For the longest time, BTS was grayed out on shapeshift; today I noticed it's apparently been completely removed.

Any idea what happened?

Alternatives?

Let's ignore the recent massive price drop, as it has no bearing on what I'm about to say.


Can someone explain to me, why the wallet is tracking all users and sending this data to openledger? https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,25938.0.html

Can someone explain to me, why the screen is still blank on startup, while in the background TCP connections are being attempted, in the mean time leaving the interface in a completely unhelpful and unusable state? This will be the first contact many new users have with Bitshares - think they'll stay?

Can someone explain to me why the USD values displayed in the wallet are all different from each other? My total balance, open margin positions, sell value on the market page etc, all differ from each other, they do not add up.

Can someone explain to me, how can "MY ACTIVE NODE BE OUT OF SYNC" while at the same time having "NO BLOCKCHAIN CONNECTION" ?

Can someone explain to me, why even after setting a specific node to connect to, the wallet is still spraying & praying and trying to connect to nodes all over the world? (snitching to openledger in the process, see gripe #1)


We have (had? will have again?) hundreds of thousands of dollars available for development.

How is it possible that years later, this is still the state of the official wallet?

For those of us who have been around for a few years, it seems all but certain that blockchain technology is set to revolutionize the financial sector.

While the rest of the world hasn't quite caught up to this, for anyone remotely involved in this movement, the advantages and technological supremacy of this technology are, quite frankly, patently obvious.


HOWEVER.

Especially since the events of September 11, 16 years ago already, we as a society have been on the fast lane to a mass-surveillance society, where if certain forces in society had their way, ordinary people would have next to no privacy in their day to day lives.

Anything they do on the internet, cataloged and stored in a database somewhere.

Everything they buy online, sold to some company to build a database.

Wherever they go, with their trustworthy personal tracking device (I believe they call it a cellphone), their location tracked, to say nothing of built-in cameras and microphones, and untrusted baseband firmware.

Their closed-source software, phoning home and betraying their privacy online.

Voluntarily signing up for services provided by companies more than happy to make the user their product.

"I have nothing to hide", most of them say, without really realizing what they're losing.


Against all of that, there is nothing that blockchain can do.

However, in the field of financial privacy, this technology can either level the playing field once again, by putting financial privacy in the hands of the people, or it can greatly accelerate the trend towards a totalitarian all-knowing state, by not protecting the users' privacy.

https://shouldhaveusedmonero.xyz/

I strongly believe that a society where private purchases are made public for the whole world to see is a dystopian society, where people will self-censor, in much the same way that people self-censor when they know that  they are being watched.

Fortunately cryptography was developed, and savvy people have that last line of defense against powers that be hellbent on knowing everything about as many people as possible, "just in case" -- how this is not self-evidently a terrible and unfortunate idea, I truly cannot understand, because even before the days of Utah datacenters and bombastic Snowden revelations, all of this was pretty obvious already.

And thus users of cryptographic technologies are free to engage in as much thought crime as they desire, safe in the knowledge that the mathematics shields them from the intruding nature of Big Brother. Imagine that, being able to read whatever you want without being tracked..

Unless this concept is carried forward to the blockchain revolution, as far as I'm concerned, we're really just enslaving ourselves with pretty fancy bleeding edge technology.

The ability to transact private has always been present, for THOUSANDS of years. We live in a time now that is an EXCEPTION, where slowly it is becoming accepted that unless some banker or politician or figure of authority can see what you are up to, then you must be up to no good -- this must be resisted and fought against, not celebrated and embraced, for it is our very freedom that is at stake here.

Relevant YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cy-7lzt3als

Relevant propaganda: https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html

Final words

Monero is the only cryptocurrency, that in my analysis, has the right ideas about what a widely used cryptocurrency should be designed like. It is what Bitcoin was meant to be.  True digital cash, anonymous, untraceable, just like cash has been for thousands of years.



Now, I see the big potential for Bitshares, or I would not be around still (though frankly I retain only about 10% of my position since this summer, as it became clearer and clearer than privacy does not seem to be a big concern in the project roadmap -- indeed, if it wasn't for TITAN (flawed though it was), I probably would have never even joined the community).

I would like to "hear" everyones' opinions on this very important topic, let me know what you think.

I've heard on the hangouts here and there about the next evolution of Bitshares being in the form of an application in EOS.

Recently, on steemit, someone wrote this as a certainty, no longer as a speculation.

What is the present consensus on this matter? And what are the strongest arguments in favor of this change?


Assuming the change happens, where does that leave things like private transactions, witnesses, worker proposals, to name but a few?

Did UTFSE, could find nothing of use .. poked around in the GUI, functionality doesn't seem to be implemented (and as a slight tangent, it doesn't appear to be possible to read existing proposals from the wallet gui either?)

Something dramatic appears to have changed in recent versions (my previous software version was from a few months ago), I use a randomly generated password for the wallet, and now when pasting it into the UI, when attempting to unlock the wallet, the program freezes for 1-2 minutes, while cpu% goes through the roof.

Eventually it will paste, and unlocking will work. But it was not like this in previous versions.

Any idea why, @svk @xeroc ?

This is the GNU/Linux (latest) version of the wallet, btw.

Hello everyone!

Through sheer luck while searching for a solution to an unrelated problem, I came across this (very recent) article:

https://coinidol.com/bitshares-munich-to-unleash-project-stealth/


Once more, having been gone for awhile, I would like to express my thanks to @kenCode, @Chris4210 and the rest of the team for having picked this up, I'm convinced this work will do wonders for adoption ..

One quote stood up from the article for me, the following:

What I personally really like about Stealth is that it only shows one message:
“unknown” sent “n” “unknown” to “unknown” - plus a timestamp.
That’s it.

Here's an observation: Wouldn't it be better if there was no record at all? That an observer couldn't even tell that any transfer was made from account X.

Depending on the (legit) circumstances, it can already be way too much information to even be able to tell that a transfer was made from a certain account.

Take Monero, for instance, even if you knew the address of the sender through third-party means, the total balance of that address (account in bitshares) cannot be queried, you can't even find out if transfers were made to/from it.

This, I believe, is ideal.

Thoughts?