Having a discussion with someone privately about why proof-of-burn is incompatible with a hard fork upgrade and I thought I would share:

Proof of burn for an upgrade is fundamentally unfair. What if you owned the coin and were not checking in on the forums for a couple of months? Then you would not receive your stake in the upgraded chain? That would be so wrong! And if the "burn" was only to vote for or against consensus then nobody would do it because then there would be a chance that the vote fails in which case you just burned all your stake (!). As you can see, proof-of-burn is not a substitute for blockchain voting, is fundamentally unfair for hard forking, and does not work for proving or achieving consensus on a community decision. It is useful as a distribution mechanism for a new asset, but not for this purpose.

Just a tangent really, but I think it may lay to rest some issues for those who brought it up.

For those of you who are not shareholders in PTS and wish to see PTS die, I think your negativity is misplaced. The fact remains that this is a hard fork upgrade with an exact 1:1 allocation in the new chain. Bytemaster, stan, testz, and a host of other individuals have expressed their support for both this upgrade and PTS' continued existence as a sharedrop instrument for 3rd party DACs.

It is disingenuous to present obsolete information such as proposals that Dan made in the past and try to frame it as though he is against this project. Dan is the original developer and he has expressed his explicit support and so has TestZ, the "custodian" of PTS, Stan, many of the largest stakeholders, and other core Bitshare devs. At the same time, a couple of things are abundantly clear:

(1) Dan and the other I3 devs are no longer custodians of PTS due to BTS being their primary focus going forward. This has been the case for some time now.

(2) We must perform the upgrade responsibly. To me, this means that the first item on the agenda after the upgrade will be a complete rebrand (including a name change). We cannot allow PTS to be confused with the flagship product of Bitshares which is and will continue to be BTS.

None of this discussion is unexpected, and I think we all know that any proposal will have its share of naysayers. It is my hope that those people will realize what Invictus and PTS shareholders already have - that there is a place in this world for PTS and that this badly needed upgrade is an overall net gain for the Bitshares ecosystem and community.

Quote from: Stan on November 30, 2014, 11:17:02 pm

Quote from: testz on November 30, 2014, 03:34:42 pm

Quote from: islandking on November 30, 2014, 03:29:36 pm

Will the spark snapshot be on this new chain?

No, spark snapshot will be taken at same time from old PTS (last block of PTS at December 14, UTC).

Therefore it is incumbent upon the new PTS team to make sure that the old PTS are not tradable after the December 14 snapshot.  I know there are people out there that will try to sell the old PTS after the snapshot to unsuspecting people who have not heard about the new PTS. 

This strikes me as highly unethical, even fraudulent, behavior and therefore it is sure to happen.

You should do all you can to prevent it from happening as well as warning all involved.

This is your biggest argument for the exchanges to treat this as a chain upgrade and discontinue the old one at the same time.  They won't want to collect fees in trading the old PTS known to be worth zero after the snapshot, so this would be in their best interest.

And you certainly don't need this controversy for your new PTS reputation.

Actually the unethical behavior is on the part of PTS 2.0 (or whatever the alphaBar's PTS is called).... they can not claim they will be the only PTS after they sharedrop on PTS... Hell it is not their chain to do whatever with it -they have no legal or moral right to inform exchanges to not  honor/declare dead after their sharedrop or whatever else they like doing to it.

Quote from: hadrian on November 30, 2014, 11:30:37 pm

The block production is REALLY slow with the current implementation of PTS, which I think was the main argument against proof of burn as a way to claim new DPOS PTS. It'd be lovely if someone could think of a way to use proof of burn.

Is there no way that the snapshot could be taken, as announced, in order to allocate new DPOS PTS, but then only release the new funds after old PTS is sent to a proof of burn address? Even if people have to wait for weeks for transactions to go through, would it really matter?

Of course it can be done! But this way they will have to really be exposed to how many people actually like their coin to be the new PTS... It is much easier to just state ' We are the new PTS i.e. the new sharedrop target!'

Tony, there is no other choice. The PoW chain is dying or already dead. If you think a protocol change is "unethical" then you should be objecting to every one of the hard forks that BTS has had over the past few months because those are technically a "new coin" as well (not really). To state that the only "ethical" solution is to let PTS die is just bizarre. We're working hard to add value to the Bitshares ecosystem, and most of us are invested heavily in BTS as well. Nobody here feels "defrauded" by securing their funds and upgrading to a sustainable consensus protocol, which is all we are doing. If I can't convince you that we're adding value here then you are free not to invest.

Dry Run #1 announced: http://pts.cubeconnex.com/index.php?topic=48.0

Quote from: alphaBar on November 30, 2014, 08:48:11 am

The billion units was primarily to help in marketing. It gives us a nice round number to start with for supply (vs. 1,783,034) and it creates the perception of value (eg, feels better to tip 100PTS than 0.1PTS). Perception drives reality.

I agree this is an unnecessary and distracting change. Changing the number of units again feels like a new project, rather than an upgrade. Maybe a 1.8 mil hardcap, with the the last 40,000 set aside for transaction subsidies.

I think the community and exchanges are fairly accustomed to this by now. There is broad enough support that I don't think the scaling will be a problem, especially now that the PoW chain has almost ground to a complete halt.

I've already pledged that I will not support any pre-mine, dilution, or change to the snapshot allocation, so I think inflating for subsidies is a non-starter. One thing I will say is that with most things there are a million wrong ways to do it and a handful of right ways. For all the things that could be done better, I think the plan I've outlined reaches common ground among PTS holders on the most important points.

One question - ProtoShares allows for a 1% inflation over time as a transaction processing subsidy -

1081: // Subsidy may be a minimum of 0.19012850*COIN
1082: // Expected 365.25 * 24 * 12 * 0.19012850 = approx 20,000 coins per year, 1% annual inflation
1083: if(nSubsidy<0.19012850*COIN){nSubsidy=0.19012850*COIN;}

If you're removing this inflation, how will PTS DPOS incentivize delegates sufficiently? What will happen if there is a lack of competition for delegate spots?

I believe the current plan is for delegates to be paid a percentage of transaction fees (0-100%), as in the old BTSX. This is understandably a low amount, and therefore we will need to select transaction and user registration fees carefully in order to help offset, however slightly, the cost of running delegates. I will mention that there will be a degree of centralization in the early days, similar to the "init" delegates of BTS/BTSX. As market cap and volume increase, the incentives for running delegates should increase accordingly.

Just call it "protoshares". Calling it "bitshares-PTS" was an unfortunate necessity because I3 was a company that could get sued.

Yes, the branding is a bit of an awful mess but our intention is to address one issue at a time. The current focus is 100% on an upgrade to DPoS. Same coin, same name, same allocation, same exchanges, with only one simple upgrade.