The current worker system has a small limited budget.  For every use of this limited fund, we need to justify it carefully.

Beyond Bitcoin (BB) has been providing a core communication service between the bts English-speaking community and BM.  Unlike a typical marketer which focuses its effort and time on attracting new users, BB serves mostly on the needs of existing users.  The direct communication with BM brings instant benefits to the users:

1) Get latest status updates
2) Get information on new and upcoming developments
3) Get close contact with the core dev when addressing concerns and problems encountered

In addition, the users benefit from:
4) Recorded meetings to be playback for th busy ones who missed the boat
5) Translated scripts for users whom English are not their first  language and they could not catch part of the conversation

I believe this is a great service and it would be a pity if BB is to close down due to lack of funding.  I believe it would be difficult for BB to switch to a referral kind of system since their focus (by its nature) is on helping existing users and not so much on attracting new users.  To ask BB is to divert its effort and time to attract new users, it would likely end up with a poorer service to the current users.  I do not think we like that to happen. A worker's funding can save BB from this situation.

The new project/venture with tipbot and banter is much harder to quantify the risks and benefits and to justify for it.  If its main benefit is to draw in new users then the BTS2 Referral System is specifically built for this purpose.  Assessing the risks and benefits is a difficult thing for the community to do.  The owner of the project will be a better person to analyse the costs versus potential revenue/profit.  If he/she is confident of making a good profit, he/she would no doubt go ahead with using the referral system and earn $$$ commission from newly acquired users' transactions.  Please consider trying out the new Referral System.  It is designed for entrepreunial businesses like yours.

ps: If we could expand BB to cover for the Chinese-speaking and other non-English groups, many more users would benefit from this service.

Wow! Thank you cube for posting this.  We've been agressivly talking behind the scenes regarding this situation and how best to approach it.  It's been challenging to say the least! 
I'm currently working on a proposal for Beyond Bitcoin and believe we have found a happy medium that the community could support while also giving us the opportunity to upgrade and get BB to the next level.
I'll be publishing it in the very near future.  Thanks for your support!

+5 one hell of a write up! Excellent job. 

Quote from: clayop on October 26, 2015, 07:44:22 pm

I cannot claim my balance, because I cannot select my existing account name in the balance claim page

I had this also.  Reload fixed.

I'm having this issue also... even after reloading several times.

edit** Winblows 10 64bit
And also the "import key tool" doesn't show up.

Someone mentioned earlier we need a sales person's perspective... so I'll throw in my 2 bits.
I agree that the majority here is correctly identifying that Bitshares main core is (and I'm listing in order what I see as priority)...
1) The DEX
2) Core SmartCoins (USD, CNY, EURO, etc.)

Since the DEX is the main backbone of our system, IMO it would be silly to over tax the activity of the exchange and in turn, dry up any incentive for future/present trading.  The only way (again IMO) is to set trading activity fees pegged to a percentage. I can see 0.5% being a great starting charge for trading fee's, but capped at 300 or so BTS, allowing those Large Quantity (ie Big Player) traders ample breathing room to play.
Putting this in a number perspective...
3000 BTS order = 15 BTS fee
20,000 BTS order = 100 BTS fee
60,000+ BTS order = 300 BTS fee
I don't see how you can effectively and fairly asses a "regional" fee or flat fee when it comes to DEX trading.

Now obviously we know that BTS (the underlying share) is the crucial life force, so squeezing that available supply line will help increase BTS value while also "guiding" people to start utilizing SmartCoin's more as the primary currency, while also giving more demand for creating more USD, which is what we want correct?   
So for a BTS Transfer fee, in my mind, should be a flat somewhat higher tiered fee...
1 to <100 BTS = 1 BTS fee
100> -1000 BTS = 5 BTS flat fee
and then 1 BTS per 1000 BTS thereafter and cap it a 500 BTS threshold.

For CORE SmartCoin transfer fee's.. I'd make it a percentage base fee of 0.05% and cap it at $5 USD (or it's equivalent to that specific SmartCoin).
So a $100 USD transfer would cost five cents ($0.05). 
$10,000+ USD would be $5 USD fee
Again, this will help keep Big players in the game to do big money transfers utilizing SmartCoins.

For UIA's transfer fees... again, I'd make it a low percentage like the CORE asset fees I just mentioned.  I almost hate saying this... but I could see it making sense to ONLY use CORE SmartCoin's for the transfer fee's of UIA's. 

So all-in-all keep DEX fees low.  Create higher friction for BTS transfers.  SmartCoin fees low to keep the flow!
 

Hey folks,

First off, let me apologize for our wallet/market being down and the confusion this has caused.  Understand that we run 400+ wallets and 99.9% of the devs work with us for critical wallet updates, especially one that causes a hard fork like this.  We were told to monitor https://github.com/BitShares/bitshares/releases which we did, but never got any notice that the 2.0 snapshot date was finalized. We were still working and verifying tickets via http://bitsharesblocks.com which is still currently up and running.   

That said, what has happened, has happened. We obviously could have been more diligent ourselves.  Here's where we are currently:

* All funds pre-fork are perfectly safe.  There was some confusion on when the snapshot block was but we've got that sorted out. 
* We have our implementation ready to go but we need some help from the devs.  I've emailed what contacts I could but haven't heard back.  If anyone on the dev team could please contact us via our IRC or support channels, it'd be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
richie@bittrex

Thanks for the update and good to hear things are up and running again!

I'm liking this one also.  Only change would be the icon, maybe add more depth to it, if possible.

https://beyondbitcoin.org/poloniex-proves-its-solvency-on-the-bitshares-blockchain/

I think we really should push this topic so people could pay more attention to this kind of questions. We have BitShares solving a very common problem cryptocurrency users face nowadays! Make people demand and care about transparency. Solution: OpenLedger.

+5  yes to this ^^^^