Stealth Transfers Worker Proposal

[jakub]

Since 2014 Q4 (when the dev team ran out of money), CNX owes us nothing. Just get used to it.
CNX is free to make worker proposals whatever they like (including fixing bugs) and we are free to accept them or reject them.

If a coder is unwilling to take responsibility for his bugs, he only risks his reputation.
CNX is not doing us a favor - they are just taking care of their reputation.
They said they would fix the bug so there is no issue.

And if we continue with this "attitude of entitlement" - we risk our reputation (as a community).

[tonyk]

No software company offers a warranty on a FREE product provided WITHOUT WARRANTY.

If you think BitShares should have a software support contract that covers a certain amount of bug fixes then that may be the proper way to structure things.

Software bugs cost people money, if we had to take out liability insurance for any and all losses as a result of software then our rates would be $1000 per hour or more. It would be totally impractical to produce software on an kind of market competitive schedule.

It is not liability insurance, it is fixing the non working coffee makers coming out of your factory. (as in not compensating the people killed by it, just fixing the one that fail at making coffee)

Really?

The warranty would be 9 times greater than the product itself???

This is one hell of a shitty product, if it costs 9x more to repair all defects than to produce it in the first place.

[clayop]

I don't have contempt nor do I feel entitled.  CNX coming back to the bts coffers for a quarter of a million dollars needs to be highly scrutinized.   Especially for things that we were told would be included in the initial release.  Why not just admit "we made a mistake, and didn't realize we were unable to do what we said we could.   We will be glad to fix it, but we need more funding".  Instead it's passed over like you are doing BTS a favor. How do we know these projects that you talk about won't be over promised and under delivered again?  I'm just going off CNX's track record.  Just once I would like to see an example of something that was completed 100% and I would feel more confident.

Again my main question.  If BTS pays for these upgrades, will they be available to the the other chains like identabit and muse??

Did BM ask more funding to fix this problem? Please give me the source.

[Akado]

We traded bond markets for stealth transfers at the protocol level.

 

I share the same opinion as jay, it might not be your intention but you're making it sound like a favour and that you need to get paid for features we thought we would have. Apparently we thought it wrong or there was a clear lack of communication. I know you can't work for free, but all of this could be have been avoided if it was communicated pre 2.0 announcement.

I thought that we would have all of the tech you mention here https://bitshares.org/technology/ Otherwise, why even mention it? That way ethereum can announce they have millions of apps, etc when they haven't even start working on them.

All I'm saying is although I believe you didn't do anything with malicious intent and understand you need to be paid, there was a clear and serious lack of communication.

[karnal]

https://github.com/cryptonomex/graphene/issues/452

This worker proposal is under development but may be the single most important worker proposal in terms of near-term impact.

My "gut" tells me that crypto-diehards are looking for an easy to use ANONYMOUS currency and those of us that are freedom loving actually want and need this.  Our current lack of privacy is a turnoff to many in the crypto and banking world.

If we have the best of breed privacy then it will put us well ahead of the competition.  Hopefully helping pull us up to Dash.

This work is heavy on UI development and advanced Javascript so has a lot of unknowns.

YES YES YES


This is the right way. We NEED the privacy - otherwise BitShares becomes a tool of oppression and control (should it ever take off w/o privacy) rather than liberation. As I've always believed it HAS the potential to be.

You touched on this on your "Why are we Here" post recently. While I don't reply in that thread (traveling), let me say here that you delved into the very heart of the matters at hand. I totally share the same vision - many of here do.

May I also suggest that proxy support be implemented! For advanced users it's simple enough with firewall wizardry, but normal users don't have a chance. SOCKS5 proxying at least (-> tor). Do you agree?

[lil_jay890]

I don't have contempt nor do I feel entitled.  CNX coming back to the bts coffers for a quarter of a million dollars needs to be highly scrutinized.   Especially for things that we were told would be included in the initial release.  Why not just admit "we made a mistake, and didn't realize we were unable to do what we said we could.   We will be glad to fix it, but we need more funding".  Instead it's passed over like you are doing BTS a favor. How do we know these projects that you talk about won't be over promised and under delivered again?  I'm just going off CNX's track record.  Just once I would like to see an example of something that was completed 100% and I would feel more confident.

Again my main question.  If BTS pays for these upgrades, will they be available to the the other chains like identabit and muse??

[tonyk]

@lil_jay890 has some very harsh judgements that are both factually incorrect unfair in my opinion.

CNX didn't take any referral fee of 99.6%, Open Ledger did. It is in control of an account belonging to OL.

Your post implies we did it intentionally to "steal" some referral fees.

It is costing CNX more to fix a simple scaling bug in the wallet than was paid in referral fees, so we are either stupid thieves or it was an honest bug and personal sacrifice on our part to fix. Furthermore, CNX isn't taking any of those referral fees, but letting Open Ledger keep 100% of them.

The one thing that CNX did is over promise what we could deliver given our time and money. But considering we were paying for 100% of what we did deliver we have no liability to deliver anything on any particular schedule. We certainly don't have a commitment to continue funding development in any area we do not see as having a role in the future profitability of CNX.

Those who are investing in CNX have to pick and chose what to spend those investment dollars on. They will of course spend the money on the projects that have the highest payoff. The reality is that subsidizing development of features for BitShares has a very low payoff without a side business plan.

We created Graphene so we could license the blockchain technology to those who need high performance blockchains. We are continue to innovate in providing custom solutions and helping others adopt blockchain technology. BitShares got a free upgrade based upon our efforts, but we have no more commitment to support Graphene than any other open source software provider giving their work away for free. Tech support, bug fixes, and new features are on our schedule at our discretion.

As far as the prices we quote, it isn't greed it is practical reality. It is about free market prioritization and balancing supply / demand.

We aren't forcing anyone to pay us anything nor are we unilaterally voting these proposals for our own benefit. 

We traded bond markets for stealth transfers at the protocol level.

The attitude of entitlement, contempt, and blame is totally uncalled for.  Everyone is working their hardest to find a sustainable long term solution.

He did not say you made the bug on purpose and/or to steal the money*! [That is something you put in his mouth in order for him to sound like the bad guy]

All he said was [which you confirmed in the above]  that you, for whatever reasons,   consider it a great favour to fix your own bugs. While at the same time  asking [unwillingly and at loss according to you] to produce more piece of garbage...excuse me code, for which you have no desire to take even the simplest responsibility.



*The fact still remains, even though neither I nor him think it was a deliberate attempt, you and your partners OL ended up with 96% or whatever, but practically all of the fees (besides the BTS 20% cut)

[bytemaster]

No software company offers a warranty on a FREE product provided WITHOUT WARRANTY.

If you think BitShares should have a software support contract that covers a certain amount of bug fixes then that may be the proper way to structure things.

Software bugs cost people money, if we had to take out liability insurance for any and all losses as a result of software then our rates would be $1000 per hour or more. It would be totally impractical to produce software on an kind of market competitive schedule.

[bytemaster]

@lil_jay890 has some very harsh judgements that are both factually incorrect unfair in my opinion.

CNX didn't take any referral fee of 99.6%, Open Ledger did. It is in control of an account belonging to OL.

Your post implies we did it intentionally to "steal" some referral fees.

It is costing CNX more to fix a simple scaling bug in the wallet than was paid in referral fees, so we are either stupid thieves or it was an honest bug and personal sacrifice on our part to fix. Furthermore, CNX isn't taking any of those referral fees, but letting Open Ledger keep 100% of them.

The one thing that CNX did is over promise what we could deliver given our time and money. But considering we were paying for 100% of what we did deliver we have no liability to deliver anything on any particular schedule. We certainly don't have a commitment to continue funding development in any area we do not see as having a role in the future profitability of CNX.

Those who are investing in CNX have to pick and chose what to spend those investment dollars on. They will of course spend the money on the projects that have the highest payoff. The reality is that subsidizing development of features for BitShares has a very low payoff without a side business plan.

We created Graphene so we could license the blockchain technology to those who need high performance blockchains. We are continue to innovate in providing custom solutions and helping others adopt blockchain technology. BitShares got a free upgrade based upon our efforts, but we have no more commitment to support Graphene than any other open source software provider giving their work away for free. Tech support, bug fixes, and new features are on our schedule at our discretion.

As far as the prices we quote, it isn't greed it is practical reality. It is about free market prioritization and balancing supply / demand.

We aren't forcing anyone to pay us anything nor are we unilaterally voting these proposals for our own benefit. 

We traded bond markets for stealth transfers at the protocol level.

The attitude of entitlement, contempt, and blame is totally uncalled for.  Everyone is working their hardest to find a sustainable long term solution.

[tonyk]

Additionally, when can we expect a worker proposal  "To remove the greatest invention in Margin Calling"?

Is it worth 30K or less?

I do not mind this particular square wheel in the BTS system. All it does is guarantee no liquidity for any and all bitAssets, but if it is as fine with you as I garter  and as long as one can transfer his losses stealthily....man no problem here.

[tonyk]

"We fix our own bugs for free!... Sometimes...and only as a favour" INC

.... is not a very good title

or behaviour.

[tonyk]

How do you feel about the bug that caused our "marketing blitzers" to lose almost all of their referral fees??  Maybe they would unleash a blitz and let the "wizards" code if they actually had a functioning referral system from said "wizards".

You can't keep finishing things 80% of the way.  This pie in the sky stuff needs to be put on hold until the exchange and referral system works.  It needs to be put on hold until an actual usable platform is available.  You could have all the bells and whistles in the world, but it wouldn't mean a thing if the underlying exchange sucks.

What is 80% of cutting edge?  That's like the sharpness of a baseball bat...

I was not aware there was an issue with the referral system. Link?

As far as the market.. I've made several trades with no issues, and they are working on the GUI already. It has been updated at least once and the new market view is a step in the right direction.

Let Bytemaster do his thing. The second he leaves the project Bitshares is screwed (that is until the community grows to a certain size.) We should keep him happy and support proposals he thinks are important, as he is usually right and has steered us in the right direction thus far.

I'm referring to this thread...

https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,19961.0.html

CNX took 99.6% of the referral fee... they said it was a bug, told us that it's not their responsibility to fix it but they are going to be nice and fix it for "free".

1. I believe it is their responsibility to fix the bug.  Every real company offers at least a 30 day warranty of manufacturing defects.  This is no different.
2. Too many people here treat BM as some sort of God.  News flash, he isn't.  I'm sure he is a good coder, but I'm not in a position to judge that.  All I know is that bitshares graphene is maybe 60-70% of what was promised an hyped in June.  Now CNX is trying to create worker proposal to charge for different projects.  One project is the bond market.  This was included in the announcement in June... now he is saying it is going into a worker proposal and it's going to cost $100k!!!  This on top of his other proposal to fix the API and trading fee stuff which is another $50k... and it could be argued the fee and API should have been corrected before bts 2.0 launched.  So I guess what's the big deal if we spend another $45k on some privacy thing??...  Oh, and it was brought up in the mumble today that we should pay for his travel to go to conferences and promote bts.  Second news flash... they have been going to conferences for the last 2 years and look at how much that has helped the price.   No big deal lets just burn $250k.

People here say "yeah lets do it" because they feel we have unlimited funding.  We don't.  We already cut our fees and the transactions have not picked up... take a look at our reserve fund, it's not going in the right direction.

And I still have not seen a response to whether or not these worker proposals will be distributed to muse, identabit and any other chain... all on BTS's dime.

I was just waiting in the weeds for you to to write it better than I could ever do!

[well, not being me stating the truth helps a lot as well]

but as in the previous case...100% correct in addressing all the important issues.

+ 100


PS
I want to include some posts from the "BM is our only hope" kind of guys...but way too many of them. so I will assume everyone is aware, if not participating in this ..way of. ...thinking.

[lil_jay890]

How do you feel about the bug that caused our "marketing blitzers" to lose almost all of their referral fees??  Maybe they would unleash a blitz and let the "wizards" code if they actually had a functioning referral system from said "wizards".

You can't keep finishing things 80% of the way.  This pie in the sky stuff needs to be put on hold until the exchange and referral system works.  It needs to be put on hold until an actual usable platform is available.  You could have all the bells and whistles in the world, but it wouldn't mean a thing if the underlying exchange sucks.

What is 80% of cutting edge?  That's like the sharpness of a baseball bat...

I was not aware there was an issue with the referral system. Link?

As far as the market.. I've made several trades with no issues, and they are working on the GUI already. It has been updated at least once and the new market view is a step in the right direction.

Let Bytemaster do his thing. The second he leaves the project Bitshares is screwed (that is until the community grows to a certain size.) We should keep him happy and support proposals he thinks are important, as he is usually right and has steered us in the right direction thus far.

I'm referring to this thread...

https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,19961.0.html

CNX took 99.6% of the referral fee... they said it was a bug, told us that it's not their responsibility to fix it but they are going to be nice and fix it for "free".

1. I believe it is their responsibility to fix the bug.  Every real company offers at least a 30 day warranty of manufacturing defects.  This is no different.
2. Too many people here treat BM as some sort of God.  News flash, he isn't.  I'm sure he is a good coder, but I'm not in a position to judge that.  All I know is that bitshares graphene is maybe 60-70% of what was promised an hyped in June.  Now CNX is trying to create worker proposal to charge for different projects.  One project is the bond market.  This was included in the announcement in June... now he is saying it is going into a worker proposal and it's going to cost $100k!!!  This on top of his other proposal to fix the API and trading fee stuff which is another $50k... and it could be argued the fee and API should have been corrected before bts 2.0 launched.  So I guess what's the big deal if we spend another $45k on some privacy thing??...  Oh, and it was brought up in the mumble today that we should pay for his travel to go to conferences and promote bts.  Second news flash... they have been going to conferences for the last 2 years and look at how much that has helped the price.   No big deal lets just burn $250k.

People here say "yeah lets do it" because they feel we have unlimited funding.  We don't.  We already cut our fees and the transactions have not picked up... take a look at our reserve fund, it's not going in the right direction.

And I still have not seen a response to whether or not these worker proposals will be distributed to muse, identabit and any other chain... all on BTS's dime.

[TravelsAsia]

I already mentioned I liked the idea of stealth transfers, however, I rather see it a Q1 2016 item. I'd like to see the focus on the items we had on the current roadmap: exchange, apis, referrals.

I remember reading somebody mentioning that this approach isn't as secure as Monero's rings. I'd like to hear from a developer on their thoughts.

[Empirical1.2]

How do you feel about the bug that caused our "marketing blitzers" to lose almost all of their referral fees??  Maybe they would unleash a blitz and let the "wizards" code if they actually had a functioning referral system from said "wizards".

You can't keep finishing things 80% of the way.  This pie in the sky stuff needs to be put on hold until the exchange and referral system works.  It needs to be put on hold until an actual usable platform is available.  You could have all the bells and whistles in the world, but it wouldn't mean a thing if the underlying exchange sucks.

What is 80% of cutting edge?  That's like the sharpness of a baseball bat...

I was not aware there was an issue with the referral system. Link?

The debate is that Western referrers are building business models around the new BTS transfer fee of circa $0.15 - $0.2. In their professional opinion it's unlikely the referral programme will be effective at a much lower amount.

However some (like myself) believe $0.2 is too high for a user to user transfer fee compared against crypto & centralized competitors.
It's particularly a problem in our largest market China,  also disrupts some existing business models that need a more competitive fee and new ones like the tipping bot.

I think this is the latest thread covering the subject. The committee put forward an attempted compromise but which wasn't much of an improvement for either side. https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,20073.0.html

I know why you are stubborn in your opinions. The same reason I am  ....way too often they are correct. But please make an effort and see that the tipbot does not need lower fees. The opposite - the somewhat high fees make him a major (only for now) player in the micro payments in the BTS ecosystem.

Not wanting to derail this important thread on the stealth workers proposal, I responded here https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,20132.msg259108.html#msg259108