I see transactions. However my balances are not updating. I sent between my accounts, and the balances just stay still.

You are absolutely correct my friend!  I have no idea what the non-sense above means.

From the sound of it, on some test exchange, you will be selling and/or almost selling real fast –‘ 10 transactions per second’, some kind of cloths ‘shorts’  .
Just for the fun of it –'ha ha' -you will also have groups placing bid and ask orders, but it will be impossible for those orders to be matched - 'Bids/asks/… (but no order matching, ha ha)'

Indeed I have no idea which part makes it so amazing?

I've been playing with Dry Run 8. I must say - the almost instant confirmations are absolutely astonishing. So for comparison - Bitcoin takes 10 minutes. This takes a few seconds.

And the funny thing is - there is still so much room for improvement.

UPDATE: I am glad I did not become liquid before I saw the end result up and running. I was going to sell up to 70% of my stake. But now I think I might just keep buying.

Running on Windows by the way...

Tried the param --min-delegate-connection-count 3 (added it to target in the shortcut)
Also did the desired connections set to 50. Still not producing blocks.

Still have only 4 connections. Should I forward a specific port from the firewall to my PC? Or is the client using UPnP?

To produce blocks you need
* register a name as delegate on the blockchain
* to be approved/votes and be within the top 101 delegates
* more than 5 connections
* blockproduction enabled
* wallet unlocked

Got all of the above, except for more than 5 connections.

You can vote your own delegates, but you have to disable production or do it from another wallet.

So how do I do it on the same machine?

I did the following:

>> wallet_delegate_set_block_production crabbypattie-1 false

OK
Now do I use the vote proposal? I don't understand the proposal_id there

>> help wallet_vote_proposal

Usage:
wallet_vote_proposal <name> <proposal_id> <vote> [message]                                            Vote on a proposal
Vote on a proposal

Parameters:
  name (account_name, required): the name of the account to vote with
  proposal_id (proposal_id, required): the id of the proposal to vote on
  vote (vote_type, required): your vote
  message (string, optional, defaults to ""): comment to go along with vote

Returns:
  signed_transaction


What you are missing is that, if you were to donate in BTC, you would have to convert the PTS to BTC anyways.

Since you can convert between PTS and BTC back and forth. Your question is no different than asking if I have 1 BTC and want to donate, should I donate 1 BTC or convert to PTS and then donate.

The fact that you have some proportion of PTS and BTC makes no difference at all.

Essentially you are asking 2 questions in one:

1) When I donate, should I DONATE in BTC or PTS?

2) With my balance left, should I KEEP it in BTC or PTS?

The stuff you donate is gone regardless of whether it was BTC or PTS.

wowzers... what does a guy have to do register as delegate?

{"required":"427,780.00237 XTS","available":"100.00000 XTS"}
    bitshares  wallet.cpp:242 bts::wallet::detail::wallet_impl::withdraw_to_transaction



I would like to test setting up a delegate crabbypattie-1 XTS77XVea48TbrDmvafkkd2HvvmT4b9HQgDZYsy2C3z4nKsXUYdhc