximum value threshold (MVT).  What is the MVT?  The MVT is when a currency aligns itself with human psychology, in which humans feel comfortable with the number value associated iwth their "coin" or "dollar".  Bitcoin, for instance, has a terrible MVT, where people don't feel comfortable using one bitcoin, as they feel to valuable and cumbersome.  Look also for instance at Dogecoin and Next which are valued in pennies on the US dollar becuase there are billions rather than millions of coins.

 Dogecoin has become the "tipping" currency because it feels so easy to give out freely.  This is a good thing.  The more at ease people feel about using their currency the better.  Dogecoin may just be a copycat currency, but if people feel it has more utility than bitcoin (even for inexplicable psychological reasons), then they will be more likely to use it, buy it, etc.  This is good for Dogecoin in the longrun (..although I'm sure it will be beaten out by second generations crypto-currencies..) .

I hope 3I will take these psychological phenomenons and MVT into account when determining the total number of bitshares.

I addressed this issue in one of my earlier posts. I said that Bitshares because it is so divisible the maximum number should be nice and low, 4-6 million. Then you simply price it in it's lowest currency unit on exchanges and in the client.

The mistake Bitcoin exchanges and charts make is they display the largest denomination which is the Bitcoin vs Dollar instead of the lowest denomination which is Satoshi vs Dollar.

One Bitcoin is 100,000,000 satoshi. If you have 10 Bitcoins you have more satoshi units than the entire NxT currency. If you have have 100 Bitcoins then you have more satoshi units than the entire Dogecoin currency.

You do not have to dilute or inflate the currency to take advantage of psychology. All you have to do is stop discussing it in its largest denominations and discuss it at the absolute smallest denomination from the start so that everyone feels rich.

My advice to you is start discussing Bitcoin at the satoshi level and encourage others to do the same. When Bitshares come out I think we should start the price mechanism at the lowest denomination. Now you'll have 100,000,000 currency units and can use that for your micro transactions, tipping, or whatever.

But it is in my opinion that the largest dominations are supposed to be scarce in any currency. You don't know a lot of billionaires do you? Having 1 Bitshare should be like having a million dollars and having 100 should be like 100 million dollars because that is the highest denomination in the currency.  Just like the penny probably doesn't compare to the highest denomination either and it would make no sense for Bitshares or Bitcoin to price itself according to the limited divisibility of the dollar. The weakness of the dollar should be the strength of Bitcoin or Bitshares and the main weakness of the dollar is that it isn't a store of value, it does not maintain buying power because it's too inflationary, it cannot do microtransactions below a penny, it's not digital, and let's face it if I give you a million pennies do you feel rich and start shopping more?

If that is the case we should ban the $1000 and $100 bill and start dealing in pennies. The way to do this is just to set the Bitshares client by default to list in the lowest currency units so that when everyone opens their client they feel like they are rich even though in the beginning it costs 100,000,000 currency units to buy a pizza, a year later it will cost 100,000.

Quote from: MrJeans on December 17, 2013, 11:11:35 am

Powerball, DAC sounds cool, and allot faster to develop than BitShares.
What is the status on this one?
Have we found some people to develop it?

It is on our roadmap, to be undertaken when we are able to raise enough funds to pay for its development.

But if some other developer were to start credible work on it, we would be happy to cheer them on. 

It doesn't matter to us who develops these DACs, we will invest in them on their merits like everyone else.

This generates decentralization in developers just like the DACs themselves.

Once we have multiple credible developers, hopefully on different continents, the whole industry will be much safer.

Stan,

I honestly think one of the first and most important tasks of Invictus Innovations should be to develop and release an exquisite DAC development kit. If this were any other industry, say the gaming industry for example and you're building a platform for construction of games then you release an easy to use development kit to facilitate the process. If it were mobile technology like Android then you'd release a kit which any programmer can make use of using whatever language they know.

The reason most developers (myself included) don't know where or how to get started right now is because there isn't a development kit. This would mean a lot of documentation, reference protocols and a high level interface. If there are enough programmers opening up the development so that other programmers can write reference implementations, or templates, that could help too.

I've taken a look at Keyhotee and I can figure out what it's doing, and I've looked at Protoshares as well. Protoshares is based mostly on Bitcoin and Bitcoin is very daunting for anybody to mess around with, as a result not a lot of people are able to make anything more than small changes. When I tried to compile Protoshares I could not get it to compile in Linux due to the various dependencies.

Bitshares in my opinion is where it really gets interesting. I hope the API for it is high level enough that I can build on top of it and that development can take place in many programming languages at once. I could easily see a scenario where we are building DACs on top of DACs.

Maybe I can tell you what went wrong.
Under ordinary use they have been times where the wallet.dat becomes corrupted. The way to avoid that situation and loss of coins associated with that risk is to keep multiple backups of the wallet. Keep the wallet encrypted at all times even if the password is unsophisticated. Make sure that your computer itself isn't connected wireless to anything, no blue tooth. Don't make wallet on virtual machines either because random number generation is critically important.

Sometimes it's the network itself or you are not connected to enough nodes. Protoshares is alpha, it's not beta and it's not a finished product. Bitcoin is beta and is not 1.0. Keep that in mind and understand that when Bitcoin was first released the price crashed when hackers looted peoples wallet.dat files which weren't even encrypted because no one knew Bitcoin could make it to $30.

That same environment exists now where people have a false sense of security or think Bitcoin or Protoshares are as safe as their bank account. It's not safer yet, but it has the potential to be if used properly and if the right products are developed.

Before you leave Protoshares please understand what you may be leaving. Invictus Innovations may go down as one of the most important companies in the history of mankind. These shares may be worth several times more than a Bitcoin and you don't want to be the guy who quit because he lost a few shares which probably were worth only $60 at the time but are worth $600,000 in the year 2017.

This is an interesting question and to extend on it.

When equity crowd funding goes into effect in the USA will these angelshares in these DACs be convertible to real life legally backed shares?
http://www.sec.gov/News/PressRelease/Detail/PressRelease/1370540017677
http://www.forbes.com/sites/northwesternmutual/2013/12/05/the-next-big-thing-where-crowdfunding-and-investing-meet/
It seems it is only a matter of time before the SEC issues its new ruling on crowd funding. If each DAC team becomes a legal company, with all the legal ramifications, could the community get the legal benefits as well? It begs the question about whether equity crowd funding makes sense. Right now it's in a grey area but once the SEC puts crowd funding in full effect in 2014 why not just use that too?

If it doesn't fit into the regulatory framework then it becomes obvious to push for regulatory reform as necessary.

Quote from: que23 on December 19, 2013, 01:54:18 am

Quote from: 麥可貓 on December 18, 2013, 05:09:57 pm

Forgive me if I mis-understand something,
but I think angleshares could be a natural part of 3I as an DAC,
just like the model they have proposed before.

For example,  a possible model should be like this:
1. Every software project of 3I should have a new (angle)share/coin branched from the mother DAC share, and use coding as POW because the new project is directly benifited by coding itself. There is already some software available like Bithub to do this (https://github.com/WhisperSystems/BitHub)
2. This new share should accept as many currencies as possible,  and donors acquire this new share in current exchange rate. In this way,  this project is funded and the new share is backed by the donated money,  just like fiat currencies are backed by gold.
3. To honor protoshare,  protoshare holders should have 1:1 amount of this new share relative to their protoshares.

And these are also the three ways to obtain such new share
(i. e. 1. Mining by coding 2. Exchange by funding 3. obtain PTS)

The big picture: Everyone here is really keen on decentralization. But, there's a problem. Invictus is a centralized company. What to do? Well, because Invictus loves decentralized entities too, they came up with the idea of ProtoShares. ProtoShares does not benefit Invictus. They mine them just like everyone else does. If they sold the PTS, then they would have no stake in the future of DACs. Now, this is important. The future of DACs. Nothing guarantees that Invictus will be a part of that future. The projects are open source. Anyone can copy them and start their own DAC. If this happened, then it would also benefit the new company to honor the PTS social promise/contract. If they didn't, that company would have to start a whole new community fresh. They would have no network effect to propel them.

Now, Invictus needs funding. Every company needs funding. What to do? AngelShares gives any team of DAC developers a chance at funding. If the idea is good and the team is good, then funding should be easy to obtain. However, if the team starts to fail (this includes invictus) then people can stop buying the AngelShares and even trade them for another team of developer's AngelShares.

PTS is the glue that binds the DAC movement. AngelShares is the engine that move it forward. Technically, any team of Developers is free to release their AngelShares however they want. Invictus hasn't officially released their AngelShare model but it seems to be a system where you pay them to mine Invictus AngleShares for you.

Exactly. The key is every DAC/project needs funding.

As a donor,  one may wanna be specific where his money goes:
1. To the DAC(3I) at kickstarting stage.  This purpose is served well by PTS for 3I.
2. To a project of the DAC.  This could be where angleshares go.

So PTS is like the root dorectory of '3I system' and angleshares are sub-folders.
In this way,  angleshares should not be recognized as duplicate/dilution of PTS.

The problem with the whole Angelshares thing is we don't really want to trust a centralized company even if its 3I. Look at what happened to Bitfunder, or BTCT.

3I is in the United States just like those others were. If it's done following the Mastercoin model then it could work but if it's traded on an exchange then it might have legal vulnerability. I just don't know and this needs more planning.

Mining doesn't have any of these risks but I do understand the problem of raising funds and that you need some kind of Kickstarter.

Vegas Baby, Vegas: The Buzz About Bitshares by Brian Page

Like most of you, I first heard about Bitcoin in the news.  As each month went by I found more articles popping up: A guy purchases $27 in bitcoin and forgot about only it to find himself a millionaire a short time later.  I read about miners who were supposedly building money machines in their homes and the shutdown of silk road by the government.  It kept coming to my attention until I couldn't ignore it any longer.

The more I learned about it the more it resonated with me - not just because of the potential to make money but because of what it could mean for privacy, freedom and the disruption of the status quo. The powerful idea that money can actually be separated from state and that financial power can be decentralized sounded like an idea who's time has come.

I heard from veterans in the tech industry that Bitcoin and the crypto-currency business was reminiscent of the early internet dot com boom. I didn't have an opportunity to participate in that historic event but I decided years ago that I wasn't going to miss the next big thing. Could this be it? I put everything on hold to spend months doing research. I ate, slept and breathed crypto-currency. I decided to put myself in front of as many experts as I could. This led me to the Inside Bitcoins conference in Las Vegas.

When I arrived the first day the mood was electric.  There were venture capitalists mixing with private investors. I saw tech savvy silicon valley types chatting up the CEO's of new crypto currency companies as well as the just plain curious folks, like me. 
I like to be curious.  It allows me to get to the top of the food chain fairly quickly by simply asking quality questions. Questions like: Where is the greatest opportunity today? If Bitcoin was the answer to that question in 2009, what about in 2014?  If Bitcoin was the Microsoft of the decentralized world, would there be an Ebay, a Facebook or Google? What opportunity lies just around the corner as a result of this paradigm shift? That was what I was searching for.

I've done this kind amateur investigating since I was very young, allowing me to meet and be mentored by some well-known leaders in personal development and business.  Leaders who's names you'd recognize as new york times bestselling authors, international speakers and business visionaries.  I found that these people are generally identifiable early on, if you know what to look for. I'm the kind of person who would seek out Satashi Nakamoto himself and camp on his front lawn if need be if it meant I could work with him. But sadly, he was not in Vegas...or was he?

I set out to meet as many people as I could in the industry.  I asked nearly everyone this question: Where is the greatest opportunity right now in the crypto-currency industry?  I heard a few companies get mentioned but the one comment I heard more than any other was some version of: "You should look at what Daniel/Invictus/Protoshares is doing." I heard it being discussed by groups of people in the hallway during the breaks, by some of the speakers, by miners and prominent bloggers.  It kept coming up.
 
Throughout the next 24 hours I spent a lot of time within earshot of Dan, listening to him address groups of people who were either huge fans of Invictus or who wanted to learn more.  People who mined Protoshares were coming up to him to tell him how much they admired what he was doing.  Other CEOs asked to joint venture with Invictus, or suggested placing his future Bitshares on their exchange next year.  There was a real buzz about us as we walked around MGM.  One guy I met offered to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars with Dan and I watched at least two people each offer him millions. Seems the secret was out.

Earlier that morning I heard Dan speak on a panel of experts and I was one of the first to come up to him to introduce myself.  He invited me to join him and some of his team for dinner. I peppered them with questions at Wolfgang Puck. I was looking at the next big thing and I wanted to be a part of it.

But as much as I was fascinated I was also honest with Dan. I felt that for a company with so many fans among the tech savvy and crypto-currency set, his company's marketing and image left something to be desired. 

Now to be fair, things in this industry are happening at lightning speed and Dan and his team have so many hats to wear, that marketing/image/brand were not particularly at the forefront of their minds.  After all, they seemed to be doing just fine with Protoshares.  It was just launched Nov 5 and was already in the top 10 for market cap.

But I could see that the potential was huge.  That they had just begun to scratch the surface.  What they needed was a clear message.  A brand with an edge, and a new website to help introduce the public at large to what they're doing, and in general, a strategy.  He must have liked my energy and passion because he asked me to join the team that same day.  I said yes.

So what's next?

Invictus is going to the tailor. We're taking off the baggy sweat suit and putting on a brand new tailored three-piece Armani.  We're designing an image, a message and a true brand.  We're producing quality videos to explain the concept clearly to the non-technical person, a new site, a strong presence on all social media, infographics and print media. We're getting this company ready for it's close up.
 
Within the next year we'll be in front of mainstream news organizations and creating one of the largest, if not the largest team in the industry. We'll form new channels of investment through our various Bitshares, building on our already solid buzz and support in the community.  We are the first crypto-equity company in history, and we will change business the same way Bitcoin is changing money.

We want YOU to be a part of it. All of you.  We look forward to your opinions and support as the largest community supporting, mining and buying Bitshares.  We look forward to including you in an incredible opportunity to not only profit but to change the status quo.  Be patient with our team as we implement these changes.  Look for me to be a part of this forum, contributing to the ongoing discussion and making announcements as these changes take place over the coming months. 2013 has been the year the world woke up to Bitcoin. 2014 will be the year of Bitshares. 

Sincerely,

Brian Page
Director of Marketing
Invictus Innovations

Wow this is fantastic. You're really good. Multiple thumbs up!

Could someone tell me the advantages of Bitshares over Mastercoin?  Are Bitshares going to use the Bitcoin block chain, like Mastercoin does?

I also have another question.  It was my understanding that a Bitcoin exchange could be built as a DAC, allowing people to go between USD and BTC.  This would have the advantage that the government could not shut such down, since it is not centrally controlled?  Is this not the case?

Thanks,

Brent Allsop

Mastercoin requires some other blockchain to function. One advantage was that Bitshares would have it's own blockchain and would not depend on Bitcoin infrastructure. I am not entirely certain of the future of Bitshares but I do believe it can be independent from Bitcoin and that centralization around Bitcoin is not a good thing.

Bitcoin is merely a currency and you should not centralize something as important as Bitshares or Mastercoin around any specific currency. Any currency should be able to buy Bitshares from the start because Bitshares is capable of doing it like that.  That is just my opinion, I think anyone with any altcoin should be able to trade them for Bitshares. This would be one way to satisfy the people who are miners who have altcoins because they'd be able to mine the altcoins and then trade them for Bitshares even though Bitshares isn't mined.

Since Bitshares allows people to create new currencies, it is more important in my opinion than all alt currencies or Bitcoin which at this time cannot do what Bitshares can do. Bitshares will be able to create bitBTC even.

Mastercoin and Bitshares aren't really technically different in terms of capabilities or ambition at this time. They both are improving each other in a synergistic relationship rather than merely competitive. If either has a good idea the other will steal it and use it. Exodus address for example seems a lot like the Angel address. Contract for difference seems like how Bitshares does things rather than the escrow mechanism Mastercoin was planning to use.

Quote from: Stan on December 18, 2013, 02:47:49 pm

Quote from: MrJeans on December 18, 2013, 11:37:42 am

THANK YOU!!!!
I made similar comments under the topic "should we be calling it BitShares"
This thread was started just before the recent plunge.
I believe it is very necessary to separate the concept of BitShares from Bitcoin.

The recent drop in price of bitcoin has caused PTS to half in value, even though this doesn't make too much sense. and Protoshares doesn't even sound like bitcoin.

Now if we launching BitShares (which even sounds like bitcoin), we may be tethering ourselves to a sinking stone. BitShares has the potential to be a colossal mammoth of a ship, it would be a shame to see it sink because it was anchored to a sinking stone.

As for China, right now China is dominating the bitcoin market in terms of transaction volume and market share. Thus problems in china would cause a price drop causing more people in China to sell. After some time if China keeps its current strict regulations, it will loose its market share and price will be determined by other countries. In such a situation, price may go up even if China becomes more strict. This will open up a large informal market in China for bitcoins independent of Chinese regulation.

People in China can still buy bitcoins, just not through banks and exchanges.

Every new government restriction just increases the demand for free space options.

As the actor Clint Eastwood once said, "Go ahead, make my day!"   

I fully agree with you. My concerns are that people may find it hard to imagine a world with BitShares and without Bitcoin. So if bitcoin takes a dive so will BitShares.
Even though they are different services.

Gov restrictions will create demand for free market systems. In such a situation success of bitshares will be deflated by restrictions on bitcoin. Something completely avoidable and unnecessary.

BitShares is the first revolutionary innovation after bitcoin (where other services are only evolutionary). And it will service a different function, independently.

If bitcoin takes a dive, so will mastercoin. And bitshares should go up in value, this is a major advantage of BitShares over Mastercoin. I feel with the current branding and perception of BitShares, it could easily fall with bitcoin and mastercoin.

In which case I will cry myself to sleep  haha

You don't understand Mastercoin. Mastercoin isn't based on Bitcoin at all. When Bitcoin takes a dive Mastercoin stays the same because no new Mastercoins are being created. The only way Mastercoin will take a dive is if people sell them and right now your wealth is more secure in Mastercoin than Bitcoin and will probably always be so by design.

Mastercoin does not require you to have Bitcoins to exchange for it because a distributed exchange is what they are building. You also have people working for Mastercoins, and contests, so for the most part it's distributed by contests, or people buying them usually on the Bitcointalk forum.

I think Bitshares isn't even out yet so we cannot say much what will happen but I hope people look at this situation with China and understand why the investment from fiat model is not sustainable. If a government blocks you off from putting fiat into the system then all you have left to offer is labor. In the short term the United States investors will be just fine and this may even seem like it's favorable to them but the Chinese investment is cut off and this could happen anywhere else too which chokes off the distribution of shares.

Please analyze this Chinese case study.