The 2.0 launch - lessons learned

[theoretical]

Hopefully third-party companies will take it as a starting point, improve UX and expand it further.

I'd like to point out that the referral system is designed to give such third-party companies an incentive to develop their own UI solutions.  Specifically, if you develop a UI, and program the UI to set yourself as the registrar / referrer of anyone who registers through your UI, then you can get a big cut of the transaction value created by users who register through your UI.

[Louis]

Maybe it should have been announced before the release of 2.0 that the backend was ready and  fully functional and  to excuse the UI for is still in development but nevertheless very useful. Something along those line.

[jakub]

The back-end is great, no doubt about it.

But the GUI is more like a solid proof of concept showing how to connect a Graphene back-end with a javascript front-end.
Hopefully third-party companies will take it as a starting point, improve UX and expand it further.

So I'd say the current GUI is nice, it has a big potential but it is still work-in-progress and was released to the public prematurely imo.
If I were a big bank I wouldn't dare to release an interface to a financial system at this stage of development.
But I understand that BitShares is not a proper company with unlimited funding so maybe different rules apply.

[mike623317]

I think the backend is great. Super fast. 

I would like to see a better GUI. I really think we should aim for something like kencode suggested yesterday, but that can be a lower priority.

My 2 cents.

[jakub]

This is how I see it:

• It's been declared that UX is a priority in 2.0 yet we have released a GUI which is still an unfinished product, with known bugs and without proper tests.

• The migration process has been flawed for Windows users and unable to handle wallets with a large number of private keys. It's clear it hasn't been properly tested on all platforms and for non-standard cases.

• The official http://bitshares.org website has not been updated in a timely manner. Even now it still contains large sections referring to the old blockchain.

• There was no contingency plan in place in case somebody discovered a new attack vector right after the launch. Luckily the name squatting incident was the only one that has happened so far, but had it been something more serious, all committee members would have been unavailable to react quickly while CNX was asleep.

• We've had a clearly flawed pricing strategy regarding registering new account names. As a result we've lost quite a lot of revenue and ended up with thousands of fake names.

• We've had 2.0 witnesses who have 0.9.2 delegates still running on the old blockchain.

• EDIT: Not all exchanges were directly informed. Instead of reaching them we just assumed they would follow our announcements.

• EDIT: The new rules for SmartCoins shorting were not explained well enough before they started to take effect.

Other than the above it's been quite a success.
I mean it, really well done (except for the things above).