Author Topic: Why we need Angel Shares[UPDATED Dec 18]  (Read 18808 times)

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Offline luckybit

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The future of DACs
Two days ago Bytemaster introduced to us an idea to create Angel Shares. AngelShares is what I'm calling a development engine. It's extremely powerful. It would allow resources currently wasted to be pumped into development. Right now, Invictus is on the bleeding edge of a new frontier opened up by Bitcoin. But things are happening quickly and people are flooding into this new space looking for opportunities. The BitShare project risks falling behind.

How the development engine works
It's not much different from renting an ASIC miner to mine Bitcoins. Instead, you rent the miner from Invictus. You rent the miner and then you receive shares directly to your wallet. Mining will be proportional to work as measured by the money invested. This money will be used to fuel the BitShares project.

ProtoShares
ProtoShares will continue be mined. However, because Invictus only has enough time to mine so many AngelShares before the release of Bitshares, this means ProtoShare holders will end up with more than 10% of the money supply. It could be up to 50% or more.


Mining
Invictus has made it clear for awhile that it was looking to move from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake. This means, the DACs no longer need to pay miners to work for it. This is why Bitshares will no longer be mined. Mined shares are a reward for the work miners do, or used to do. There is no reason to pay for that work. It would just be a waste of electricity. Also, it has become clear that Proof-of-Work has many weaknesses. In addition, mining eventually favours the rich. How many of us can build a factory to produce ASICs to mine Bitcoin? This has happened with Bitcoin and it threatens its survival. Companies are mining Bitcoin. With Proof-of-Work, the rich will win. With Proof-of-Stake, the rich have to come through us if they want in. And if they want in early, then they will only be supplying us with the tools to make us stronger.

Centralisation
Some have raised concerns about Invictus being a point of failure. Some of these concerns are valid and there are possible solutions to the problem. However, Invictus is already a central point of failure. It is unclear who would pick up the torch should something happen to Invictus. If there was capital fuelling the development of the project, then there would be a larger pool of people who could continue the project should anything happen to Invictus. I believe bringing on more developers to the project will actually help the community who is already overly reliant on Invictus.

Where does the money go
This question is still open for debate. Personally, I'm advocating for an expansion of bounties. There are many things that DACs need done. Wikis, FAQs, How-To guides, and much, much more. DACs need people! And of course the project can use funds to bring on more developers.

How is the money allocated
This is still open for debate. Personally, I'd like to see the core team hand down the tasks and then the community can decide on appropriate bounties and completion requirements.

Distribution of Wealth
Some have raised concerns about only people with money being able to participate in the AngelShares system. As shown above, tasks and work can be distributed and this work is paid for from the Angel funds. The DACs will always need people to do stuff. Unfortunately, this means that people who just wanted to use their computers to mine for shares won't be able to do that. It should be pointed out though, that it's already too late for people with personal computers to mine ProtoShares meaningfully, and that BitShares, even under the Proof-of-Work strategy, would have been GPU and ASIC proof and cloud-proof and pool-proof. There would have been no BitShare windfall for profiteers. Without the need for brute work, it's difficult to see how or why Invictus should just give away shares. Mastercoin and Ripple provide examples of different strategies that may help us decide how to proceed.

Summary
Invictus is a slow moving steam locomotive. With Angel Shares, Invictus could turn this project into a high speed train.
Most of the ideas you present are fine but...

I don't want any core team to hand down tasks. That is complete control of what is supposed to be a decentralized free market community. Priority of tasks should be set by vote according to a sort algorithm which is set up stone and in code. A DAC could handle assigning tasks. Bounties don't work well long term and for programmers its better to hire them full time than to use bounties. Also it ignores marketing, documentation and a whole range of other kinds of jobs which we don't know the fair value of to the market at the time because we don't know how many people want to do those tasks.

The way you're presenting this idea you're removing an entire sector (mining) and the profit strategies associated with that sector no longer exist somewhere else. So you're basically taking away the profit making strategies of an entire sector without providing an alternative new sector to replace it.

I provide an alternative sector with Proof of Commitment as a scheme to move the profit strategies from obsolete (mining) to advertising, marketing, and other kinds of simple tasks which benefit the economic ecosystem. These tasks will be voted on in terms of priority by the community and the amount of payment to the task should be determined by a formula of how many people are trying to complete the task and how high it's voted.

You can distribute coins/shares that way so that it's not just distributed to whomever has the most money saved up, inherited or from a trust fund.

In order for this to work we have to turn miners into some other kind of worker. If we just get rid of all these people from the economy then they cannot afford to buy your angel shares, bitshares or anything else.

If removing mining will take away from the economic ecosystem while also hurting the little guy then I'm not in favor of it unless some other mechanism replaces it which is just as accessible and offers similar levels of profit.

Here are my ideas on how we can resolve the problem. https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=1413.msg15246#msg15246 review the proposal. I don't believe turning our backs on the little guy is an option even if we want to cut out the botnets. Many people simply will not have money to buy anything unless they can get paid for doing something. We should not mirror the problems we have in the real world in this community when we don't have to.

« Last Edit: December 17, 2013, 08:09:45 pm by luckybit »
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Offline oco101

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All depend on how Angelshare will be implemented.

 Angelshare should be cheaper than PTS if they don't give you any share on the  DAC's and they only give you 1:1 on bitshares. And if AngelShare give you 1:1 in every3I DAC  then they should be priced same as PTS 1.0 or else nobody will buy them or if they are cheaper nobody will mine PTS 1.0  or buy PTS 1.0 anymore.

Offline Gekko

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PTS mining at current difficulty is no more profitable. It's an investment hoping for higher PTS value in the future.
I wonder how the initial Angelshare investment would look. Early birds get 1 share for 0.01$?

Offline oco101

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Not knowing what the bounties would be I'd like to say that I (probably) don't like the idea as I don't have much time to work for bounties... But I would always have a few minutes time to set up 10(0) miners.
Of course it's stupid to waste money into mining-heat. But at least if you're on of the "early birds" your (stupid) mining could bring you a lot more than you invest (as long as difficulty is low).
I don't see that kind of chance right now with Angelshares. (How) does the early bird profit for being faster than others?

True but you still have protoshare for mining you could buy Angelshare too, I thing we are still in the "early birds" stage right know.

Offline GoldTiger69

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HackFisher +1
Gekko  +1
coolspeed +1

Offline coolspeed

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Not knowing what the bounties would be I'd like to say that I (probably) don't like the idea as I don't have much time to work for bounties... But I would always have a few minutes time to set up 10(0) miners.
Of course it's stupid to waste money into mining-heat. But at least if you're on of the "early birds" your (stupid) mining could bring you a lot more than you invest (as long as difficulty is low).
I don't see that kind of chance right now with Angelshares. (How) does the early bird profit for being faster than others?

Virtual mining is much the same as real mining. By joining early, you can get more shares with less money.
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Offline Gekko

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Not knowing what the bounties would be I'd like to say that I (probably) don't like the idea as I don't have much time to work for bounties... But I would always have a few minutes time to set up 10(0) miners.
Of course it's stupid to waste money into mining-heat. But at least if you're on of the "early birds" your (stupid) mining could bring you a lot more than you invest (as long as difficulty is low).
I don't see that kind of chance right now with Angelshares. (How) does the early bird profit for being faster than others?


Offline HackFisher

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I would say I don't quite sure whether this is whole good thing to discover the unnecessity of mining. Mining used to solve the both security and money distribution problem at the same time, in a coupled way. When the money are burned, a waste it is. The money used in mining becomes nothing, and no legal and political problem, no need to audit.

After all, why would we burn the money while there's no need to do it? Does mining still worth survive?
Bytemaster and I reached that conclusion a while ago. This is why I've supported Peercoin for months. Mining is dead and we have something to replace it.

Then again everyone wants a free lunch(heh I'm mining right now). Mining is more about advertising and making a profit than securing the blockchain.

It's right, the traditional way of mining is a waste of eletric, and money, so it is stupid. But in my concept mining could be an greater framework, representing all the useful work need to be done for the DAC. Under this framework, 3I could be the leading miner, and provide transparent protocal and build the APIs for other miner to join.

I agree the old mining way is dead, but the framework is great, we may find a more innovative way.

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Offline super3

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I would say I don't quite sure whether this is whole good thing to discover the unnecessity of mining. Mining used to solve the both security and money distribution problem at the same time, in a coupled way. When the money are burned, a waste it is. The money used in mining becomes nothing, and no legal and political problem, no need to audit.

After all, why would we burn the money while there's no need to do it? Does mining still worth survive?
Bytemaster and I reached that conclusion a while ago. This is why I've supported Peercoin for months. Mining is dead and we have something to replace it.

Then again everyone wants a free lunch(heh I'm mining right now). Mining is more about advertising and making a profit than securing the blockchain.

Offline coolspeed

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I would say I don't quite sure whether this is whole good thing to discover the unnecessity of mining. Mining used to solve the both security and money distribution problem at the same time, in a coupled way. When the money are burned, a waste it is. The money spent in mining goes nothing, and no legal and political problem, no need to audit.

After all, why would we burn the money while there's no need to do it? Does mining still worth survive?
« Last Edit: December 17, 2013, 11:35:29 am by coolspeed »
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Offline que23

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As per my discussion tonight, the AngelShare funds should be held by members of the community via a multi-sig transaction. In essence Invictus would have to write an invoice for funds, have it approved by the community, who then can sign the transaction from the Angel address to Invictus.

Therefore if the earth was to open up and swallow Invictus, it would not matter. All the code is open source anyways, and the community would still have 98% of the funds. Just hire a new team, and hope no more strange acts of God happen.

It adds transparency backed by the blockchain.  ;D

tldr; Remove point of failure with multisig.

Invictus should take precautions that the funds can be moved and we should be introduced to a second or third developer(hopefully outside their current city/state or perhaps the country.) who wants be the Godfather/mother for this project. However, I don't really want to hamstring Invictus too much. Perhaps they can just propose an opening budget, say 10 million, then everything after that could be locked up until they need more funds. But they have to be able to make commitments to developers and others. If they tell someone they can hire them for one year, that developer needs to know she's going to be paid. The proposal could just be a general outline but it would be nice to have more details later to make sure there's no waste.
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Offline coolspeed

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As per my discussion tonight, the AngelShare funds should be held by members of the community via a multi-sig transaction. In essence Invictus would have to write an invoice for funds, have it approved by the community, who then can sign the transaction from the Angel address to Invictus.

Therefore if the earth was to open up and swallow Invictus, it would not matter. All the code is open source anyways, and the community would still have 98% of the funds. Just hire a new team, and hope no more strange acts of God happen.

It adds transparency backed by the blockchain.  ;D

tldr; Remove point of failure with multisig.

+1

Money should not be wasted. But money should still under the control of shareholders.
« Last Edit: December 17, 2013, 11:34:01 am by coolspeed »
Please vote for  delegate.coolspeed    dac.coolspeed
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Offline super3

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As per my discussion tonight, the AngelShare funds should be held by members of the community via a multi-sig transaction. In essence Invictus would have to write an invoice for funds, have it approved by the community, who then can sign the transaction from the Angel address to Invictus.

Therefore if the earth was to open up and swallow Invictus, it would not matter. All the code is open source anyways, and the community would still have 98% of the funds. Just hire a new team, and hope no more strange acts of God happen.

It adds transparency backed by the blockchain.  ;D

tldr; Remove point of failure with multisig.

Offline 5chdn

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Offline devilfish

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Yeah I'll say I'm starting to agree, transparency will be key.
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