Announcing Brownie Points (BROWNIE.PTS)

[Empirical1.2]

I think most people would be better with brownies as a share drop target if BM didn't have absolute control.  Being able to give them out is one thing, but being able to take them away is completely different.  I trust BM now, but he is human and even the best people have sacrificed their beliefs for money, power, or avoidance of jail.  Under some sort of threat, Dan could go and retract all Brownies from everyone...

There should be some sort of table or rubric that explains how brownies are earned.  For example how much is pumping your investment in a forum and saying  worth in comparison to what Arhag did with programming?  I got paid 300 Brownies for setting up an interview with FXStreet. How does that compare to contributing on the programming side, which BM seems to favor?  There is so much fog and so much discrepancy which makes them unsuitable as a target.

Careful!! 

I may also seize brownie points from any account if you fall out of favor and anyone who complains in any way about how Brownie Points are issued or how I use Brownie Points is certainly not in my favor and may lose any Brownie Points they have earned.

The few who understand the system will either be so interested from its profits, or so dependent on its favours, that there will be no opposition from that class." Baron Nathan Mayer de Rothschild

[lil_jay890]

I think most people would be better with brownies as a share drop target if BM didn't have absolute control.  Being able to give them out is one thing, but being able to take them away is completely different.  I trust BM now, but he is human and even the best people have sacrificed their beliefs for money, power, or avoidance of jail.  Under some sort of threat, Dan could go and retract all Brownies from everyone...

There should be some sort of table or rubric that explains how brownies are earned.  For example how much is pumping your investment in a forum and saying  worth in comparison to what Arhag did with programming?  I got paid 300 Brownies for setting up an interview with FXStreet. How does that compare to contributing on the programming side, which BM seems to favor?  There is so much fog and so much discrepancy which makes them unsuitable as a target.

[Stan]

How do we balance this with the sharedrop that Bitshares dev core team gets from inflation?  They will get to double dip in both Brownie Pts and the newly minted BTS.  This can yet be another controversial piece.

Nobody calls a compensation package with multiple features a "double dip".    So it would be totally reasonable (and often done in practice) to give an employee a small salary, a bonus, and some stock options.  People who do work for startups generally agree to some mix of benefits.

And "we" do not do the balancing for Identabit anyway.  This is a decision by a new chain developer about how to distribute his genesis block to maximize success.  He decided to honor the 20% consensus for BitShares and go beyond that to do something special for a group of people who made the ecosystem what it is today.  No other factors than that need be considered.

But if he wanted to give them all to Snoop Dog, that would be his business.

[Stan]

I understand what Stan is saying about brownies (how they're "fun", generally represent BTS contributors, etc), but I can't help but feel like they're just a form of repeated past mistakes (AGS, PTS, rolled into BTS, people still want AGS & PTS recognized anyway, complaints abound)...just seems like another avenue for controversy/further confusion of the BTS brand image to me. Especially with the highly centralized/selective nature of their distribution. They may seem fun, but as soon as money and sharedrops are on the line you can bet things get serious real quick.

The reality is that everyone's simply going to fight for whichever asset he or she has the most stake in. If we wanted to avoid controversy, they shouldn't have had to make a choice to begin with.

My 2 BTS.

Our position has always been that the developer of a new coin should be free to choose a distribution that will maximize the potential of the coin, including selling them all herself.

There are over 600 blockchain assets in existence out there, each of which represents a "mailing list" to a particular demographic of users who have bought in to that membership to varying extents.  My number of Dogecoins indicates in a very quantifiable way the degree I have made myself a member of that demographic.

There are other demographics that are not tracked with blockchains.  Like citizenship in Iceland, or ownership of a lot of mining hardware, or membership in some professional society.   Those represent options a developer could choose too.

It is perfectly fine for a person who is a member of some demographic to argue why that demographic would be good supporters to attract. 

But in the end, the choice belongs to the developer.  It is every bit as important of a decision as what technology they use.

[nomoreheroes7]

I understand what Stan is saying about brownies (how they're "fun", generally represent BTS contributors, etc), but I can't help but feel like they're just a form of repeated past mistakes (AGS, PTS, rolled into BTS, people still want AGS & PTS recognized anyway, complaints abound)...just seems like another avenue for controversy/further confusion of the BTS brand image to me. Especially with the highly centralized/selective nature of their distribution. They may seem fun, but as soon as money and sharedrops are on the line you can bet things get serious real quick.

The reality is that everyone's simply going to fight for whichever asset he or she has the most stake in. If we wanted to avoid controversy, they shouldn't have had to make a choice to begin with.

My 2 BTS.

[topcandle]

How do we balance this with the sharedrop that Bitshares dev core team gets from inflation?  They will get to double dip in both Brownie Pts and the newly minted BTS.  This can yet be another controversial piece.

[Stan]

  I may reward them (or not) as I see fit, in the amounts I see fit, for the reasons I see fit.   I may also seize brownie points from any account if you fall out of favor and anyone who complains in any way about how Brownie Points are issued or how I use Brownie Points is certainly not in my favor and may lose any Brownie Points they have earned.

Btw, if Brownie pts simply remained as a token to be played with and provided with small incentives. Making it a sharedrop target equivalent to BTS is insane; especially if you consider the ad-hoc and whimsical nature of its distribution.

Nothing ad-hoc or whimsical about it.  Every word said about them is said with a purpose and intended to achieve a desired effect.  Including legal considerations.  Do not confuse the fact that they are handed out generously with a very broad criteria of eligibility to mean that they are handed out "whimsically".  Do not assume because we try to make them light-hearted and fun that BM is not serious about them.  One of the purposes is community morale, so of course we want them to be fun.

And it takes a lot of BM time to read all that everyone is doing and figure out a roughly appropriate token of appreciation.  That is part of his duties in this community and he is happy to do it because his appreciation is genuine.

Any errors in this process are random noise and should be considered to be a "no purchase necessary lottery" superimposed on a serious attempt to recognize relative contributions.  So the risk that you might get more or less than what you truly "deserve" is part of the "fun".

Net effect - a perfectly reasonable combination for someone to use as a mailing list to give away promotional tokens in a way that is part random and largely targeted to a demographic of helpful people.  It doesn't have to be perfect to serve its intended purpose.

And after all that, it is up to the giver, Underwood in this case, to determine if this particular mailing list serves his own purposes - which may or may not coincide perfectly with Bytemaster's.  The list exists.  People are free to use it if they like.


 

[chryspano]

Nothing important to mention, just a bts supporter and forum member since March 08, 2014

BTS: chryspano

Thanks

[clayop]

  I may reward them (or not) as I see fit, in the amounts I see fit, for the reasons I see fit.   I may also seize brownie points from any account if you fall out of favor and anyone who complains in any way about how Brownie Points are issued or how I use Brownie Points is certainly not in my favor and may lose any Brownie Points they have earned.

Btw, if Brownie pts simply remained as a token to be played with and provided with small incentives. Making it a sharedrop target equivalent to BTS is insane; especially if you consider the ad-hoc and whimsical nature of its distribution.

Then what alternative measures can you suggest to gauge contributions to BTS?

[sumantso]

  I may reward them (or not) as I see fit, in the amounts I see fit, for the reasons I see fit.   I may also seize brownie points from any account if you fall out of favor and anyone who complains in any way about how Brownie Points are issued or how I use Brownie Points is certainly not in my favor and may lose any Brownie Points they have earned.

Btw, if Brownie pts simply remained as a token to be played with and provided with small incentives. Making it a sharedrop target equivalent to BTS is insane; especially if you consider the ad-hoc and whimsical nature of its distribution.

[donkeypong]

I asked you to donate my Brownie Pts to charity, but damn it, I want some now. If you haven't given mine away yet, I'll take a few (donate most of them to charity myself and play around with the remainder). Thanks!

BTS: platinum

[luckybit]

I think I have caught up with people on this thread.  If you think I may have missed you let me know.  It certainly wasn't intentional.

Never received brownie points from this thread. Although I did receive the brownie points from the mumble session.

Some of my posts and contributions going back to 2013 will be included for review. In most cases I contributed to the idea space, in other cases I brought other developers to the community, attempted mergers, helped generate the social consensus license, and some ideas like the bounty coin/bounty exchange platform and others which people may not have paid a lot of attention to, brought to the attention of the Bitshares community "Cooperative Proof of Stake" which led to Fuzzy interviewing Stephen Reed, which had an impact on DPOS,  corrected spelling errors on website, coined the term "sharedrop" form instead of airdrop which was in my opinion not a good frame. I also helped to bring Crypti over to DPOS.

Some attempts failed, such as Blackshares merger failed, but a lot was gained from the discussion. Virtual mining is probably the most tangible and easy to measure, and I think in the long term minebitshares will make Bitshares 2.0 very easy to market to people who know PoW.

Examples:
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=3587.0
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,1413.msg15246.html#msg15246
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,4306.msg54135.html#msg54135
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,4643.msg58797.html#msg58797
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,4087.msg51096.html#msg51096

All topics I've started from the beginning:
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?action=profile;area=showposts;sa=topics;u=258

Feel free to give what you think my efforts are worth.

[mint chocolate chip]

Posted earlier in this thread https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,17354.msg221131.html#msg221131 and was hoping I was overlooked as I have not received any brownies, I made some edits to the original post to include a few other things I have been apart of over the past 20 months.

But I have to emphasize that I started doing this....

We need to really take over google and to do that we need a lot of blog articles talking about what is going on.   Content needs to stay FRESH and be updated daily to maximize rankings.    More instructions will follow as we hear from our partners, but I would like to look for people who feel they can write something brief... perhaps 3 or 4 paragraphs per day about something related to this industry and include links to us. 

This will serve two purposes... SEO and helping those who want to follow us stay up to speed.

before you even asked on my bitsharesmarket.com site with links and information for BTSX, VOTE, DNS, PLAY and all the other ideas...

and really took it to another level at bitsharesblog.com with updates on topics and links to partners that include: bitshares.org, the client download, delegate toast being hired by blockchain, BitShares Blocks, marketing including John Underwood, BTC38, Sparkle, CoinGecko, BitSharesTV, Bytemaster's Blog, DevShares, DPOS, I3, BitShares development objectives, AboutBTS, Daniel Larimer interviews on BitSharesTV and Let's Talk Bitcoin, BitShares Login, Yield, competitors, Delegates of the Month, Cryptofresh, Shape Shift, r/BitShares, Mine BitShares, Bter, light wallet release, web wallet release, Beyond Bitcoin Show, Tri-Fold brochure, NOTE, Moonstone crowdfunding,  NullStreet Journals, DacX, Infographics, Getting started, market cap, BitShares 2.0 announcement, CCEDK, Banx Capital, NanoCard, Max Keiser, Lime Wallet and more.

I have never received a single donation or any delegate pay for any of these efforts, and hope that my contributions warrant some brownies. Thanks bts: bitsharesblog

[hadrian]

You will want to make sure you claim your BROWNIE.PTS because it would just be rude to refuse the BROWNIE.PTS and one day you may regret it; Karma can be a Bitch.

I delayed making this post because it's a little embarrassing to compare the paltry amount of value I've added, with the achievements of many others around here. Nevertheless, I don't want to miss out on whatever amount of brownies might be deemed suitable for my relatively limited contribution.

I've prioritised BitShares (after family life and employment) during any time I can scrounge together. Bearing in mind I have no technical background, here is an overview of my general approach towards BitShares over the last couple of years.

• Bought Protoshares when they were expensive!
• Joined forum and donated to AGS in Feb 2014.
• Put a lot of time into learning from others about BitShares and related subjects, so I can gradually increase my contribution to the community.
• Tried to be constructive, helpful and positive on this forum.
• Encouraged people around me to look into BitShares.
• Remained a 'strong hand' w.r.t. all things BitShares.

Here are examples of my attempts at being constructive on this forum:

• Caring for bytemaster - "How to show our appreciation to bytemaster", even though I spelled your name wrong a couple of times - this one's gotta be worth some brownies!!
• Idea for splitting delegate roles (in July 2014, before it was feasible I think) - "Motivating people to vote".
• Looking out for problems with recurring payments.
• Ideas for an alternative DNS model.
• Ideas for 'negotiation of proposals', and a stupid one on fundraising.
• Opinions on NameNarwhal here and here. And on transferable account names and negative votes.
• I suggested the name for "Notes" when we still had 'BitShares Music'. Other suggestions in brainstorming sessions for Keyhotee, Peertracks, BitShares slogans etc.
• General positivity, e.g. here, here and here.
• You 9bytemaster) seemed to appreciate my suggestions in "Draft Pitch for new BitShares.org", "Should we kill the DACronym?"?
• Reporting typos etc. - for bytemaster, and here, here, here, here, here etc.

I think I can stop scraping the barrel now - there are no more brownie crumbs in here for me!!

[Stan]

I can't think of a better criteria for who should get a share than those who helped build the ecosystem.
The challenge is in determining how helpful each someone has been to the cause.
This is inherently subjective in any application where there is a wide range of ways in which supporters contribute.
There is no pre-defined formula that is sufficiently complete.

Managers seeking to acknowledge contributors to their mission always have this problem.
The brownie method is more open and quantitative than most performance reviews I have had in my career.

In the end, such things don't have to meet any criteria other than what suits the giver of the gift.
In this case, Underwood decided that Bytemaster's thank you note system was as good a metric as any.

Parable of the Generous Employer