Quote from: Stan on February 19, 2015, 02:32:54 am

Music and Play have their own independent teams and schedules.  As I understand it they are still on track with things happening in the next few months.  Check them out.

BitShares Me was the first to merge into BitShares X last summer before launch and you have been using it for six months as User Issued Assets.  As a result you can trade between UIAs and MPAs with combined maximum market depth that the two would have had separately.

With the current BitShares, our priority is to get something stable and easy to use so that marketing can start bringing in entire new classes of users that don't know anything about crypto and frankly don't want to know.  So all hands are focusing on that before adding new features like Vote and DNS.  Lots of  thinking on Vote and DNS is still going on among the core devs, but we are trying to stick to priorities even though the champions of those new features are chafing to get started.

Without the merger

BitShares X would still be what it was back in November -- Unmarketable.

BitShares Vote would be exactly what BitShares is now,
a self-funding business able to pay people to work on it,
and getting better every day.
(Except it would be splitting its market cap and market depth with X.)

This is because post 2/28 donations would have ethically had to focus on new stuff (Vote and DNS) and BitShares X would have been placed on hold.  Waiting for more funding. Forever. Those are the fiscal realities.

The two would be competing head to head and splitting market depth and market share but BitShares Vote would be pulling ahead relentlessly because it would have all the delegate manpower that BitShares now enjoys.  And Vote would still have the promise of new features we are still working on while X would still be just X.  Forever.

Every developer is working on a loooooog to do list in priority order.  The value of their compensation is tied more directly to their performance than most workers have ever experienced in this world.  So incentive can hardly be in doubt.  (You can elect new, better developers, you know.  Just find them, vet them, hire them, train them and fire the ones you've got.)

If we were making progress on the other things mentioned in this thread that means we would not be making as much progress on improving the user experience, stability, and usability for low-powered machines.  Zero sum game.

If you want to help, recruit more developers and marketers, and find ways to fund them.   

Rats.  I hate it when something this profound scrolls out of the top 100 recent posts before the 24 hour view cycle is over.  Especially during Lunar New Year when people are not in front of their computers as much as they really should be.  Alas, I guess there's nothing I can do about it...

But, lest I be accused of a shamelessly thinly disguised bump, I'll use this opportunity to reprise a classic piece of Casswork.  The Greater BitShares Ecosystem Iceberg Metaphor - what you see is but a small part of what lies below the surface.   Tracking down bugs, developing new wallets, pursuing new partnerships... these things lie below the surface where you don't see all the work that is being done.  So it is easy to grow impatient.  We understand.  We hope you will understand.