Yes, obviously votes needs to be informed..


Perhaps call the delegates, employees?.. there are surely others doing work for the benefit of BitShares, who are not paid.

Then perhaps you could acknowledge the voters as workers?.. Seriously, I don't know who has time to consider proposals closely.

Accountability is important but keep it simple, treat everyone the same.. I don't know then if that suggests warp the voting, so that whales only get a log(balance) or some f(balance) rather than =(balance) vote.

Tell me what your biggest technical concerns about BitShares are.

What BitShares offers as pegged assets has huge potential. That should be clear to everyone. I wonder that capability should be the centrepeice of all marketing; wiki's and FAQ, as it's fairly unique to BitShares - value of asset by consensus, is a really important idea.

My principal concern then is that DPOS is not obvious and simple but confusing and political. The voting doesn't provide effective positive and negative feedback; large holders dominate and minor holders see their votes have little effect. The payments to the principal delegates are not obviously fair .. 100% is a license to print money. Where is the clear simple list of business cases for those?.. and even with that creating work for a user, expecting them to trawl through 101 of those to confirm they make sense, is too much. Better perhaps to set classes of delegate - devs get 100%; admin-support 80%; marketing 64%; etc or whatever but make it simple==trivial to understand and draw confidence from. While BitShares BTS are not worth what they will be, some delegates will be accruing a small fortune. Like it or not such central wealth and whales are not an attractor in a world looking for fair distributed power and wealth. It might be better for the long term that those are burnt through into BTC even?

There is then a serious question legal/technical question that's beyond me, about whether BitShares will need to become realistic and acknowledge KYC and AML in some way.. sufficient to engage large investors. Bytemaster and others seem to understand their options and it's not clear atm what Governments will insist on.. the UK perhaps being more realistic in how the perceived value of a digital token, is not Government's business and the exchange of those is not requiring KYC/AML but ye old bank and institutional money might not understand to take confidence from consensus rather than legislation. Jumping in one step to what we want from what we have, might not be realistic.

Other issues such as usability; GUI etc as incidental and will naturally evolve over time.

let's get everything stable and smooth before selling the product ... waiting for BitShares 1.0

Duke Nukem Forever?.. yeah that got released.. eventually. Difference was that people were aware of that, so that approach became an advantage.

It's not the product they need at this point, it's the idea.. they are talking about Ethereum already; I expect they will commit their awareness and then resources to projects they are aware of.

Don't overestimate where they are at. Potentially the seeding of the idea, that will make delivering 1.0 that much easier? Obviously, devs can wait if that's considered the better option but marketing sometimes works better on the back of brand awareness; also if BitShares needs any real investment to bridge devs' salaries or pay for moonstone, then there might be an option there to leverage support and funding.. and perhaps prevent any competitor arising and passing BitShares by.

UK:London http://smlf.info/ had an inaugural meeting to kick off its http://bitcoinandblockchainleadershipforum.org/ this morning.
This is a forum for traditional banking and that well represented. The forum supported by the BoE; LSE among another 50+ key interests from global fintech.

You missed the banking sector getting its head around basic questions. It's currently more about learning (basic orientation); sharing ideas (wonderments) and insights (few). So, some way to go before there's any 'leadership' but given the key interests from traditional banking, it has potential to become influential if not useful.

There was no mention of BitShares or really any depth of awareness beyond the obvious - Ethereum and 'smart contracts' were mentioned in an obvious way. I had a sense that some in the room understood at depth but most including the BoE are at the stage of doing their homework before making any decisions. The big take away, I suppose is no surprise that they are taking blockchain technology seriously.

There seem to be a few efforts to create accelerators (Barclays is a key player) and so perhaps from the crowd will emerge real expertise. BoE rep talked of their current research and how legislation might not necessarily be the same as old banking.. but made clear indication that they consider that confidence comes from stability and therefore by their logic, necessarily that requires regulation. So, they are not fully understanding the potential but it's a step in the right direction. There's expected to be more of the same each month on different related topics tbc.

What was not discussed was any talk of supporting current development and I'm not sure what to make of that. Perhaps those present are above such trivia but I suspect many will have money to burn researching this over the next years. Investment is the best route to understanding?.. I didn't get a chance to suggest that they would do us all a favour splurging on moonstone.io or directly supporting key devs of substantial projects like BitShares.

It's clear that they all believe that regulation is necessary but the form that might take relative to each class of activity, is not clear. There's talk public already of the BoE and others looking at hosting their own blockchains but I can't see the advantage of that and the risks of proving such a network are great.

Opportunity potentially there if BitShares core devs want to reach out to traditional banking, contact smlf and pitch for a presentation within future meetings.. @bytemaster ? Some in the room have insightful questions and not to be underestimated and all appear clever enough to appreciate real depth of answer to their concerns about 'what can it do for me'.

There is no such thing as "just a little" government.   Power will always want to grow and eat anything that it sees as a threat.

There could be such a "thing" as limited Government AND "Power will always want to grow and eat anything that it sees as a threat."
For that limited Government, you just need individuals empowered and taking responsibility. The gross excesses have followed from individuals being lazy and complacent, allowing parental Government to take care of all their needs and more.

Obviously, you're not the first to consider fluid membership of Government.. and see http://www.bitnation.co/ if you haven't already.

Kennedy RIP

".." Rockefeller

@fuzzy: So.. what's your point?

[Big Government: Bad] AND [Small Government: Necessary]

The whole point of decentralisation is that power corrupts.. but there's no point making yourself impotent against real threats from organised groups. To ignore history would be foolish. Society is evolving but it is unrealistic to expect some discontinuity and a sudden jump to a perfect world in which individuals are not left unnecessarily vulnerable to the consequences of unreasonable selfish actions from others. Until people are educated well enough that they are strongly resistant to base impulses that adversing impact others, it is not reasonable to expect a chaotic free for all.

Well it sure seems to be spooking people...  that is the response I'm seeing.  And it already is having a chilling effect. The fact is that we ultimately don't need the governments that, largely throughout history, are actually behind "terrorist" attacks...via false flags.

If gov really cared about us, we would have no NDAA, Patriot Act...etc and they would instead spend their time working on free energy and imprisoning banking cartels and shutting down the IRS--which would actually make us far safer and wealthy. They want to implement artificial scarcity and they know that cryptocurrency is the golden egg to tie all their Metadata together for ultimate control.

Given the financial and then economic crisis, I expect the West will have more interest in the upside of blockchain technology then ever the worry of the downside. So, they've gone after Ripple, so what; that was to be expected. That's not an error.. there's no point ignoring that society has an interest in frustrating crime.

Because they are not perfect, does not suggest Governments have no use. There are fundamental systemic errors but there are also good reasons that society has evolved to see representation of our interests by others. The notion that individuals can do everything for themselves, is libertarian fallacy. There is no prospect of individuals countering organised crime or nation state actors.. the idea those will dissolve is utopian ideal. Meanwhile, back in reality, the question is how do we get good representation of our interests and where is the appropriate limit on what is Government and what is not. Right now, Government is wildly off target, representing corporate interests and national interest above individuals.. ultimate irony for the US with its constitution perhaps.. but people forget how young the US is. The challenge is to recast the parameters that limit Government action.. and the best way to do that is protecting our own individual Privacy; Security; and Freedom.. hence my support for MaidSafe.