Hey all,

I wrote an article about Sidechains for Blockchain Bunker News. Check it out: http://news.blockchainbunker.com/graphene-could-help-guarantee-the-reserve-holdings-of-online-cryptocurrency-exchanges/

Sidechains can be implemented on DPOS in a way that is superior to any other consensus algorithm. We should be exploring every option to make this a reality! Right now, we have a decentralized ledger, but we are still trading centralized proxy tokens for other major blockchains (OPEN.BTC, TRADE.DODGE, METAEX.ETH, etc.). We need to come up with a robust multi-sig cold storage token solution to offer our users, so we can finally be a 100% decentralized platform in every way. If you have any suggestions, experience, expertise or even just opinions, please join the discussion at http://forum.blockchainbunker.com/.

I hope to see you guys there!

Well, not the tv show.....yet.

But maxkeiser.com picked up the Forbes story:  http://www.maxkeiser.com/2016/02/sharebits-gives-bitcoin-users-another-way-to-tip-on-twitter/

Too bad it says "bitcoin users"....

@cob,

Some people on this forum have begun to question your ability to execute. While I do not yet count myself among them, I have a growing concern with your lack of professionalism, casual dismissal of the valid grievances of MUSE shareholders, and apparent unwillingness to provide a greater level of transparency. I understand that what you are attempting to build must be very difficult, but if you were to spend some time finding ways to improve communications with MUSE shareholders, then I think a little effort would go a long way.

As a Peertracks crowdfund investor, I would like to bring to your attention some concerns I have about the way you have conducted your fiduciary responsibilities to your shareholders. To be clear, I am aware that you are not legally bound to any duties as such, but nevertheless I hope the contents of this letter can provide you some insight and feedback that you will choose to take to heart.

I do not possess any “insider” information that would give me a reason to doubt the project, but I also do not have much solid evidence to the contrary. Therefore, I believe that my evaluation is likely similar to what others who are “outside the loop” have found.

Here’s my assessment:

From October 6 thu. December 5, 2014, you raised 1,436 BTC, ostensibly towards the development of a Music promotion/sales/peer-2-peer platform based on the DPOS software protocol.

I assume that you immediately converted those funds to a stable fiat currency, rather than holding the BTC and speculating with the funds that investors entrusted to you. Between the two crowdfund dates, Bitcoin never fell below $350, so even if you only managed to get $300 per BTC, that would still put your grand total over $430,000.
http://www1.agsexplorer.com/

From December 2014 to present, you have averaged less than 1 official update to the Bitshares community (your largest crowdfund donor pool) per month, usually 3-4 paragraphs each, in which you have repeatedly claimed that 90% of your plans must remain under lock and key, as they are so amazing that they would immediately be stolen by the competition.

During this same period, you published 4 different websites, IMO all rather unprofessional looking, but nevertheless full of big promises. Setting aside the numerous spelling and grammatical errors, none of them seemed to leave the reader without much sense of what Peertracks actually is. In fact 13 months after the completion of your crowdfund, you have yet to deliver a business plan, timeline, milestones, strategy, budget, marketing materials, or much real evidence that you have done anything besides talk. (I personally believe that you have done more than talk, but nevertheless I am finding little empirical evidence to support this.) I'm not a coder, but AFIK releasing a clone of the Bitshares light client and labeling it "MUSE" is does not require more than a few days effort.

Last Thursday, you dropped a bombshell of an update. Please correct me if I misunderstood, but you stated that you must raise more money or you will not be able to continue development? I thought it was rather strange that you chose to spend 1/3 of the update justifying how your admittedly bad decision to outsource developers "actually worked out in your favor" because of labor market forces beyond your control. This does not inspire much confidence in you ability to make sound business decisions.

What I mean is - if you are trying to prevent a loss in confidence, then why would you spend 3 paragraphs highlighting your error, and then attempt to cover your tracks by basically saying “don’t worry guys... due to a fortuitous accident, we didn’t mess up as badly we should have”. I’m not trying to be a jerk, I’m just trying to highlight that you guys should really consider hiring a PR manager.

More to the point - my number one question is - How have you spent the rest of our money? I know that nobody likes to be micromanaged, but since you have taken funds from a public crowd sale - I believe we have the right to know. Even if you round to the nearest $1000, I would find that more satisfactory than nothing.

Frankly, your inconsistent and cryptic communication over these last 12 months would never fly if you were a publicly traded stock. At this stage, you would be hard pressed to raise a 2nd round of capital from any investor who did his due diligence. Of course you could always try your luck with a naive and unsuspecting “kickstarter” crowd, which is apparently what you are now considering.

To be perfectly clear, I am not at all accusing you of foul play, but I am trying to highlight the fact that a few short paragraphs of hype and promises does not satisfy your responsibilities to the people who have been waiting patiently for over a year. I have extended “benefit of the doubt” up to this point, and have chosen to watch and wait patiently. I have not overlooked the obvious roadblocks that you have faced, least among them the bumpy upgrade to DPOS 2.0. I have been a huge supporter in my own circles, and several of my friends and family members have invested in Peertracks. I say this to disclose that perhaps my feelings or opinions are not entirely unbiased.

I very much want this project to succeed, and so I hope that my feedback will useful to you. I also hope you will honor your responsibility and address some of the recent feedback of other concerned shareholders, rather than the “ignore and push on forward” method that I have seen you adopt in the past.

Thanks for your time,

Michael

There has been much talk about whether or not a “crypto-currency” that uses a licensed software is in agreement with the principals of voluntarism, libertarianism, anarchism, etc. I would like to make the bold assertion that it is very much aligned with many of the key ideals espoused by such philosophies. In spirit, though often not in practice (due to a convoluted legal framework), a “license” simply implies that the creators of said software should be entitled to lawfully claim the fruits of their labor.

I am certainly not in favor of the modern legal framework for copyrights and patents and we all know that they are now being used to justify fraud, extortion, and many other de-facto legal (but not lawful) practices. However, BM has stated that their intent for claiming a “license” over the Graphene toolkit is to satisfy the needs of potential VC investors rather than to serve the purpose of allowing Cryptonomix to file suit against offenders. So I ask, why is this such a threat to our “philosopical foundations”, as some have suggested?

Furthermore, since all the code is open-source and therefore completely transparent for auditing, any actual threat of a small group gaining undue influence over a particular technology is marginalized by the ease of hard-forking the code. Of course you might say “but it is now illegal to hard fork the code”, to which I would reply, “the license only applies to C++,” or if I was feeling facetious, “have you ever tried to arrest a blockchain”. The truth is it would require, very conservatively, far less than a million dollars, 3-4 months and perhaps a room full of professional programmers to deconstruct and re-assemble the entire Graphene toolkit into another language. Based on this fact alone, I think we have enough evidence to motion the court to dismiss any notions of monopoly, evil empire building, federal reserve 2.0, or whatever other nonsense is currently being leveled against the Cryptonomix crew.

I would like to, instead, express my gratitude for the hard work by our devs that are offering us a number of features that hold the potential for a truly massive social, political, economic and philosophical revolution. I feel lucky in fact that we are being given freely, or rather at a very reasonable price (average $400/month BTS dilution per dev) this vastly superior toolkit to the current BTS. I even wonder if this license arrangement might serve to benefit our community by acting as a (albeit short) temporal barrier to large wealthy interests who are tempted to carbon copy our toolkit and use their vast financial and human resources to gain advantages in this still burgeoning space. Whatever the case, I think we would actually betray many of principals we claim to uphold if we were to somehow denounce the notion that Cryptonomix should retain whatever rights they choose to their own creation.

EDIT: I want to add, I am also very grateful for the frank and open discussion that takes place on these forums. My intent is not to trample anyone's right to have an opinion, but rather to present an alternative viewpoint with the hope of bringing some clarity to a few "big picture" items

Delegates and Shareholders,

The time has arrived, once again, to get your delegate updates submitted for the next NullStreet Journal (BitShares community Newsletter). Please send your updates to newsletter@bitshares.media. The deadline is Thursday, April 16th, at 23:59 UTC.

Whether you are a delegate, a community volunteer, or an entrepreneur building your business on the BitShares platform, we would all love to know what you have been up to since last month! If you have never submitted an update before, please consider taking advantage of this great opportunity to get your message out to a large group of BitShares supporters. The April newsletter will contain three categories: Development Updates, Marketing Updates, and Proposals & Opportunities.  If you need ideas about formatting or style, please check out last month's edition: https://bitshares.org/newsletter/2015/nullstreet/the_nullstreet_journal_0-2.pdf

Cass and I are committed to doing everything we can to make this process easy for the delegates, but if you have any suggestions for improvement, send us a PM. Also, I want to continue offering assistance to anyone who needs help with editing their update, so please don’t hesitate to ask. Great! Can’t wait to learn about what’s new!

Michael

BitShares Community,

I want to thank you all from the bottom of my heart for your contributions to our little “thought experiment” on the relative merits of censorship. If you have not yet explored this thread, please check it out: https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=14621.0

In order to better understand where and how we should apply our efforts at consensus building, I thought it might be useful to take the unpopular position of embracing censorship and give voice to what I felt were the strongest arguments in favor. Interestingly, the counter argument I was watching for did not appear until the very bottom of the 3rd page, when fluxer555 posted the reply “...anyone can trivially record mumble sessions without using the built-in function. There is going to be no way to stop people from recording.”

The simple logic of this statement stopped the OP dead in its tracks. Fortunately, it’s curious absence from the first 3 pages allowed many of us the opportunity to explore the roots of our feelings about censorship, and recognize that most of us have quite similar sentiments. We all have different ways of processing the “unknown quantities” of things that we cannot control, and I was impressed that most of you were willing to channel your frustration and discomfort into an insightful and productive debate.

Censorship does not work because censorship cannot be technically enforced. The only recourse a would-be censor has is to try and control the channels that information is distributed, but this is often easily circumvented and will soon be completely impossible to maintain. The hubris of those who would control the narrative with an iron fist will soon be eclipsed by the bright light of the truth, expressed through a decentralized revolution that is tearing down the walls of perception to expose a new emergent social order.

So how can we begin to advance our purpose in a way that empowers us as individuals, and encourages a higher degree of trust and cooperation into ecosystem as a whole?

First, I think it would be a good idea to have a place where we each can share a more detailed profile of ourselves, our businesses, our interests, skills, and hobbies, and anything else that might help us to connect to each other so we can all work together for the betterment of the ecosystem. I have suggested to bitsapphire that we expand the bitsharestalk profile page to include a number of additional fields so that we have a convenient central hub to search for this information. This will also help to reduce the frequency of accidental objective misinterpretation, because the reader of a forum post will be able to make a more informed decision about whether the specific “disembodied opinion” they are observing is of an anonymous passerby, or rather.backed by someone who has actually chosen to place their reputation on the line.

By extension, the mumble server will continue to serve as a valuable space for the leaders of many BitShares related projects to hold meetings with different model structures, such as remote press conferences, meet & greets,  and all varieties of participatory discussions, with the disclaimer that recording is always allowed because it can never technically, much less morally, be prevented.

Finally, the two can be combined. For every mumble session, each person who speaks aloud has also given implicit consent for their @handle to be recorded, since everyone’s handle is visible on mumble. So after each event, when the audio recordings are prepared for release, a simple (low bitrate) video file can also be created to display the @forum handle of each person while they are talking, once again giving listeners the ability to better assess the relative objective value of each “disembodied voice”, and inspire them to further explore the nature of influences that are behind the opinions which are being expressed.

Although the forum is centralized, it is run by a group of people in whom we have voted to represent BitShares as trusted delegates. Although mumble is centralized, it is also run by a group of people in whom we have placed our implicit trust. Eventually everything will be decentralized, but In the interim it is imperative that we strive to honor and leverage the web of trust we have already built. Whatever course we take, I strongly suggest that we construct some sort of reliable reputation system immediately so that confidence does not continue to waver for want of objectivity.

Someday soon, your BitShares wallet, likely in conjunction with other decentralized systems, will fully support the original “keyhotee” vision. Things like decentralized DNS, open source hardware, and mesh networks will soon enable a mass migration away from the current paradigm and out onto a new frontier of freedom and security. I find it curious and somewhat paradoxical that the trust we have for each other has become the foundation for the building of these amazing trustless systems. I will therefore continue to work hard at finding solutions to help us keep closing the gap, and I am grateful for everyone’s continued guidance and support!

BitShares Community,

I would like to thank everyone who was able to participate in our discussion on mumble this morning,  and I want to extend my hand and express my gratitude for all of your efforts at helping to form a communication bridge between the east and west. I am looking forward to many such meetings in the future, and I am honored and humbled to be a part of such a brilliant and gifted group of individuals.

That said, I would like to offer to you a proposal. This topic was discussed in our meeting, however I do not wish to imply that there was any overall consensus. Rather, I have organized a version that I would like to bring forward in order to stimulate further discussion.

We cherish the level of intellectual intimacy that we have thus far enjoyed between ourselves and one of our beloved founders, Dan Larimer. We also understand that as a community, our organization has often suffered from sudden market turmoil because it seems we have yet to figure out how to enable the free and open exchange of ideas between us, without leaving ourselves vulnerable to subjective responses from people for whom it is impossible to grasp the larger picture. This is not by means the only force at play, but I present it for purposes of illustrative example.

We discussed, in our session today, the various PR blunders that we have experienced in the past year, and the point was often raised that if a radical idea was initially proposed by bytemaster in a mumble session, the blunder would be quickly contained and not escalate very far. We observed that this was likely due to the immediate feedback he received, combined with a general human tendency to grasp the more subtle implications of words when they are spoken, rather than written on a page. By extension, whenever he brought fourth a radical idea or concept on the forums, the asynchronous delay (lack of real-time participation) combined with natural language barriers became a powerful fertilizer for seeds of doubt that would then be cast and sewn across the landscape.

In most places within the United States, it is illegal to use recording devices inside a courtroom. The reason for this is because a recording can potentially be taken out of context, and used as a tool to manipulate public opinion. The written account of an eyewitness, or an artists graphic rendering of a dramatic court scene do not have 1: 10,000 the impact of a “viral” video or audio recording. To make up for this, a high percentage of court preceedings are open to the public, so as to protect against overt or blatant foul play. Again, by no means the rule, but presented for arguments sake.

My proposal to bytemaster and to this community is that he consider continuing to hold mumble sessions with us, but that we do not record them. I do not believe that this would betray our principals, because anyone is still welcome to join and participate. What it does provide is an opportunity for all of us to continue the lively discussions that we have grown fond of, while protecting ourselves significantly against the accidental rapid dissemination of subjective misinterpretation.

Public Relations is the art of managing the spread of information, much more than placing restrictions on the source of the information. Many Hollywood actors are prone to running at the mouth and making a fool of themselves, but if they have a good publicist, the channels through which this information might otherwise be spread are carefully observed and controlled. Thus, the restrictions I am proposing are aimed at limiting the damage that might be caused by our open discussion by eliminating the opportunity for it to spread.

The greater internal PR strategy will continue to fall upon those who are working closely within his circle of trust. Perhaps they might consider advising Mr. Larimer to limit all initial presentation of his more radical ideas to to weekly or bi-weekly mumble sessions? That way we can continue to enjoy the inspiration and excitement of his wisdom and understanding, and he can continue to enjoy the benefits of personal growth through our valuable feedback.

What say you all?

Shareholders and Delegates,

Our new BitShares community newsletter “The NullStreet Journal” has published it's first issue! I want to thank everyone who submitted their delegate updates and progress reports, and everyone else who took the time to contribute. This was truly a group effort!

Please visit https://bitshares.org/newsletter/2015/nullstreet/the_nullstreet_journal_0-1.pdf
and check out all the latest BitShares news.

Cass and I are working out the details to streamline a process for delegates and community members to contribute to future issues. Once we have everything in place, I will post an update with directions and information about how to get involved. Meanwhile, please enjoy the first issue, and let us know what you think!

Thanks,
Michael