http://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/news/cryptsy-in-disarray/2014/04/17

"The popular cryptocurrency trading site Cryptsy.com has been having some noticeable issues these past few hours. Users of Cryptsy have been reporting negative balances, frozen transfers, suspended withdrawals. Speculation is that a recent update is causing the issues. Cryptsy is aware of the issues, but no official statement has been released yet."

Although not explicitly stated, it is pretty clear that the vast majority of those who know what the acronym "DAC" stands for embrace some libertarian variant of anti-authoritarianism. We almost never see anti-authoritarian leftists in our midst.  In this, we are missing out on an incredible opportunity.

http://www.yesmagazine.org/new-economy/bitcoin-for-activists-what-you-need-to-know

Only very rarely might one see a band of Rothbardians or Objectivists willing to stand up for their beliefs in front of a water canon in freezing weather, but hold an IMF or Bilderberg Group meeting, and leftist radicals will show up in large numbers in spite of tear gas, concussion grenades, and dogs.

That's the kind of dedication that we need!

Considering that Bitcoin is associated with money, per se, and leftists typically hold money in disdain, we might get some traction among them with BitShares.

For example, someone could use BTS ME to issue Protest Hours (XPH). The movement organizers could exchange XPH for anything else of value, including BTC, BTS, BitUSD, etc., that rally organizers could use to reward protesters who show up at a rally. After the rally, anyone in possession of a unit of XPH could use it to redeem from the movement organizers some fraction of what the rally organizers paid, or better yet use the XPH as a medium of exchange within the activist community.

If the shares circulated as an intra-community medium of exchange, a would-be radical just getting started would be able to look at the market prices of the different movements' shares and either join one with a high market cap or help out one of the underdogs.

Alternatively, the movement organizers could fund their activities with a Distributed Autonomous Charity.

Either way, rather than compete for attention among existing Bitcoin users, we could recruit within a largely untapped market that includes environmental, food, anti-exploitation and anti-human-trafficking, pro-choice, feminist, LGBT, and peace activists. While one might not agree with their agendas, decentralization does imply diversity of thought, and they do have the numbers on their side.

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Looks like there are some grumblings of financial discrepancy...

Interesting that they can spend so heavily in marketing a product that doesnt even have a deadline anymore. How long before we get a "Gee Golly guys, we tried our best but we ran out of funding!"
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http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/22q6t5/bitshares_the_next_neobee/

BitShares mentioned on pp.37-38.

https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/chainbook/Great+Chain+of+Numbers+A+Guide+to+Smart+Contracts%2C+Smart+Property+and+Trustless+Asset+Management+-+Tim+Swanson.pdf (Warning: PDF)

OK, so that's not the real acronym.  The point is that the age of DACs is upon us.

"RideShares is a community-based open-source project built on a fully distributed architecture with no central core. From decision making to stake holdings, servers, development and adoption, the organisation is built on a completely peer-to-peer protocol and it’s power is in it’s people."

We have a new board for the BTS Mutual Aid Society (BTS MAS) DAC (aka 'insurance').

Those who are interested in this topic are encouraged to help design the workflow and the cash flows of the DAC. I am working on the white paper, and there are several different ways of handling some aspects that come largely down to a matter of personal taste.

Risk The risk of a particular course of action is like energy or subatomic spin; it cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed or transferred. Like pollution, risk never vanishes, even if it is spread so thinly across the environment that one does not notice it, it is buried in a remote dump, or it is poured into a river to be carried out to the open ocean.

In efficient markets, the party transferring the risk pays a premium to the party that bears the risk, whether it is for an insurance policy, an appliance warranty, a loan guarantee, or any other similar arrangement. Although one is covered, the risk does not cease to exist; someone else has agreed to bear the cost.

When one transfers one's risk to others without compensating them, this creates market inefficiencies, as we see with bailouts of 'too big to fail' firms that do not pay for this coverage during upward phase of the business cycle, with relief payments to property owners in areas prone to natural disasters who pay no premiums to relief agencies, etc.

The same holds true with a mutual aid society (MAS), which is a voluntary association formed by a group of individuals with a common bond to provide mutual aid to its members for relief from sundry difficulties, to which each member pays a fee to compensate the other members for bearing his or her risk.

In other words, in exchange for the expectation of aid in time of need, each member incurs some cost that he or she should consider to be sunk. Participation in the MAS should not be seen as a speculative investment, as the purpose of insurance—most broadly speaking—is to compensate one for one's losses, and not to enable one to profit from them.

We should bear this in mind, when developing the payout scheme.

This topic has been moved to BitShares MAS.

https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=3561.0