Have you read @starspirit's proposal for a reworking of pegged assets?
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,15880.0.html
If not, what are your own opinions on the where the current design needs work?
I haven't had the chance to do so yet. In general, you really can break pegged assets into two broad buckets: pegs connected to market mechanics and pegs connected to promises or actions of a set of trusted actors. There are a lot of factors that go into building a nice stable peg from access to timely information that isn't corruptible, reputation metrics, network latency, how the trading mechanics work, liquidity and if fungibility is a requirement. Probably more that I've missed; however, the point is that it's a fairly complex game to go down the road of something that's trustless much less federated, which is why I partnered with Dan a long time ago in the first place. It's a really hard problem that not many people are trying to solve due to the easy opt out of centralization.
One boon has been the emergence of smart contracts and oracles. Ethereum and Augur are really pushing the market towards thinking about these things and that gives developers a better suite of tools to experiment. eDollar I believe is going to launch on Ethereum. This said, the technology simply does not scale (both Ethereum and eDollar) and it's far too much to ask for a production ready financial system. But it's nice to see things like these projects and boardroom.io coming along.
The other elephant is identity and reputation. In general having tools to move value and structuring value in certain configurations is always beneficial; however, you usually need to have some notion about your counterparty for the transaction. For example if you want to send a microfinance transaction, then you need to understand if this person is creditworthy. Generally, governments and central entities are the ones in the identity business and thus this is a big bottleneck for those of us who want something a bit more trustless or those in the developing world where there just isn't anything at all.
In all honesty it's a system. A very complex system with tons of stocks and flows and lots of feedback loops and generic considerations. It's truly hard to draw a boundary around the system in any reasonable place and then governance of the underlying mechanics hasn't been well thought out. I'd recommend reading Donella's Meadow's book thinking in systems (link:
http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Systems-Donella-H-Meadows/dp/1603580557/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1439595730&sr=8-1&keywords=thinking+in+systems) and Alex Plentland's book on Social Physics (link:
http://www.amazon.com/Social-Physics-Spread--Lessons-Science/dp/1594205655/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1439595778&sr=8-2&keywords=alex+pentland). They give a nice foundation to think about designing these systems properly or at least understanding what can go wrong (especially with the archetypes section in Meadow's book) .
At one point I was a bit too tied up into Bitshares wanting it to win and probably misperceived your intentions, Charles. If I personally had much to do with your aggravation or such, my apologies. I myself have been working on being a more positive person because as you said ... life is too short and stuff.
I wish you the best in your endeavors.
I could have been more graceful as well. There is too much passion in this space and things are always moving too quickly. We tend to forget that there are human beings behind the ideas and keyboards and let the competition get the best of us. Winning ought not be constrained to a project, but rather always the ideas. The whole point is that we are changing paradigms about how money, society and governments should work. Value can now move at the speed of thought, contracts are now digital and self-enforcing and the idea of no one being in charge actually is tangible. It's going to change things and we either all fail together or succeed together regardless of the particular company or project.
For what it's worth, I think the altcoin space is where the best minds and innovation are at today. The bitcoin maximalists and silicon valley types are running around either chained to bitcoin without any context or reason (I guess it's the standard) or are rapidly building business models centralizing or federating technology. They just don't seem to get it.
Hello Charles, welcome back.
Time for some Neil Young
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlhwPXpfSoc
Topic: Let's Try This Again (Read 10009 times)
