Author Topic: [Proposal] PTS Angel fund allocation in the new Bitshares PTS  (Read 8100 times)

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Offline emski

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I'm not sure I like the restrictions for III.
Their stake is significant but this should be the case anyway.
We want them to have a stake in future 3rd party DACs.
This way they will be incentivised to provide support.
I'd leave everything as-is.

Offline alphaBar

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Blech just make it into a BTS asset.  PTS had one purpose.  If a PTS DPOS chain is made and forces all these rules because of DPOS, then I'd just as soon see someone create the BTS asset and be done with this.

I thought the whole point of using PTS was because it was considered a fair distribution... well ok, not really ?

Again, this was not the point I am trying to address in this post. A group of us are working to create a PTS upgrade. This post was intended to create a reasonable divestment plan for the Angel fund in that upgraded PTS chain (nowhere else). I discussed this with Stan and he suggested getting input from the community to make sure there was no strong objection to it.

Understood, but it is somewhat relevant because making it as an asset on BTS completely removes the need for reducing I3's stake.  Although I'm confused who owns these keys etc and where these coins would be spent going forward as everything is being dissolved.

Because this thread was not intended to argue the pros and cons of PTS being moved to a standalone blockchain, I will not dive into that issue now. What I will say is: (i) we're not asking for anything that would impact BTSX, the current PTS, the future BTS, or anything prior to the November 5th snapshot and (ii) the consensus problem is not the only reason to encourage the Bitshares Trust to adopt a rational divestment strategy. Even as a user-issued asset PTS would suffer from the lopsided allocation held by the Trust. Sharedropping is a mechanism for distribution. If the sharedrop instrument itself is heavily centralized, do you think that would make it more likely or less likely to incentivize developers of future DACs to sharedrop PTS? For some applications it doesn't matter, but in general I think it is safe to assume that a chain with a more even distribution is far more appealing to "sharedrop" into.

Without diverging too much from the topic at hand, I will add that PTS stands to gain a lot more from this strategy over the alternative which is essentially to "do nothing". We are a team of motivated people with a wide range of experience. The PTS we envision does not compete with the agile feature-packed digital corporation that is the new BTS. It is a simple unit of account built on the core Toolkit. We want an opportunity to grow value for the entire Bitshares platform and I think it would be crazy to say "no thanks" to that.
« Last Edit: October 29, 2014, 08:11:33 am by alphaBar »

Offline Bitty

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Offline gamey

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Blech just make it into a BTS asset.  PTS had one purpose.  If a PTS DPOS chain is made and forces all these rules because of DPOS, then I'd just as soon see someone create the BTS asset and be done with this.

I thought the whole point of using PTS was because it was considered a fair distribution... well ok, not really ?

Again, this was not the point I am trying to address in this post. A group of us are working to create a PTS upgrade. This post was intended to create a reasonable divestment plan for the Angel fund in that upgraded PTS chain (nowhere else). I discussed this with Stan and he suggested getting input from the community to make sure there was no strong objection to it.

Understood, but it is somewhat relevant because making it as an asset on BTS completely removes the need for reducing I3's stake.  Although I'm confused who owns these keys etc and where these coins would be spent going forward as everything is being dissolved.
« Last Edit: October 29, 2014, 06:46:12 am by gamey »
I speak for myself and only myself.

Offline tonyk

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People of Bitshares, I’ve been discussing an issue privately with Stan and it was suggested that I present the issue to the community for input. As many of you know, a group of us are trying to organize an upgrade to PTS and to reposition PTS as a currency DAC and sharedrop instrument. I’ll try to provide a quick summary before diving into the details.

Background Information

* Many PTS investors are displeased with the recent merger proposal. In particular, many feel that the social contract has been violated by:
  -granting only 7% stake to PTS/AGS holders instead of 10%.
  -even worse, locking PTS into a 2 year vesting period in the merged BTS.
  It is not the intent of this post to discuss the “fairness” of the allocation.
* Currently, the PTS Angel address currently holds ~13.5% of the entire money supply of PTS.
* It was the intent of the merger proposal to “absorb PTS” into the new BTS and therefore, in theory, PTS residual value would be almost nothing without community action.

Problems

A single entity owning 13.5% of the money supply is a non-starter for “distributed consensus” in a DPOS version of PTS. This is because the entire legitimacy of the coin comes into question when a single entity owns such a massive stake. There is a "critical mass" of centralization (which someone alluded to in another post) that effectively makes the entire consensus algorithm useless. Here is a thought exercise illustrating the point:

  * What is the likely percentage of PTS holders who move their funds out of the genesis block? I would guess a minority within the first year. Let's take an estimate of 50%.
  * What percentage of those people would actively participate in voting? Let's estimate that at 35%.

If these estimates are even close to being reasonable, it would mean that only 17.5% percent of the stake would be used in active voting. A single entity owning 13.5% of the money supply (not counting the personal funds of I3 employees) means that essentially a single person (Dan) decides the entire 101 delegate stack. This translates into complete centralization of the currency. I want to emphasize that I am not arguing that Dan should not be trusted, just that it violates the intent of a distributed consensus algorithm for a single entity to possess absolute and unanswerable control. At this point it becomes more efficient for Dan to simply manage the ledger as a trusted counterparty. I contend that we are currently at that point with PTS.

Proposal

Firstly, I appreciate that the Bitshares Trust has been careful not to crash the price of PTS by liquidating the Angel fund recklessly. I think most would agree that, long term, having a 13.5% stake in such an asset is not in the best interest of the Trust or PTS holders. I’ve proposed a structure for reducing the position of the Angel fund in the upgraded PTS, as follows:

The Bitshares Trust would promise to:
-reduce the fund’s position to a maximum of 3% stake within 2 years. This requires divesting about 180,000 PTS.
-sell 55,000 PTS to private investors in a series of blind auctions distributed over the next year (e.g., monthly). For example, two 2300 PTS segments can be sold each month at a discount to large investors in exchange for a non-binding commitment to not sell for at least 1 year.
-sell another 55,000 PTS on the exchanges over the next 2 years.
-perform a controlled burn of 30% of the fund to offset the downward price pressure of the above. The 30% stake is not chosen randomly. The BTS allocation of PTS was discounted by 30% from the amount of the social contract and this would be a similar allocation.

This proposal would allow I3 to generate a lot of cash and to maintain a very large stake in PTS without compromising the integrity of the whole system.

Advantages

* Over the long haul, the Trust would get a higher return on investment than if it were to simply sell the whole 13.5% on the exchanges. In fact, I’m not sure if there would be any incentive to keep PTS alive without such a commitment from the Trust. Without such a structure in place, the actual end result might be that PTS completely dies after the BTS merger.
* Such a commitment would do a lot to restore PTS investor’s confidence in Bitshares and I3, and to inspire PTS investors to grow the Bitshares ecosystem.
* Lastly, such a commitment would better position PTS as a stable long-term store of value for outsiders who may be wary of investing in a PoS coin with low participation and a single shareholder having a lopsided proportion of the money supply.

Conclusion

This proposal allows the Bitshares Trust to generate a lot of revenue from a currency that would otherwise die and therefore be worthless to all parties. The Fund would keep a significant stake in the new PTS, and at the same time show PTS investors a token of good faith after the very tumultuous recent events.

I have presented this proposal to Stan. He did not offer an approval or disapproval of the idea, but he did mention that the proposal should be presented to the community in order for the Bitshares Trust to consider supporting it. Please voice your concerns and opinions here.

WHOW WHOW  -  what happened to the 'fair POW' distribution?

I thought this was in the 'GRAND NEW PTS Manifesto'??????

Now, it is back to abandoned shit  coin that somebody is trying to buy and pump.






This proposal allows the Bitshares Trust to generate a lot of revenue from a currency that would otherwise die and therefore be worthless to all parties.

Race donkey here. I appreciate your efforts. But where's the other shoe here? If I'm following your logic, you are saying that (1) the PTS currency is presently worthless, but (2) you want to allow I3 to sell this worthless currency to make some money. I can see some utility in #2, but who is going to buy it if #1 is true?

If you're going to resurrect PTS, that's cool. And I'm with you there. But considering there aren't a lot of DACs on the horizon, I think you have a lot of work to do to sell the 'valuable currency' part before talking about sucking more value out of it. I understand this proposal could improve the governance, but it also creates a headwind before it's been made clear where any forward momentum would come from.

Cart before the thoroughbred?

 +5% couldn't have said it better myself.  Without a guaranteed 10% from I3 (which I don't foresee given current BTS snapshot proposals), I'm afraid PTS holds little real world value.  It's like owning a movie ticket to yesterday's film.
+5% to both of you.
« Last Edit: October 29, 2014, 05:54:20 am by tonyk »
Lack of arbitrage is the problem, isn't it. And this 'should' solves it.

Offline alphaBar

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I agree with you that we have an uphill climb ahead of us. I think the main objective here was to give investors some confidence that the funds in the Bitshares Trust would be dealt with responsibly and to counter the argument that we will inevitably face when people object to the lopsided holdings of the fund.

IMO holding a BTS bond with 2 year redemption gives me more confidence and feelings of security than holding a coin that generates no value that currently has no developers, no business plan, and minuscule volume.  I own PTS and I don't feel like things are 'lopsided' with the distribution nor do I feel burned by the BTS share allocation.  PTS was basically a development fund for I3 similar to Devcoin except it promised sharedrops so I have no problem with them holding a large stake... in fact, that gave me more confidence that my investment was safe.  I3 already sharedropped 50% of BTSX to PTS and the other snapshats were also largely sharedropped to PTS.  I think the final airdrop of BTS should be celebrated rather than muddying the waters with this mumbo-jumbo.  PTS was a fine vessel but BTS is the ship that will take us to the moon then the stars. 

Edit per Stan's response:
One of the early proposals was the idea of merging them into BTS but that did not achieve consensus and is not part of the current proposal.  PTS and AGS will remain unchanged, representing their two demographics as always.

The current proposal airdrops on AGS and PTS like always, with special provision for DNS and VOTE as "partially born" DACS.  The only issue is the makeup of the BTS sharedrop, not a proposed change to the targets of that drop.

Ok, I've said it about 4 times in this thread, but you seem to not care at all about the point of discussion here. The allocation issues were only discussed by way of background. I specifically stated: It is not the intent of this post to discuss the “fairness” of the allocation. Then I repeated it not once but twice. The purpose of this thread is to discuss the divestment proposal I have outlined for the PTS Angel fund in the upgraded PTS (post-November 5th). You've made your point that you believe PTS will have no residual value so therefore I will assume that you also have no issue with the divestment plan.

Offline yellowecho

I agree with you that we have an uphill climb ahead of us. I think the main objective here was to give investors some confidence that the funds in the Bitshares Trust would be dealt with responsibly and to counter the argument that we will inevitably face when people object to the lopsided holdings of the fund.

IMO holding a BTS bond with 2 year redemption gives me more confidence and feelings of security than holding a coin that generates no value that currently has no developers, no business plan, and minuscule volume.  I own PTS and I don't feel like things are 'lopsided' with the distribution nor do I feel burned by the BTS share allocation.  PTS was basically a development fund for I3 similar to Devcoin except it promised sharedrops so I have no problem with them holding a large stake... in fact, that gave me more confidence that my investment was safe.  I3 already sharedropped 50% of BTSX to PTS and the other snapshats were also largely sharedropped to PTS.  I think the final airdrop of BTS should be celebrated rather than muddying the waters with this mumbo-jumbo.  PTS was a fine vessel but BTS is the ship that will take us to the moon then the stars. 

Edit per Stan's response:
One of the early proposals was the idea of merging them into BTS but that did not achieve consensus and is not part of the current proposal.  PTS and AGS will remain unchanged, representing their two demographics as always.

The current proposal airdrops on AGS and PTS like always, with special provision for DNS and VOTE as "partially born" DACS.  The only issue is the makeup of the BTS sharedrop, not a proposed change to the targets of that drop.

TLDR;

« Last Edit: October 29, 2014, 04:50:01 am by yellowecho »
696c6f766562726f776e696573

Offline alphaBar

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Without commenting on the bulk of this thread until I've reviewed it thoroughly tomorrow, I want to head one thing off at the pass:

AGS and PTS do not become abandoned after November 5th. 

One of the early proposals was the idea of merging them into BTS but that did not achieve consensus and is not part of the current proposal.  PTS and AGS will remain unchanged, representing their two demographics as always.   We expect 3rd parties to honor AGS and PTS as they always have. 

The current proposal airdrops on AGS and PTS like always, with special provision for DNS and VOTE as "partially born" DACS.  The only issue is the makeup of the BTS sharedrop, not a proposed change to the targets of that drop.

Thank you for clarifying this point Stan.

Offline alphaBar

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Blech just make it into a BTS asset.  PTS had one purpose.  If a PTS DPOS chain is made and forces all these rules because of DPOS, then I'd just as soon see someone create the BTS asset and be done with this.

I thought the whole point of using PTS was because it was considered a fair distribution... well ok, not really ?

Again, this was not the point I am trying to address in this post. A group of us are working to create a PTS upgrade. This post was intended to create a reasonable divestment plan for the Angel fund in that upgraded PTS chain (nowhere else). I discussed this with Stan and he suggested getting input from the community to make sure there was no strong objection to it.

Offline Stan

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Without commenting on the bulk of this thread until I've reviewed it thoroughly tomorrow, I want to head one thing off at the pass:

AGS and PTS do not become abandoned after November 5th. 

One of the early proposals was the idea of merging them into BTS but that did not achieve consensus and is not part of the current proposal.  PTS and AGS will remain unchanged, representing their two demographics as always.   We expect 3rd parties to honor AGS and PTS as they always have. 

The current proposal airdrops on AGS and PTS like always, with special provision for DNS and VOTE as "partially born" DACS.  The only issue is the makeup of the BTS sharedrop, not a proposed change to the targets of that drop.
Anything said on these forums does not constitute an intent to create a legal obligation or contract of any kind.   These are merely my opinions which I reserve the right to change at any time.

Offline alphaBar

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Please let's not derail the discussion here. I did not post this to argue whether or what the value of PTS should be. My only objective was to reach an agreement on a divestment plan for the PTS Angel fund in the upgraded PTS. If you believe that PTS should be worthless then you should have no objection to the divestment plan since it will also be worthless anyway.

Offline gamey

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Blech just make it into a BTS asset.  PTS had one purpose.  If a PTS DPOS chain is made and forces all these rules because of DPOS, then I'd just as soon see someone create the BTS asset and be done with this.

I thought the whole point of using PTS was because it was considered a fair distribution... well ok, not really ?
I speak for myself and only myself.

Offline yellowecho


This proposal allows the Bitshares Trust to generate a lot of revenue from a currency that would otherwise die and therefore be worthless to all parties.

Race donkey here. I appreciate your efforts. But where's the other shoe here? If I'm following your logic, you are saying that (1) the PTS currency is presently worthless, but (2) you want to allow I3 to sell this worthless currency to make some money. I can see some utility in #2, but who is going to buy it if #1 is true?

If you're going to resurrect PTS, that's cool. And I'm with you there. But considering there aren't a lot of DACs on the horizon, I think you have a lot of work to do to sell the 'valuable currency' part before talking about sucking more value out of it. I understand this proposal could improve the governance, but it also creates a headwind before it's been made clear where any forward momentum would come from.

Cart before the thoroughbred?

 +5% couldn't have said it better myself.  Without a guaranteed 10% from I3 (which I don't foresee given current BTS snapshot proposals), I'm afraid PTS holds little real world value.  It's like owning a movie ticket to yesterday's film.
696c6f766562726f776e696573

Offline alphaBar

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This proposal allows the Bitshares Trust to generate a lot of revenue from a currency that would otherwise die and therefore be worthless to all parties.

Race donkey here. I appreciate your efforts. But where's the other shoe here? If I'm following your logic, you are saying that (1) the PTS currency is presently worthless, but (2) you want to allow I3 to sell this worthless currency to make some money. I can see some utility in #2, but who is going to buy it if #1 is true?

If you're going to resurrect PTS, that's cool. And I'm with you there. But considering there aren't a lot of DACs on the horizon, I think you have a lot of work to do to sell the 'valuable currency' part before talking about sucking more value out of it. I understand this proposal could improve the governance, but it also creates a headwind before it's been made clear where any forward momentum would come from.

Cart before the thoroughbred?

I agree with you that we have an uphill climb ahead of us. I think the main objective here was to give investors some confidence that the funds in the Bitshares Trust would be dealt with responsibly and to counter the argument that we will inevitably face when people object to the lopsided holdings of the fund.

Offline donkeypong

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This proposal allows the Bitshares Trust to generate a lot of revenue from a currency that would otherwise die and therefore be worthless to all parties.

Race donkey here. I appreciate your efforts. But where's the other shoe here? If I'm following your logic, you are saying that (1) the PTS currency is presently worthless, but (2) you want to allow I3 to sell this worthless currency to make some money. I can see some utility in #2, but who is going to buy it if #1 is true?

If you're going to resurrect PTS, that's cool. And I'm with you there. But considering there aren't a lot of DACs on the horizon, I think you have a lot of work to do to sell the 'valuable currency' part before talking about sucking more value out of it. I understand this proposal could improve the governance, but it also creates a headwind before it's been made clear where any forward momentum would come from.

Cart before the thoroughbred?
« Last Edit: October 29, 2014, 04:24:16 am by donkeypong »