ANNOUNCEMENT 10 - BitShares 2.0 PitchFork Date is Tuesday, October 13, 2015

[Stan]

ANNOUNCEMENT 10 - BitShares 2.0 Pitchfork Date is October 13, 2015

The foreshadowing began back on April 6th with this subtle hint:

Pitchforks.  When hard forks just aren't enough!

The final hint came just minutes ago when Bytemaster spilled the beans, um, I mean, actually announced something ahead of schedule for a change -- here:

2 days left now.  How are you guys feeling about the testnet?  On track for friday?

I believe that the test network has proven robust enough to replace the BTS 1.0 network in 30 days.

We have some graceful fallback positions that can be taken without missing the upgrade deadline:

1.  If all witnesses are on a single node then the network works perfectly, even with 1 second blocks
2.  Have several different witnesses all run from the same Amazon or Digital Ocean location
3.  Have all witnesses use a dedicated server to relay messages through while being geographically diverse
4.  Have all witnesses use current P2P and reduce block times to 5 seconds

In any event we are confident in the market behavior and evaluation of transactions and see no reason to delay upgrading the protocol simply because of networking/communication issues.

On the user interface side we have a viable wallet that supports:

1. market operations
2. transfers
3. voting
4. backups

Over the course of the next 30 days we will continue to refine the user interface, but at the very least it should be better than BTS 1 long before 30 days is up.

In other words, I am feeling pretty good about having the upgrade date be:  Tuesday, October 13th  (middle of work week)

So, yes, it's true. 

And as an added bonus, you all get a super deluxe 34-day countdown at no extra charge.

If you were planning on having the World's Best New User Training and Referral Funnel (WBNUTRF) ready to sign up new users when we go live, I'd suggest you start sprinting now.