Angel Shares Feedback Requested

[seraphim]

Without the ability to (at least approximately) calculate profits, would people still throw that much money into mining pts?

I like the idea, but the switch has to be made very carefully. Maybe even with an eye on the current exchange prices...

[phoenix]

With respect to signing authorities being a central point of failure.... the account balances are all public and thus the signing authority can be changed and allow the chain to continue if the authority is ever compromised or shutdown.   It would be inconvenient, requiring all nodes to switch their authority but the network would continue. 

Suppose we were controlled by the government, the only thing we could do as a signing authority is stop transactions. 

Lets keep one thing clear, Invictus being the signing authority would only apply to PTS because Invictus is the one receiving the funds that replace mining.   No way to decentralize that.   

The DACs that we build will be set up to live without Invictus based upon some variation of the Proof of Stake ideas being proposed.

So, they could stop the creation of new DACs by Invictus, but they can't stop the DACs that are already in existence? I like this, since anyone with the coding skill could carry on the torch of DAC-creation

[bytemaster]

With respect to signing authorities being a central point of failure.... the account balances are all public and thus the signing authority can be changed and allow the chain to continue if the authority is ever compromised or shutdown.   It would be inconvenient, requiring all nodes to switch their authority but the network would continue. 

Suppose we were controlled by the government, the only thing we could do as a signing authority is stop transactions. 

Lets keep one thing clear, Invictus being the signing authority would only apply to PTS because Invictus is the one receiving the funds that replace mining.   No way to decentralize that.   

The DACs that we build will be set up to live without Invictus based upon some variation of the Proof of Stake ideas being proposed.   

[bytemaster]

I agree it's more efficient for funds to go into developing but just as with the trustees proposal this signing authority sounds like central points of failure.  Have you looked at the legal ramifications of having officers of your company imbued with exclusive signing authority and if that changes the assumed unregulated status?  Looks a lot more like something you control if the blocks don't get created without officers of Invictus.

Invictus is a central point of failure and the legal aspects are something that may hinder our options here.   However any fund raising we do results in potential problems.   If we restrict fund raising to just investing in Invictus Stock then US law keeps out the little guy and our investors are torn between buying PTS from someone else or buying our stock.   If we did it mastercoin style then it would be a 'one-time'  action rather than a continuous case and those investing in us would lack liquidity.

These are challenging questions and thus why we bring them to the forum for discussion, we want to maximize the value of PTS and opportunities for investors and funding for DACs. 

[phoenix]

True, the legal ramifications would be difficult in this scenario. If Invictus did all the paperwork, there wouldn't be any problems from the government. The real problems would be people that are afraid that Invictus is being controlled by the government.

[Lighthouse]

I agree it's more efficient for funds to go into developing but just as with the trustees proposal this signing authority sounds like central points of failure.  Have you looked at the legal ramifications of having officers of your company imbued with exclusive signing authority and if that changes the assumed unregulated status?  Looks a lot more like something you control if the blocks don't get created without officers of Invictus.

[phoenix]

I like that you want to recapture the money that's being wasted on mining. I hate to see centralized cloud mining companies getting all the money that goes into developing a "decentralized" currency/DAC

[Stan]

Aren't you sacrificing the equitable distribution and excitement of the Bitshares rollout?  Now it sounds like you're pre-selling the entire thing, which I'm not sure is ideal.

Actually we are proposing a more equitable distribution... you either pay your electric company, Amazon, or someone else who paid their electric company or Amazon.   Now you pay us and everyone gets a fair shot without having to know how to setup a huge mining farm or consuming a lot of their personal time managing servers.

Instead of favoring people that have access to the Chinese Super Computer or Botnets we give the everyone equal opportunity.

ALL the money currently spent on mining would go flowing back into ecosystem development rather than up in smoke.

[bytemaster]

Aren't you sacrificing the equitable distribution and excitement of the Bitshares rollout?  Now it sounds like you're pre-selling the entire thing, which I'm not sure is ideal.

Actually we are proposing a more equitable distribution... you either pay your electric company, Amazon, or someone else who paid their electric company or Amazon.   Now you pay us and everyone gets a fair shot without having to know how to setup a huge mining farm or consuming a lot of their personal time managing servers.

Instead of favoring people that have access to the Chinese Super Computer or Botnets we give the everyone equal opportunity.

[Lighthouse]

Aren't you sacrificing the equitable distribution and excitement of the Bitshares rollout?  Now it sounds like you're pre-selling the entire thing, which I'm not sure is ideal.

[bytemaster]

How long will this go on?  After 20 weeks there will be 2x the protoshares that were ever intended to be created.  What is the maximum amount or do Protoshares continue to dilute forever.

Just so you know, proposing massive dillution like this and changes to the social contract has a fantastic chance of causing the panic sellings of the currency because it looks like you're renegotiating the deal mid-stream.

This will go on as long as we have DACs to build.   In the case of PTS, they were suppose to end up with 10% of the BitShare money supply after several years of mining... now PTS will end up with 100% of the BitShare money supply as only a couple hundred Angel Shares will have been mined and Momentum Mining would end once the upgrade to PTS 2.0 began.   

Bottom line we are increasing the benefits to PTS holders rather than decreasing them.

[Lighthouse]

100k per week for how long?  Are you proposing to make Protoshares an inflationary currency?   Will current PTS holders represent less than 10% of the eventual PTS supply?

More details needed here.

[bytemaster]

Each and every day over $100,000 is being spent on mining PTS in the form of electricity or cloud computing costs.   This adds up to over $3 million per month.  In recent posts we have made the following observations:

1) Mining based upon resource consumption results in centralization.
2) Mining based security is more expensive than proof-of-stake based security and thus less profitable for a DAC and therefore the DAC would be less competitive.
3) DACs require money to be developed
4) Money is another kind of Proof-of-Work... right now we just prove that we burned it, what if we could use it to build the DAC?
5) The ideal mining pool would allow anyone to pay for 'servers' and receive a payout equal to their capital investment without any fees.

In light of these facts we would like to introduce a new model where you mine with your money rather than mine by burning your money.  Invictus would launch ProtoShares 2.0 that would honor all existing PTS and then mine 100K PTS per week.  To mine, you would send Bitcoin to the Angel address.   The 100K PTS would then be divided among those who contributed proportional to their investment.   The proof-of-work would be switched to the signature of our private key and we would set up a server to produce one block every 2 minutes.  As a result mining will still be proportional to work as measured by the money invested.  The more people the contribute the more difficulty mining becomes.

This new model will raise money for Invictus which we can then use to build out the half dozen DACs that will honor all PTS holders.   Instead of PTS holders getting 10% of new genesis blocks, they would get 100% of the genesis block.  We could implement this as a hard fork that would give everyone time to upgrade their wallets and it would be otherwise entirely transparent to holders of PTS.   

Existing PTS holders benefit because instead of being diluted by miners burning money, they get diluted by miners funding the development of DACs. 

Considering the number of people at Vegas looking to throw money our way, the most successful way to do so would be by capturing money currently being waisted at Amazon, DO, and your electric company.

Thoughts?

It is clear to us that we cannot change ProtoShares even though we believe it would have been a better deal for everyone but the botnets.   

Based upon the feedback you all have provided at our request we will leave ProtoShares and its social contract as-is. 

In the mean time we are still looking for ways to crowd fund development of new DACs through a concept similar to Angel Shares.   

We welcome any constructive suggestions.