Quote from: vikram on November 06, 2016, 12:13:42 am

Soledger Inc. (myself and @Agent86) is proposing a BitShares worker for handling administrative and maintenance tasks including--but not limited to--the following:

• Emergency security patches
• Emergency network stability patches
• Merge upstream Graphene, fc, other library updates
• Fix important compilation and compatibility issues
• Tag core releases
• Manage GitHub issue tracker
• Manage GitHub pull requests
• Consolidate high-quality community projects into BitShares GitHub organization
• Consolidate and maintain other important documentation to help ease contributing and integrating

Vikram - I don't mean to quench your enthusiam, but like others have already said, the software has been *very* stable, which means that there is no immediate need for any of the above. You've set up a worker that pays $1200 per month - for essentially nothing.

Also, I find it a little strange that someone with little knowledge of Graphene turns up after a year of absence, and the first (well, second actually) thing they do is request full access to the main GitHub repo.

I know you're a very capable person, but I would still prefer a more gentle approach to things. That would allow the community to evaluate your work, and give you a chance make yourself familiar with the new codebase. If we reach a point again where BitShares sees more or less regular updates, with your help, I will certainly approve your maintenance worker as proposed above. But not yet.

I definitely hear your concerns and perhaps we should have reached out to you directly before attempting to finalize such a proposal. And perhaps I should have also been more descriptive in the OP:

- Emergency security patches
- Emergency network stability patches

Ideally these would never require any work. However, if such an issue were to arise--which may happen unexpectedly at any time--I think it is important that a specific party has responsibility for ensuring that the issue ultimately gets resolved.

- Merge upstream Graphene, fc, other library updates

This may be a combination of minor things, but something that I want to make sure is maintained well nonetheless. I note that bitshares/bitshares-2/bitshares has diverged from cryptonomex/graphene/master after commit 006d54863312c7daf1ccb73d5940ec658c860efb and has diverged from cryptonomex/graphene/develop after commit f049fce4e97154ce0d037ee2818a285ebffb944f. bitshares/fc has also diverged from steemit/fc after commit 0dca15c3954d38f2a8603aab316d214ca893930f. The updates themselves may not be particularly important but I think it points to a lack of organization in that these divergences persist.

I am also interested in backporting other base Graphene fixes from Steem when applicable and permissible. I also want to look into the feasibility of backporting an upgrade like ChainBase (https://steemit.com/steem/@steemitblog/announcing-steem-0-14-4-shared-db-preview-release) should it be successfully integrated into Steem.

- Fix important compilation and compatibility issues

Ideally this would never require any work. However, operating systems and environments continue to update and move forward, and it may become more difficult to contribute to or run BitShares as time goes on. As an example, I am unable to compile BitShares on my local machine running Arch Linux, presumably due to compilers or libraries which are too new. Perhaps nobody needs specific responsibility for issues like this, but it is something that I intend to keep track of and try to address when possible.

- Tag core releases

Perhaps I misunderstood this initially; although @svk has been tagging what are marked "GUI Release"s, they indeed incorporate all of the few changes to the core code that occurred as well. I do not want to interfere with his work. However, if in the future, there are non-trivial changes to the core code, I am willing to perform final reviews of all said changes before signing off on an official release tag, as I previously was responsible for with BitShares 1. Further, if there are significant updates in the future, someone should also be responsible for coordinating and notifying exchanges and other service providers, a step which has had oversights in the past.

- Manage GitHub issue tracker
- Manage GitHub pull requests
- Consolidate high-quality community projects into BitShares GitHub organization
- Consolidate and maintain other important documentation to help ease contributing and integrating

On second look, I am not yet sure on the best path for the issue tracker. If it seems that bitshares/bitshares-2 will continue to diverge from cryptonomex/graphene, perhaps it does make sense to open an independent issue tracker for bitshares/bitshares-2. This can also be used to collect BitShares-specific issues and should also be more discoverable for BitShares users who do not understand the Graphene heritage.

There are also outstanding pull requests in cryptonomex/graphene, cryptonomex/fc, and bitshares/bitshares-2. The commits may ultimately be inconsequential, but again I think it points to a lack of organization that these requests sometimes go unaddressed. I want to make sure that potentially valuable issues or contributions do not fall through the cracks.

I will have to do more of a survey of projects to get a better idea, but I was thinking that projects from community leaders such as https://github.com/xeroc/python-graphenelib, https://github.com/xeroc/graphene-paperwallet, https://github.com/svk31/graphenejs-lib, https://github.com/svk31/graphenejs-ws, https://github.com/kenCode-de/bitshares-wallet, https://github.com/kenCode-de/smartcoins-wallet as some examples, could potentially be moved into https://github.com/bitshares if said owners find it suitable, to consolidate pieces of the BitShares ecosystem more clearly under the "official" BitShares name.

I will also have to explore the state of documentation more, but I want to look into consolidating and updating info from places like https://bitshares.org/, http://docs.bitshares.eu/, https://bitshares.org/doxygen/, https://github.com/bitshares/bitshares-2/wiki, or at least try to help organize things so that relevant information is more discoverable.

In general, I will also do my best to address relatively clear issues that arise if and when possible. As an example, while syncing a new node yesterday my p2p logs ballooned to greater than 35GB. I can't say that fixing such an issue will be straightforward, but it is the kind of clear problem that I will look into.

Again, I hear your concerns but I hope I have clarified my thinking at least somewhat. The system has indeed been stable and hopefully will remain so, but I do not think these responsibilities amount to nothing. In a system as large and integrated as BitShares--still around a $10 million market cap--I think it is important that even the small details are taken care of. If BitShares were to rise dramatically in value, I think it is even more important to pay attention to the details.

I indeed have relatively little experience working with Graphene, especially after the time that has passed, but I am not wholly unfamiliar with its design--I was there when it was first built and made a number of commits (https://github.com/bitshares/bitshares-2/graphs/contributors) --and am confident in my ability to get back up to speed.

If I recall correctly from when I previously stepped down as GitHub admin, at the time the only other admins were Cryptonomex, BlockTrades, and maybe @cass. If no one else has been added since, it seems like there is room for additional active community leaders to be given administrative permissions, which I would want to grant to probably at least @xeroc and @svk--if there is no great objection to me adding more admins. I will edit the OP to mention this, but it's a natural extension of consolidating community project repos into the GitHub organization. Part of the intent of this worker proposal is for stakeholders to vote on assigning administrative authority to a new party. BitShares is a decentralized project and will continue to have different people in different roles as time goes on.

I hope I have made my thinking a bit more clear. Thank you for the honest thoughts and consideration.

I do not know how the overall Bitshares community feels but personally I think the blockchain trend of 2017 will be the "mainstream utility" movement. Blockchains that are built to fulfill a specific utility while appealing to the user-friendliness regular folks appreciate. This is what is starting to bubble up to the surface and spill over in terms of where the overall crypto communities want to move. I guess people are finally tired of sending transactions to each other back and forth and circle jerking about it being soooooo decentralized!   

These "REAL utility" blockchains will be the big winners going forward. With the potential that Steem has shown this year there is no doubt anymore that decked out infrastructures are not needed to make some type of impact on normal consumers (which is actually where the big money lies). And if Steem can fix the kinks in their business model don't be surprised if it shoots right back up next year. It still in beta and people forget this.

I mention that because you said you were experimenting along side trying to figure out the type of services Soledger can provide. If you don't feel comfortable sharing what it is you are actually experimenting with I understand. But would you mind mentioning the specific industry your experiments could appeal to? For instance Steem/SteemIt built a lightweight blockchain that was for the social network/blogging industry, PeerPlay is in the e-sports/Sports Betting/Gambling industry and my project we are in the Hollywood/CableTV/Streaming space. What space are you experimenting for? Or does it have a more broader application that could generally apply to multiple industries?

Finally while I do not believe you could get the steady stream of project's needing technical help here (in the way that say Ethereum provides), I do believe there is some merit to Soledger making a play for the business model CODE/Consensys is doing. They should not be the only ones in that space right now and the technical expertise of Joseph Lubin and his team has allowed many Ethereum projects to raise crazy amounts of money for their projects. The last being SingularDTV a worthy competitor to my project. This model of using reputation and coding expertise to funnel resources to a crypto-community is a winner in my book. It brings monetary resources to their community so their economy around the blockchain is actually built.

Graphene and other application specific blockchain business models can be your niche or selling point. They will be the winners going forward. And I believe if Soledger were to focus on helping projects like these it could be a great alternative to Consensys/CODE's Ethereum specific model. And could be a great way to funnel resources to this community and most importantly yourselves. This is of course just one service in addition to whatever else you could potentially want to do. The only real question is the one all new businesses struggle with and that is where to start... Let me know what you think of these ideas. Peace and THE CUBS WON!!!!

I am liking your thinking Solomon. Lance and I have been having some thoughts along similar lines. Particularly concerning the ideas around the development of focused, application-specific chains.

As for our current experimentation: Lance and I both have longstanding individual interests in consensus mechanisms, and it was on this basis that we had originally linked up with each other. So up until now, Soledger had primarily been focusing on exploring the viability and uses of a specific consensus protocol of our own design, which offers certain unique security and performance tradeoffs. Lance mentioned it briefly in his earlier post. I am not sure that our work is concrete enough to begin a public discussion with everyone yet, but I will let @Agent86 chime in if he wants to say more.

Now that we are reconnecting with the BitShares community however, new possibilities are already opening up. I have just posted a BitShares worker proposal (https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,23495.msg300188.html#msg300188) for me to handle some of the project administration tasks, as I once did with BitShares 1. Hopefully it is successful, and after getting back up to speed with Graphene and BitShares, there may be opportunities for Soledger to do further Graphene-based development along the lines you mentioned. Given the amount of infrastructure and exposure that continues to grow around Graphene, I can indeed see opportunities to do targeted development around BitShares, Peerplays, and/or other Graphene-based chains that are yet to be launched. Going a step farther, as an example, I know Lance has a great passion for different SmartCoin and bond mechanisms--so there may be potential for future Graphene blockchains focusing on such contracts.

You're probably aware but there also turns out to be a number of blockchain-related meetups on Meetup.com around the Chicago area. Lance and I have gone to a few and will continue to do so when it makes sense--meeting people in person is helpful to keep a finger on the pulse of things, and to keep abreast of local developments and opportunities.

This proposal is based on my original thread here: https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,23474.msg300044.html#msg300044

Soledger Inc. (myself and @Agent86) is proposing a BitShares worker for handling administrative and maintenance tasks including--but not limited to--the following:

• Emergency security patches
• Emergency network stability patches
• Merge upstream Graphene, fc, other library updates
• Fix important compilation and compatibility issues
• Tag core releases
• Manage GitHub issue tracker
• Manage GitHub pull requests
• Consolidate high-quality community projects into BitShares GitHub organization
• Consolidate and maintain other important documentation to help ease contributing and integrating

I have prior experience with all of these tasks from when I was project manager of BitShares 1.

We think it's important that a specific party maintains responsibility for addressing any emergency issues that disrupt the ongoing stability and operations of the network. In addition, it is my experience that it is helpful to have an unambiguous project administrator to act as a clear point of contact to help coordinate community contributions, avoid fragmentation of community efforts, and generally help keep things organized so that important information is readily accessible.

Taking into account that the BitShares codebase is reasonably stable at present, we have chosen a pay rate of 10,000 BTS/day for this worker. At a conservative exchange rate of $0.004/BTS, this is roughly $1200/month or $14,500/year. $0.004/BTS currently corresponds roughly to a market cap of $10.3 million. At the time of posting, the current price is around $0.0045/BTS and market cap $11.6 million.

For comparison, here are the most recent expired workers:




This Soledger worker has been defined to last until 2017-12-31. For those who want to approve this worker, please choose the correct version that expires in 2017, instead of my first attempt that was mistakenly set to expire in 2016:






If and when this worker is approved, I will request full administrative permissions for the BitShares GitHub organization (https://github.com/bitshares/). Upon acquiring said permissions, I will begin to perform any reorganization/cleanup/updating that I see fit, in line with the tasks outlined in the initial bullet points.

Edit: Given the decentralized nature of the greater BitShares project, I think it is important that currently active community leaders hold some administrative authority, and so if I am given GitHub admin permissions, I will also look into adding other admins: @xeroc and @svk are two names that come to mind.

Thank you to all stakeholders for your consideration.

Thank you everyone for the warm welcome! It's great to see so many familiar names and the enthusiasm among the community.

Lance and I have both mostly been out of the loop for some time and the feedback is very helpful.

You might want to also try posting on SteemIt and introducing your project there. Many of the old Bitshares community members reside there more often than here. Regards.

Yes we will look into getting set up on Steem.

fixing all the little warts, polishing edges, properly tagging and announcing releases, and more generally maintaining the administrative part of the project that makes it easier for the rest of the ecosystem to consume the software.

Yes this is what I was thinking. Although these tasks are relatively simple, having someone consistently handle them can help prevent friction for others to contribute or integrate.

Historically, it has been difficult to get workers approved.  It may be easier to break apart tasks into smaller, specific worker proposals instead of one general proposal.

However, as BlockTrades.us had a worker for the maintenance work but still left some fund unspent after months, I guess we don't have much high priority work here to be done (or perhaps not to be funded by worker proposals). Please be aware that your worker proposal will be evaluated by all stake holders, not only the ones who replied here (and don't be surprised if it didn't be voted in quickly).

Consider potentially looking at the current list of fixes and creating a roadmap for each one along with potentially some minor feature enhancements. This would go a long way towards providing a long term benefit of your worker and keeping it voted in in tandem with releases.

I agree with abit - we have little need for maintenance right now. The software has proven to be very stable.

What we need is people who are capable of tackling specific projects. There are several threads here in the forum where improvements are being discussed. Most of the stuff is frontend-related, but there's backend work to be done, too.

Thanks guys this is all good to know. The way I structured the tasks in the OP was just an initial idea; Lance and I will continue to discuss possible paths based on your thoughts. In particular I see that @abit, @pc, @svk, and @xeroc are amongst those who are still active on the GitHub repositories so I especially want to see what you guys are thinking. And I want to emphasize that we don't want to step on anyone's toes or do anything that is against stakeholder wishes or interest.

Since you've started a new company, I guess you have a real business plan, not only to work for BitShares, right? Could you share more info?

@Agent86 has started another thread here: https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,23478.msg300083.html#msg300083 to start a discussion a bit more focused on Soledger as a company. Keep in mind we are very young still and appreciate any and all feedback especially from this community.

default (unlocked) >>> blockchain_get_transaction b8b48df1
[
  "b8b48df153694436146fa756fa6906a2fa4685cc",{
    "trx": {
      "expiration": "2015-08-28T18:12:49",
      "operations": [{
          "type": "withdraw_op_type",
          "data": {
            "balance_id": "BTSMgUiRGTuTR84outs5LMFdS68mM1gFY4Tb",
            "amount": 300050000,
            "claim_input_data": ""
          }
        },{
          "type": "deposit_op_type",
          "data": {
            "amount": 300000000,
            "condition": {
              "asset_id": 0,
              "slate_id": 154922349881702406,
              "type": "withdraw_signature_type",
              "data": {
                "owner": "BTS6VD7GESA66yjxCH1axZzfFTQRcxecwwZo",
                "memo": {
                  "one_time_key": "BTS4zc14SqNCxf2uHAwCQcCmMuQp8EGenQUaMRjcHJzqa2kpyLPfq",
                  "encrypted_memo_data": "ff986b90d3a73412f816f0c016e8bfdd30f2bfa9c3890b28e01ad7884022d03f37e6d1628a142c2244100acdcdefd2bbb95e2267aeb1cb3bcd5a2ffc6a3b99e9"
                }
              }
            }
          }
        }
      ],
      "signatures": [
        "20558c398f46dba7654ceb27b590e8ab20679addf5c94c41204102fdd951f1cdde56b3731593da4d28d67b70f91a30626ae65aa5097b45d0c2be2225e2c867df51"
      ]
    },
    "signed_addresses": [
      "BTSFF2ArNBxK2XZ7aBTS8fkgUoqAe1bLTTC",
      "BTSB8MUQBYcrbRgnbxJLXyXpZRR2GXiAFUmi",
      "BTSHMHN4tR9zmqeGWETkFn2xL1eU6uBe9Ls7",
      "BTSMKYZm1LU73HgcPv5xizJ6KRUCE5rncxkF",
      "BTSP2roVjx4VWc7wP2LZEPQ2gFU9UPjj9qw8"
    ],
    "min_fees": [],
    "max_fees": [],
    "fees_paid": [[
        0,
        50000
      ]
    ],
    "total_base_equivalent_fees_paid": 50000,
    "delegate_vote_deltas": [[
        35920,
        300000000
      ]
    ],
    "yield_claimed": [],
    "op_deltas": [[
        0,[[
            0,
            -300050000
          ]
        ]
      ],[
        1,[[
            0,
            300000000
          ]
        ]
      ]
    ],
    "chain_location": {
      "block_num": 3442397,
      "trx_num": 0
    }
  }
]

It's in the blockchain.

BitSharesBlocks isn't guaranteed to be reliable -- when in doubt, always check your own copy of the blockchain.

i intend to agree here! We should also audit current admin section .. i begin to think that more then 50% of then current admins aren't active here since months ... thoghts?

Agreed:

On a separate note, it's probably a good idea for the community to audit all of the mods/admins of the forum, because I doubt anyone has reviewed them in a long time.

Here all all the admins:

Code: [Select]

bitsapphire
BitSharesDevelopment
boshen1011
bytemaster
cass
cn-members
itnom
logxing
metalallen
testz
toast
vikram
[ -_-.] sysadmin

And here are all the global mods:

Code: [Select]

cn-members
DACSunlimited
dannotestein
fav
HackFisher
James
Stan
testz
WildWex


There was a thread that started with "The most important thing Bitshares...." has been deleted because it possessed posts that questioned CNX's ability to stay true to Bitshares. I only know this because my last post was a response to a well written post by Empirical1.2. I couldn't find my post or his and decided to search my history where I found the link to the thread here https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,17994.0.html
And it has been completely removed.

Here is a line from the Moderation Log:
Removed topic "Deleted - ID:17994" from "General Discussion" August 18, 2015, 01:59:02 AM BitcoinJesus2.O Full Member

Same ID, 17944; looks like he was OP and deleted it?

And/or have a mod remove all references of the link on this forum and watch it drop off the first page in a week or so, put the link in google and include site:bitsharestalk.org and see all the times we linked to it

Broke the link to the marmot page in the OP, as we have done in the past at the request of community members so as not to give them higher search rankings. OP if you are unhappy with this, feel free to change it back and I won't edit your posts again.