The Main Problems with Bitshares

[twitter]

agree     but need to keep an eye on price as well and listen to the valuable suggestions from community to make a better exchange platform together

If you're not fully happy with the direction or governance decisions, then as I see this, you have two choices. First, follow Thom's advice and try to bring change through the existing system. Second, develop the exchange you want to see, either by developing your own alternative wallet or by forking this with a social consensus sharedrop. I'd rather have an economy of scale with one system, but if there are competing objectives, then at some point maybe it makes sense to try some different things. Let the market run its course and let natural selection decide what's most needed.

[donkeypong]

If you're not fully happy with the direction or governance decisions, then as I see this, you have two choices. First, follow Thom's advice and try to bring change through the existing system. Second, develop the exchange you want to see, either by developing your own alternative wallet or by forking this with a social consensus sharedrop. I'd rather have an economy of scale with one system, but if there are competing objectives, then at some point maybe it makes sense to try some different things. Let the market run its course and let natural selection decide what's most needed.

[jakub]

@jakub I did not equivocate one bit. I want Dan's power reduced. I want more decentralized governance, I want more transparency which would allow for more community involvement. What I have said throughout my post is that I trusted CNX to manage bitshares better. I know longer trust that they will make the right business decisions. We need to open up the management of this exchange to the community. We need to put together a checklist, prioritize each item and delegate task among community members. We need to establish trusted proxy voters. We must establish trusted committee members. We need to leverage the proposal system.

My point is that we shouldn't trust bytemaster to manage everything we should start making bitshares an actual company dividing up responsibilities in a transparent fashion, allowing for greater accountability.

My OP was a personal anecdote. But my message has far less to do with me, or BM than you suggest. This is a message to the community that we have to change things around. We have to turn this project into a company and we have to provide a better service than our competitors.

@clout, now I fully agree with this^.

I really appreciate you writing it after incurring a significant financial loss. It's easy for me to advise you to "take responsibility" while not being in your position myself.

As much as I admire BM's genius for making spectacular inventions, I never really relied on him in the business-running area. He makes mistakes as we all do but the problem (and the solution) lies not in him but in us having the will to take over from him, at least in areas we all know he's not really good at.

Conclusions like the one above give me a lot of faith in BitShares.

[Tuck Fheman]

The biggest problem with BitShares is ...

"I'm I rich yet?" 

[Empirical1.2]

He's smart but not business savvy and definitely doesn't understand the difference between theory and practice.

what scares me the most is, if... he does

I don't think behaviour modelling and prediction is his (or nearly any developers) forte.

We are nearly there though,  BTS 2.0 is an awesome and flexible system, who else could have created it for that little money and time besides BM & crew?

While some things can't be 'undone', now it's mainly a case of adjusting parameters based on real world observations and feedback. 

[xiahui135]

Given Dan and company's inability take care of the little things when they matter most (like coordinating the upgrade of exchanges) their total lack of business acumen

That leaved me a bad taste also...
One week before snapshot he states he will focus the last week to coordinate the upgrade off the exchanges...
And after snapshot he just confirms that bittrex (I suppose the same is true for others,bter(?)) was not individually  informed and they should know about it because 1 month prior we made a buzz about this news...
If we had 50 exchanges that support us I could  understand it,  but we have only six (poloniex,btc38,bittrex,bter,yunbi,metaexhange)...
With this logic he shouldn't care informing any exchange prior snapshot...

PS I believe that exchanges in reality knew of course about the migration.  But  we gave them the opportunity to blame us for the luck of communication/migration... If bm had sent them only one fu#$% email before snapshot (2 minutes "work") they would not even have the chance to do it...

PS2 I agree with almost everything clout has said...

I think lack of business mind is the problem.
The team do not understand there are things very easy but create huge value. Making migration more easier, notify exchanges are things of this kind.

If the team consider more, we will spend less effort, and create more value. Think about why Dash and Dogecoin have a larger marketcap without the "innovation" like bitshares.

We lean on innovation too much, but do not understand to solve a problem we also need many "traditional" method. We lean on develop too much, but do not understand to solve a problem there are other steps to take. Or, we do not have real problem-solve mind too.

[NewMine]

What a bunch of FUD'sters. Lol.

[liondani]

He's smart but not business savvy and definitely doesn't understand the difference between theory and practice.

what scares me the most is, if... he does

[clout]

Just take a step back and look at the big picture.  Bitshares 2.0 is a week old and needs someone to hold its hand and guide it while it grows.  A baby needs to be nurtured and needs to trust it's parents in order to survive.  Only as it grows older and more aware under the nurture of a higher authority does it realize it is time to start thinking and doing things for itself.

Bitshares is a baby now and Dan is the care taker.  He knows the system better than anyone and I am happy to have him raise bitshares until we as a community become proficient with the system.

I'm saying the time is now that we become the care takers of this DAC. All we need is better coordination of the resources we have at our disposal. I'm not saying I don't want Dan to play a major role, I just want the community to step up and collectively play a larger role.

[liondani]

Given Dan and company's inability take care of the little things when they matter most (like coordinating the upgrade of exchanges) their total lack of business acumen

That leaved me a bad taste also...
One week before snapshot he states he will focus the last week to coordinate the upgrade off the exchanges...
And after snapshot he just confirms that bittrex (I suppose the same is true for others,bter(?)) was not individually  informed and they should know about it because 1 month prior we made a buzz about this news...
If we had 50 exchanges that support us I could  understand it,  but we have only six (poloniex,btc38,bittrex,bter,yunbi,metaexhange)...
With this logic he shouldn't care informing any exchange prior snapshot...

PS I believe that exchanges in reality knew of course about the migration.  But  we gave them the opportunity to blame us for the luck of communication/migration... If bm had sent them only one fu#$% email before snapshot (2 minutes "work") they would not even have the chance to do it...

PS2 I agree with almost everything clout has said...

[clout]

@jakub I did not equivocate one bit. I want Dan's power reduced. I want more decentralized governance, I want more transparency which would allow for more community involvement. What I have said throughout my post is that I trusted CNX to manage bitshares better. I know longer trust that they will make the right business decisions. We need to open up the management of this exchange to the community. We need to put together a checklist, prioritize each item and delegate task among community members. We need to establish trusted proxy voters. We must establish trusted committee members. We need to leverage the proposal system.

My point is that we shouldn't trust bytemaster to manage everything we should start making bitshares an actual company dividing up responsibilities in a transparent fashion, allowing for greater accountability.

My OP was a personal anecdote. But my message has far less to do with me, or BM than you suggest. This is a message to the community that we have to change things around. We have to turn this project into a company and we have to provide a better service than our competitors.

[CLains]

And suddenly we all became insiders, and it was all real, and now we're talking..

Leaving aside the "blame game" most of the criticism is constructive and I agree this is the time to focus. Better to have a monopoly in a small bowl than swim around in the ocean of banks and exchanges, meaning for us: focus on our decentralized exchange with ease of use, including decent on/off ramps. The crypto community is our primary target, as they are already in the know and can join us in further developing this into something great.

All eyes and ears have been on BitShares in the last few weeks in a way that I have never seen in this space, which signals the beginning of the cryptocommunity at large being secure and comfortable with the horizon and "galaxy rise" beyond Bitcoin. For the time being, lets just be a small sun in that large opening, slowly gathering the love and respect from our fellow crypto-heads, we'll gain community to build and expand to other worlds, other stars.

[lil_jay890]

Just take a step back and look at the big picture.  Bitshares 2.0 is a week old and needs someone to hold its hand and guide it while it grows.  A baby needs to be nurtured and needs to trust it's parents in order to survive.  Only as it grows older and more aware under the nurture of a higher authority does it realize it is time to start thinking and doing things for itself.

Bitshares is a baby now and Dan is the care taker.  He knows the system better than anyone and I am happy to have him raise bitshares until we as a community become proficient with the system.

[jakub]

Under the previous system I would not have been margin called and if I had I would not have been subject to an additional 50% loss. The changes to these rules were not well defined.

I referred to your OP,  where you mention many things but NOT the rules-being-secretly-changed issue. This was raised later on by tonyk. Your original rant was about exchanges not being upgraded in time and witnesses taking price feeds mainly from Poloniex. And I replied that I thought it was quite ridiculous to blame BM for that. Especially when you say:

This whole centralized system of governance where Dan arbitrarily decides the rules needs to stop.

So you need to make up your mind: do you want BM to take care of everything (including the reliability of price feeds and relationships with external exchanges) or do you want BM's role to be reduced? If the latter, the community itself needs to take on those responsibilities (as Thom rightly says) and stop relying in every aspect on BM.

No, the bitasset market should not be operational at the moment

And who was to decide that? BM? So you want him to be the ultimate decision maker or not?
If you think the bitasset market was not reliable after the 2.0 launch you should have closed your short positions immediately when you realized that. What makes you think BM was in a better position to make those judgements on behalf of everyone else while you could not make a similar decision yourself regrading your own money. All I'm saying is just take more responsibility for your own actions, clout.

Not everyone has the time to be central role in the governance model. People raised concerns about having the bitasset market operational while exchanges had not upgraded and Dan said no that's not a problem so witness went along with it.

"Witnesses went along with it" - so why is your rant directed at BM, and not the witnesses?

Witnesses just do what dan says other wise they get voted out. Dan shouldn't be in charge of business decisions. He's smart but not business savvy and definitely doesn't understand the difference between theory and practice.

That's not BM fault that almost nobody else cares to vote, is it? He has said multiple times in the Mumble session that he wants to have less and less influnce on BTS but it us (the community) who need to fill in the void to make it happen.

How is my rant off target when I mentioned those as my two biggest concerns.

No, clout, you're making this up. Your main concern was that the price feeds were wrong, not that the GUI is unfinished or the migration process is clumsy.

Given Dan and company's inability take care of the little things when they matter most (like coordinating the upgrade of exchanges) their total lack of business acumen I just don't know anymore where bitshares will be in the long term.

Again, you're bitching about "Dan being unable to take care of the little things". But is BM really supposed to take care of the "little things"? Isn't it our (i.e. the community's) responsibility? And if we fail we should blame nobody but ourselves. BitShares is a community project, not BM's private company.

Furthermore the reason for the short squeeze was a lack of coordination between the dev team and exchanges, particularly those exchanges that provide liquidity for the bitasset market.

Again, you expected BM to coordinate. But why didn't the community check if the exchanges were informed and ready? You want BM to be responsible for everything and the same time you want him to step down.

The funny thing is that the problem is not BM clinging to power. The problem is our inability to take on the responsibilities that BM is clearly not very good at. He wants to give them to us. But for some reasons (unknown to me) we are not willing to take them.

[Thom]

My problem is that over the past two years, every change that was supposed to be good for bitshares has driven the price down to where we see it now. I can't in good conscience tell anyone else to invest in bitshares because I can't say that there won't be an arbitrary change that confuses the market and drives down the price of bts further.

You totally ignored my response clout, and I feel it is central to the issue of how will BitShares become successful. So why don't YOU step up and do something about it? YOU can, if only you choose to do so. Don't just armchair quarterback and and let others shape BitShares, be responsible and help make it happen with a meaningful contribution.

What I so often see when it comes to issues of marketcap / BTS price is a total lack of commitment to the vision of BitShares. It is that vision that has kept me here despite the many blunders BM & team have made. I too become disillusioned at times when I see the same mistakes repeated.

But WE can end that if we take the responsible role of governance away from CNX and into the hands of a committee of those who are committed to the BitShares vision and can lead the community by setting goals and priorities.

That can probably not happen in the short term, as CNX is this community's only source of programming talent with enough knowledge, time and resources to make significant changes in the near term. What CAN happen now is identifying specific people from this community to serve on the committee, to draft worker proposals, and identify specific problems and a plan to solve them. Consensus starts with discussion.

Fuzzy has a separate thread aiming to identify the problems and hopefully a plan to resolve them.

It all starts with proactive individuals. Will you be one of them or just a nay saying armchair quarterback?

What you just said is "You can be the difference, but oh wait CNX actually controls the network so you probably wouldn't be able to make a difference at this time." That's what I got out of your comment.

Not everyone has the time to be central role in the governance model. People raised concerns about having the bitasset market operational while exchanges had not upgraded and Dan said no that's not a problem so witness went along with it. Witnesses just do what dan says other wise they get voted out. Dan shouldn't be in charge of business decisions. He's smart but not business savvy and definitely doesn't understand the difference between theory and practice.

You're right to say that we need new committee members. That's something i advocate for in the OP. But what happens when those committee members disagree with Dan? Will they be voted out before any proposal has a chance to take affect? What we need first and foremost is to establish a robust network of proxys which Dan/CNX should divide their voting power between. This is where the real decentralization occurs. Dan should at this point rely more on the community to make decisions and stop this paternalistic mindset where he feels he knows best of all how business should be conducted and the market should be defined, because he doesn't and we've seen that with iteration after iteration of the market engine.

The problem I really have with your response is that you say YOU can do this, YOU should do that, not taking into consideration the tragedy of the commons we have before us. It is not in my best interest to expend my energy and resources if others will not do the same. It is not YOU and ME  that must do these things, it is WE as a collective that must do these things, otherwise none of these haphazard attempts at changing the management and structure of this project will work.

There's a lot of wisdom in your response clout, and you're right about most of it.

I can appreciate your perspective regarding "your best interests", I don't disagree in principle. However you clearly have some level of interest in BitShares, I just don't see the commitment to back it up; you don't have the vision it seems to me.

You saw a contradiction in what I said, that is understandable from a short term perspective. However from a longer term perspective I'm not sure I can agree.

All we can do is act for ourselves, not as a collective. All I am saying is that if you believe in the vision of what BitShares can become then do your part to make it happen and protect your personal interest in it. Not getting involved abdicates your responsibility to others.

Take a risk, try to make a difference. Step up your investment by committing yourself to the project's governance, wrestle it out of the hands of BM and help make it what YOU want to see it become. BM has said on many occasions he does not want to be in the leadership role of the ecosystem, but it will remain that way until people step up to change it.

We need people of passion to do this, or DPoS WILL fail, just like America IS FAILING.