Show Posts

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.


Messages - tbone

Pages: 1 2 3 4 [5] 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 ... 43
61
General Discussion / Re: Liquidity, Liquidity, Liquidity
« on: February 03, 2017, 01:00:32 pm »
In my previous post on this thread, I mentioned the liquidity rewards idea that I've been talking about in Telegram.  And Telegram user @LogikGeek asked me a question about it in the chat so I wanted to answer here since it's relevant to this thread.  The question and answer are below.

Logik Geek asked:
Quote
@tbone you have said in the past that bitshares needs to become attractive to traders who short bitusd instead of long term investors because long term bitshares investors creating bitusd depend on the price of bts to rise. By traders did you mean traders who make trades on a time horizon that is so small (next hours to days) that bts is as likely to to up as down during that time, effectively eliminating the effect of long term price trends of bts?

It's not so much the timeframe. It's the fact that they play both sides at all times, buying at the bid and selling at the ask, enabling them to earn the spread.  That's what market makers (like @bitcrab) do.  And if the market trends too much in one direction (creating an imbalance in their inventory) they know how to hedge it.  We need more sophisticated market participants like this and should incentivize them by rewarding anyone who ADDS liquidity to the order book. 

This is NOT to say that the other types of participants are not important.  In fact, attracting market makers would be *great* for the trader types (@JonnyBitcoin, @clayop, etc) who want to short BitAssets into existence, because their biggest fear is being unable to get out of their short position if BTS goes down.  They would not have to worry about this if we had proper market makers who would be sitting on the ASK, giving the BitAsset shorters a way out whenever they need it. These BitAsset shorters would also benefit by earning some of the liquidity rewards, as long as they are ADDING liquidity (by selling BitAssets at the bid), not TAKING liquidity (by selling BitAsets at the ask).

62
General Discussion / Re: Liquidity, Liquidity, Liquidity
« on: February 03, 2017, 12:00:10 pm »
1) Focus on BitUSD  -- I agree that we should focus more on bitUSD.  When it comes to the tabs, I would like to see OBITS removed as well.  Actually, in the bitshares wallet OBITS doesn't have it's own tab.

2) Simplify borrowing of BitUSD -- I also agree with the idea of simplifying the borrowing of bitAssets.  And I'm glad @svk added the borrow link.  But keep in mind that it's only showing up in your wallet because you happen to have some bitUSD balance.  Anyone that does not have any bitUSD balance will not see that.  I have some ideas about how to deal with this, but it needs to be part of a broader plan relating to how assets in general should be displayed on the account page of the wallet.  OL has taken a step in the right direction with their new table displaying all assets.  But unfortunately they are only getting it partly right and don't seem to be interested in listening.

3) BitUSD:OPEN.USDT market  --  I am slightly on the fence about this one.  Although I agree with it more than not.  I'm just having a little trouble grasping the utility of this market.   I mean, who will actually USE it.  There's no point if there won't be users.  In other words, outside of market makers and arbitrageurs,  who has USDT and would like to exchange it for bitUSD (or vice versa)?  But yeah, theoretically, there SHOULD be people who want to do this.  So I would be in favor of giving it a try.  And I agree that it's easier for non-sophisticated participants (i.e. non market makers) since the market is 1:1 and can't trend in one direction and create a large and growing imbalance in your inventory (which market makers would ordinarily hedge against).  And even if it did get out of balance, there's no real risk that needs to be hedged.  The only actual risk is ending up with more of the centralized asset than the trustless one, if that's a problem for you.

4) Maker / Taker model  --  I don't  see why this would be very difficult even though it requires a hard fork.  I think we should consider doing it because it just makes sense long term.  Every real exchange offers a maker/taker pricing model.   But in the short term, we really do need more than that to push liquidity.  We need something like the liquidity rewards I've been talking about, which requires no fork (it can be done totally off-chain).

5) Bots -- I would love to see even better, easier-to-use bot options.  btsbots is a really nice step in the right direction, but the interface is not very intuitive.  And there's no way to manage the balancing of your inventory within some constraints.  If you're not careful, you could end up with all of your funds in just one of the assets you're trying to provide liquidity to.  As discussed in #4 above, this is not as big of a deal in a 1:1 market  like bitUSD : USDT.   But you still probably don't want to end up so imbalanced like that.  So for the sake of making it easier for people to provide liquidity to ALL markets, I hope btsbots continues to improve. 

6) Distribute BitUSD  --  You're talking about creating users.  I totally agree with that.  We'll probably start to get more users when Blockpay merchants start coming online.  But we should bolster that and accelerate the user adoption.  Another idea is to have a trading contest focused on bitUSD markets.  See link below as an example.  This would bring in more users, traders in this case.  By the way, users mostly TAKE liquidity.  Which is fine.  We need that kind of market participant.  But it's pointless unless we also have participants that ADD liquidity.  This is partly addressed by your list of suggestions.  But we need a real rewards program that incentivizes proper market makers by rewarding anyone who adds liquidity. 

https://www.fxcm.com/why-fxcm/trading-contest/

63
General Discussion / Re: Why Bitshares?
« on: January 21, 2017, 11:42:31 pm »
Why Bitshares?
Bitshares enables anyone to control their own funds/wealth.

Why does it matter?
The fractional reserve banking system is precarious.  Financial institutions are overleveraged.  Some (or many) will fail.  There will be bail-ins, and who knows what else. 

Why does it matter to me?
I don't want to be at the mercy of these institutions.  I want to control my financial destiny.  I want real financial freedom.  Bitshares gives us that.

Bitshares -- Real Financial Freedom



64
No, it's two different use cases and UI's entirely. Echo will use all of the core components that we have been building, but also include voice, video, chat and things that the Smartcoins Wallet just doesn't need.

Got it.  In any event, cosmos is already a blockchain project and you probably don't want that confusion.  How about calling it Jupiter?   

65
General Discussion / Re: plan for sidechain?
« on: January 21, 2017, 10:56:24 pm »
I'm pretty sure you don't know any more than anyone else.
I wouldn't go so far .. BunkerChain labs is working closely with BlockTrades who has two very high profile devs for graphene ..
Pretty damn sure will PeerPlays have a positive effect on Bitshares .. as has Steem(it)

I agree that Peerplays will likely have a positive effect on Bitshares.  That's partly why I own a nice bunch.  Of course, I own even more Steem.  And I've said a few times that Steem is one of the best things that has happened to Bitshares, the full effect of which we have not yet seen.  But that's all beside the point.  In my previous post, I was simply refuting the conclusion that Steemit's roadmap has anything whatsoever to do with what what Dan may be tinkering with in his spare time. 

66
General Discussion / Re: plan for sidechain?
« on: January 21, 2017, 06:44:05 am »
@bytemaster has stated a possible solution, in which top 15 witnesses do MULTI-SIG to relevant bitcoin transactions, however "In theory the witnesses could collude to steal all deposited BTC funds."

in my words the "risk" refer to this, I don't know whether there are ways to avoid this kind of risk.

The best way to substantially mitigate this risk is probably to have known entities as witnesses.  For starters, below is a list of 10 entities that might participate.  And there may be other entities that I'm not thinking of, especially in China.  @bitcrab?

The remaining slots could be filled by known entities outside the graphene ecosystem and/or a few of the most prominent, publicly-known witnesses within the ecosystem.   

Anyway, I wonder if Dan has secretly been working on a solution behind the scenes.  It wouldn't surprise me.  Anything announced along these lines would be a pretty big development.

1. Steemit Inc.
2. OpenLedger
3. BlockPay
4. Transwiser
5. Blocktrades
6. Peerplays
7. BitKapital
8. BitGate
9. Chainsquad
10. Busy.org

You can stop wondering.. he wasn't. Have you read the recent steemit roadmap? The word bitshares and all the other words you listed above other than steemit do not appear in that document that is supposed to layout the next year for steem.

If it was on the roadmap, I would have referred to that, don't you think?  So yeah, obviously he's not working on it officially.  I said behind the scenes.  Who knows what he's tinkering with in his free time.   I'm pretty sure you don't know any more than anyone else.

67
General Discussion / Re: plan for sidechain?
« on: January 21, 2017, 03:04:11 am »
@bytemaster has stated a possible solution, in which top 15 witnesses do MULTI-SIG to relevant bitcoin transactions, however "In theory the witnesses could collude to steal all deposited BTC funds."

in my words the "risk" refer to this, I don't know whether there are ways to avoid this kind of risk.

The best way to substantially mitigate this risk is probably to have known entities as witnesses.  For starters, below is a list of 10 entities that might participate.  And there may be other entities that I'm not thinking of, especially in China.  @bitcrab?

The remaining slots could be filled by known entities outside the graphene ecosystem and/or a few of the most prominent, publicly-known witnesses within the ecosystem.   

Anyway, I wonder if Dan has secretly been working on a solution behind the scenes.  It wouldn't surprise me.  Anything announced along these lines would be a pretty big development.

1. Steemit Inc.
2. OpenLedger
3. BlockPay
4. Transwiser
5. Blocktrades
6. Peerplays
7. BitKapital
8. BitGate
9. Chainsquad
10. Busy.org

68
hey @kenCode, I thought your plan was to combine all of the Smartcoins wallet functionality into Echo once you have the messaging piece worked out.  If that's the case, why not rename the SmartCoins wallet EchoPay and then later combine it with EchoChat?   To refine it further, maybe the app itself is called Echo, and EchoPay is the first feature, while EchoChat will be the next feature.

Just some ideas.

69
(....)
We should be brainstorming new ideas regarding how we can drive up voter participation in the future, such as holding informal fun polls (favourite colour, community mvp polls, etc).

The Gridcoin network is also experiencing a lack of voting participation - only 1/7th of total vote weight votes which brings the validity of poll results mandate into question.

Why not give up the idea of ​​voting.
Maybe we should make the algorithm to vote.

Eg.
A candidate for the witness would have to meet certain requirements.
This is my suggestion:

The maximum possible total score to achieve 1000

The first criterion: proof of geographical dispersion.
The maximum possible score to achieve 300
we want a large scatter in different countries and on different continents
(We need a developers discussion  how to achieve it.)


The second criterion: proof of resources (computing power) and net speed
The maximum possible score to achieve 300
Threshold of 50%, if not achieved, the candidate is eliminated completely.


The third criterion: proof of commitment
The candidate must provide prices feeds for MPA
The maximum possible score to achieve 300


The fourth criterion: proof of reputation
The maximum possible score to achieve 100
Points as a result of vote

The first (eg.) 50 candidates will be witnesses, and receives a salary.
The next (eg.) Of 150 candidates will not be witnesses and receives some less pay for it that they are ready to become a node in case of failure of other nodes


This is really along the lines of a conversation that took place in Telegram yesterday (today for some people).  It makes a lot of sense.  I think the main thing missing is a bond i.e. locking away a certain amount of BTS in order to qualify as a witness.  Some people said it should be minimum of 1M BTS.  I'm personally not sure it should be mandatory.  But I do think it should at least be part of a scoring system such as the one you laid out.  Actually, come to think of it, there should probably be mandatory minimums for all criteria, and anything over the minimum raises the score.  Anyway, I made a couple of comments next to some of your criteria (see comments in red below).

By the way, i also like your idea of having some small pay for backup witnesses.  I was talking about that in Telegram a week or so ago.  Anyway, since you suggest they should get some pay, I assume they would be producing some blocks.  If so, what percentage, maybe 5-10%?  This would be a good opportunity for back up witnesses (or "witness candidates") to earn some reputation and perhaps prove he can reach some initial scoring thresholds. 


Quote
The first criterion: proof of geographical dispersion.
The maximum possible score to achieve 300
we want a large scatter in different countries and on different continents
(We need a developers discussion  how to achieve it.)

This seems tricky, could leave it out at least initially.

The second criterion: proof of resources (computing power) and net speed
The maximum possible score to achieve 300
Threshold of 50%, if not achieved, the candidate is eliminated completely.

Does this include latency?  And what about taking server uptime into account?  How feasible is it to measure these metrics?  Well, latency seems straightforward.  But what about the others?
Latency - Yes!
Server uptime - Yes!

How feasible is it to measure these metrics?  Well, latency seems straightforward.  But what about the others?
Maybe network could send some random( task ) to calculate, once peer random(X days, XX days ). The task should bey predictable within 1s - 10s max seconds (maybe something like pice of "Multicore Super Pi Benchmark" but CPU + RAM )
It could also be that some post-witness-installation, or trustless self test



The third criterion: proof of commitment
The candidate must provide prices feeds for MPA
The maximum possible score to achieve 300

Maybe this should include missed blocks?  And perhaps call this proof of ability or proof of work.  Proof of commitment should perhaps be locking funds, no?
agree

The fourth criterion: proof of reputation
The maximum possible score to achieve 100
Points as a result of vote

The first (eg.) 50 candidates will be witnesses, and receives a salary.
The next (eg.) Of 150 candidates will not be witnesses and receives some less pay for it that they are ready to become a node in case of failure of other nodes
it's just outline

Do you want to rewrite your outline with the changes?  In the meantime, I'm asking @Chris4210 if he can put this on his radar.

70
General Discussion / Re: plan for sidechain?
« on: January 20, 2017, 11:59:15 am »


If it is 'with risk' then it is not a sidechain. It s a multi-sig gateway. It should be called a multi-sig gateway. Calling it anything else is false advertising in my estimation.

As bitcrab noted.. some projects have claimed they are going to deliver blockchain interoperability in some way. There has been literally tens of millions of dollars of funding going into the research and development of this concept/idea. Still, nobody has done it.

Lets have a degree of realism about the technical possibilities with what is in reach with a virtual zero budget available to Bitshares dev.

Multi-sig gateways, sure, that can all be done right now. Just takes some individuals willing to take the risk and technical difficulties of running one. I for one won't participate in something like this till I have seen it working with considerable transactions. I don't want to be liable for the lose of peoples bitcoins for whatever reason.

So to recap. We are talking about multi-sig gateways here, not sidechains.

I'm not sure OP was talking about multi-sig gateways.  He referenced Stan's graphic which I do believe was intended to relate to eventual actual sidechains.  But I have no idea what Stan sees as the time frame.  As for bitcrab's reference to "risk", I have no indication that he meant counterparty risk.  He could have meant that.  Or, the way I read his comment, he could have meant the risk of things going horribly wrong.  Kind of like what you cited. 

Anyway, I do agree that sidechains are probably a ways off.  If we want to be serious about them, we should probably be developing worker talent so we'll have more people capable of helping to implement it when the time comes. 

In the meantime, I still like the idea of some kind of multi-sig gateway implementation.  I'm sure there are risks.  But everything has risks.  Could multi-sig gateway have more risk than stealth, for example?  I dunno probably maybe.  :)

71
General Discussion / Re: [vote] Upgrade Forum Software
« on: January 20, 2017, 11:37:39 am »
Thanks Chris for the detailed info about Discourse.

Although @tbone ranked translation functionality as a lower priority on his list, I believe it should be given more weight. It may be a moot point since the consensus appears to be converging on Discourse, but we should be doing all we can to be inclusive.

We're all very aware of how strong the eastern contingent of users is, so let's make sure we do everything we can to be inclusive of their input.

On that note, have we considered the weechat or whatever they're finding popular? According to my limited research Discuz! is the market leader for forum software in China. The language barrier is a big deal. We need to bridge the gap, and it almost seems unfathomable that solutions don't exist to solve that problem. They may be I guess, but perhaps not a price we can afford. 

After searching around and not finding much, I posted a question to the IMUG facebook page:

Quote
'm looking for a different forum for our international user group. There are quite a few multilingual versions of various social platforms, however the multilingual support on those I've looked into doesn't provide translation of messages / posts / articles. Ideally I would like a forum similar to Discuz! (http://www.msg2me.com/portal.php) where ALL of the content, not just the user interface or input laguage is translated by clicking on the little nationality flags at the top of the website.

Does such software exist? If so are any open source versions available? If not what level of costs are involved?

Thank you for all the work you do at IMUG. If you can't answer these questions I'm not sure anyone can.

Hopefully I'll get a reply and we can factor that into this discussion.

@Thom, I'm in total agreement about the importance of communication with the Chinese community.  I've been pushing that idea heavily in Telegram, trying to be diplomatic in heated conversations with @alt and @bitcrab, etc.  And I put translation on a list of must haves, but in last position with the "good to have" qualifier because an existing plug-in isn't necessarily a total requirement since the other requirements include open source and customizable, so it should be possible to create our own translation plugin if necessary.  But yeah, it would be better if we didn't have to!

72
(....)
We should be brainstorming new ideas regarding how we can drive up voter participation in the future, such as holding informal fun polls (favourite colour, community mvp polls, etc).

The Gridcoin network is also experiencing a lack of voting participation - only 1/7th of total vote weight votes which brings the validity of poll results mandate into question.

Why not give up the idea of ​​voting.
Maybe we should make the algorithm to vote.

Eg.
A candidate for the witness would have to meet certain requirements.
This is my suggestion:

The maximum possible total score to achieve 1000

The first criterion: proof of geographical dispersion.
The maximum possible score to achieve 300
we want a large scatter in different countries and on different continents
(We need a developers discussion  how to achieve it.)


The second criterion: proof of resources (computing power) and net speed
The maximum possible score to achieve 300
Threshold of 50%, if not achieved, the candidate is eliminated completely.


The third criterion: proof of commitment
The candidate must provide prices feeds for MPA
The maximum possible score to achieve 300


The fourth criterion: proof of reputation
The maximum possible score to achieve 100
Points as a result of vote

The first (eg.) 50 candidates will be witnesses, and receives a salary.
The next (eg.) Of 150 candidates will not be witnesses and receives some less pay for it that they are ready to become a node in case of failure of other nodes


This is really along the lines of a conversation that took place in Telegram yesterday (today for some people).  It makes a lot of sense.  I think the main thing missing is a bond i.e. locking away a certain amount of BTS in order to qualify as a witness.  Some people said it should be minimum of 1M BTS.  I'm personally not sure it should be mandatory.  But I do think it should at least be part of a scoring system such as the one you laid out.  Actually, come to think of it, there should probably be mandatory minimums for all criteria, and anything over the minimum raises the score.  Anyway, I made a couple of comments next to some of your criteria (see comments in red below).

By the way, i also like your idea of having some small pay for backup witnesses.  I was talking about that in Telegram a week or so ago.  Anyway, since you suggest they should get some pay, I assume they would be producing some blocks.  If so, what percentage, maybe 5-10%?  This would be a good opportunity for back up witnesses (or "witness candidates") to earn some reputation and perhaps prove he can reach some initial scoring thresholds. 


Quote
The first criterion: proof of geographical dispersion.
The maximum possible score to achieve 300
we want a large scatter in different countries and on different continents
(We need a developers discussion  how to achieve it.)

This seems tricky, could leave it out at least initially.

The second criterion: proof of resources (computing power) and net speed
The maximum possible score to achieve 300
Threshold of 50%, if not achieved, the candidate is eliminated completely.

Does this include latency?  And what about taking server uptime into account?  How feasible is it to measure these metrics?  Well, latency seems straightforward.  But what about the others?

The third criterion: proof of commitment
The candidate must provide prices feeds for MPA
The maximum possible score to achieve 300

Maybe this should include missed blocks?  And perhaps call this proof of ability or proof of work.  Proof of commitment should perhaps be locking funds, no?


The fourth criterion: proof of reputation
The maximum possible score to achieve 100
Points as a result of vote

The first (eg.) 50 candidates will be witnesses, and receives a salary.
The next (eg.) Of 150 candidates will not be witnesses and receives some less pay for it that they are ready to become a node in case of failure of other nodes




73
Quick update regarding the 'GRIDCOIN' MPA - The Gridcoin price fluctuated, triggered a black swan state and the asset has been stuck in said state ever since: https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,22733.msg299091.html#msg299091

It has however opened the door to new developments by PC regarding MPA resiliency to black swan events. Once these new changes are in effect, the Gridcoin community will reactivate the market pegged asset, requiring more witnesses to produce the price feed.

Prior to the black swan event we only had 2 or 3 witnesses out of 25 (27?), whilst changing the witness count may be a dangerous idea the concept of vote weight degradation over time for witnesses and committee members is still sound.

What does everyone think?
I do think a UIA fits more in Gridcoin's situation, perhaps with a special owner/committee like the STEALTH asset (check https://cryptofresh.com/u/stealth-mgmt , the owner is a multi-sig account, automatically controlled by top 5 holders)
We've already got an EBA (OPEN.GRC), issuing an UIA would inflate the GRC coinsupply (unlikely to fly with the GRC network unless we burnt GRC before project-raining an GRC UIA).
We're waiting for the blackswan hardening features to be implemented within BTS early this year, when the changes are implemented we will revive the GRIDCOIN MPA even if it's risky.

This is off topic though, back to the main point - vote degredation!

People are talking about increasing the block rewards for witnesses to encourage more active/productive witnesses: https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,23702.0.html

Surely degrading votes over say 4-6 months would encourage witnesses to continuously campaign for their positions and open the door for new witnesses to potentially gain power?

Getting witnesses to add price feeds for the GRIDCOIN MPA was like pulling teeth  - witnesses should be far more active & inactivity should have consequences, even if their witness node is healthy.

I think vote degradation may be a problem if there isn't a ton of voter participation to begin with.  Also, I think @pc made a good argument against degradation earlier in the thread.

By the way, I wonder if witnesses have been reluctant to offer price feeds for Gridcoin MPA because they think MPA is the wrong way to go.  I tend to agree with that.  A cryptocuyrrency is not the best use case for an MPA, especially an MPA that will have difficult gaining liquidity.  Why not issue a UIA?  You could get rid of your blockchain and replace the coins with a committee-controlled UIA.  Then you could focus on maintaining/developing your BOINC software rather then futzing around with a blockchain, which has nothing to do with your core competency.   Anyway, just my 2 cents.


74
Ok, I think we're making some progress.  @bitcrab has a very valid point here.  The way the referral program is designed, it adds complexity for communities like in China where the $100 fee is way too high.  He can return his 80% share of LTM fee to the user, but that's not an elegant process.   First the user would have to pay from their own wallet, then he would have to reimburse them.  That seems undesirable.  Another problem is that he would have to wait 3 months (I believe) to get that 80% back.  Again, this is too much to expect. 

So what's the answer?  Maybe registrars should have the ability to waive their 80% share so the user never has to pay the full amount to begin with, all they have to pay is the $20 and the registrar would not have to do anything, and would not have to wait 3 months to get any money back.  This would at least address the problem with the $100 price being way too high for non-western communities.  @bitcrab could possibly that work for you?

75
General Discussion / Re: [vote] Upgrade Forum Software
« on: January 18, 2017, 08:17:51 am »
A very important feature of our current forum (SMF) is something called "Show unread posts since last visit".  Most people using the forum should be aware of this.  If not, there's a good chance you're missing posts. 

For some reason this feature was not working properly for several months until recently (knock on wood).  This was one of the 3 primary reasons for the decline in use of the forum, in addition of course to the steemit experiment, and the rising popularity of the Telegram chat.

My point is, we really need to make sure any new forum we're considering has this feature, and that it works as expected (similar features on different forums each work a little differently, sometimes with undesirable results).  Without this feature working properly, I can guarantee people will miss posts and the level of engagement will suffer, perhaps dramatically (again).


By the way, I don't think I've seen a list of requirements for the new forum.  Here's my attempt: 

o open source
o customizable
o show unread posts (with expected behavior)
o import/migration supports SMF 2
o chat component
o translation plug-in (good to have)


Pages: 1 2 3 4 [5] 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 ... 43