I approached Stan and Dan with the thought of my paying CNX $45,000 to get the Stealth work funded. This is a huge chunk of my lifetime savings, and it is a huge risk for me to be taking. However, I am in total harmony with Bytemaster's philosophy and goals as far as I understand them and want this project to succeed, and to succeed .

I find that a lot of community members are expecting others to do the work needed to get this project rolling for free or for less than market rates. And out and out jealousy rearing its ugly head in some comments today.

Thanks to you for this generous offer. As you can see, it is unleashing a discussion of how BitShares can open itself to these kinds of 'cash advances' to fund needed work in a way that will both pay back your investment and vastly improve the BitShares ecosystem. If anyone wants to crowdfund ('community-fund?') any other features with a strong certainty of being reimbursed down the road, I certainly would be willing to participate.

i like the idea

but would suggest some changes

1. make it possible that a UIA is created for the investor
2. the UIA can be in control of the committee members and the investor
3. create a automated buyback mechanism etc.
4. the fees for this UIA should only be paid on top of a normal transaction. so if a normal transaction costs 20 cent and the stealth fees say 30 cents and then split the 30 cent like discribed.

With this we can finance many more project in the pipline

you want a prediction market? done, create UIA get the project funded

with this we can create multiple automated UIA assets on our blockchain who will be traded and give our bitshares exchange some unic assets.

Best suggestion so far!

I voted for one of your options, but my best answer would be: the lack of fiat gateways or on/off-ramps. We are still dangerously reliant on Bitcoin, which really limits us to the crypto market until your grandmother can go "click, click, click" and buy through her bank account.

I'd even be happy with a CNX UIA token where they sharedropped and then shared their profit. See Obits for reference.

To get simple UIA/IOU's to really work, you need to attract a ton of people to your market. Some are capable of this, and if they can draw users for their product, that will be quite beneficial to the overall exchange. But I think if you are tracking an existing market like many smartcoins do (with price feeds), then in essence you are piggybacking off the legitimacy/participation/liquidity of that other market, which sets a baseline. And so I feel like there ought to be much less effort involved in getting a robust market going for a smartcoin than for a simple UIA/IOU. Unless your name is Kanye or you have a lot of twits following you.

The difference is that they've had elite connections and a marketing presence from the beginning. If you act like something, and have a lot of people paid to say good things about you, then people start to believe you are something. Having a cash-strapped, decentralized community is much more of a challenge, but we're getting there.

I agree we need to focus on things other than just the currency. It is a medium and if people come here for other functions, they'll gain some comfort with the currency. There are a lot of countries in the world where people cannot buy something as stable as a USD so they watch as their own currencies inflate and reduce the value of their own hard work and savings. Add in remittances and the market is there for a good currency that's stable, instant, and easy to use.

As for micropayments, there is a great deal of potential, though it may not be a lucrative business as much as a way to help the world and bring in a broad base of users. If someone can develop a service akin to a tipbot, maybe a browser plug in that can send micro-tips whenever the user reads an article he or she likes, etc., then that could give news sites a new source of revenue. We could see entire business models spring up from micropayments, which I think could be a natural tie-in with any reputation-based system online as well. And charities certainly would benefit from micropayments.

This is a major improvement. Great work! I had not noticed it before seeing your post here, but I will try one of these gateways right now.

Suggestions:

(1) I would put a quick explanation on top of that screen, something like:

"Please select one of the following Bridge or Gateway services. These will allow you to deposit currency directly into your wallet or withdraw from your wallet to an external address."

(2) I definitely did not notice any drop-down menus in the BlockTrades bridge area until you mentioned it. Then, clicking on LTC, I saw that it opened up some others. This does not look AT ALL like a drop down menu, nor is it obvious enough. The fonts are way too small and are not prominent in the interface. It needs a bigger and clearer button. Also, I would include a direction/instruction there, such as "Please select a currency from the drop-down menu".

(3) It is nice to have a buffet of different services, all of which are competing for our business. But a lot of users will not know or care what a bridge or gateway is. If they are comfortable navigating this, it sure is much easier than before. But scrolling down that page, it still begins to look pretty scary for someone with no clue. To make this even more user-friendly, I would also include a function at the very top that is an expansion of the Blocktrades interface.

Why not have one single section at the top with a drop down menu that includes every FROM-->TO currency that any of these services offers?  For example, the drop down menu would have all choices and look something like this:

BTC-->OPENBTC via OpenLedger/CCEDK
BTC--->TRADE.BTC via BlockTrades
DOGE-->BTS via BlockTrades
ETH--->METAX.ETH via Metatrades
MUSE-->OPENMUSE via OpenLedger/CCEDK


And then when a user selects one of these pathways, the appropriate deposit address or other info would appear on the right side of the screen, as it does now within each section.

That way, no one would have to go digging for it. Once the day arrives when there are too many to list in a drop-down menu, then there could be several drop-downs in the same section, organizing the possibilities by category. The categories could be divided up by which service or by which type of currency (e.g., someone selects "BTC" from the drop-down and up come all the things you can change into from BTC). But for now, one drop-down (or two drop-downs, one for the "FROM" and one for the "TO") might do it.

This is a very exciting improvement -- thank you!