Whale Powered Assets

[Chris4210]

Extra credit questions for the serious student: 

1.   What is the best way to set up a UIA currency backed by a large, sustainable stream of whale earnings? 

2.   What is the stabilizing formula for computing the buy/sell wall for an appreciating McBuck on the BitShares DEX referenced to a decaying basket of fiat currencies and/or commodities, any of which could drop off large cliffs in purchasing power at random times during the next few years?

• a.   Peg McBuck price to the USD adjusted for the official rate of inflation that the US government admits to or , whichever is greater.  (So the price of the McBuck in dollars always grows by at least 5% annually.)
• b.   Same as a, except peg daily to the currency/commodity in the basket that has gained the most against the others from the beginning to the present.    If the leading fiat collapses, the next best takes over.  Gold automatically takes over when not being manipulated.

3.   How would one use such a whale stream to make one of the current top crypto currencies the unassailable new global reserve currency?

4.   Which leading blockchain would work best for such a strategy?  Why?

1. Maybe Helicopter money is too crazy for this one, but I got this lead from a former banker: http://www.fvs-ri.com/files/better_monetary_system.pdf
One of the leading European financial think tanks analyst Thomas Mayer wrote in his ECONOMIC POLICY NOTE 16/3/2016 an essay about: "From Zirp, Nirp, QE, and helicopter money to a better monetary system" . It is a good short read. The EZB is already discussing this method.

Alternative I thought about using monthly/yearly dividends from a conglomerate to back the UIA. UIA users can exchange their UIA against Fiat again. Alternative use the UIA like a voucher, set up deals with the industry so that regular consumers can get +20% discounts if they buy the product with the UIA. The Industry can exchange the received UIA into Fiat again, or pay the UIA as a bonus to their employees.

2. No answer.

3. See CLains plan below

A benevolent whale could buy up BTS and provide liquidity for market makers. That in itself would be immensely profitable for both the whale and BitShares as a whole. Secondarily they could hire someone who knows about interaction-design/marketing/market-analysis to figure out how we can best create our interface, if we should have one or several interfaces to BitShares, how they should be branded and feel, and how the introduction-process to BitShares can best be accomplished. In addition to this they could hire someone to begin creating a Global Gateway Alliance or something like that to provide resources like documentation and help to entrepreneurs to set up their own (profitable) wallets and gateways in their own jurisdictions for local currencies, precious metals, to interact seamlessly with the global exchange. Finally they could help fund  the current developers full time and make sure that they stay voted in to provide code fixes and upgrades, general infrastructure, documentation and support for new developers, as well as new features (bond market, etc.).

Spending even just a few million dollars on this in 2016 I think could easily send BitShares to 100 million marketcap and beyond. An investor buying up $500k worth of BitShares would probably make his money back with a return already by 2017, not even mentioning the earnings from market-making, referrals and gateway transactions fees. They would then also have a foothold within every aspect of the BitShares network that can provide an endless stream of new opportunities if this is a success. BitShares is already in line to get network effect and a small push like that would make it almost certain to dominate the decentralized exchange sector. I think people still do not realize how big a deal this is; a global, decentralized, frictionless tranding network that cannot be taken down is absolutely insane, and we actually have the speed/volume capacity and scalability to pull it off beginning right now. The best part is, nobody knows yet, nobody knows what BitShares is capable of, there's endless talk about blockchains and bitcoin scalability and ethereum apps, but this chain is live right now, everything ready to impact the lives of a billion people.

I think CLains is on the right path to success...
1. Get a hold on a substantial amount of BTS (ask some old whales to buy bulk)
2. Slowly build up liquidity in the DEX with MPA
3. Hire an expert marking team to create a subset of Exchange/Gateway interfaces for each continent, matching the local UI/X taste and trend
4. Fund expert developing companies to build the important key elements of a new global infrastructure (gateway, wallet, cards, exchanges, customer support, marketing, atm etc.) 
4. Build a Gateway network with Banks, Retailers, and Food-Chains so that everybody can interact with the system seamless
5. Share drop the UIA at the beginning, Users can claim the UIA and consume or sell the UIA at the Network. (It could be branded as a "Universal Income" for everyone, or users gain extra discounts if they spend the UIA at the stores, merchant can claim back again fiat)
6. The UIA could be used as a new retirement money, share dropped and paid out to all involved industries and connected companies (final goal, earn part of your extra salary in UIA)
7. Create a money circle where the UIA flows between consumers and companies

That is still a long way for us

4. Only a Blockchain system that can adapt to current world affairs, with a sustainable governance system. A platform that can scale to future requirements. Why not BitShares?

I always wonder why some of the big whales (Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, etc.) burn billions in unnecessary initiatives and somehow always skip the obvious investment opportunities to make this world a better place. We have such a great pool of awesome technologies (New energy sources, Bio engineering, Nano technology,  and so on) but we are holding back our full potential for some unknown reason. It is so disappointing, right?

[Stan]

@Stan I'd love to see this one reposted on Steemit...

Heh, heh,  OK.  Thanks for the suggestion!

[kenCode]

Whale Powered Assets

Governments and wealthy institutions (sovereign whales) traditionally supply our currencies because they can decree them by fiat.  We all know why we don’t like that, but such coins generally work well enough for economies to function – until they don’t.

Crypto currencies are intended to fix what we don’t like about whale issued coins, but they have their own problems, such as instability and reluctant mass adoption. 

So most of us settle for a mix of the two to meet our needs for a Store of Value (SoV), a Unit of Account (UoA) and Medium of Exchange (MoE).  BitShares is a versatile, low-friction economic platform where such mixing can take place efficiently.

But it can also be thought of as a “currency factory” that offers a way to create a variety of useful hybrid coins that breed desirable features from multiple currency strains.  Some are trustless.  Some engineer blockchain-assisted trust.  Some represent real assets mapped onto the blockchain by trust alone. Others are stable with respect to external assets that may or may not be stable themselves.  Some are deterministically self-contained mathematical constructs.  Others extract order from the unpredictable external consensus of generally clueless people.  Our industry is generating a Cambrian Explosion of new coin species.  Some will emerge as the fittest.

So what are we missing?  Are there other strains of monetary DNA that could be added to the mix that would serve as versatile building blocks for the perfect hybrid currency?   

Well, what about sovereign whale power?  There are plenty of whales out there itching to use their power (benevolently, of course) to create better currencies.  I’ve talked with some of them.  Is it possible to use crypto-integrity to harness and safely direct sovereign whale power?   If I were a friendly sovereign whale with relatively unlimited resources, could I find a way to infuse that power safely into the BitShares factory to produce the ideal cryptocurrency – without destroying its essential self-governing robotic integrity? 

Strange bedfellows spawn the “perfect” currency?

In December 2014, Dan “Bytemaster” Larimer posted a two-part article (with cameo appearances by Vitalik Buterin) explaining how to do the “impossible” task of creating a stable decentralized crypto-currency.

Stable Crypto Currencies are Impossible.
How to Create a Stable Decentralized Crypto Currency

There, he opined “The real goal is the global acceptance of a fixed supply, predictably appreciating currency. The challenge is how do we get from where we are today to global acceptance when the value of our crypto-currency is highly volatile.”   

That’s where I think whale power might come in.

In Bytemaster’s opinion, if BitShares were to somehow become big enough and accepted enough it would be both (a) the ideal predictably appreciating asset to use as a currency itself and (b) the ideal reliably appreciating base asset needed for generating currencies pegged to everything else. 

Whales specialize in making things big, accepted and appreciating.

“Unlike the other pegging systems,” says Bytemaster, “BitAssets have a positive return proportional to the expected growth in the value of BTS relative to the value of the pegged asset. In time BTS will become the reserve currency and will ultimately become the fixed supply, counter-party-free, highly predictable, constantly growing ideal money.”

So, all we need to do is to harness up a whale to provide these three missing ingredients:

1.   Acceptance.  A whale can provide marketing power and branded clout to generate consumer awareness, trust and demand.
2.   Liquidity.   A whale can provide market-making functions that drive liquidity of the base asset and the BitAssets built on it.
3.   Growth.  A whale can generate the buying pressure, shrinking supply, and momentum necessary to cause “predictable appreciation” of the base asset.

What is especially intriguing is that it might be possible to get a whale to do this without giving it any power at all to corrupt the resulting suite of currencies.  A robotically honest, whale-powered cryptocoin factory?  Surely you jest!

No.  And don’t call me Shirley.

First, let’s assume that our friendly whale is big enough to generate a revenue stream sufficient to power our factory. Suppose it comes from the earnings of a whale-owned asset that the whale is willing to provide because of the economic or social benefits she expects to derive from the mere existence of such a currency.  Nothing outrageous, mind you, just a billion dollars per year – the amount McDonald’s pays for its hamburger input stream.  If you are Apple or Exxon, or can buy Apple and Exxon, you could siphon off just a few percent of your profits to power BitShares.  That’s all you would need to create the ideal world reserve currency(!).    That’s a tiny fraction of what it would cost you to back a currency directly with gold, oil or cannabis.  Perhaps we could simply reallocate 1% of the improper payments made in subsidizing the US healthcare system. 

I’ll leave the details of how to harness whale power as an exercise for the student.  Like plutonium, let’s focus on all the cool things we could do with it if we had some.

The Brute Force Counterparty Method.

If I lacked all imagination, I would simply tell our whale to issue a User Issued Asset called the, um, “McBuck”, and use her whale power to pay interest.  That would immediately set it apart from all other currencies in an era of negative interest rates.

A billion dollar stream would back a 20 billion dollar currency at 5%.  That’s an interest-paying digital currency three times bigger than Bitcoin and 100% liquid.  Sure there’s counterparty risk, but that mythical whale is spending a billion dollars a year promoting a public chain she doesn’t control just to earn the world’s trust – and she owns Apple and Exxon!  How risky can that seem to the consumers we are courting? How does that even compare, in the public’s mind, to the risk associated with the three self-appointed mining companies that control Bitcoin?   

If you are worried about referencing the McBuck to a decaying fiat currency, why not use a whole basket of currencies and reference the McBuck to the best of the bunch on any given day – plus 5% APR scheduled appreciation.   Since the best fiat in the basket is just losing ground at the slowest rate, it will actually cost less than 5% to redeem a McBuck in constant terms.  To be successful we don’t have to outrun the coming fiat collapse.  We just have to outrun the competition.

The Elegant Counterparty-Free Method.

But can we use whale power with no counterparty risk at all?  Sure.  Here, we simply use whale power to accelerate how quickly BitShares itself gains the remaining things it needs to become the ideal currency – acceptance, liquidity, and growth.  The question becomes how best to use an annual power stream of $1B to make this happen.  Here are some things that a whale could do with her power stream, although it is not clear what the optimal mix might be:

1.   Pay for marketing and education about BitShares and its Smart Coins.
2.   Fund BTS workers allowing dilution to remain zero while improving ecosystem.
3.   Offer free samples to get new members to sign up.
4.   Buy up to $1B worth of BitShares per year and lock or burn them.
5.   Pay lifetime membership fees for every user (moving 20% out of circulation).
6.   Fund an interest-paying asset like the above McBuck to attract more users.
7.   Fund market-making activities to give BitShares the best depth and liquidity.

Note that the only involvement of the whale is in boosting acceptance, liquidity, and growth.  The whale has zero control over the currency or the platform that operates it.  All it does is build kinetic and potential energy.  If the whale power stream ever ends, BitShares continues to safely glide forward until we can hook up another whale.  At scale, BitShares should be stable enough to ignore any such transients and will no longer need whale power.  We are only relying on the whale to tow our glider to a self-sustaining altitude.

A big enough whale might choose to do all of the above and give consumers and businesses a rich choice of options.  So, assuming, hypothetically, for the sake of motivated discussion, that our business development team could find such a whale, what should they be telling her right now?

@Stan I'd love to see this one reposted on Steemit...

[Empirical1.2]

Proposals are based in part on what resources are available to work on them.
Resources are hired based on the availability of stable funding.
A constant battle over who controls the funding light switch means no one dares hire against any line item.
So the resources remain allocated elsewhere.

Voting is overrated.  I wouldn't want to ride on an aircraft controlled by voting passengers.
Give me a benevolent whale any day.

'The DAO' seems to be doing very well in its fund-raising so far, so it seems the market has faith in something similar to the BTS voting model. I guess the real test will be to see how they do in practice.

http://coinjournal.net/dao-decentralized-fund-management-crowdsale/

The DAO Raises Over US$13 Million During First Three Days of Crowdsale

Similarly, in The DAO, there is no director and no board. Voting power is granted to holders of The DOA tokens who can vote to approve or decline proposals submitted. Voting rights are proportional to the amount of tokens held. The proposals submitted to The DAO by contractors, define how much or how little control over its operational responsibilities The DAO “outsources” to the contractors.

The DAO said it is looking for projects that provide a return on investment or benefit to the organization and its members, and which benefit the decentralized ecosystem as a whole.

The organization earns revenue generated by the products and services it helps fund. Profits are then distributed to participants based on transparent rules that are decided by the participants beforehand.

[Ben Mason]

Yes thank you for pointing that out. I've been very well supported by SVK and puppies. Puppies is in the middle of helping me vest the Steem I have.  The way I see it is if Steem as an experiment works then I will be able to keep afloat and trying to help BitShares.  I believe BitShares is the community and network that will unlock the future and Steem is a means to that end. But then I still have a lot of trust in BM. Also, I think there is a possibility that the BitShares dex can eventually be the platform/medium within which other networks assets can be exchanged (so Steem and other networks with different angles) and succeed together. I may be naive but there has been a lot of delicious looking fruit coming from this community for a long time! 

[Empirical1.2]

What makes it harder is the gap in my technical knowledge and my distance from the best information.  For instance, how do I evaluate the relative value of Bitshares as it stands and new initiatives (born out of necessity or frustration or innovation) like steem?  I feel i have to take a position in steem because many key community members have and it seems prudent.   Ultimately,  I have only ever been interested in one thing and you know what that is already.  I would hand over all my stake now if it would guarantee the success of the vision......

Yeah this is why I prefer we don't promote it on BTS because it's leaching BTS investment $. (Personally I don't have any.)

Also be careful, I assume if you have limited technical knowledge you're probably not vesting, because they haven't provided a windows wallet yet to my knowledge, so in addition to everything else, the value of your Steem is likely declining in BTC terms as the value gets transferred from you to the majority owners. 

[bitimaru]

A benevolent whale could buy up BTS and provide liquidity for market makers. That in itself would be immensely profitable for both the whale and BitShares as a whole. Secondarily they could hire someone who knows about interaction-design/marketing/market-analysis to figure out how we can best create our interface, if we should have one or several interfaces to BitShares, how they should be branded and feel, and how the introduction-process to BitShares can best be accomplished. In addition to this they could hire someone to begin creating a Global Gateway Alliance or something like that to provide resources like documentation and help to entrepreneurs to set up their own (profitable) wallets and gateways in their own jurisdictions for local currencies, precious metals, to interact seamlessly with the global exchange. Finally they could help fund  the current developers full time and make sure that they stay voted in to provide code fixes and upgrades, general infrastructure, documentation and support for new developers, as well as new features (bond market, etc.).

Spending even just a few million dollars on this in 2016 I think could easily send BitShares to 100 million marketcap and beyond. An investor buying up $500k worth of BitShares would probably make his money back with a return already by 2017, not even mentioning the earnings from market-making, referrals and gateway transactions fees. They would then also have a foothold within every aspect of the BitShares network that can provide an endless stream of new opportunities if this is a success. BitShares is already in line to get network effect and a small push like that would make it almost certain to dominate the decentralized exchange sector. I think people still do not realize how big a deal this is; a global, decentralized, frictionless tranding network that cannot be taken down is absolutely insane, and we actually have the speed/volume capacity and scalability to pull it off beginning right now. The best part is, nobody knows yet, nobody knows what BitShares is capable of, there's endless talk about blockchains and bitcoin scalability and ethereum apps, but this chain is live right now, everything ready to impact the lives of a billion people.

I can't believe most traders still dont know what bitshares/openledger is after MT.GOX and Cryptsy mess-up.  I think this is a sharp argument for anyone to start trading in a safe decentralized trading network.
Volume is inexistant tho, so many trader that already know about BTS/openlegder won't trade here. Ronny is doing an awesome job promoting BTS/Openledger and I think making 'new ICOs trading' the War-Horse is really really smart. Volume could go from zero to NINETHOUSAND with the correct exposure!! Also, Ronny just mentioned he had succeed in bringing 'BIG eth players' on openledger looking forward for the Digix release... If this is not awesome news for BTS adoptions... Oh and this news is supposed to hit Forbes really soon.

[CLains]

A benevolent whale could buy up BTS and provide liquidity for market makers. That in itself would be immensely profitable for both the whale and BitShares as a whole. Secondarily they could hire someone who knows about interaction-design/marketing/market-analysis to figure out how we can best create our interface, if we should have one or several interfaces to BitShares, how they should be branded and feel, and how the introduction-process to BitShares can best be accomplished. In addition to this they could hire someone to begin creating a Global Gateway Alliance or something like that to provide resources like documentation and help to entrepreneurs to set up their own (profitable) wallets and gateways in their own jurisdictions for local currencies, precious metals, to interact seamlessly with the global exchange. Finally they could help fund  the current developers full time and make sure that they stay voted in to provide code fixes and upgrades, general infrastructure, documentation and support for new developers, as well as new features (bond market, etc.).

Spending even just a few million dollars on this in 2016 I think could easily send BitShares to 100 million marketcap and beyond. An investor buying up $500k worth of BitShares would probably make his money back with a return already by 2017, not even mentioning the earnings from market-making, referrals and gateway transactions fees. They would then also have a foothold within every aspect of the BitShares network that can provide an endless stream of new opportunities if this is a success. BitShares is already in line to get network effect and a small push like that would make it almost certain to dominate the decentralized exchange sector. I think people still do not realize how big a deal this is; a global, decentralized, frictionless tranding network that cannot be taken down is absolutely insane, and we actually have the speed/volume capacity and scalability to pull it off beginning right now. The best part is, nobody knows yet, nobody knows what BitShares is capable of, there's endless talk about blockchains and bitcoin scalability and ethereum apps, but this chain is live right now, everything ready to impact the lives of a billion people.

[Ben Mason]

Proposals are based in part on what resources are available to work on them.
Resources are hired based on the availability of stable funding.
A constant battle over who controls the funding light switch means no one dares hire against any line item.
So the resources remain allocated elsewhere.

Voting is overrated.  I wouldn't want to ride on an aircraft controlled by voting passengers.
Give me a benevolent whale any day.

While perhaps an isolated and overly suspicious view, posts like the above make me think a lot of Stan's recents threads like this one are actually veiled pitches for Steem which is already controlled by a 'benevolent whale' in form of Steemit. If so I think they should be moved to random discussion.

On the contrary...they should forever stay in the  General area as a remind of a great lessons learned in the past

This lesson in particular - on how the fighter for decentralization and freedoms for all, can turn the blockchain into a centralized solution where she holds virtually all of the stake ( and constantly tries to increase it by 9x ratio each and every time a new crumble of stake is thrown to the masses... small bait given in a hope to gain network effect and so even more money for her). This  Opost in particular being a brainstorming on "how to justify what is in our personal narrow interest, is the only and true way forward for everyone else"...

This lesson of course - when money and power are at stake, all other virtues tend to be twistable...

Crickey you guys just won't let up will you? How about using your big brains to contribute to the discussion without trying to twist it with some dark agenda?   Steemit does not qualify as a 'beneve-whale' and as such is clearly not the point of the discussion. If you don't like Steem, fine. We have BitShares. We have BitShares and its vision in part because of the virtue of those you are disparaging.

I appreciate your constantly uplifting, positive and unifying attitude Ben, you Clains & Fuzzy in particular imo are among other things, critical rocks of support for those who face often unfair criticism while doing the hard work of actually building BTS & I have faith that you are and will remain steadfast supporters of BTS and it's values.

While I apologise to anyone I unfairly criticise in my defence of BTS does the 'voting is overrated' post, sound BTS friendly in your opinion?

I'll be honest with you......i am finding it increasingly difficult to keep as much capital in Bitshares as i'd like because there are so many worthy projects to support and i am limited to the funds I have in crypto as it stands.  What makes it harder is the gap in my technical knowledge and my distance from the best information.  For instance, how do I evaluate the relative value of Bitshares as it stands and new initiatives (born out of necessity or frustration or innovation) like steem?  I feel i have to take a position in steem because many key community members have and it seems prudent.   Ultimately,  I have only ever been interested in one thing and you know what that is already.  I would hand over all my stake now if it would guarantee the success of the vision......

The Bitshares community has fractured to some degree around the issue of scarce resource use and the means of further developing the network.  Being part of a community that is not pulling in the same direction is greatly unsettling at times......however understandable.  So, huge mistakes were made in the history of Bitshares.......we have not made it easy for ourselves.  I believe all those mistakes were honestly made.  We only damage Bitshares if we continue to insist on chewing it all over.  We have some incredible technology built.  We have incredible partners working their asses off.  We need to re-galvanise Bitshares and the community and that's not easy at all.  But there is no other choice if we want to survive. 

I think Stan is frustrated that the powerful democratizing and flexible voting tools we have in Bitshares has not yielded the proactive, unified, driven developer paradise it could one day be.  Bitshares probably works better at scale......but how to get there.  For me, despite the economic challenge, sharedrops are the only way to remain connected with those that share a direction (technical, spiritual or philosophical) as we meander our way to mass adoption......this is snakes and ladders after all. 

A whale would make getting there a hell of a lot simpler.  We need to show ourselves and everyone else why our community is the one.  Clearly there is work to do but all the things we need are right here.

[Empirical1.2]

Proposals are based in part on what resources are available to work on them.
Resources are hired based on the availability of stable funding.
A constant battle over who controls the funding light switch means no one dares hire against any line item.
So the resources remain allocated elsewhere.

Voting is overrated.  I wouldn't want to ride on an aircraft controlled by voting passengers.
Give me a benevolent whale any day.

While perhaps an isolated and overly suspicious view, posts like the above make me think a lot of Stan's recents threads like this one are actually veiled pitches for Steem which is already controlled by a 'benevolent whale' in form of Steemit. If so I think they should be moved to random discussion.

On the contrary...they should forever stay in the  General area as a remind of a great lessons learned in the past

This lesson in particular - on how the fighter for decentralization and freedoms for all, can turn the blockchain into a centralized solution where she holds virtually all of the stake ( and constantly tries to increase it by 9x ratio each and every time a new crumble of stake is thrown to the masses... small bait given in a hope to gain network effect and so even more money for her). This  Opost in particular being a brainstorming on "how to justify what is in our personal narrow interest, is the only and true way forward for everyone else"...

This lesson of course - when money and power are at stake, all other virtues tend to be twistable...

Crickey you guys just won't let up will you? How about using your big brains to contribute to the discussion without trying to twist it with some dark agenda?   Steemit does not qualify as a 'beneve-whale' and as such is clearly not the point of the discussion. If you don't like Steem, fine. We have BitShares. We have BitShares and its vision in part because of the virtue of those you are disparaging.

I appreciate your constantly uplifting, positive and unifying attitude Ben, you Clains & Fuzzy in particular imo are among other things, critical rocks of support for those who face often unfair criticism while doing the hard work of actually building BTS & I have faith that you are and will remain steadfast supporters of BTS and it's values.

While I apologise to anyone I unfairly criticise in my defence of BTS does the 'voting is overrated' post, sound BTS friendly in your opinion?

[fuzzy]

比特股寻精之旅！
bitshares searching for sperm  of journey!

great!
good idea!
i like this!
just do it!
 

Are you the one who sent me a bunch of SPERM UIA?.. 

[Ben Mason]

Proposals are based in part on what resources are available to work on them.
Resources are hired based on the availability of stable funding.
A constant battle over who controls the funding light switch means no one dares hire against any line item.
So the resources remain allocated elsewhere.

Voting is overrated.  I wouldn't want to ride on an aircraft controlled by voting passengers.
Give me a benevolent whale any day.

While perhaps an isolated and overly suspicious view, posts like the above make me think a lot of Stan's recents threads like this one are actually veiled pitches for Steem which is already controlled by a 'benevolent whale' in form of Steemit. If so I think they should be moved to random discussion.

On the contrary...they should forever stay in the  General area as a remind of a great lessons learned in the past

This lesson in particular - on how the fighter for decentralization and freedoms for all, can turn the blockchain into a centralized solution where she holds virtually all of the stake ( and constantly tries to increase it by 9x ratio each and every time a new crumble of stake is thrown to the masses... small bait given in a hope to gain network effect and so even more money for her). This  Opost in particular being a brainstorming on "how to justify what is in our personal narrow interest, is the only and true way forward for everyone else"...

This lesson of course - when money and power are at stake, all other virtues tend to be twistable...

Crickey you guys just won't let up will you? How about using your big brains to contribute to the discussion without trying to twist it with some dark agenda?   Steemit does not qualify as a 'beneve-whale' and as such is clearly not the point of the discussion. If you don't like Steem, fine. We have BitShares. We have BitShares and its vision in part because of the virtue of those you are disparaging.

[tonyk]

Proposals are based in part on what resources are available to work on them.
Resources are hired based on the availability of stable funding.
A constant battle over who controls the funding light switch means no one dares hire against any line item.
So the resources remain allocated elsewhere.

Voting is overrated.  I wouldn't want to ride on an aircraft controlled by voting passengers.
Give me a benevolent whale any day.

While perhaps an isolated and overly suspicious view, posts like the above make me think a lot of Stan's recents threads like this one are actually veiled pitches for Steem which is already controlled by a 'benevolent whale' in form of Steemit. If so I think they should be moved to random discussion.

On the contrary...they should forever stay in the  General area as a remind of a great lessons learned in the past

This lesson in particular - on how the fighter for decentralization and freedoms for all, can turn the blockchain into a centralized solution where she holds virtually all of the stake ( and constantly tries to increase it by 9x ratio each and every time a new crumble of stake is thrown to the masses... small bait given in a hope to gain network effect and so even more money for her). This  Opost in particular being a brainstorming on "how to justify what is in our personal narrow interest, is the only and true way forward for everyone else"...

This lesson of course - when money and power are at stake, all other virtues tend to be twistable...

[unreadPostsSinceLastVisit]

Proposals are based in part on what resources are available to work on them.
Resources are hired based on the availability of stable funding.
A constant battle over who controls the funding light switch means no one dares hire against any line item.
So the resources remain allocated elsewhere.

Voting is overrated.  I wouldn't want to ride on an aircraft controlled by voting passengers.
Give me a benevolent whale any day.

While perhaps an isolated and overly suspicious view, posts like the above make me think a lot of Stan's recents threads like this one are actually veiled pitches for Steem which is already controlled by a 'benevolent whale' in form of Steemit. If so I think they should be moved to random discussion.

oooooooohhhhhhh I'd like to think I would have figured that out eventually.

[Empirical1.2]

Proposals are based in part on what resources are available to work on them.
Resources are hired based on the availability of stable funding.
A constant battle over who controls the funding light switch means no one dares hire against any line item.
So the resources remain allocated elsewhere.

Voting is overrated.  I wouldn't want to ride on an aircraft controlled by voting passengers.
Give me a benevolent whale any day.

While perhaps an isolated and overly suspicious view, posts like the above make me think a lot of Stan's recents threads like this one are actually veiled pitches for Steem which is already controlled by a 'benevolent whale' in form of Steemit. If so I think they should be moved to random discussion.