Learning to Trust Strangers by Martti Malmi.

"Who wants to be a bad guy if anyone you meet already knows it? Your reputation goes ahead of you. Against government monopolies of law enforcement and justice, reputation could easily be a stronger, faster, less corrupt and more cost-efficient force for good. It just needs to be done right."

Check out his project Identi.fi (also on GitHub)

Go see the New Stealth Transfer Worker ($1000) thread if you haven't yet. Somebody got an absolutely brilliant idea: he will fund the development of the stealth transfer GUI if he gets royalties from every stealth transfer after it's implemented.

We should discuss this idea in more broadly. How can we use private funding to accelerate the development of other new features for Bitshares? Can we agree on a standardized process?

I think best way to make this happen would be to issue UIA that acts like a share for the feature. The person/group/company that funds the feature gets all the shares and profits that those shares will collect in the future. When somebody uses the feature and pays for it, part of that money goes to the share-UIA and part to the blockchain.

Can anybody come up with a good name for it? Dappcoin? Featureshare?

Investor can be just one person (or a company), who develops the feature himself and then offers it to Bitshares in exchange for share-UIA. Or investor can be crowdfund group that uses the money to pay for the code.

Investor can define how many shares there will be, how much they will get profits and how long they are valid (might be forever). BTS owners then decide if this is a good deal and accept or decline it. How the process should go? Worker proposal?

Of course the share-UIA can be traded in the Bitshares exchange, if the investor wants to sell it. This should be also possible in advance for the crowdfunded projects.

This should be our highest top priority!

Why? Because right now we can fund only very few projects at a time. We get out 5 bts/s from reserve pool and that's not much with current shareprice.

With privately funded blockchain features we could develop dozens of projects at a same time! That would give an enormous boost to the development process!

We'll get lots of new users who want to buy shares for these features because they can make money with them: just buy and hold and get revenue automatically – who could resist that? We'll get lots of new developers who will earn money by coding these features. So incentives are very much in place.

I'm getting really, really nice mindblowingfullness feelings from this, anyone else?

But first we should decide how exactly this process would work, what kind of hardforks it will need, etc.

In the threads discussing fee structure there have been frequent demands that we should lower our fees to match our competitors like Bitcoin and Paypal.

I think this is wrong point of view because we have now or we will have in the near future a better service than our closest competitors.

Making a superior product should be our main focus on competition. People are ready to pay bigger fees if they get a product worth of their money.

Lowering fees might get us some users more faster, but it won't necessarily make us more profitable.

So let's do a comparison. Feel free to add any kind of pluses or minuses you can think of. Try to think more of the payments and not the exchange business (we can to that later). Add more comparisons to other cryptocurrencies and payment processors.

Bitcoin
+ Price stable smartcoins
+ Faster
+ Better transaction capability
+ Stealth transfers
+ Recurring and scheduled payments

- Way more users (network effect)

+/- Transfer fees are cheap for the Bitcoin user right now, but Bitcoin's business model is fucked up. Payments are subsidized by inflation that will end in the long run (next block reward halving is coming next year). Transfer fees have to go up some day. Lately the real cost per transaction has been 8-10 dollars. If Bitshares wants to lower transaction fee to the same that Bitcoin has, we need to think how we can make money after that. Is the transaction business going to be subsidized from reserve pool? What if the reserve pool goes empty? Think of the bigger picture here, not just the point of view of a price sensitive customer.

Paypal
+ No cancelled/refunded payments
+ No need to tie account to credit card or bank account
+ Anybody can open an account anywhere in the world
+ No freezed funds
+ Stealth transfers

- Way more users and merchants (network effect)

+/- Paypal's customer service sucks and people hate it. Bitshares doesn't have any official customer service.

Does anybody have good recommendations for books worth reading? Especially about economics/trading/startups/marketing etc. that might be useful for trying to learn and understand more about second generation crypto products and how to build and market them.

Tim Swanson has written a good blogpost.

Bitcoin doesn't have a consensus mechanism for blockchain parameters so it's users and developers have to spend a lot of money and time to fight what should be done.

This is one reason why I think Bitshares is superior to Bitcoin.

If you have superior prediction skills, you may also specify which half or quarter or month of the year in the comments.

Also, it would be nice to know which you believe more: Bitcoin will fail and it's price will drop dramatically or Bitshares will go to the moon?

Are there any charts that would tell how much the total market cap of all cryptocurrencies has evolved over time?

The current total market cap can be found in coinmarketcap.com, but it is only for the present moment – no chart is displayed.

It would be interesting to know how much new money has been flowing in to the whole crypto market. My guess is that the flow has been quite small recently. Price movements are mostly just speculators trying to guess what currencies are going up relative to others – so the currencies are traded against each other, not much new money is coming in.

A lot of the market activity seems to be short term speculation and pumpdumping. That might explain why bitshares price has been so low. Not that many traders are doing fundamental analysis and investing in the long term.

This is just thinking out loud, not a serious proposal for Bitshares.

Would it make any sense if DAC had two kinds of shares?

Share A is meant for people who are interested in taking care of the DAC:
- able to vote
- if not used in voting in a period of time, will lose a small percentage of the shares (something like 5 % per year)
- if used in voting, will get the shares from non-voters (this will effectively be like an interest)

Share B is meant for people who will just want to hold and enjoy the value going up:
- not able to vote

Both shares can be used for shorting to create bitassets (or whatever they will be called).

This would mostly solve the problem of voter apathy. Those who are not interested in voting would just buy B-shares, and those are interested in voting, would have even more incentives for it (they could gain or lose shares).