The idea of to establish a BTS big shareholders’ club

[lovejoy]

Agreed.. prolific and valid, how do you do it luckybit?

It seems that getting to the bottom of what it's going to take to implement bond markets is the shortest route to a solution here, is it not?

I think we should get to the bottom of that issue first, before considering brownie points as a solution, which are not universally appreciated outside of the 195 people currently holding them, and perhaps a handful of folks who do not.

If no one else tackles that line of questioning on Mumble Friday, then I will.

[unreadPostsSinceLastVisit]

luckybit you make a lot of valid points. You have me reconsidering my thoughts on this.

[BTS007]

from BM in: Workers / Re: Worker Proposal Review--18

So here is a question, what is the present value of a BitShares to be delivered in 2 years?  You must discount todays BTS price by risk and time value of money. Stated another way, how much additional BTS would we have to pay to convince someone to lock up their BTS liquidity for 2 years. Stated another way, how much BTS would be required as collateral for a USD loan payable in 2 years?

If we have a price of 21M BTS payable upon delivery, then we would have to charge much more for BTS payable in 2 years and might even go out of business if we are unable to finance the work.

[luckybit]

I disagree with the argument that low prices will kill BTS. Low prices didn't kill Bitcoin in the beginning.

That's because Bitcoin was Proof of Work. You could acquire Bitcoins without buying them so of course low prices didn't kill Bitcoin. If Bitcoin could only be acquired by buying it then low prices would have made Bitcoin look like a Ponzi scheme to everyone involved. It's only due to the fact that you could mine Bitcoin with your CPU or GPU until 2013 that Bitcoin could have low prices and not look like a Ponzi scheme because a lot of people could just say they'll mine some Bitcoins, take minimal risk in acquiring them,  but let Bitcoin reach the single digits now and see how that turns out after people spent almost $1000 on a Bitcoin.

If you're somebody who can afford 5m BTS immediately and you only have 100,000, then you have little faith in BTS, and rather than give you incentive to jack the price up when you'll most likely just dump as soon as you can, I think I'd prefer to just stock up on cheap BTS a while longer.

I don't see the logic of your argument. When I mentioned dumping I specifically gave the reason why people dump. They dump due to opportunity costs, not necessary to go back into fiat. Even people who believe in the crypto-revolution don't want to miss the boat on other platforms.

A lot of people don't get it. WIthout interest, without dividends, without yield, Bitshares 2.0 will not be as feature complete as 1.0. We took a step backwards here. Large holders will hold until they find a better opportunity, and there will be plenty going into the future so I don't see these prices in Bitshares holding up unless you keep the whales interested.

Whales chase yield, dividends, interest, and Bitshares at this time offers none of that. The economics of Bitshares 2.0 are wrong and it wont be fixed by fiddling around with the fees. The argument made to switch from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake was no dilution and we still ended up with dilution (the worst part of Proof of Work). The argument was that Bitshares would be profitable, the argument was that burning fees would be promoted and that there would be 5% interest, dividends.

That is how Bitshares X achieved such a high market cap. Ever since the changes what has happened? The current Bitshares has an entirely different value proposition from Bitshares X and it all depends now on whether or not Bitshares 2.0 can be successful as an exchange and that requires attracting liquidity. There seems to be no coherent plan to attract liquidity and no metrics are being released on the decentralized marketing campaign or other aspects so we can make informed decisions.

[unreadPostsSinceLastVisit]

1,Low prices will kill BTS, we have no much time to wait.

2,Not to advance is to go back.

3,Do not worry about the reward for big holders, because they have more risk than who has less BTS.

4,The club is open for everyone, and all is voluntary and fair.

5,Now there are about 30-50 persons with 5m BTS, if the plan will be implemented, there will be 100 persons with 5m BTS immediately, and the value of BTS will rise to 5-10 times.

6,As me, I am only 100000BTS now, if the plan will be implemented, I want to buy BTS to become a person with 5m BTS immediately.

7.the goal to set the members in observation period is what can reduce the frequent in and out of members.

I disagree with the argument that low prices will kill BTS. Low prices didn't kill Bitcoin in the beginning.

If you're somebody who can afford 5m BTS immediately and you only have 100,000, then you have little faith in BTS, and rather than give you incentive to jack the price up when you'll most likely just dump as soon as you can, I think I'd prefer to just stock up on cheap BTS a while longer.

Also I disagree with point 3. If a 5m BTS holder only has 0.01% of what they could afford if they went balls out, and a 100,000 BTS holder has 95% of what they can afford invested in BTS, then in my mind the person with less BTS is taking the greater risk.

[BTS007]

1,Low prices will kill BTS, we have no much time to wait.

2,Not to advance is to go back.

3,Do not worry about the reward for big holders, because they have more risk than who has less BTS.

4,The club is open for everyone, and all is voluntary and fair.

5,Now there are about 30-50 persons with 5m BTS, if the plan will be implemented, there will be 100 persons with 5m BTS immediately, and the value of BTS will rise to 5-10 times.

6,As me, I am only 100000BTS now, if the plan will be implemented, I want to buy BTS to become a person with 5m BTS immediately.

7.the goal to set the members in observation period is what can reduce the frequent in and out of members.

[kuro112]

If cheap bts price makes further development of the project difficult, we can ask for another round of donations in exchange for brownies.

Donations from who? If the biggest losers are the longest holders who are you going to get future donations from? The dumpers aren't going to donate.

People that after 2 years are still here donating, despite all this pain, deserve brownies more than a whale who decides to lock 10 out of her 20M bts (he wouldn't sell those 10M in any case, he will "only" dump the remaining 10M he has, but now he can earn some free brownies too! 10M bts x 50.000 brownies equals 500.000 brownies! isn't that great? what will be the next project that this whale will dump his "free" brownies-sharedrop? identabit? )

While I'm a person who was here for the full 2 years, I still think because a whale has more of an impact on the network by their holding, they should get more reward because ultimately they are taking more risk TODAY. People who held since the beginning took a lot of risk over a long period of time but the risk wasn't the same opportunity cost as it is for the whale today.

There was no Ethereum back then, there was no competition from anything but NXT back then, but now the competition is fast rising, and the ecosystem is different. These opportunity costs have to be factored in and I think you're missing the opportunity costs that a whale is taking that a small holder isn't taking.

A person who holds 10,000 BTS isn't taking the same risks in terms of opportunity cost as the person who holds 10 million BTS.  10 million BTS is worth a lot more money than 10,000 and 10 million BTS may be a person's entire life savings while 10,000 BTS is a lot for a lot of people, but it's not the same. Brownies by the way should be slow release and capped at 50,000 so 500,000 isn't possible.

People in the 10,000 BTS range might be more willing to trade all 10,000 BTS in the hope of increasing it. They have opportunities within BTS itself to make a profit off 10,000 BTS. A person with 10 million BTS can't do a lot right now and most people aren't going to risk their entire life savings gambling in the high risk opportunities currently offered.

Giving candies to a "criminal" may stop him from doing "criminal" activities but this doesn't mean that he deserves the candies, it's just a bribery. I don't know how many TRUE "criminals" you will find that are willing to be "good guys" in exchange for candies.

I'm not sure where you are going with this. Why should we be using terms like "criminal" and "good guys" and "bad guys" as if this is a black and white space? We only have math to work with and a person willing to lock up a significant portion of BTS no matter who they are, is doing a favor for BTS, and is showing faith in BTS.

It might be that some of the BTS holders who do this held BTS and never sold any for the full 2 years. It might be that they acquired the BTS by accident when some whale dumped recently. It doesn't really make a difference as long as they are willing to lock up their BTS.

If you view a gift as a bribe then Protoshares could have been the bribe used to create Angelshares and ultimately Bitshares X. If you view gifts as bribes then all sharedrops could also be bribes. Anything which is a gift could be viewed as a bribe if you take on that glass half empty perspective, but if you take on the glass half full perspective then it's just loyalty credits. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loyalty_program

Companies use loyalty credits all the time on employees and on customers. Bitshares is currently using similar sorts of credits with Brownie points which basically are a kind of loyalty point, but without the promise of any reward. We might have people willing to buy them because they trust Dan will reward them or sharedrop on them but it's very possible that Dan can change his mind and there is nothing legal they could do about it.

That is why I haven't bought any, and that is why I don't treat Brownies like a currency or like some kind of stock. It's a gift token, and anyone can offer a gift token and redeem them or not, it's at their discretion. So you can't call it a bribe unless there is a promise involved. These tokens are speech and the Supreme Court of the USA has made a decision.

 

If in the other hand we care about those people that still HODL and we feel we need to reward them, then we should randomly(once per month? random date) check for accounts(in the future and in the past if this is possible) that keep accumulating bts and reward them.

That is fine too but you're not offering enough of a detailed plan on how we would go about doing that. Also I think because there is a limited about of Brownies I don't see how what you're doing could be done with Brownies which is why I think we should focus on the whales first, as a test case to see if a reputation economy can be built with the people taking the most financial risk and accepting the most opportunity cost.

Opportunity cost, I'll put the definition here so people can understand my arguments.

In microeconomic theory, the opportunity cost of a choice is the value of the best alternative foregone, where a choice needs to be made between several mutually exclusive alternatives given limited resources. Assuming the best choice is made, it is the "cost" incurred by not enjoying the benefit that would be had by taking the second best choice available.[1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost

DEFINITION OF 'OPPORTUNITY COST'
1. The cost of an alternative that must be forgone in order to pursue a certain action. Put another way, the benefits you could have received by taking an alternative action.

2. The difference in return between a chosen investment and one that is necessarily passed up. Say you invest in a stock and it returns a paltry 2% over the year. In placing your money in the stock, you gave up the opportunity of another investment - say, a risk-free government bond yielding 6%. In this situation, your opportunity costs are 4% (6% - 2%).

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/o/opportunitycost.asp

Brownies offset the opportunity cost and are therefore fair. If you think it's fair for commercial entities to offer frequent flier miles, then it's the same exact concept going on here. People who are loyal to the Bitshares network, who are whales, will get more credits, just as people who fly more will get more points, or people who shop more. Over time you could expand on this to include people who test out new features of the network receive Brownies, but the point is at this time we need to test it out on whales because currently whales don't have any better way to contribute to the benefit of Bitshares.

 

am i the only one who learns a ton of shit when he reads luckybits posts x.x

[luckybit]

And I'm not saying that only whales should ever be allowed to be part of the "shareholders club" but that initially the whales will have to lock up before you would expect everyone else to. You can't ask the little guys to be loyal while the whales dump on them, so it has to start from the top down.

The whales might get more Brownies initially, but there should be plenty of opportunities to acquire Brownies in other ways which are more appealing to small holders, like for example EarnBitshares or some similar mechanisms like random lottery of long term holders (more than 6 months). The point is we have to start somewhere and whales are the logical place to start because they have the biggest measurable impact.

Also if you're trying to get a userbase to your DAC it makes all the sense in the world to sharedrop on whales who have enough faith in the technology to lock their BTS up for a set period of time because maybe they could be convinced to lock up on your blockchain as well, whether it be Muse or something else. This is all good because you want the founders with large holdings to have a gentleman's agreement to hold, it is what happens in corporations to improve the perception of the company.

How would Microsoft or Apple be perceived if Bill Gates or Steve Jobs were dumping the moment it went on the exchange? But I guess in altcoins it's acceptable for the founders and large holders to dump continuously in order to avoid opportunity costs? The reason people dump is opportunity costs and if we offset that then people have less reason to dump.

In the situation where a large holder locks up 50% of their BTS, if they have 20 million and lock up 10? That isn't necessary if the minimum is 1 million and the max amount of Brownies is the same if they lock up 1 million or 10 million, it would only require they lock up 1 million. Sure they could dump the rest but then they'd be reducing the price of their 1 million which is locked up.

If Brownies offset the opportunity cost enough then they'd have no incentive to dump at all, and if not then they may dump, but they'll still hold some BTS, while the alternative could be that they dump their entire stash to go to Ethereum. The purpose of the holding is to buy enough time for the development of a proper bond market or loaning or margin trading so that they have something they can do with 20 million BTS besides dump it. If they dump their whole stash then when you have the bond market feature it will be harder to get them back.

[luckybit]

If cheap bts price makes further development of the project difficult, we can ask for another round of donations in exchange for brownies.

Donations from who? If the biggest losers are the longest holders who are you going to get future donations from? The dumpers aren't going to donate.

People that after 2 years are still here donating, despite all this pain, deserve brownies more than a whale who decides to lock 10 out of her 20M bts (he wouldn't sell those 10M in any case, he will "only" dump the remaining 10M he has, but now he can earn some free brownies too! 10M bts x 50.000 brownies equals 500.000 brownies! isn't that great? what will be the next project that this whale will dump his "free" brownies-sharedrop? identabit? )

While I'm a person who was here for the full 2 years, I still think because a whale has more of an impact on the network by their holding, they should get more reward because ultimately they are taking more risk TODAY. People who held since the beginning took a lot of risk over a long period of time but the risk wasn't the same opportunity cost as it is for the whale today.

There was no Ethereum back then, there was no competition from anything but NXT back then, but now the competition is fast rising, and the ecosystem is different. These opportunity costs have to be factored in and I think you're missing the opportunity costs that a whale is taking that a small holder isn't taking.

A person who holds 10,000 BTS isn't taking the same risks in terms of opportunity cost as the person who holds 10 million BTS.  10 million BTS is worth a lot more money than 10,000 and 10 million BTS may be a person's entire life savings while 10,000 BTS is a lot for a lot of people, but it's not the same. Brownies by the way should be slow release and capped at 50,000 so 500,000 isn't possible.

People in the 10,000 BTS range might be more willing to trade all 10,000 BTS in the hope of increasing it. They have opportunities within BTS itself to make a profit off 10,000 BTS. A person with 10 million BTS can't do a lot right now and most people aren't going to risk their entire life savings gambling in the high risk opportunities currently offered.

Giving candies to a "criminal" may stop him from doing "criminal" activities but this doesn't mean that he deserves the candies, it's just a bribery. I don't know how many TRUE "criminals" you will find that are willing to be "good guys" in exchange for candies.

I'm not sure where you are going with this. Why should we be using terms like "criminal" and "good guys" and "bad guys" as if this is a black and white space? We only have math to work with and a person willing to lock up a significant portion of BTS no matter who they are, is doing a favor for BTS, and is showing faith in BTS.

It might be that some of the BTS holders who do this held BTS and never sold any for the full 2 years. It might be that they acquired the BTS by accident when some whale dumped recently. It doesn't really make a difference as long as they are willing to lock up their BTS.

If you view a gift as a bribe then Protoshares could have been the bribe used to create Angelshares and ultimately Bitshares X. If you view gifts as bribes then all sharedrops could also be bribes. Anything which is a gift could be viewed as a bribe if you take on that glass half empty perspective, but if you take on the glass half full perspective then it's just loyalty credits. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loyalty_program

Companies use loyalty credits all the time on employees and on customers. Bitshares is currently using similar sorts of credits with Brownie points which basically are a kind of loyalty point, but without the promise of any reward. We might have people willing to buy them because they trust Dan will reward them or sharedrop on them but it's very possible that Dan can change his mind and there is nothing legal they could do about it.

That is why I haven't bought any, and that is why I don't treat Brownies like a currency or like some kind of stock. It's a gift token, and anyone can offer a gift token and redeem them or not, it's at their discretion. So you can't call it a bribe unless there is a promise involved. These tokens are speech and the Supreme Court of the USA has made a decision.

 

If in the other hand we care about those people that still HODL and we feel we need to reward them, then we should randomly(once per month? random date) check for accounts(in the future and in the past if this is possible) that keep accumulating bts and reward them.

That is fine too but you're not offering enough of a detailed plan on how we would go about doing that. Also I think because there is a limited about of Brownies I don't see how what you're doing could be done with Brownies which is why I think we should focus on the whales first, as a test case to see if a reputation economy can be built with the people taking the most financial risk and accepting the most opportunity cost.

Opportunity cost, I'll put the definition here so people can understand my arguments.

In microeconomic theory, the opportunity cost of a choice is the value of the best alternative foregone, where a choice needs to be made between several mutually exclusive alternatives given limited resources. Assuming the best choice is made, it is the "cost" incurred by not enjoying the benefit that would be had by taking the second best choice available.[1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost

DEFINITION OF 'OPPORTUNITY COST'
1. The cost of an alternative that must be forgone in order to pursue a certain action. Put another way, the benefits you could have received by taking an alternative action.

2. The difference in return between a chosen investment and one that is necessarily passed up. Say you invest in a stock and it returns a paltry 2% over the year. In placing your money in the stock, you gave up the opportunity of another investment - say, a risk-free government bond yielding 6%. In this situation, your opportunity costs are 4% (6% - 2%).

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/o/opportunitycost.asp

Brownies offset the opportunity cost and are therefore fair. If you think it's fair for commercial entities to offer frequent flier miles, then it's the same exact concept going on here. People who are loyal to the Bitshares network, who are whales, will get more credits, just as people who fly more will get more points, or people who shop more. Over time you could expand on this to include people who test out new features of the network receive Brownies, but the point is at this time we need to test it out on whales because currently whales don't have any better way to contribute to the benefit of Bitshares.

[chryspano]

If cheap bts price makes further development of the project difficult, we can ask for another round of donations in exchange for brownies. People that after 2 years are still here donating, despite all this pain, deserve brownies more than a whale who decides to lock 10 out of her 20M bts (he wouldn't sell those 10M in any case, he will "only" dump the remaining 10M he has, but now he can earn some free brownies too! 10M bts x 50.000 brownies equals 500.000 brownies! isn't that great? what will be the next project that this whale will dump his "free" brownies-sharedrop? identabit? )

Giving candies to a "criminal" may stop him from doing "criminal" activities but this doesn't mean that he deserves the candies, it's just a bribery. I don't know how many TRUE "criminals" you will find that are willing to be "good guys" in exchange for candies.

If in the other hand we care about those people that still HODL and we feel we need to reward them, then we should randomly(once per month? random date) check for accounts(in the future and in the past if this is possible) that keep accumulating bts and reward them.

[merivercap]

i should we want a lockup?

i want them to trade on our exchange. in my opinion it is not a good idea.

we need active user.

I agree Shentist.  I'm not a big fan of locking up shares.  I mean I can somewhat understand the sentiment to try to artificially create a perception about the market value of an ecosystem, but is it logical?  Is everyone considering the unintended consequences?  It's like trying to discourage people from acting as they would normally and letting the free market work.   Why give favors or brownie pts or anything to weaker holders, non-believers, or people who just need liquidity compared to those newer believers, potentially stronger holders who would have better prices to buy in? 

If we are trying to intervene with the free market, we should create a BTS big trader's club that promises to buy & sell 5 million BTS in a month.  We should refund all transaction fees.  Locking up of BTS creates illiquidity does it not?

Also in the long run, we should probably favor those who use the platform more than those that just do nothing with it...(ex. giving more voting power to BTS holders that use it for transactions/transfers)....then BTS itself eventually might be used as a form of money in the distant future...

Fortunately the plan you're talking about has nothing to do with what we discussed.

Weak holders wouldn't be people who are whales with over 1 million BTS. At some point they believed or they wouldn't have acquired so many BTS.

At the same time if you purchase that many BTS and you're watching BTC go up, or Ethereum, or Storj, or Safecoin, or anything else, even if you don't believe in it at some point you're going to have to dump because the opportunity cost of holding becomes too high.

So the options we have is encourage people to dump so they don't miss the opportunities to invest in better newer or perhaps just rising older technologies, or we will have to promote loyalty. It's your choice.

There aren't any transactions for whales to put 1 million BTS to use. We don't have a bond market so they can't loan it out. The majority of people aren't going to risk trading 1 million BTS on an untested hard to use exchange even if they were professional traders and if they do trade they probably would only trade a small fraction while dumping the rest to put it on Poloniex so they can get interest.

There is no logical reason for someone to hold millions of BTS on Bitshares 2.0 for no interest when they can hold something else which gives them interest, unless they can know for sure other people are going to hold. Basically this is like game theory where if you know everyone else is going to dump you don't want to be that one bag holder who decides not to.

So if you have people locking their coins up then you know there are people like you who still believe, and who can't dump, and now you'll be more likely to lock yours up as well. The people saying Brownies shouldn't be used this way, wait what are Brownies for then? Are Brownies supposed to be treated as BitUSD? Were any of the people saying that around for Protoshares and Angelshares?

Angelshares was basically locked Protoshares. We don't have that anymore but we should and these ideas would basically take us back to that mentality but perhaps better because you'd get a reputation economy. When you mention the free market, a reputation economy is a market, a gift economy is a market, but it's not the kind of market you're used to so you believe it's somehow less than free?

In a gift economy no one is obligated to give anything to anyone. People feel guilty if they don't return the favor because in these societies there is the value of reciprocity. People give to receive, but they don't make any promises, and they don't expect or know how the favor will be returned. So it's not barter where you know exactly what you're trading for, but more like Christmas where you give a gift of some unknown value and receive a gift of some unknown value and hopefully it all balances out.

If you would like to dump and encourage others to dump then go ahead. Ethereum and Bitcoin are waiting. If you'd like to encourage people to hold then without a Bond market, Prediction markets or any of the use cases to make a person actually use Bitshares you're basically asking people to hold a lot of Bitshares and essentially do nothing with them, not even for Brownies but out of charity to the market so that people dumping can get better prices.

I don't think it's wise to punish the most loyal holders with low priced BTS and make them bag holders.

Let's just say I have a different viewpoint about this topic and just wanted to provide a different perspective.  It's really not a big deal to me one way or the other how other people use their free time and resources.  I was trying to point out what I thought were unintended consequences whether people believe them to be true or not. As far as food for thought:

Maybe weak holders are those that would consider selling at these bargain prices?... or are these bargain prices with the risk?  Who knows?  Maybe it's up to each investor?  Don't a lot of people think these big shareholders have the potential to be the Bill Gates and Buffetts of the world? Isn't this why they are big shareholders in the first place?  If seems like a bunch of average Joes  spending a lot of resources making potentially rich people even richer. I'm an average Joe btw so I could be spending resources doing the same trying to help the rich get richer, but it just seems kind of odd.  There's nothing wrong with that.  Usually people want to help the average Joes and the poor and I'm not even making a judgement about if that is good or not... but without bargain prices the avg Joes and poor won't get as good an opportunity to capture the upside of Bitshares. 

If people feel like short-term prices are so important,  an alternative is just to find the richest guy you know and convince him to put in a couple million into BTS and prices probably will go up and at these prices that's close to 25% of the entire ecosystem.   Bringing a lot of new investors and new money would seem more productive and also getting investors to fund new businesses that help the ecosystem...  again it's just one perspective...

[donkeypong]

Yes, I understand the gift economy and it's a great ideal, but the crypto space has seen far too many scams for me to believe that people will willingly hand over their large BTS holdings to some trust, without a contract or expectation of any reward. I think it could use a kick in the pants to get started.

People did not donate to Angelshares purely out of the goodness of their hearts. We all saw that the money would be used to develop the software and that down the road, those who donated would be able to help share in the reward of that technology. This was backed by the Social Consensus. We also knew that PTS on its own was nothing unique and that it would end or be replaced at some point. AGS was sponsored by the core BitShares team and product; if we did not have faith in them, then we would not have bought PTS in the first place.

I don't know that any core team is going to do this one, so let's just imagine that two or three longtime community members start a BitShares Trust. And then begin asking big holders to deposit their BTS in trust for a period of time, maybe something like a CD. (Feel free to do it without contracts, but I think you'll have even less participation.)

The most trusting people are those of us involved in the BitShares community in one way or another. I'm not sure how much the active, trusting community overlaps with the large 5M BTS holders. I'd guess more members of this community have somewhere around 50,000 - 500,000 BTS. If you are Joe Forum Member and you have scratched your pennies to accumulate 120,000 BTS over a period of months/years as your crypto savings, you have done so largely because you believe in the future of this technology and currency. You think it's going to appreciate as this catches on. Are you really going to put your 120K into trust? 100K? I think the trust would be lucky to get 20K from that person. And that's a trusting individual who is engaged in the community.

You need to offer some suggestion of a reward or that the funds will appreciate (I can't say 'promised' but that's the word I want). Otherwise people will see it as a 'money for nothing' crypto scam. The reward must be offered in such a way that it is not a legal promise, yet it is enticing enough that people want to donate.

Working this expectation into the Social Consensus might be the best way to get the community's power behind a strong suggestion of reward. Have future sharedrops include a suggested x% drop to trust donors. If the whole community stands ready to welcome or to ostracize someone, then that's a pretty powerful reputation system. Can you see any other way to fund this and harness the community's power to support it?

[luckybit]

Angelshares was basically locked Protoshares. We don't have that anymore but we should and these ideas would basically take us back to that mentality but perhaps better because you'd get a reputation economy.

That's an interesting thought. There were some potential legal hurdles with AGS, if I recall, but mostly because it looked a tiny bit like a security. Assuming those issues could be avoided, then the community could empower someone to hold donated shares in trust. What would be the reward? I think they'd eventually get their principal back for sure. One thing I'd suggest is that we could consider modifying the social consensus, requesting that x% of any future sharedrops be made to those who have donated to the AGS trust (perhaps instead of using Brownie Points for this). That would be consistent with the gift economy, though with an uncertain future array of projects, it might make sense to combine that with some other reward.

As far as we know there were no significant legal risks with Angelshares. In a gift economy there is no legal hurdles, because everything is voluntary, there are no contracts, there are no promises, and ultimately the only thing we have to trust is the source code itself.

Bitcoin doesn't legally promise to cap at 21 million. It's capped at 21 million because the source code promises 21 million and the community has organized to make the source code into something sacred like the 10 commandments on a stone tablet. In Bitcoin the ecosystem has faith in the source code and in the mathematics Satoshi Nakamoto arrived on.

In Bitshares we don't seem to have the same level of faith. Angelshares were illiquid so when I see people saying they don't want to lock their BTS up because it would make BTS illiquid for some period of months, they don't seem to remember that illiquidity was how BTSX originally was launched and people who switched to Angelshares couldn't sell them.

Fuzzy and some others are already empowered to distribute Brownies. Additionally any of us can be empowered to distribute our own tokens. We can have a decentralized gift economy without any of the language you speak of. There is no "principal" because there is no promises, there is no "contracts" there are no "securities", it's simple people proving their loyalty and hoping at some point in the future their loyalty will be rewarded when it's time to decide who to give the gifts to.

Anyone is free to vote on who should receive gifts by making their own token and then sending their tokens to the people they would gift. This puts their intentions on the market so that it is known who they might choose to gift. At the same time Brownies are who Dan might choose to gift. These tokens just track who is on the good side of the Bitshares ecosystem, and each of us can have our votes, and value different things, but I would guess that loyalty is valuable and dumping isn't something most people want.

When there is massive dumping the costs to develop Bitshares will increase. Having a higher price will support the development of Bitshares. Reducing the amount of tokens for sale either through burning them or locking them up is a way to boost the price and it's not a "trick" if people do it voluntarily.

It's no more of a trick than people collecting interest on BTS which is what was promised in the original whitepaper. What happened to earn 5%? What happened to the prediction markets? What happened to the bond markets? Sure we have a decentralized exchange and payment system and these will impress the small holders or people just discovering Bitshares but for people who have been waiting for over 2 years, who have held and have not sold a single BTS, what about them? Should they be the bag holders to people who only bought BTS on Poloniex to pump and dump it?

Brownies in my opinion can and should be used to show appreciation for long term holders who have had to watch their $ go down month after month, year after year, but who haven't dumped. If you want to reward this behavior then reward it, if you don't care then you don't care, it's all voluntary in a gift economy.

[donkeypong]

Angelshares was basically locked Protoshares. We don't have that anymore but we should and these ideas would basically take us back to that mentality but perhaps better because you'd get a reputation economy.

That's an interesting thought. There were some potential legal hurdles with AGS, if I recall, but mostly because it looked a tiny bit like a security. Assuming those issues could be avoided, then the community could empower someone to hold donated shares in trust. What would be the reward? I think they'd eventually get their principal back for sure. One thing I'd suggest is that we could consider modifying the social consensus, requesting that x% of any future sharedrops be made to those who have donated to the AGS trust (perhaps instead of using Brownie Points for this). That would be consistent with the gift economy, though with an uncertain future array of projects, it might make sense to combine that with some other reward.

[BTS007]

Who can save the BTS？Only our own

if there were 200 members with 5 m BTS, the price of the BTS would be changed dramatically！

The rise in the price of BTS, is the best reward to  the most loyal holders with low priced BTS and make them bag holders.