In 2017 the global Blockchain market cap grew over $700 billion USD and attracted millions of new users around the world. The leading exchanges Coinbase, Bitfinex and Bithumb struggled under the pressure of 200,000 new users per day and more pushing into the new digital economy. Drunk on the rush Coinbase´s mobile app even hit the number one at the Apple store just right before Christmas. So what comes next?

Once they get sober again they are shocked to realize that most crypto wallets on the market are poorly designed, complicated to use and not user-friendly for beginners at all. Transaction costs more than the minimum wage in America, transfers take hours and where can I spend my cryptos anyways?

We are a group of Blockchain enthusiasts located in Germany and our vision is to accelerate the transition to the blockchain based digital economy. Over the last months, we developed a new payment platform that leverages leading blockchains and will be a new home for your favourite crypto currencies.

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Quote from: chris4210

Without these IP transfer documents, the code is still owned by the original developers and cannot be sold by the company.

Sold to whom?

In this term sold means to commercialize. In general, a company itself needs to own the IP so that it can commercialize and market the software it developed. Also in the case of granting any license to the public, one has to own the IP first.

In our case of BitShares Munich, we have different options how we can use the software we developed.
* Sharing the source code of the mobile wallet with an MIT x11 licence for free
* Selling white label versions of the mobile wallet to clients
* Selling a privatized and modified version of the mobile wallet to clients
* Integrate the source code of the mobile wallet into an existing app and add value to their user base
* Plus many more options

All those potential revenue streams are not possible without the company owning the IP.  Hope I explained it good enough in the examples given above.

Why are shareholders being left in the dark? THAT is a VERY important question. I totally agree, they shouldn't be. In a mumble several weeks ago chris4210 claimed kencode did not have an agreement with his devs concerning the ownership of the IP their code represents. That was a serious allegation, and one I found difficult to believe as kencode has been a businessman who managed open source software projects in the past. Ken personally assured me he DOES have such agreements in place. The fact that kencode has control of the code repository of that IP which chris has been trying to obtain is strong evidence (not proof) of that.

Until so far no development agreements and IP transfer agreement have been presented by Ken that documents that BitShares Munich IVS is de facto the legal holder of the Software IP it paid for with investor funds. Without these IP transfer documents, the code is still owned by the original developers and cannot be sold by the company. At the moment Ken´s private Github page is granting a MIT x11 license for code that is still owned by the developers, not by the company. More details on that issue in the upcoming report.

Ken had a broken mic (this is not a new problem for ken. It's just not a priority to spend money or time to fix) but assured everyone present via the mumble chat those devs have NOT been paid. I don't know about you but I put far more credibility in an affirmative answer directly from the dev's manager than a "No comment" from the accounting department (i.e. chris4210). In addition chris4210 has not accounted for the 50% pay that was agreed to by BitShares Munich to supplement the worker proposal. Has he kept that for himself? Why has he not paid that which he agreed to pay? That represents a violation of the worker proposal chris4210 published before it was approved to sweeten the deal to shareholders.

There has been no violation of the worker proposal so far. Alfredo´s worker proposal is still actively running and managed by BitShares Munich. Payments for Alfredo are regularly done and he will get paid what has been announced in the worker proposal to the community. We all learned our lesson with the BitShares worker system. The worker is ending July 24th 2017. https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,23698.0.html

Lastly I will comment on an aspect of kencode's management style I am not a big fan of, that being disclosure of specifications and design documents. The issue of specs was mentioned in today's mumble as well. This is also an area that xeroc has raised concern over. Ken & I have also had differences over his lack of disclosure concerning the roadmap to completion you may have read here in the forum, however I admit I am not in ken's shoes so I am willing to let him manage the project in his own competent manor. Doesn't mean I'm letting him off the hook, I am just giving him more time.

It's very important to note that I have raised similar concerns with the PeerPlays project about disclosure of witness duties, those related to reporting event results. @Taconator has hit the nail on the head in his steemit article to describe what is involved in that aspect of a peerplays witness responsibilities. I have also spoken with Jonathon about this in addition to bringing it up on the Friday mumble many times. The point I am trying to make is that the reason these people are not being transparent regarding such details, stealth specs / roadmap and peerplays witness event reporting details, is because BOTH ARE OPERATING IN A HIGHLY COMPETITIVE MARKET and they believe such disclosure would be detrimental to the success of the project. I was persuaded by Jonathon's rather lengthy but thorough explanation of the rationale for those decisions, and defer to his judgment now that I better understand some of the elements that went into it.

As to design docs & specs, I tend to take xeroc's perspective and believe those are extremely important. But when has ANYONE demanded that ByteMaster or Cryptonomex produce such documents, let alone to do so BEFORE their product was released? That is simply not reasonable. A roadmap is a different matter IMO, and is more a matter of PR and accountability than anything.

Stealth is a very sensitive technical feature for the BitShares Platform and is also highly debated. One the one side Stealth can be used to protect the privacy of the users, on the other end it can be used for illegal and criminal activities. Both sides have to be considered and evaluated while developing this feature.

Further, we are talking about a new core feature for the BitShares Blockchain because the old version from BM was just using blinded transaction. The new stealth version "2.0" also includes new technologies like CA that still need to be tested. As BitShares shareholder I would like to know what kind of new features will be added to the core code and how do they work? Who has access to the stealth feature and its mechanic? Can a stealth transaction be rerouted? What parts of the Stealth transaction are hosted on IPFS? Who holds the IPFS management keys? How are these keys protected? What if the keys get stolen?

There are still many open questions and I think it is in our all best interest to know more about the mechanic of this critical feature before we add it to our BitShares Blockchain. As Xeroc and others already mentioned a technical documentation of the feature would be helpful.

Quote from: Thom on May 27, 2017, 04:03:16 pm

RE - "disrupting" mumble. My goal in challenging chris4210 was NOT to disrupt the mumble. In fact, it wasn't until 40 minutes into it this discussion occurred. With such an important issue we shouldn't restrict the discussion, and Friday mumble is the perfect venue to make people aware of what is going on. On that note mission accomplished. If that means some topics aren't discussed this week so be it. 1 hour is obviously not enough time to cover everything. I will admit it might have been better had onceupoonatime posted in the beyondbitcoin steemit article that fuzzy publishes each week to officially get on the bbc agenda, but that was addressed in the opening moments when chris / fuzzy asked the audience if other topics should be added to the agenda. So the discussion of stealth was introduced properly and acknowledged as an agenda item that way.

I did not mean to imply that you were disrupting the mumble session, I meant that if we were to all ask in the mumble about this topic one after another we would only get 'no comment' from Chris. I do agree that it's a serious issue that needs resolved, but he's simply not going to divulge anything productive in public (other than fud - eg rebranding/reissuing tokens).

Quote from: Thom on May 27, 2017, 04:03:16 pm

RE - the lack of community interest. I simply don't see many people even willing to ask questions about this mess. @pc in the forum actually said it's not good to make this public. ALL IT TAKES FOR EVIL TO PROSPER IS FOR GOOD MEN TO DO NOTHING. If this were happening to you wouldn't you want the truth to be known? Those wanting to do evil thrive in the darkness of secrecy and it's important to shine a light of truth on them to expose them. How hard can it be to ask a question?

Perhaps because it's really negative and none of us were expecting this mess when we originally invested in Blockpay? If I was a developer who had his pay cut because of a quarrel between my bosses I'd be livid; it's disgusting to withhold employees salaries, doing so is a serious warning that something is wrong (perhaps even breaching EU work rights?). If I was Chris I'd be asking others to host the hangout to avoid the public spotlight until this is all sorted out...

The reason why I decided to continue hosting the weekly BitShares Mumble is to be approachable by all of you. I am open to community question and continue to answer them as good as I can at that specific moment. Unfortunately, some questions cannot be answered right away due to legal issues, but I hope to come back to them later again to clarify.

  these graphics are very cool. Can I use them for BitShares presentations at Universities? I am there from time to time to get people started with Blockchain and BitShares.

Dear BitShares Stakeholder,

We would like to introduce a new worker proposal that pays for a new BitShares core dev.

Please vote for Worker 1.14.49: Alfredo Garcia, Bitshares Core Dev
 
This Worker Proposal is for 6 months, and will include fixing Graphene Issues via github, and building the new features for the Bitshares platform and DEx that the community has been asking for.
 
Worker Details

• Total Cost of hiring Alfredo: 3,261,671 BTS (~9600 USD at $20/hr)
• This Proposed 6-month Worker will cost Bitshares 1,630,835 BTS (~4800 USD)
• *BitShares Munich will pay the other half, ~4800 USD
• Worker Lifetime: 6 months, (Jan 23 - Jul 23, 2017)
• Working Hours: 20h per week
• Worker focus on the 190 Github Issues, and new BitShares features from BitShares Roadmap

@fav, Please see the initial proposal. The worker is quoted in BTS, not in USD.

I agree with you if the worker would have been quoted in USD, then the leftover BTS would have been burned or repaid to the pool. That is not the case with this worker.

Alfredo fully deserves his payout, since he worked many hours for the BitShares community as core dev and is highly motivated to continue.

If the future BitShares workers should be nominated in BTS or in BitUSD like Xeroc´s worker is up to all of us to decide.

So whats the consensus here? I actually feel safer with BTS on polo that trusting myself not to lose my password. Lol.

And I DONT trust Polo.

I asked about hardware wallets. Someone said to use the desktop client, but it was confusing as hell.

The desktop client is a good version to protect your private keys on your own laptop. Always remember to make backups of your 3 private keys (active, owner, memo).

There is also the option use Paperwallets for BitShares. http://paperwallet.bitshares.eu/

Right now we have one community member Brandon who is working on a Trezor integration based on the work of Xeroc and SVK.

Dear BitShares Community,

today I got some awesome news for you all. After a few talks with Alfredo, Xeroc and others we came to the conclusion that Alfredo has become a very valuable member of our community and his past few months of hard work have paid off. Alfredo is now an active member of our BitShares community and has contributed a lot to the BitShares code base, its security and its future.

I am happy to transfer Alfredo the first part of his BTS worker salaries for the time frame: January 23th, 2017 to May 13th, 2017.
In total: 1,180,210 BTS
Outstanding: -450,625 BTS
In total: 1,630,835 BTS

http://cryptofresh.com/tx/86f46f20f741d67191626cb361692d9fbdd34fa1

Next payout day: July 26th, 2017

Thank you all for your support for Alfredo´s worker and I am looking forward to more of his great work.

Best regards,

Christoph

.. where do private / confidential transactions stand ? Are we looking at some month's delay until ETA?

@Chris4210 

Hi Karnal,

I will release more info regarding Stealth and confidential transactions within the next weeks. I am collecting all the latest information from our devs for a report.

Best regards,

Christoph