Using openledger to create a UIA.  When I click the Create button it doesn't do anything.  I tried to click Create a few times. 

The window does pop up some time after (20 - 30 seconds) ...

Gave two types of error messages.  Once said time expired and the other:

Failed to broadcast the transaction:
is_valid_symbol(symbol):

Trying to create the following UIA:
 BITCASH.PTS

let me know what might be the issue....thx!

Hey community,
The more I think about the current design of Smartcoins, the more I believe they will not work.  Force settlements, guarantees, and premiums all have negative consequences that will make Smartcoins unattractive to most people. 

For consumers:
Smartcoins with a permanent premium will be both confusing and inconvenient for daily use for consumers.  The further the price of bitUSD goes away from one dollar the more unlikely it will be adopted.  With fees, a permanent premium, and illiquidity I see bitUSD selling at times for 1.25 to 1.35. 

For traders:
The forced settlement feature creates a disadvantage for shorts so there will be far less desire for shorts to create Smartcoins and hence less liquidity overall.   

I think evaluating the traction of any design can take some time so for those that want to experiment, promote and build off the current design I think that's fine.   However,  I strongly believe in a design without forced settlements or permanent premiums and believe we do not have as much time to keep testing one design at a time and risk having to start over again.  If we can create one alternate design or two we can be far more efficient in discovering what design will allow us to gain the most traction and allow businesses more options to help Bitshares grow rapidly.   Hence I propose we have one more design for bitUSD and possibly bitCNY.

I do understand we will be splitting up the liquidity of the market and may cause some slight confusion for traders, but traders will have more options and I think we will have distinct groups of traders and users who would prefer one design over the other so the downside will not be that great.

Let me know your thoughts.  Thanks.

Hey guys, I think this is an important topic to discuss for multiple reasons.  I think by identifying vulnerabilities in our protocol we can all as a community learn to be stronger and protect the system.  Secondly in order to gain mainstream adoption, we need more people in the blockchain community to accept DPOS.  Proof-of-work(POW)-maximalism dominates mindshare currently.  We aren't doing a good enough job explaining DPOS and I think a lot of smart people in the Bitcoin community are stuck thinking inside the box.  We need each and every one of us to be able to make the strongest arguments in favor of DPOS.  There are white papers discussing various consensus mechanisms and I think that's a great start.  However, I think one of the most powerful ideas  that support DPOS is not a technological argument, rather it's an economic one, namely:

Almost all the millions of corporations and organizations that do business today currently use DPOS.

That is the meme I've been using personally for quite some time.  Those that have a majority stake or share in any business or organization dictate the strategy and operations of a business.  There is far more real world evidence that DPOS works than POW.  Once people accept the idea that DPOS is equivalent to shareholder voting in almost every business that exists today, it's far easier for people to adopt the technology. There's no need to even discuss the Byzantine General's Problem.

We do have to be aware of the vulnerabilities of the system.   One explanation of what can go wrong is essentially the same as what can happen in a 51% attack for mining.  Anyone who owns 51% can corrupt the system.  What is the worst damage that a witness or a colluding group of witness do and how can we minimize that?  Furthermore, those who are part of startups who've created businesses or are intimately involved in the affairs of corporations understand what happens when any individual, group, or entities control 51%. I'm sure there are many horror stories about battles over control, direction, and also regarding corruption.  There are many minority shareholder rights battles that go on because of the power the majority have.  An extreme example is that if you as a startup founder control 51% of a company and investors hold 49%, you can issue a large amount of share to yourself as salary, bonus or anything such that you end up with 99% of the company over time.  On the other hand if an investor group has 51% of the control they can do the same thing and give themselves new shares for any reason such that they get 99% of the company and the founder and employees get 1%.   There are free market forces that prevent these extreme cases because in the first case if a founder was self-dealing new investors would not come in.  On the other hand if an investor group self-dealt the current founders/employees would leave and the investor group would have to find new talent to operate the company.  Yet I'm sure there a lot of cronyism that happens and you can imagine anyone with control can give unqualified friends jobs and unqualified businesses contracts.  This is a vulnerability that we should keep in check.  Ultimately the free market has corrective mechanisms.  The market value of a business goes down if it operates inefficiently and there is cronyism.   However it is wise to be vigilant so that we don't have to wait for the market value to decrease to make corrective actions.  Even the perception of corruption will effect our DPOS ecosystem.  I think it's incredibly important for each one of us to uphold the integrity of the system and minimize any perceptions of conflicts of interest.

Just to kick off the conversation, just a few questions:

1. Why do you trust in DPOS? 
2. What arguments do you use in favor? 
3. What do you perceive as vulnerabilities?
4. Have you started your own organization before or have been a majority/controlling stakeholder?
5. What experience do you have as a minority stakeholder and what level of participation have you had?
6. Do you think about the integrity of our DPOS voting system?
7. How are you protecting the Bitshares DPOS system and what formal or informal controls do you think can make it stronger?

Just saw this one :

BitShares SmartCoins Price-Stable Cryptocurrencies LIVE TRADING NEWS
http://www.livetradingnews.com/bitshares-smartcoins-price-stable-cryptocurrencies-124705.htm

Hey guys.  Just listened to the mumble session and I do understand that eliminating many of the fees can help improve some perceptions of our ecosystem, but it is extremely important for us to maintain transfer fees!  It is important to have a sustainable business model for both of our core value propositions as a decentralized exchange and as a Smartcoin payment platform.  The referral system is the main driving force and incentive structure to enable us to bring blockchain technology mainstream as a payment platform and that's the main purpose of BitCash, our hosted wallet solution.  We want to bring blockchain/Bitcoin technology to the millions!

In any case, I urge the community to support keeping transfer fees.  We can eliminate memo fees for simplicity and also try to find a solution for regional pricing, but the 20 cent tranfer fees for the US is appropriate.  Please show your support on this thread to keep transfer fees and help us as a company and we as a community to keep the incentives that can bring Bitshares to the millions!

What's the best resource to explain DPOS?  I skimmed through the Neucoin whitepaper and they addressed four kinds of attacks:
1) Double spend
2) History revision using old private keys
3) Grinding attack
4) Pre-programmed long range attack

Also mentioned is the 'nothing at stack argument'...  It seems DPOS is different and more deterministic because delegates or 'witnesses' are voted in and that's different from most POS systems that are forked from Bitcoin/Peercoin.  Can someone explain the differences between POS and DPOS and address the common arguments against POS?   Will there be a whitepaper for DPOS?   I think it's important to have a resource to point to so we can bring over some open-minded Bitcoin developers to our ecosystem.  Not everyone in the Bitcoin community is a Bitcoin maximalist.   It's important to increase DPOS mind share and help Bitcoin influencers understand DPOS.  Just like many people & developers first dismissed Bitcoin and eventually came around, I think the same thing will happen with POS/DPOS and Bitshares so it's just a matter of finding powerful ways of explaining these concepts at both a high level and at a technical level.    Bytemaster?

Robrigo just started this meetup for us:
http://www.meetup.com/Bay-Area-BitShares-Blockchain-Interest-Group

I plan to help organize so if any of you are in the SF Bay Area, please feel free to join! 

...?