You need to take down the ads. Ads are good for monetizing when no other monetization method is more effective. Right now we have a few clear, valuable call-to-actions: get a bitshares account, buy bitshares, buy bitUSD, and sign up for the mailing list.

Anything else just distracts users away from these important goals, all while damaging the perceived value and credibility of you and bitshares on the whole.

Since UIA issuers have the ability to control all the balances of those who own them, I think it would be possible to allow users to confirm their identity through the BTS client, and receive IOU versions of the assets they currently own on the centralized website. Then, when funds are used on the client, they also reflected on the balances of their centralized server, and vice-versa.

Would this have any benefit for either the exchange, the user, or both?

After New Years, I made a resolution to get my BTS off the exchanges and vote. Yesterday, I voted for the first time, and it was much less painful than others have experienced. My only gripe, was that I needed to pay at the very end. Even though it was only 0.5 BTS, It took a bit of the sweetness out of the experience.

I understand that transaction spamming is important to prevent. Therefore, I propose that all users can vote for free once per day.

Is it feasible for this to be implemented? I'm worried that because of TITAN, it may be difficult.

I have just thrown together a proof-of-concept feed generator, which uses a volume window and individual trades to calculate price.

https://github.com/flux627/bts-volume-feed

Copy-pasted from the README.md:

Volume-Aware Price Feed

What is this?
This is a price feed generator which calculates the average price of BTS exchange pairs based on volume at a per-trade basis, for use by BitShares delegates. The script is capable of sorting trades across multiple exchanges by their execution time, and then taking an average price of the most recent trades in a user-specified BTS amount window.

Why was this made?
Current price feed implementations use spot prices, which are much more easily manipulated. Futher, they are arbitrarily weighing these exchange's spot prices, based on an average volume over 24 hours. By considering every trade at a set of exchanges, the place the exchange took place becomes irrelevant, and only the trade amount and time become important.

How is this accomplished?
The script currently supports one current pair (BTS/CNY) on three exchanges (BTC38, Bter, Yunbi). Fortunately, all these exchanges have a public API for listing recent individual trades. Every 10 seconds, this script fetches, formats, combines, and sorts the data by time. It then runs through all the most recent trades, calculating the average price until the user-specified volume window is filled. If the last order pushes the total over this window, this last order is truncated, and the rest of the transactions are not included. The average price is displayed in the terminal, and saved to the price.json file. The trades used to calculate this are saved in the trades.json file.

If you start the script and on the initial iteration there is not enough volume across the exchanges to fill the volume window, no price feed will be output, and a partial trades.json file will be created. Every time new orders are detected, it will add to this file until the window is matched, at which point it will begin generating a price feed.

Usage?
You can change the config settings at the top of the file, changing the WINDOW, as well as disable/enable the exchanges.

After you have changed these settings, you can simply run the script like this:
$ python price_feed.py

Know issues?

• The Yunbi exchange's timestamp is not parsed correctly by the ISO8601 date parser, as it does not factor in the timezone offset. Additionally, it seems that their timestamps are off by 9 hours. For this reason, I have disabled the Yunbi exchange by default until I can confirm that this is indeed correct.
• When you stop running the script, and run it again after much time has passed, it is possible that it will use old trade information until they are pushed out by new orders.
• Queries to the APIs are not done exactly every 10 seconds, it is actually 10s + (time it takes to retrieve all data).

Future plans?
The current code is only a proof-of-concept to guage interest in this kind of price feed. If there is indeed interest, the next steps are:

• Implement more exchange pairs (need to figure out rate-limiting from exchanges)
• Integration with bitshares RPC

If PayPal needed a separate app to process transactions across the web, they would be pulling in much less business. Of course, the problem of processing BTS transactions without opening the client is security, however I think this is not an impossible hurdle to overcome. Any ideas?

I'm interested in conducting a highly unscientific survey of the readers of this forum:
http://www.polljunkie.com/poll/ncqiwd/bts-stake-survey

I didn't use the built-in forum poll because I wanted to keep this information anonymous, as mods / bitsapphire might be able to see.

You can also use the 'comment' section to say something anonymously that you would normally not feel comfortable saying if it was tied to your name.

I understand the mechanics behind everything. Shorts compete by bidding on interest rates. But in terms of economic exchange of value, from where does the value of interest originate?

I'm sorry if this is a seemingly stupid question. I ask because I think it would be extremely valuable to concisely describe this to people who think this is a scam.

I remember reading that I3 said they want to make the AGS Funds last. I don't think this is smart.

A DAC that can fund its own development is no doubt game changing. But, in terms of bootstrapping young DACs, it's sort of like trying to move your car from standstill while in 5th gear. If it even moves moving at all, it will accelerate very slowly, be highly inefficient, and if you're not careful could totally f*** up your engine.

What I mean is, $2500 a month per delegate at max inflation is going to take a long time to build up momentum. That's fine, except we have booster rockets, called AGS Funds.



I think that once all system checks say 'GO', we should fire up those engines and spend the AGS funds rapidly. We shouldn't try to stretch them out, because we already have a system for sustained funding (dilution). If everything goes to plan, the AGS Funds will bring us above escape velocity and we won't have to dilute BTS holders unreasonably. Delegates could be earning $10k per month with 3-5% dilution, and meanwhile we'd have all eyes on us, bringing in new money and talent.