Author Topic: Cabinet Hosted Meeting #1 on BitShares-wide topics  (Read 2677 times)

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Offline Sapiens

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Thanks to everyone for the initiative.

Next time, a video recording, or at least a voice recording would help. So that we can listen the dialog while driving, cooking, etc.

S.


Offline Cryptick1

Permie,
Thanks for taking the lead on this. I feel it is going to take some serious rounds of meetings among the participants on the BitShares exchanges in order to pull us together. There is a wide range of issues we need to deal and we need to pull people together. Currently, BTS is a toxic environment and it is unlikely that it can succeed and effectively compete in this space without pulling people together on a common set of vision and goals. A round of talks is something that can help do that. I don't know what the outcome of it will all be; there is much discussion to be had, but without pulling people together and creating a better environment this project is unlikely to fulfill out visions of greatness.
Cryptick1

Offline BitsharesLabs

Excellent announcement Permie22. It would be great to have a global public calendar for all events pertaining BITSHARES. It's time for the entire global BITSHARES community to be involved.

优秀的宣布Permie22。 拥有与BITSHARES相关的所有事件的公共日历将非常高兴。 现在是整个全球BITSHARES社区参与的时候了。
We build apps on top of the Bitshares Blockchain

Offline Permie22

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Permie: Sounds good. Ammar when you talk about “we” are ioBanker a team or group that you’ve formed?

Ammar: ioBnaker is a company based in Estonia and we are trying to utilise the trends when it comes to technology and how its being managed. That's why we started in estonia, we are also a licensed exchange. When it comes to bitshares its totally personal to me. I consider myself an ioBanker and actually planning on being an entity with particular groups within this community. They are not just separate entities. When I refer to “we” i refer to the bitshares community who are trying to enhance this platform.

Permie: like you say Ammar it's complicated and there are many different proposed solutions.

Fractalnode: Bot use would be very good for BitShares if most of its users used bots.

Permie: So that brings us onto our next topic talking about DEX Liquidity. There are quite a few in the community seem to agree that as many bts users as possible who hold bts need to be putting it to work on the DEX, potentially with the help of bot software like DEXBot, RuDEX have another bot, and there are a few more. Bot software providing liquidity attracts new users who don't care about bts but just want somewhere to come and trade their assets. But having a many bts from many holders being traded with bot software makes the proposition to other outside users to come and use the DEX much more attractive due to the liquidity.

Fractalnode: DEXBot for everyone in wallet
I believe we could create self driving smart contracts for DEXBot strategies, and do not engage user resources like PC, Mac, VPS

We could also connect to Tradingview and use the opportunities offered by strategy programming and take advantage of network effects and get to know their community.

Permie: So a smart contract that does the trading and not using the users computer to do the trades?

Fractalnode: Yes, bitUSD is smart contract. imagine users, invest their funds for 1 year in bitUSD and bitCNY and leave the bot for a year
they will tell a lot about it to everyone

I'm not sure if it can be done
this is just an idea
the user must have considerable knowledge at the moment
or outsource it to someone

but the topic of Bot for everyone is tempting

Ammar: Bots can be designed as a plugin on the blockchain and be controlled by the UI. So we are actually having a lot of  discussions related to how this liquidity feature could work. When you are running it on the blockchain you would call it a bot, you would call it an automated mechanism to manage your assets. This would enhance the platform a lot as you would eliminate the efforts that would be coming from the developers and you would let every user on the platform use the feature and you would have more liquidity on the platform. It's something that can be  done, systematically, its still under  discussion.

Permie: Are we talking about something similar to Bancor? They call it something like a Relay Token where you have say a certain amount of bts and bitCNY. So the only thing I could see it working is if you send bitCNY or bts to this smart contract and have control over a pool of both say bitCNY and btc, and when outside users send bitcoin to this smart contract it sends out the amount of bitCNY according to the price as the time, minus a small % that is profit for the smart contract holder?

Ammar: I see this subject is actually related to the earlier discussion we were talking about. The liquidity pool and its separation. The development curve will one day end up where you can automate the bot approach into a smart contract and it will end up automated. Where users can go and park their funds and see the details in the UI for their funds putting to work for a set time without other inference. And that's how we see the future. It will be very similar to what banks are doing, actually.

Permie: So each user who wants to put their funds to work would create their own Smart Token with terms and the strategy they want to use written for themselves?

Ammar: Yes, and they can tie it to particular assets  or whatever investment approach that they think of. When you put your money in dollars in the bank its being used by the bank.

Permie: Yes, the bank investing the money and paying interest on the deposit. I don’t want to go too deep  into the technicals, but I want to ask is BitShares already capable of doing this? Or would there need to be new transfer functions developed so that a token or a smartcointract can make trades itself without an account? Does the contract take control of hte account held by the user? Because this token or smart contract has to be acting autonomously to a set of predefined rules to be fit for purpose.

Ammar: Definitely this can be done but there are issues.

Permie: And do you think this feature is required for the most liquidity to come to the DEX?

Ammar: Definitely the approach of segregating the liquidity pools creating multiple liquidity pools, reserve pools, would help this approach. There has to be a mechanism that actually segregates all these activities so the value of bts can be used for these activities. This is being designed with the mechanisms on the blockchain but nothing is finalised. We were discussing this approach for the past 4 months and nothing is yet finalised. It is really so complex. The price feeds are coming from external sources. Before anything we need to fix the price feed mechanism. We are approaching the HTLC technology to get a segregated price feed that is not reliant on a CEX. We need to stabilize our base before we move forward. Price feeds must be  moved away from CEX competitor control.

Permie: Thanks for your thoughts. We are coming up to 2hrs in this meeting, how long do you guys have left?

Fractalnode: Let’s do one last subject.

Permie: I think we’ve discussed nearly everything on the agenda. You both agree that bitshares is still in startup mode… Let’s talk about a rising bts price. Why does or should bts rise? Is it traders buying on Technical analysis? Is it increased user awareness? Is is investors seeing fee income?

Ammar: Well there are two main influences on bts value. One of them is hearing stories about bitshares and studying the documents about bts and then coming as investors. Buying bts from CEX’s and then they will be shocked that they don’t have that huge influence over bts governance and then they leave. Some investors are coming here with very huge capital in order to start influencing the development of the blockchain. And that is where I see the value coming from. I don't see any values coming out of bts’ investment. Whatever is happening now on blockchain is now just decentralized exchanges. People are investing within the platform and waiting for the returns. Definitely it will happen with the more use cases that are developed will push the value up but we should not depend on waiting for people to come. Some workers (proposals) are not producing revenue. I think in this next phase in future we should focus on WP revenues. Workers not bringing revenues should not be funded. But we should continue funding our operating expenses. Like node infrastructure, UI, Core development and DEXBot. In any investment, particularly in this early phase you would be cutting unnecessary costs to push the investment forward.

Permie: So you think there are two categories of worker proposals and things bts should be funding? Operating expenses of infrastructure and then everything else should be revenue producing for eventual long term profitability.
And you think anything that isn't one of those two shouldnt get funded.
Fractalnode do you have anything to add?

Fractalnode: 
from TA point of view,  BTS it’s on his lower lows,
the increase from the lowest levels is twice as high as the average altcoin’s market cap  (TOTAL2)


I'm not aware of any big investor

but there is also a fight for BTS and power
 
There is infighting in the community which is bad for the price.
 
Ammar: I just wanted to say we are aware that there are many pyramid schemes. A pyramid scheme is only beneficial for the creator. New buyers coming into the scheme looking for a return are being fooled in a pyramid scheme. Users who bring their investment into blockchain and feel their investment is wasted they will leave and not come back and spread a bad reputation about such a project. So i always consider that, bts should not act as a pyramid scheme. That's why i think the CEX’s that control the market with the on/off ramps and we need to consider the price stability in bitshares else the investors are all at risk, and if there’s no stability the developers will all leave and go to work on another blockchain. We need to avoid that.
 
Permie: When you talk about a pyramid scheme are you talking about an attitude of let’s try and get the price as high as quickly as possible for the short term so that we can sell out and abandon the project?
 
Ammar: Yes. If you would allow short term investors to come and gain the whole added-value of the network and escape with it that is a very identical to a pyramid scheme. We should make sure this is not happening. The management body of bts needs to be the biggest influencer that should be closing any loopholes that allows anyone to game the system. This should include looking after small and tiny investors before the biggest ones.



Permie: So thinking about the long term not the short term. If we build management tools and work on bts governance by talking more and having more management bodies that can ensure a clear vision and monitor what is happening on the chain and with development we can improve a lot of bitshares problems. The tool, the technology,meaning that bitshares is is the best in its class and that the problems that we see are solvable as they are not tech problems, but people problems. Any community that wants to launch a DEX are going to come into these people-centric problems and they will have problems as well. Like ammar saying in the early stages of projects like this there will always be dis-organisation and disagreements but we can improve it, and I think we are getting better. WE are in a good place to start improving things.

Ammar: Yes i agree with you. I would like to add that we are dealing here with human beings and human beings perform the same everywhere. Whenever you allow a human to misbehave without any limitations they will make a mess. I was talking today with @favdesu and i was telling him regulations are there to protect the consumer and that is the real role of governance. The software should be designed to meet the security measures outlined by an overarching bts governance/management body. That’s what we need to focus on in the coming phase. Stabilising bts and closing loopholes that allow bad actors to affect the image of the ecosystem.

Permie:  are you talking about designing the code to provide the regulations/rules that governments show that need to be fulfilled? Or do you mean that the code needs to be designed to comply with state regulations?

Ammar: No, what I mean here is that we need to protect our ecosystem and our market from bad influencers and that is what we are starting to do with studying how to improve the margin call system with regards to bad debt.

Permie: Do either of you have anything to add before we finish?

Ammar: Thank you so much for hosting this precious conference. A lot of things that we negotiated here are so important for us and so important for the masses to know. Hopefully the next phase for bts is much better than the last phase. I see a lot of negotiations going on behind the scenes between the east and west bts communities. The chinese community are coming forward and discussing how to improve bts value and begin communicating with the wider community and coming to justify why they voted for refund 400k which affects the development of the platform. I see this as a healthy approach. We always have to question our approach and our behavior, otherwise we will never move forward. We have to question the way in which we do the work. Thank you everybody, hopefully this won't be our last meeting!

Fractalnode: Thanks Permie and Ammar for a good meeting.

Permie: No no, I plan to do more of these hosted meetings! Thank you so much Ammar and Fractalnode for being the first two participants. I’m hoping to go through the same agenda with multiple different people and have them all written up so everyone can see all the different perspectives on the same subjects so we can work together to move forward. I think we will see similar themes were lots of people agree with “this bit” but not so many agreements on “that bit” so that when we come to write up a community-unified plan we know which bits definitely need to be included because everyone agrees, and which need more compromise.
Thank you very much, have a great day.

Offline Permie22

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Permie: So youre saying the crux of the issue between the East/WEst divide and the high threshold of Refund400k is that the management structure is… upside down almost? You
Re saying the developers are pushing forward the vision because there seems to be an absence of anyone else doing it. So it makes sense that the developers, who arguably know the most about the chain, are pushing the vision forward. So youre saying that now  is the time that the investors come forward and see that the vision comes from the investors and not from the developers. Rather than developers having a vision and requiring the investors to agree with it to move forward.

Fractalnode: There is a big learning curve for the codebase. We have had many developers who’ve been here for years and remember that the investors would not have invented HTLC.

Permie: That’s true but i think we can say that the investors could have organised to decide that they want to be able to trustlessly exchange. And the developers could have worked out the details on how to do that. And the developers should be highly highly praised for doing that. We should try and retain as many of them as possible but it’s not saying that they don’t know what they're doing or that they shouldn’t be involved. It’s saying that by developers putting forward the idea is that there's an immediate conflict with the investors. Some will agree with it some won’t. But if the vision comes top-down from the investors they will have had to organise and compromise  to come to that agreement. The conflict would be solved at the earliest stage possible.

Ammar: Let me add a point here when it comes to the investors and the developers and the current scenario on BitShares. Now you have the Bitshares Blockchain Foundation. The BBF is managed totally by developers and the developers are the ones who are supposed to phrase the media and talk about the blockchain. I totally agree with this. These are the best people to talk and speak generally about the blockchain. But again these developers, I believe, don't really have the time to do the managerial aspect of BitShares. They are not able to facilitate the communication between the bts community. They are having a lot of difficulty. I know a lot of the developers, i talk to them almost every day. I know the struggles that they go through and i know that the job of developer is a very time consuming thing. Developers never have time to go and make ties with ICO’s and sign contracts with people and follow up with external entities to enhance the whole thing that is BitShares. We should not involve them in this as this is out of their scope. Of their profession. They agree with that. The last things i have seen in the marketing telegram channel they are trying to come up with a board for the marketing and saying anyone who is interested to come and step up for the job because they do not have time. At the same time they cannot handle this. Because of the organisation that we see on the blockchain we don’t really have an idea how many human resources that are there willing to work with us. There are no profiling for people around this blockchain to share skills, except among the developers. Which is something, as I said earlier, is something normal for a startup, but we have to carry on and move forward in this organisation.

Fractal Node: The BitShares Blockchain foundation definitely shouldn't have to work alone. However the developers do see the coming trends in technology and they should be in close communication with the PR department, that does not yet exist.

Permie: Absolutely. The PR guys should not be expected to know every single detail of the inner workings of every technological feature and have to answer the technical questions of the blockchain. The PR guys should understand what a feature does and why a user should want to hear about it. And for the technical questions they need a link with the developers who can give them the proper answer. Like in normal companies the sales people are nowhere near as knowledgeable about the product than the guys who built it.

Ammar: I was saying as well when it comes to this marketing board I say we should not vote for marketing board, but vote for a marketing plan. Why don’t we see different marketing proposals that are managed by different people? And when they compete on cost the voters can vote on this plan or that plan. But to have a single board with a huge budget doing all the marketing, when we can’t see what all the funds will be spent on. Where is the plan?

Permie: So we’re discussing the marketing telegram channel. Stefan who works closely with the BBF posted an idea for a WP that would get funds from the RF and use it for a marketing board to allocate tasks for PR and marketing. Like a github structure for PR. But it doesn’t have an overall “this is what should be done” as a concrete plan. But rather have the funds ready and when someone comes along with a good idea for marketing the board to decide if it’s worth spending money on. And it sounds like that is something you’re not happy with Ammar. But, to me, the marketing board sounds just like what we were talking about 4 or 5 WPs for different departments and a sub-committee deciding what to spend it. Does it not?

Ammar: Yes it does sound like that. I just said that I am not against having a board, but I am saying that to not include the marketing campaigns within these management structures. I was proposing to have a particular PR management board will have its own operating expenses and elected. There will be competition, and it is a competition now, and this will put the management board into a particular scope which is not doing the work, but to have a particular control over communicating the work and how it is going to be done to the investors. Facilitating the communications and recording budgets and where it was spent and doing the auditing into the quality of the work. I think the management cannot be excluded from the work done and it must have a budget,

Permie: So what you think is missing from the marketing board is a vision at the top saying: “This is what the board will do”. Outlining their role more thoroughly. They are not doing the work, but they should encourage workers to come to them and present what they can do and interview them for the task. We need management bodies that have a single vision across all departments. I don’t think all the boards should be completely separate. They need to work together with a shared plan and vision. There can be the same people spread across different departments here and there, but there needs to be a clear plan.

Core vision committee at the top

Development
PR
Security

The current idea for the management board has no overall scope of defined vision. We know that we need this marketing board will be working to a particular scope.

Permie: So multiple departments, but with one superior board that contains members from each of the sub groups that demands that each committee reports to them and make sure it all fits with the core scope and vision of the BitShares community.

Ammar Yousef: I believe that the leadership committee would be about reporting and studying business use cases and making plans for how to target specific use cases. Working together with the investors to facilitate an agreement for a particular vision. Which is currently not happening. I believe in the current BBF, they were elected. But there are a lot of work done by people who are not in the BBF. And the BBF is currently expected to do things outside of the community scope. And that’s why I think we’ve seen de-votes on particular workers. 

Permie: Shall we move forward to a new point? I have to say I am very pleased with the depth of conversation here.
Okay let’s discuss voter apathy - most bts stake does not vote. Do you have any opinions or ideas on how we could combat that or is it just waiting for the network to mature? Do you think there could be more people voting with their bts?

Fractalnode: I don't see voter apathy as a problem. Uninformed voters don't need to participate and uninformed voters are susceptible to manipulation. You can’t make democratic decisions for everything, like to build the Large Hadron Collider or to build a battleship. If dont understand the topic they shouldn't vote or they are open to manipulation - as we see in some countries the candidate with the most money for campaigning wins the election. Every voter has their own agenda and differing opinions and this is ok.

Permie: Fair points fractal. Ammar would you agree with that?
Ammar Yousef: I agree with fractal but i would like to talk about it a little more deeply. When it comes to the voting currently we are tying votes with the amount of bts. I see this is healthy for the software simply because you are allowing people to buy bts for voting. This gives the network value, from the investors. The dynamic structure of the governing body, the vote system, is so healthy. A real investor can put his value on the network and impose his vision. Which is also healthy in a capitalist style of development. Now definitely within this system we will be having issues. If the voters are uneducated there would be a big mess, but it wouldn't happen for a long time because people who know how to make it work will come along and buy votes. This kind of fairness, where more bts has more weight, allows BitShares to function and keep good development. In the early stages it will be a struggle but this will be fixed by time. We as developers have to make sure that things are going fairly. We should not let the skills of the gateways affect who are getting funded. We should have departments with specific managerial teams. We should not allow bad debt to remain on the network and we need to implement solutions to the bad debt, as these assets are essential for paying developers. If these SmartCoins are unstable the developers will go away. Investors aren’t realising these SmartCoin problems, but some people are already working on solutions to the bad debt issue on the platform.

Permie: So you’re talking about the margin calls on SmartCoins right?

Ammar Yousef: Yes.

Permie: We can get to that on the agenda, that is a big topic and im not sure how well it can be discussed over a voice chat. But we will give it a go even though it's complicated.

So we’ve talked a little about the PR and branding and marketing board. But mainly we talked about how it should be structured. Ammar thinks it should start with a vision, a top body, that works above the sub committee that organises specific PR tasks. But how do you think BitShares should brand itself? We discussed what BitShares can offer the world. Do you have five words or a tagline of what BitShares should be branding itself as?

Fractalnode:  “P2P trading, trade anything against anything. A token factory for creating your own crypto and smartcoins”

Permie: I think that is good. I think that appeals to the traders and potentially the cryptocurrency traders on CEX’s like Binance and BitFinex are very important. I think BitShares needs to make itself ready as quickly as possible and offer those CEX users the features they have on the CEX on the DEX. These traders are on average wealthy, and are interested in trading. Potentially one of their biggest fears is that their CEX will go bankrupt and steal all their crypto from them. Which BitShares is able to offer them protection against.

Fractalnode: We just need to emphasise what BitShares already has and get the word out better,

Permie: I’ve known the general opinion of BitShares among other crypto communities is that they have thought bts was a dead project for about 4 years. It needs a concentrated effort I think to solve this.

Ammar Yousef: I agree with fractalnode when it comes to these features that he is listing. I just would like to add very few things when it comes to our selling points for the application. Or lets say how should we market bitshares? Now all these features are actually perfect when it comes to the availability of decentralised network. On the CEX’s we find very similar features but these features are not decentralised. When it comes to selling these features we should let users feel the difference, why should they use these features on the DEX and not on the CEX? Highlight the security, decentralisation, the people behind this platform. On a CEX the Users and investors can’t see who is behind it. They can;t see the motivations behind them as it’s all closed source. BitShares and the DEX can be open-source and show the  direction that the platform is heading. It is transparent. Users can see all the code and read all the docs. They can know that the developers aren’t stealing their money. The DEX takes care of their crypto. This is another selling point, the transparency. The nature of the ecosystem is one of the main selling points behind it. Which is the decentralisation approach and the security approach.

Permie: Yes i agree. But my thoughts on it are that it's such a paradigm shift of what people are used to. Obviously there is a small subset of the population who are really into security and privacy and self-sufficiency and that kind of thing. But people in general just aren’t used to having to look after their own things. If you have a traditional bank account and someone steals your bank card and spends it, all you have to do is call up the bank and they will refund your money. People are used to having a lot of things in place, as these banks are run by a private business they have a lot of money to pay for their customers’ mistakes in order to keep a good public image. If one of their customers had their money stolen and the bank didn’t refund the money, the bank might lose a lot of other customers. But when we’re talking about a decentralised system we have to ask the users to totally rely on themselves. Some people say this is a very beneficial to society as self-reliant people are more resilient and able to adapt and look after themselves and work together as a community better. But it’s quite a problem to overcome. Even crypto traders who are quite into decentralisation and like bitcoin as its allegedly a market solution to a banking system; even these traders are still mostly trading on the Centralised Exchanges. That’s a lot to do with liquidity and the user experience but I think it's really difficult to convince people to use this BitShares system which is better when it's so complicated and people are so resistant to looking after themselves. So I think the PR should focus on teaching people why they should want to use this system and why they should want to be able to audit the system they are trading on.

Fractalnode: Paradoxically we also have to not be too loud or else they will come for us! BitShares is dangerous for the current system.

Ammar Yousef: I agree with you guys. The complexity behind these technologies are not actually meant for the end users to go and figure it out or actually operate on it. These are so advanced systems that are very similar to advance systems that already exist, which are massively used. Like Bitcoin and Ethereum and XRP. What I love about BitShares is the integration between the developments. You have UX developers who are actually doing their best to facilitate the UX. In the sense of simplifying the journey of the user. I’m sure that you can’t shout too loud about what BitShares is, but we can convince business use cases to utilise the platform and to simplify the user side. BitShares wouldn’t succeed without having real use cases. I believe we are still in the startup phase due to this reason. We because we do not yet have many business or user use cases. We should work on simplifying the development to provide them tools and at the same time to do our best to convince them that the platform is stable. That their investment within the platform will be having a good return. How can we sell that? Simply if anyone in the world wants to establish an ICO or an exchange they would need a very huge infrastructure, handling trades, handling nodes and so on. On the DEX they can come and use the tools on top of this Blockchain and they can participate with the development freely and this is a real advantage of any business to minimise their costs.

Permie: You’re saying BitShares as a DEX is more able to outsource all its needs to anyone anywhere in the world without needing to know who they are? And not worry about the paperwork?

Ammar: Yes. Exactly.

Fractalnode: With regards to PR it would be enough if every BTC owner knows what BitShares is. And that every use of DAI knows that bitshares is where that started and BitShares is DAI’s ancestor. And that BitShares is a CDP factory. (Collateralized Debt Positions, SmartCoins). BitShares is not for everyone.

Permie: So Ammar and Fractal when you’re talking about business use cases you think we need to do more to attract business use cases to the DEX. Which I agree with. Let’s talk a little bit about VPLedger, which is OpenLedgers major new chain where every user is KYC’d, know your customer, where every use umbits their passport to be allowed to be a part of the chain. OpenLedger say this is to be able to get business clients and to be able to come and build on top. OpenLedger say that they need to have all these things in place in order to conduct the use cases that they want to build. What do you think about that?

Ammar: Well for me, VPLedger was a fork that came from the idea that BitShares do not want to run Ethereum code within the BitShares source code which I also don’t support because it would take us somewhere else. BitShares is a particular blockchain which should not involve itself in integrating external code within its source code because we not be the creator of the code. We need to know everything that is going on behind the source code. OpenLedger was actually insisting on integrating the platform with Ethereum in order to expand the business use cases on the platform, I don't believe they have created the fork to satisfy KYC part because KYC is related to financial licensing that is held at the end of the registered entity and has nothing to do with the technology itself. If I am a company which offers exchange services I need to get KYC of my customers. But if i am facilitating the tools of a blockchain and these tools do not involve custodian services KYC is not needed. I believe a lot of blockchain users are not aware of regulations and how they work. What are the requirements? I was having a little conversation with DigitalLucifer this morning about this big misunderstanding and we should not actually involve ourselves in regulations and regulations has nothing to do with BitShares. BitShares is a software, its running on a blockchain, facilitating communications between nodes, we call them seeds, and has plugins running on it in order to allow or enable users and businesses to do some kind of work. We are not involved in their personal use cases for this blockchain. Definitely Internet laws apply; if we are aware there is someone using the software for any illegal activity we should work on fixing them and we should be transparent in front of anyone who would ask us why is this or that happening? But everyone knows the systems nature of blockchain isn’t having centralised records. We enable people to use them but are not responsible for users who mis-utilise it or not meeting their obligations to other people. Which are not our obligations.

Permie: So you’re saying BitShares should try to minimise “bad” use cases and should minimise them but is not responsible for them.

Ammar: Yes, its like any internet service provider, Google for example, a lot of people are using gmail for illegal things and once these are reported these centralised companies will take action. It's the same case if we see anything illegal happening on the network we would definitely take action. We are maintaining API’s and seed nodes and we have a certain control over the good intent behind the development of BitShares but definitely we are not responsible for anyone who will be mis-utilising these tools on the internet. Now the KYC part is an obligation and this obligation is supposed to be handled by the entity using the platform.

Permie: Meaning that if a gateway wants to send fiat USD to a users bank account they are expected to take their passport details of that user before they send fiat?

Ammar: Yes definitely and it's the same case with any registered organisation who facilitates trades on bitshares. If they make a transaction and declare it as a transaction they have to meet their legal obligations and this is different from country to country.

Fractalnode: I don’t care about KYC blockchains at the moment. Blockchain is the only third party im interested in. Companies use many different databases such as Oracle or MSQL and now DLT - distributed ledger technology. It’s their responsibility not BitShares’.


Permie: Shall we get on to cascading margin calls?

Fractal Node: In short I agree with the solution in this post. It’s written by telegram user “Sapiens” @chibchombia - Feedback loops and an analysis of BitShares architechture in relation to SmartCoin sustainability https://steemit.com/bitshares/@aguerrido/feedback-loops-and-analysis-of-bitshares-architecture-in-relation-to-smart-assets-sustainability


Permie: So in this article Sapiens talks about using some transaction fee on SmartCoins being put into a pool and this pool being used to buy margin called SmartCoins so they are not sold on the DEX suppressing the price. Ammar what do you think?

Ammar: So I was talking about this earlier when it comes to segregation of pool usage. To have a particular isolated pool that will actually hold the funds so that the platform value is not mixed with these behaviours on the platform and I agree with this approach. And we are already developing solutions, me and my team. We are posting these details in bitshares vision proxy page on bitsharestalk. Soon we will be writing on the bitshares.management . So there are actually many materials and proposals on how to solve this margin call pool. We are not close to finalising anything, we are still studying the idea to close the whole feedback loops when it comes to the market.

Fractalnode: I do not fully agree with these 2 feedback loops
but I agree with the solutions.

Permie: So the feedback loops we’re talking about which are discussed in this article are the 1) Worker Proposal spending from the reserve fund for development relies on bts being sold on the open market which pushes the price down. In order for developers to pay rent etc need to sell on a Centralised Exchange.
2) The CEX’s provide the feed price for SmartCoins to determine how many bts per bitCNY are required to fully collateralise the debt. So if WP workers sell bts on the CEX’s that provide the feed price, that puts the feed price down, which can cause a margin call on the DEX. Meaning that someone who has created debt with bts collateral to borrow bitCNY will be margin called, and their bts collateral will be tried to be sold on the DEX which can further decrease the price. Sapients says these feedback loops become a vicious downward cycle.

Fractalnode: The WP funds can now be sold using the King Of The Hill strategy which aims to always be the top bid and/or the lowest ask. So WP funds can be sold without taking offers from the market.

Ammar: To be honest I cannot remember the exact details of every proposed solution, as there are many. I have read about maybe 7 or 8 documents that discuss these changes to SmartCoin design. Some of these are designed by professors, some by internet geeks, some by real investors on the platform. All of them are sharing the same subject which is not letting the margin calls influence the price of bts too much. I believe we are coming up with something very soon as this is a dynamic software. I understand that bitAssets, SmartCoins, are very important as they are one of the most important features currently working. The whole ecosystem benefits. We can continue to rely on CEX price feeds as they are competitors. And at the same time they are investors. Every one of these competitors to game the bts value and utilise its uses to influence the direction of the network. I believe this will take its time until the big investors of the network realises that the solution is supposed to be something that will make all these bitshares games share income in a very fair way. It's a very complex subject. It has a lot of variables and its not really easy to be discussed in a very open way. It has a lot of political considerations, a lot of small communities trying to enforce their ideology on the other. So we are trying to come up with something that would have an agreement between all these communities.

Offline Permie22

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The Cabinet, @permie, @Cryptick1, @Don-gabriel, @Kimchiking, @Markopaasila and @Cryptokong123 have begun hosting meetings with pairs of community members to discuss an agenda on the topic of that BitShares situation, the bts price, the WP system, and compromise towards good governance.

Permie hosted this meeting, and transcribed the 11,000 words of the meeting-minutes for everyone in the community to read. Permie aims to host the same meeting with multiple different pairs of community members and collate all the responses to each section of the agenda so we can see where everyone agrees, and where there are compromises needed to be made.

This is about improving the unity of the community and moving forward to a clear vision.

Permie tries not to take sides in any debate and to just fasciliate the conversation and make sure everyone understands eachother.

Interested People in  future meetings so far:

Bench

Bitcoinfacilcom

Thule - 90m Proxy - Eastern Europe

Jam PR - US eastern timezone

Kencode - anarchooulco UTC-5


============================================

Cabinet Hosted BitShares Meeting #1

Date: 21/09/19
Time: 13:00UTC
Discord Channel: “Cabinet Hosted Meeting”

Host: Cabinet, @Permie

Attendees:
@fractalnode
@AmmarYousef

Foreword/Introduction:

This is the first of a planned series of Cabinet-hosted meetings between small groups of BitShares supporters to discuss particular BitShares-wide issues and communicate a vision for the future. Multiple small-group meetings each discussing similar topics will help each other to see other perspectives and co-operate to reach a negotiated shared vision with some compromises. A compromised but united vision is superior to a variety of disjointed “purist” visions when it comes to BitShares voter governance.

Worker Proposals getting in and out of the funding zone due to competing visions does not make stable governance. Successfully implementing a subjectively “inferior” negotiated (but still positive) plan is more beneficial than starting and subsequently abandoning a subjectively “superior” un-negotiated plan.

Points to discuss:

BitShares is owned and operated by the community of bts holders. What is the goal of the BitShares community?

What does BitShares offer the world?

How can this community push the bts project forward?

How to enhance BitShares’ value proposition?

What challenges is BitShares facing? Describe your perspective on:

Governance

Voter Apathy - most bts stake does not vote.

Public Relations and Branding

Cascading SmartCoin Margin Calls. (Large topic)

DEX Liquidity

What should BitShares do next? Describe your perspective on:

Uniting the bts community behind a shared vision.

A rising bts price. Why does it rise? Speculators buying on technical analysis? Increased PR? Fee income?

Short term planning vs long term planning.

How important is the focus on the price and key Technical Analysis  price-points in encouraging new-holders; for speculators? For long term holders?

Is BitShares out of  “startup mode” yet? - Should bts be a profitable DAO as soon as possible? Or should it be spending now to create profitable income for the community in the future?

Introduce yourself:

Fractalnode: 5-10 mins to outline a brief summary of your perspective on what you think is the biggest problem for BitShares currently.

Ammar: 5-10 mins to outline a brief summary of your perspective on what you think is the biggest problem for BitShares currently.

Main discussion:

As a group going through the above list 2 to 2.3.3.2 and discussing each perspective and discussing points that can be compromised to reach a goal that is acceptable to the most bts holders. If only some of these topics can be discussed that is ok.

Meeting Minutes:

Permie read through the Agenda to make sure everyone starts on the same page and then fractalnode started discussion with a brief summary of his perspective on what he thinks is the biggest problem for BitShares currently.

Fractalnode: We need to recreate awareness of BitShares’ capabilities in the crypto space. Holders - Spreading awareness and teaching about BitShares on social media and among friends. By submitting suggestions for improvement and conducting constructive discussions on further development directions. With regards to development; implement new features and improve existing ones and with regards to the committee and developers together aggregate community perceptions on further development and provide funding for this development.

Permie: So hopefully with more meetings like this we help with that.

Fractalnode: How to enhance BitShares’ value proposition; I think the value of the bts project is high enough today that if compared to the competition bts should be in the top 10 cryptos. The problem is awareness of the bitshares offer we are at the moment like a pearl at the bottom of the ocean. In my opinion the value bitshares has does not actively participate in the game for a high place in the overall crypto market capitalisation. A new large proportion of investors are only following the top 10-20 cryptos and BitShares was not there when new investors appeared and that is why they do not know bitshares. People who know of bitshares often speak about it in the past tense. They talk about a project that failed due to a lack of funding for development that Dan Larimer was supposed to get in 2015/16. Few people know that bitshares is a precursor of Delegated Proof of Stake, the fastest chain from 2015-2018, a token factory, a peer to peer DEX that 16 exchanges (gateways) have been created using BitShares since Bytemaster left. But the number of transactions has increased many times since then that we have moved to version 3.0 and version 4.0 is not far away. Now we are experiencing similar threats balancing on the brink of another winter (low price and slow development). In addition, it is very difficult to get knowledge about BitShares, it is very advanced and it is difficult to talk about it, it takes a lot of time.
All involvement in PR should start with the preparation of training materials in the form of a Video Tutorial. I think it should not be less than 5 hours. All PR should start with this tutorial.

Permie: Thanks fractalnode. Ammar I think it would be good if you could respond with your thoughts on what fractal has just said before we move on.

Ammar Yousef: Thank you so much fractal for your time. Thank you so much guys. I would like to start my thoughts about BitShares with trying to describe bitshares as it is. I'm not gonna draft a vision and say this is what bitshares should be but instead I would like to talk about what bitshares actually is now and how can we describe bitshares? In simple terminology BitShares  is simply a database, a decentralised database, that is running across multiple nodes to perform particular functions and to support a particular business and user use cases such as exchange and creating ICO’s, creating particular tokens that can be used as a  security or commodity. So far the community is divided, some are saying that this platform has to be regulated while some are saying it should not. Some say we should not address ourselves as a particular entity when it comes to the community itself. So this is one of the things that is so important is to be able to describe the network and be able to identify its current structure and communicate this structure to the masses. Unfortunately it is so complicated and I agree with you, fractal, that to actually describe bts to ordinary people is difficult but it is a job that can be done.  We can have a simplified drafting, we can have particular videos which talks about the community and what it is and what kind of purposes that are going to be performed at the top of this blockchain. One of the things that me and people with me are trying to do is organise the community. The community is not well organised. Nobody knows what other people are doing, you find people writing information, sometimes inaccurate information, in the forums and telegram while some of them are not writing at all here or there while they are doing good things for the network. The investors and the community are not aware of what is going on behind the scenes. We need a particular organising tool or software which we (Ammar and his team) are currently designing. Which will let every entity of the community know what the others are doing so we evolve together. Now the network itself, bitshares, is so unique. According to my belief and according to my experience in the cryptocurrency community. BitShares is actually a big network which has a lot of investors involved in it and at the same time it has a dynamic structure, it has a dynamic management, it has a very dynamic potential and so on. Its one of the main reasons why we believe bitshares is one of the biggest blockchains in the world. When it comes to the features that its offering to the next generation. We are aware that a couple of blockchains are doing some work on competing decentralised exchanges  but so far bts are the leaders when it comes to the exchange functionality. Every blockchain would have actually a development curve. We believe that the development curve is being driven in a good direction now. We are taking care of our developers, the core developers, taking care of our channels; which are the user interface channels (Telegram and bitsharestalk). We are taking care of the dynamics of the markets when it comes to the votes and the enhancements that are going on with the bitAssets and how the deals are being managed within the platform.
I’ll stop here when it comes to describing bitshares and now let's carry on with the next subject.

Permie: Ok great. I agree with what both of you have said about how complex it is to explain BitShares to new people and to get them to consider that spending so many hours learning about it would be worth doing.Things like video tutorials and everything really needs to come together. And like  you say fractal all PR should start with videos like this.

Fractalnode: I spent 2 weeks in 2015 to learn BitShares.

Permie: Me too. Yes it does take a long time and still only just starting to understand the margin call mechanism properly, after 4 years!

Fractalnode: I think the current BitShares documentation takes too long to read.

Permie: Yes we do need a video tutorial.And I really like, Ammar, your https://bitshares.management website which is like a place to organise people like you can on github but for general bitshare tasks so that everyone can see what’s going on and what there is to help with. I think that’s really good.

Ok so, I think if we go to Point 2 on the agenda: “Points to discuss: BitShares is owned and operated by the community of bts holders. What is the goal of the bitshares community? I’ll put that question to both of you. Fractal let’s hear from you first. Actually let’s start with “What can BitShares offer the world?”

Fractalnode: Low entry barrier - the user only needs to select the account name and securely store password
Pure P2P trading
Any to Any Trading Pairs
UIA Token Factory
CPD Token Factory (aka Smartcoins)
Stable Coins - USD, CNY, …..
HERO - USD deposit +5% APR since FED

Permie: So if I remember correctly HERO has a price feed that tracks +%5 APR since the FED started printing USD bills.

Fractalnode: Trade Anything
Hertz - Algorithm Based Asset (ABA) - price feed following a sine wave.

Permie: So Algorithm based assets, that are predictable like the tide times of the sea.

Fractalnode: BTCSHA - BTC SHA256 hashpower

Permie: So trading hash power as a UIA on BitShares.


Fractalnode: TEMP Temperature in (...) - does not yet exist
square meter of housing (...) - does not yet exist
hectare of land in (...) - does not yet exist

Permie: So are you talking about a SmartCoin with a price feed of the temperature in particular location and another for the average cost per square meter of housing?

Fractalnode: Yes. And hectare of the forest in location) - does not yet exist
BitShares offers: Binary Prediction Market Token Factory
Investment funds eg. TWENTIX / BTWTY

Permie: So that’s an index fund that tracks the value of the top 20 cryptos.

Fractalnode: Exchange Backed Assets

Permie: I think that’s where the trading fee of an asset is used to buy-back the Exchange-backed-asset. Or “Fee backed assets”

Fractalnode: Decentralized Order Book of 16+ exchanges (gateways) such as:
wallet.bitshares.org
openledger.io
market.rudex.org
gdex.io
crypto-bridge.org
ex.xbts.io
exchange.easydex.net
wallet.escodex.com
deex.exchange
bit.btsabc.org
citadel.li/wallet
dex.bitspark.io
dex.iobanker.com
hellobts.com
eubx.io
exchange.winex.pro
wallet.dynx.io

And Hashed Time-Lock Contracts (Atomic Swap, OTC - Over the Counter trades)

Permie: So trades with the BitShares blockchain being the only (trustless) counterparty.

Fractalnode: Free Trading Bot (DEXBot.info) funded by BitShares through the Worker Proposal System.

Permie: So that was all for the “What can BitShares offer the world topic”. Yes there’s a lot there that BitShares has to offer and when you do internet searches trying to find an easy place that tells you all this stuff is quite hard to find unless you know what to look for. So the PR around that can be improved.
Ammar do you have anything to add?

Ammar Yousef: Yeah let me talk here about what BitShares can offer and how we can come up with the idea behind what bitshares can offer. Now there are developers offering services through worker proposals and through BSIP’s in order to actually enhance the network in one particular direction. Now these directions are not actually based in a particular use case for BitShares. It is totally based on what the developer thinks is required. But what I believe the use cases must actually come through the businesses themselves or it must come from the user himself and that’s not happening. What is happening now is actually that very few use cases are on the platform apart from the gateway exchanges. These are the only source of btishares on the network. So bitshares in this stage according to my belief is still in the “startup phase” where investors are actually investing within the platform and waiting for a particular income which is not really happening so quickly. Some of these investors are holding on because they still have the belief that bitshares will enhance and that's what bitshares itself is a project which is aiming to target a permissionless transaction that would be facilitated through a particular front end and will lay the record on the decentralised database back end. The current situation is so complex but that's how the enhancement curve works. Every startup will start in this way and it will operate partially according to the aims and it will keep developing itself from the income that will come during the way. Currently you have centralised gateway exchanges holding bts and offering bts through their centralised services like API, website or a particular GUI and they control the value of bts through buying and selling it on the platform and on the gateways side. You don't have that huge use cases on the platform for bts except the gateways who are actually utilising the software to do a transaction on the platform while offering the bts to the people who want to invest in the system. What should we do in the future? We should actually come up with a solution to enhance how our gateways are working. And i believe the HTLC feature will open up very huge wide use cases for bitshares to enhance. Now the HTLC is in a very early stage we need a lot more work related to the front end to simplify the UX and at the same time communicating how this HTLC can benefit the users who need to know. We must utilise our current value which is being mis-utilised, we should utilise it in bringing use cases for bts itself. So companies or corporations or users can come and do their transaction on the platform while utilising the bts itself and buying it and holding it by investors.

Permie: I agree with a lot of what you’re saying. Talking about the Hash Time locked contracts which is like an atomic swap and the HTLC front end does need improvement but it does already work, there have been quite a few test transactions and it works as intended. You can already use it if you go to the “Spotlight” of the download light client or if you want to use a web wallet you can go to develop.bitshares.org and it’s up and running on there. When

Ammar, when you were talking about Centralised exchanges were you specifically referring to gateways on bitshares?

Ammar Yousef: Yes when i talked about CEX’s i am referring to gateways. Gateways are simply the centralized exchanges and some of them are having a particular website that is running and you can go there and deal on these CEX’s some with KYC and some of them don’t have a particular interface but offer assets to trade.

Permie: Ok, so you think there needs to be more use cases where the gateways provide more income to the DEX itself?

Ammar Yousef: Yes because when I see that an exchange feature itself I see it is a single feature, its one of the main features of bitshares but in the end its a feature. And this feature can be offered by Centralised exchanges but if we don’t have the use cases of the bitAssets for example or the User Issued Assets - that gateways offer - we are simply using a platform that has a particular native coin and facilitating transactions between centralised exchanges but the enhanced version of BitShares it would not be that at all.

Permie: At all? Are you saying BitShares would lose the gateways or that it will build on top of that as well?

Ammar Yousef: I am saying I think that centralised exchange gateways are very important at this stage and they are responsible for a lot of the investment behind BitShares but at the same time they are the ones behind the developers because simply they are the ones liquidating the bts for the end developers in order to improve the application. So CEX’s are important but the aim of humanity should be aiming towards disconnecting the network even from the CEX’s because that is what we are currently ending up with. You have CEX’s trying to actually get the value out of bts and they have the competition to deal with. The competition is actually using the features of the platform and every one of them is trying to enforce his game on the other. And this is totally unhealthy. You are ending up with the fractured community. And if the community is trying to impose what ideologies that they have on the others. Definitely now you have the East/West division in the network. These people are saying something… and these people are saying something else. Definitely enhancing the area of centralised exchanges influence on BitShares has to have this as a top concern for the community so as not to be reliant on them.

Permie: So that would be Hash Time Lock Contracts?

Fractalnode: Gateways are temporary in my opinion. IBC will change everything. Inter-blockchain-communication. So if you've got bitcoin on the bitcoin chain and you want a bitcoin gateway issued UIA asset on the DEX IBC would allow you to trustless trade between chains.  Able to trustlessly swap between the Bitcoin chain and the BitShares network.

Ammar: That is what we are simply trying to implement and would like to know something here. We should differentiate the HTLC feature and atomic swaps. HTLC feature is a feature that works one a single blockchain to facilitate trustless exchanges between particular addresses within this BitShares blockchain. But the atomic swap feature means to exchange between different blockchains. This would require a lot of work on how HTLC works with one of these outside blockchains.There are particular measures and requirements from these other blockchains in order to be able to do Atomic Swaps with these chains. We need to make sure our developers are actually including these measurements and requirements within the code in order to be able to do the Atomic Swaps with other blockchains. Currently we are working towards facilitating particular blockchains like XRP. Im talking about XRP because simply it is already operating the same way. They support public API and they do a lot of work when it comes to integrating with the current financial system as software. XRP is a software provider which built interfaces on the XRP blockchain. But Ripple is not the same as XRP. Ripple is a company on top of XRP. We need to name things as they are as there is a lot of misunderstanding out there when it comes to XRP and Ripple role. Atomic Swaps to XRP could be useful for BitShares. The latest findings on XRP are that some are saying XRP is a centralised blockchain and particular people has a large amount of XRP but the latest findings talking about Exchanges are having huge amount of XRP on their websites. This is one of the tricky things that XRP holders use to create their use cases. Which i actually would be recommending to BitShares community. To start giving particular bounties to big exchanges so that these big exchanges would be supporting particular use cases and that is what is happening now on Binance. This is totally good for the investors not just the developers.

Permie: So youre saying that BitShares should use some of its funds to pay desirable Centralised Exchanges…?

Ammar: To be able to gain more value and to get more popularity/

Permie: Do you mean to get listed or as a PR stunt?

Ammar: Getting listed… let me tell you something, it is basically getting listed but it shouldn't be that approach. We were talking about getting listed in certain areas where there will be bts use cases, such as using SmartCoins on CEX’s. But i wouldn't actually go with the people that we should start paying to get listed. This would be a total waste. But at least we should be listed in these big exchanges so we should encourage the big exchanges in order to demonstrate the capabilities of BitShares. And then work on our bts use cases which is much more important. Now during this time definitely we have to span big exchanges until we have the HTLC function working. If the user on BitShares would be able to be his own gateway through the HTLC or Atomic Swap.

Permie: Would you be able to list some of these use cases BitShares needs to get in to? You said CEXs that could help a particular use case should be paid to help us get the particular use case. What use cases are you thinking of?

Ammar: We must attract people who are into real use cases. Like somebody who does something there and we know that it is performing and they want to do an ICO, they can use BitShares software to create their ICO. I see many ICO’s these days and the more of them that come and use bts for transactions the more the bts network will have value and a healthy environment. But we have challenges now that need to be fixed now before we are able to attract these ICO owners because we have a big issue when it comes to how our current structure is working. You know that BitShares is suffering the price dumps and its suffering on the liquidity side because every WP gets paid in bts and some are dumping on CEX’s. This has to be controlled and our proxies proposing some mechanism to control this, such as division of funding per department. Different pools for different purposes. Different budgets. So a budget for enhancement/development and it could have it’s own committee to act on behalf of the network.

Permie: so youre saying instead of having individual WPS that get unvoted all the time you
Re saying we should have 4 or 5 different Worker Proposals that are for departments that can allocate funds to tasks as needed. So you’re saying these funds go to the particular department budget and that particular development committee decides how to spend it and tell the market what they want to do. It would be in that departments gift to allocate the funds as they see fit. To then allocate funding to contractors that prove they can do the work. BitShares would be more organised and able to say “We want this done, can you do it?” as opposed to waiting for contractors to offer ideas themselves. To help BitShares get the use cases.

Ammar Yousef: Exactly but that is not the case now. Now we are waiting for the developers to come and offer work which will be voted and you don't really know if this worker is the only one that is out there because you are not giving the developer the task to work. You are relying on the developer to design what work should be done. This is not how development works best. It should have a particular vision and mission and these missions should be tied with a budget and this budget is Capital Expenditure and Operating Expenses and we should not reinvent the wheel. These are known methods. These are the basics. We have workers that are doing good work and these should not be stopped. There needs to be better organisation in order to keep our important developers working to improve the network. Without continued development BitShares will have nothing. Currently we are unorganised. It’s normal, every startup is that unorganised in the beginning but we are moving forward.

Permie: I agree. And with that system of departmentalised worker proposals to allocate a budget to a particular area with a sub-committee for each department it allows compromise to take place on that level. If we are going to use the simplified East/West division we could have half of the sub-committees from the East and half from the West and there would only be approval if there was agreement, it makes it easier to put into action the vision that each group has but ensure that a compromised version where everyone is satisfied takes place. Compromising on the vision to get development moving in a single direction and not stop/starting all the time. Each individual department making a decision on how to spend from there makes it easier to negotiate.

Ammar: Of course, mostly you will be building utility for the competition around workers to do the work, keeping costs lower. There is currently no competition because there is no particular BitShares mission giving direction and getting the market to compete to implement it. Very few developers will know about BitShares and the work that is needed to be done. People are unaware, developers are now unaware. If we find new developers to come in they would believe looking at the current structure that everything is sold out and that they wouldn’t be able to get in. Which is unhealthy for the network.

Fractalnode: That's true, but developers are passionate and visionaries. Our developers built what we have now.

Permie: You’re right. We do need to keep the developers we have currently and who’ve been here for a long time as they are a big part of what we have and the knowledge that we need to retain. All the experience that they have.

Ammar: Our developers are the best in the whole world. I’ve seen their skills. I am not saying they are doing a bad job. They are doing a great job. But, again, the vision should not come from the developer. I am saying this because that would create a conflict of interest between developers and investors. The developers are paid by the investors. This is one cause of the unhealthy community environment now. We can see these scenarios are happening as the investors are in conflict and the developers are not getting paid.
« Last Edit: September 27, 2019, 10:51:07 am by Permie22 »