Tony, you certaintly have a way with words. Thank you for this poll, it is missing just one option: "CmdrTaco hasn't adopted BTS yet".
Getting to 80% is my strength, finishing the last 20% is my weakness and has long been the case even before BitShares. BitShares is the single project I have stuck with the longest in my life and which has actually reached a usable product in the hands of thousands of users.
Everyone wants us to focus on "ONE THING" and I largely agree with that. It had better be the right "ONE THING" though or we are dead.
My personality type is INTJ (http://www.16personalities.com/intj-personality) and I am constantly challening my beliefs and understanding to make things better. I have a very hard time working toward a sub-optimal solution and what is optimal is constantly changing as knowledge increases. I am smart enough to recognize the value of focusing on one thing as well as the futility of pursuing something to completion that will be outdated by the time it gets there.
I would say that to put my skills to their best use, I should solve problems, prove the concept, and hand it off to people that are good at taking it all the way.
Anyway, BitShares is a lifelong project that will evolve in the direction this community takes it. It must become bigger than CNX and bigger than me.
That is why we are moving toward open sourcing everything. Once we open source it, we can continue to improve / develop it together. I have long term plans for it, but obviously need to blend it with short terms needs.
At the end of the day, complaining about others is the least effective means of change. Either do something to help, shut up, or leave. CNX will do everything we can to avoid being the bottleneck to progress and give the community room to do what is necessary.
Okay am going to step in and speak. Am usually a lurker and its largely Kuro that has been doing the talks in this community (and I thank him for that).
What am about to say is in view of someone that stepped into freebieservers when it was small, made maybe a few wrong decisions in terms of fund raising and stuck with it for around 19 months now. Before this, I was previous involved in a start-up that did raise sufficient venture capital to capture major market share (again within crypto) - but am not going to speak much about it.
Firstly, and foremost, from my experience at freebieservers : any business has one function at the end of the day, to make money.
The rules of the game are pretty simple : You enter the arena, show what you have, raise if needed, then begin making money.
Loans, equity shares, debentures, side hustles, take what it may need, you simply don't run out of money.
Between my experience at FS and the previous start-up, there was one simple difference.
FS made me cash, the other didn't. And there was a simple reason behind this.
We gave fuck about our customers.
If I were to analyze my chats with kuro112- it'd probably be a 20 percent cut into personal affairs, 30 percent on future products, and 50 percent on why we should build the things we do. As a biz dev, I come up with fucked up ideas from all over the god damn place, but unless it makes sense to the end consumer, in most cases we don't ship it. This is evident in how we market ourselves. Except for one case where I accidentally spent a bit on FB marketing , at no point have we spent on cash as such. Since am usually on the forefront of marketing I know what this actually means : users. We went from obscure to "something" - because we had a produc that solved a problem really well and did it right. I recall months of planning where we put our servers, how we administer them and why we should source them from the places we do to ensure the end users get the best experience. You might be wondering..why am stating this.
You see the line about BM being that smart kid that couldn't focus in school yet was the smartest kid ?
I've been that kid. I've failed a year in school being exactly that kid. When I read that line, all I could do and see what I have done right and wrong with our businesses in the past year and it all boils down to one thing : we (try to) serve our customers with a simple solution and do it absolutely well.
We have a large number of projects still pending, and we have a long list of tings we want to do, but we take them on one step at a time and sure we fail, sure we have days we starve if I don't close enough sales deals and then there are times the servers are about to go down and kuro has to ring up our partners and beg for time.. but that's what the hutle is about. Its about enduring and evolving .
We are at the forefront of a financial revolution. As hard as it may be for us to comprehend at the moment, we are changing the world in one tiny fashion at the time. From what I have noticed, the size of the problems we are solving is way too big and the number of talented individuals that can actually take the financial and intellectual risks and change things are way too low. BM keeps being all over the place because as an individual he is bound to engage in activities that creates profits for himself and the ones that are engaged with him. I mean, look at Satoshi. One could say he was "experimenting' , but doesn't he hold 350 million dollars worth of Bitcoin as of today ? (open to debate). My point being, its natural that we tend to look out for ourselves and the licensing, VC front and setting up of CNX are all a step in that direction.
So how do we evolve ? well, look at big brother Bitcoin. How did Bitcoin evolve?
The way I see it, they grew to what they are by creating user cases. Be it silk road or gyft, Bitcoin had and continues to evolve in terms of usability. Now look at Bitshares. Do we have that here ? Dont throw Muse and Play at my face because I don't see what they are doing. Actually, I reached out to play and asked for a collaboration for weeks and saw nothing. There's FMV and I know they are upto stuff as I've been following them. My point being, unless we create usability, noone's going to give a fuck and this usability doesn't have to come from banks or financial services. They can be gamers, social media sites, your grandma, anyone. What BM is doing is the right thing with open sourcing the platform and stepping aside. He's laid the foundation for what we should evolve into and am sure there are problems that each one of us tackle. For me, its financial inclusion and remittance (on the long run) and gaming. For someone else it could be identity and smart contracts. Its upto us to grow this thing.
Communities like ours are a case study on global collaboration on solving a problem. We are bound to fail. We are bound to make mistakes, but it is things like these that lead us to the future.
If we want this to succeed we need to empower entrepreneurs and builders to do what they do, either with a great product of with funding. Support could also be in terms of product tests - like what you've been doing with us on the sharebot and as this slowly evolves and attracts moer eyes...we'll finally see that shore of scale and prfitability.