Bytemaster and team are no longer working on Bitshares?

[chryspano]

Brian Page   liar

[sudo]

Brian Page   liar

[Stan]

...

It wasn't that no one could figure out how to market, it was that Bytemaster picked a guy that did next to nothing to market it effectively.  I just recently heard a story from someone who went to some Bitcoin conference years ago where BitShares had booth babes. Marketing was good at spending money and I'm sure booth babes are enjoyable to hang out with. Lets not just solely blame the fact that BTC went down in price. There was plenty of mismanaging going on. This affiliate system a lot of us were skeptical about ended up being next to worthless ...

oh i missed those booth babes 

We've had  nearly a dozen talents that have taken a shot at marketing in various styles and approaches.
At one conference in 2014, Brian Page did indeed pull out all the stops to market BitShares. 
He even sponsored the main reception.  But that was just a "next to nothing" marketing effort. 
BitShares Babes hosted it for, egad, well over an hour!  See if you can spot them below. 











Next up?  Hollywood producer/director Paul Aaron, shown here visiting Cryptonomex in Virginia last month.



You probably don't know him from behind the camera, but I'm sure you recognize his son...

[Pheonike]

All you naysayers are just pissing in the wind, while the others are building better ships.

It's been the same way for a long time now, a handful of visionary giants being dogged by a gaggle of myopic treasure hunters who should have never left shore, but simply invested in Apple stock and sucked down more diet coke while watching the 10 o'clock news and imagining themselves to be masters of their own destiny.

Ranting here about how you were victimized while backing a project on the bleeding edge of human imagination is just pathetic.

Some people build ships that cross oceans with their bare hands... and some passengers take masochistic delight in lamenting how their ship hasn't yet arrived in the promised land and that the ocean is vast and filled with terrifying mysteries, but the blame is never with them, always with some other hand controlling their fate, the captain, pirates, or the ocean itself.

Once upon a time the whole lot of you would be keel-hauled.  Nowadays you have the luxury of stinking up the decks with your own vomit.  Let's see where that gets you.

i found this story in my fairytale book:

It was promised to build a great ship, but the builders needed more funds to make their dream a reality. So they looked for supporters and donors and took their funds with the promise to build this great ship. Many of these people believed in this vision and invested their own money in this project.

- so the first ship was built it worked and many of the builders started to build their own ships and promised to give the investors portions of everything they will find

- the headbuilder then decided to destroy all other ships and make a bigger, greater ship, because it would serve as a one unity better then more smaller ships
- the investors could just follow, because the believed the whole project would be fall apart without the headbuilder

- so the great ship got bigger and some investors started to build some attachments to it BUT then

- the headbuilder suprised everyone that he and his friends built a better ship in secret and left the first, great ship behind
- the attachment builders where left behind, because nothing the builded worked with the new ship
- the new ship was not for free, the investors gave up their promise to get 10% of everything, because the headbuilder argued he build the second ship on his own

- many things where promised and everyone where exited again, BUT
- many advantages got chanceled because of time

- after it was clear that nothing will be done in the future without the approval of the community, the headbuilder left the project, because the ship was "ready"
- he builded "again" a better ship, but this time he left most of the investors behind and took some friends with him.

"You are better on your own, everything is ready nothing is left i promised, so i want to do new things"

- the people on the second shipped realized that most of the stuff of the headbuilder left in secret from the cargo. More and more people left the second ship, some swam to the third ship, but most took the rest they had and looked for better builders outside, because they wanted to be a part of something special, but could
not build on their own.

Parts of this story sound familiar, but one glaring fallacy is "most of the stuff of the headbuilder left in secret from the cargo". Steem doesn't compete with BitShares: as has been pointed out already, it only supports trading its own fixed set of assets (Steem and Steem-backed dollars).

There's also the implicit fallacy that no one else but the "headbuilder" could upgrade the ship. BitShares is an open-source project and there are plenty of people capable of updating the BitShares code base. SVK continues to do wonders at advancing the web wallet. One of the original developer's of the blockchain code, Nathan, is working on integration with it now. BlockTrades is also supporting the code base (we developed the peer-to-peer networking code it uses and we just recently fixed an issue in the memo encryption code).

It's true there's not a lot of working going on in the core code right now, but that's mainly because we think adding support for more tradeable assets and improvements to the UI are higher priority tasks at the moment than adding new features to the blockchain code. Nevertheless, there are plans to add some new features to BitShares: we're starting to work now on a mechanism for paying dividends to UIA holders via new operations as an early part of the peerplays effort.

hi dan,

with "cargo" i meant the sold BTS in secret for month.

It is true that many people can take over, but do you really believe that when Vitalik would leave ETH it will not hurth the market and the potential of ETH? People would look into his new "baby" and would ETH leave behind, because they would suspect it will be much better then ETH.

In my eyes the core founder leaving BTS activly behind is just killing for 1 year at least.

It sure hurt bitcoin when Satoshi left.

Sent from my SM-N920T using Tapatalk

[Stan]

@Stan

sorry, but did you read your own or bytemasters writings?

Quote from: bytemaster on October 19, 2014, 03:03:59 AM
There are many problems we need to resolve as a community:

1) We don't want to compete with ourselves and divide our network effect.
-->this is the reason why we now do it and not before the original holders had shares in DNS, VOTE etc.
-->i always considered the merger a bad move you can look in the old posts of me, because i invested in AGS because i know i
will get a share of many projects. The merger erased this.

2) We don't want to confuse users with a million brands.
-->great same as above

3) We want to have 1 BitUSD for everything rather than many different BitUSDs
-->great 1 pegged USD is in BTS, but a "better version" is in Steem

4) We need to recognize those who have helped fund development after Feb 28th so they don't compete with us.
-->they will not compete anymore

5) I don't want to have divided loyalties... I cannot serve two masters.
-->this is the reason why bytemaster shouldn't forced anyone into this.

6) We need to provide for long term funding and growth.
--> good luck with steem

7) We need to resolve the consensus problem once and for all.
-->it is solved, because most of the VESTED balances are secured from trusted people

Yes, I did enjoy reading that thinking then and how it has evolved today after 18 months of lessons learned.

Steem is the embodiment of those lessons.  BitShares is stabilized because others need to rely on its stability now, so major new innovations need to be pursued elsewhere.

AGSers like myself at least got something.  Without the merger they truly would have had nothing since there were not enough funds to finish more than one MVP.    ... but history isn't over yet. 

We now have a sweet approach to side chains that we didn't have at the time of the merger allowing simpler chains to enjoy the benefits of a common ecosystem. 

It is easy to second guess now, but at the time there were only two unpleasant paths into Mordor and one was cut off by the Bitcoin market avalanche...



SARUMAN:   So Gandalf, you try to lead them over Caradhras.  And if that fails, where then will you go ?
 
The Fellowship struggle around the side of the mountain, through deep snow, strong winds and heavy snowfall 
 
SARUMAN VOICEOVER:   
If the mountain defeats you will you risk a more dangerous road?
 
As the Fellowship struggle on, the hobbits being carried by Aragorn and Boromir who are thigh deep in the snow, Legolas lightly walks across the snow past them to the head of the line. He listens as he hears echos on the wind
 
A mighty crack is heard overhead, and great chunks of rock fall down from the mountain top, narrowly missing them
 
ARAGORN:   He's trying to bring down the mountain! Gandalf! We must turn back!
 
GANDALF:   No! (he steps out to the edge of the path) Sleep, Caradhras, be still, lie still, hold your wrath!
 
SARUMAN:   (standing on top of Isengard drowns him out) Wake up cruel Redhorn! May your bloodstained horn fall upon enemy heads!



A great streak of lightning hits the top of the mountain above the Fellowship and an avalanche of snow rains down on top of them, burying them underneath it.  Moments later Legolas emerges from the snow. He looks around to see the others emerge

 
 
BOROMIR:   We must get off the mountain! Make for the Gap of Rohan and take the west road to my city!
 
ARAGORN:   The Gap of Rohan takes us too close to Isengard!
 
GIMLI:   If we cannot pass over the mountain, let us go under it! Let us go through the Merger of Moria
 
Gandalf pauses thinking
 
SARUMAN VOICEOVER:   Moria... you fear to go into those mines.
 
SARUMAN:   (in Isengard flicking through a book, stops at a page showing Moria Gate) the dwarves delved too greadily and too deep
 
SARUMAN VOICEOVER:   (as Gandalf hears him knowingly) You know what they woke in the dark of Khazad...
 
SARUMAN:   (turning over another page to show  a firey balrog) Shadow, flame
 
GANDALF:   Let the Ringbearer decide
 
Frodo looks confused and turns to Sam
 
BOROMIR:   We cannot stay here! (Merry and Pippin look frozen and scared next to him) This will be the death of the hobbits!
 
GANDALF:   Frodo ?
 
FRODO:   (hesitating) We will go through the Merger...
 
GANDALF:   So be it

[btswildpig]

It seems more like the real reason behind everything is basically "Bytemaster can't or won't support his previous projects."  The dude couldn't even finish out the STEALTH proposal for reasons I don't get.

All the reasons Bytemaster gave for the merger were known BEFOREHAND. A lot of this is just rationalizing after decisions had been made.

It wasn't that no one could figure out how to market, it was that Bytemaster picked a guy that did next to nothing to market it effectively.  I just recently heard a story from someone who went to some Bitcoin conference years ago where BitShares had booth babes. Marketing was good at spending money and I'm sure booth babes are enjoyable to hang out with. Lets not just solely blame the fact that BTC went down in price. There was plenty of mismanaging going on. This affiliate system a lot of us were skeptical about ended up being next to worthless ...

oh i missed those booth babes 

[Ben Mason]

- the new ship was not for free, the investors gave up their promise to get 10% of everything, because the headbuilder argued he build the second ship on his own

if you think outside the box you will realize that you still can get at least 10% of everything... You have an "inside" information about the opportunity to create some posts on steemit and get rewarded on 4 July... 10% of STEEMS marketcap will "gifted" to all participants in about a Month (in Current valuation it is about $2M and it can certainly increase more) And nobody ask's you to invest any penny... You can just open free of charge a steemit account, make some posts (like you did here for free) and wait for some STEEM dollars... I ensure you it is worth your time.... There are already really strong indications about that...   
I bet many of future steemit user's would love to be on our position and have so early the information's we "luckily" have right NOW... And don't expect the Larimer's to make an official post somewhere to promise you they will upvote many of your  post's because they ow you their existence in crypto world!!! That would be bad PR for steemit ... Don't forget that for the first time Graphene get recognition from many community’s outside BTS...
We must think outside the box... We must see it like a great OPPORTUNITY  ... like a "half" full glass of water !!!  If you are thirsty you should drink it ... and not complaining it is half empty 

i will not use this platform, because it is against my ethical believings, but thanks for the advice, i will not give more time to STEEM as needed.

Requires effort.....so not good enough?

[Shentist]

- the new ship was not for free, the investors gave up their promise to get 10% of everything, because the headbuilder argued he build the second ship on his own

if you think outside the box you will realize that you still can get at least 10% of everything... You have an "inside" information about the opportunity to create some posts on steemit and get rewarded on 4 July... 10% of STEEMS marketcap will "gifted" to all participants in about a Month (in Current valuation it is about $2M and it can certainly increase more) And nobody ask's you to invest any penny... You can just open free of charge a steemit account, make some posts (like you did here for free) and wait for some STEEM dollars... I ensure you it is worth your time.... There are already really strong indications about that...   
I bet many of future steemit user's would love to be on our position and have so early the information's we "luckily" have right NOW... And don't expect the Larimer's to make an official post somewhere to promise you they will upvote many of your  post's because they ow you their existence in crypto world!!! That would be bad PR for steemit ... Don't forget that for the first time Graphene get recognition from many community’s outside BTS...
We must think outside the box... We must see it like a great OPPORTUNITY  ... like a "half" full glass of water !!!  If you are thirsty you should drink it ... and not complaining it is half empty 

i will not use this platform, because it is against my ethical believings, but thanks for the advice, i will not give more time to STEEM as needed.

[Shentist]

@Stan

sorry, but did you read your own or bytemasters writings?

Quote from: bytemaster on October 19, 2014, 03:03:59 AM
There are many problems we need to resolve as a community:

1) We don't want to compete with ourselves and divide our network effect.
-->this is the reason why we now do it and not before the original holders had shares in DNS, VOTE etc.
-->i always considered the merger a bad move you can look in the old posts of me, because i invested in AGS because i know i
will get a share of many projects. The merger erased this.

2) We don't want to confuse users with a million brands.
-->great same as above

3) We want to have 1 BitUSD for everything rather than many different BitUSDs
-->great 1 pegged USD is in BTS, but a "better version" is in Steem

4) We need to recognize those who have helped fund development after Feb 28th so they don't compete with us.
-->they will not compete anymore

5) I don't want to have divided loyalties... I cannot serve two masters.
-->this is the reason why bytemaster shouldn't forced anyone into this.

6) We need to provide for long term funding and growth.
--> good luck with steem

7) We need to resolve the consensus problem once and for all.
-->it is solved, because most of the VESTED balances are secured from trusted people

[gamey]

It seems more like the real reason behind everything is basically "Bytemaster can't or won't support his previous projects."  The dude couldn't even finish out the STEALTH proposal for reasons I don't get.

All the reasons Bytemaster gave for the merger were known BEFOREHAND. A lot of this is just rationalizing after decisions had been made.

It wasn't that no one could figure out how to market, it was that Bytemaster picked a guy that did next to nothing to market it effectively.  I just recently heard a story from someone who went to some Bitcoin conference years ago where BitShares had booth babes. Marketing was good at spending money and I'm sure booth babes are enjoyable to hang out with. Lets not just solely blame the fact that BTC went down in price. There was plenty of mismanaging going on. This affiliate system a lot of us were skeptical about ended up being next to worthless ...

[Stan]

The merger (#2 on my list) was also a crippling blow that crushed the marketcap (which in turn further devastated the potential funds for development). From what Stan claimed in another post, this was because they were running out of funds raised for the first sharedrop (BTSX), but I never heard that argument made at the time the merger proposal was made. ...

From BM's very first post on the topic where he shared some of his concerns with the community:

There are many problems we need to resolve as a community:

1) We don't want to compete with ourselves and divide our network effect.
2) We don't want to confuse users with a million brands.
3) We want to have 1 BitUSD for everything rather than many different BitUSDs
4) We need to recognize those who have helped fund development after Feb 28th so they don't compete with us.
5) I don't want to have divided loyalties... I cannot serve two masters.
6) We need to provide for long term funding and growth.
7) We need to resolve the consensus problem once and for all.

As a community effort we are stronger if we can agree on changes using proof of stake and we should agree once and for all that the majority will rule here.   Those that want a stable money will use BitGold or BitSilver because those are not subject to change, only supply and demand.    If you cannot trust the community of stakeholders to act wisely then create a rigid system with no rule changes and attempt to compete.

My Proposal:

1) Drop all other BitShares brands.... rename BitShares X to just BitShares
2) End PTS...  BitShares will evolve to incorporate every possible feature that stakeholders vote on.
3) If there is a clone then it should start out with stakeholders it thinks are best... because BitShares holders are uniting.
4) Add stake holder approved dilution without limit to BitShares X.
5) Bring in all AGS holders and given them a stake in BitShares X that cannot be moved for 6 months... the ratio that this stake should be given should be equal to PTS market cap... so $5 million or 10% dilution of BTSX allocated to these individuals.    This is effectively BTSX buying out our competition. 
6) Bring in one last PTS snapshot also valued at $5 million for another 10% dilution of BTSX... 6 months until funds could be spent... buy out this competition and end PTS.
7) Our team will focus on no other DACs other than BitShares in general and work to make it the most robust and *FLEXIBLE* DAC out there. 

There will still be other DACs based upon our toolkit  (Music, Gaming, DNS, etc) but those clones will not be dividing my loyalty because they have their own teams and are already known and operating independently of us.  Those who have joined those DACs can attempt to grow them how they see fit and BitShares will be competing with them where we can.

Our goal will be to scale BitShares to handle the transaction volume and users... to solve the scaling problem while still remaining decentralized and allowing 0 barriers to entry for competition except our network effect.

At the risk of calling BitShares one DAC to rule them all... I think we can worry about that after we have achieved critical mass, until then someone else may come along and build one DAC to rule them all and we don't want them to get there if we can get there first.

Once again... just proposals... everything will be thought out and community input is valued.

After the dust settled, my recap a couple of months later:

The Origin of BitShares
Part 8
Experimenting and Pivoting

...

Obstacle:  The Great Bitcoin Recession  For the sake of transparency, we left all the donated funds in BTC and PTS on the block chains where everyone could keep track of how we were spending them.  (Volatility-free BitAssets weren't available yet.)  PTS was supposed to drop as its value was transferred to new products.  But Bitcoin was supposed to hit $1200 by years end!  Instead it dropped like a rock all year long.  By the fall it was clear that our two year runway had been whittled down to one year - and that was about to end!

Pivot:  We rediscovered something every Silicon Valley startup knows well:  working for equity!  Why couldn't that work for block chain based companies?  Why not do the same thing as bitcoin - issue new shares at a slowly decreasing rate.  Except, unlike Bitcoin, we didn't have to burn them.  We could use them to pay employees!  What's a few percent annual dilution when we were expecting value to grow by hundreds of percent in the coming year?  All we had to do is bleed off a few percent of that growth and we could fund much faster growth!

Result:  If Bitcoin could do what we could now do, it could pay 101 small businesses several million dollars a year - each!  Instead Bitcoin gives all that new money to the electric companies to produce global warming.  Even at BitShares current scale, that same rate of token issuance could sustain our 2014 development budget into the future indefinitely.  With just a couple doublings of our market cap we would be looking at 101 full time developer and marketer positions working to grow the whole ecosystem.

Obstacle:  Promises, Promises  We had the solution to all our funding problems and a path to ever-accelerating growth right there within our grasp - and couldn't implement it for BitShares X!  Its Social Consensus and ownership distribution had already been defined.  No Dilution! You Promised! Remember a few posts back when I said that allocating zero shares for development and giving it all to PTS and AGS holders (50/50/0) had been a mistake?  Well that mistake had come home to roost.  BitShares X was boxed into a corner.  Bound by the same suicide pact as Bitcoin and most other chains - no way to fund developers and marketers!  Rats.

Pivot:  That's ok.  We'll just apply that lesson learned to all future DACs we develop.  MUSIC and PLAY had already spun off to their own independent developers, and ME had been merged into BitShares X, but we still had VOTE and DNS on the launch pads.  We would build them to be self-funding DACs - and they could pick up the development and marketing torch for the whole ecosystem.

Result:  Bytemaster turned his attention to VOTE and DNS.  These had to get up and operational and generating funds to pay salaries by the end of the year.  We were about out of railroad track and had to get them up to 88 miles per hour in a hurry!

Obstacle:  Fratricide!  There's just one problem.  Every new DAC we build has to be the best we can build - using all the past lessons learned - or some competitor will seize the opportunity to do it for us!  VOTE would need its own stable BitAsset currency.  To produce that it would need a full-scale decentralized exchange.  It would need its own name registration system.  It would need its own network effect and would be leveraging every poll, petition, and election registration to build it's own huge base of provably unique users.  It would need to become a SuperDAC, able to compete on all possible fronts for all important market depth and network effect.  And BitShares X would inevitably be in its cross-hairs!  Most importantly, BitShares VOTE would be self-funding - able to recycle a few percent of its growth every year into paying developers and marketeers.  We were creating our own BitShares X killer.

Does anyone know where the love of God goes
When the waves turn the minutes to hours?

-- Gordon Lightfoot, The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

Pivot: We had to go back and explain this to the BitShares community.  It wasn't pretty.  We explained that as long as we were building new DACs we would keep learning and applying those lessons to each new DAC.  And each new DAC would want to have its own BitAssets, domain names, and network effect.  Each would be forced to clone all its predecessors and fight for dominance over all our previous efforts.  If we tried to play nice and keep features separate, some outside competitor would come along and combine everything into a SuperDAC.  We couldn't leave that option on the table for them.  BitShares X would have to be upgraded, or face eventual extinction. There was wailing and gnashing of teeth. 

Correct set of mistakes:

• Giving away 100% of BTSX to pre 2/28 donors and not keeping some to pay for development.
• Failing to sell all the donated BTC (for the sake of transparency) before it collapsed in value by more than half.
• No one could figure out how to market it on a shoestring budget.

Mistakes we avoided:

• Continuing to work on BTSX until all donated funds were gone and never doing anything for Post 2/28 donors.
• Switching to spend post 2/28 donotions on VOTE and DNS and have three incomplete projects when the funds ran out.
• Making VOTE into what BTS 2.0 is today and leaving all the Pre 2/28 holders of BTSX with an obsolete subset.
  

Even after that effort to get to an MVP for all donors with the remaining funds, it took another full year of burning our own personal savings and the sweat equity of our developers to get to where we are today.

Now we at least have two viable products still in the game and working developers still available in the community. 
And Steemit has now picked up the innovation funding responsibilities for the whole ecosystem.

Hard to see how that would be true without making the best calls we could at the time.

And, of course, there is another Skywalker...   

[liondani]

- the new ship was not for free, the investors gave up their promise to get 10% of everything, because the headbuilder argued he build the second ship on his own

if you think outside the box you will realize that you still can get at least 10% of everything... You have an "inside" information about the opportunity to create some posts on steemit and get rewarded on 4 July... 10% of STEEMS marketcap will "gifted" to all participants in about a Month (in Current valuation it is about $2M and it can certainly increase more) And nobody ask's you to invest any penny... You can just open free of charge a steemit account, make some posts (like you did here for free) and wait for some STEEM dollars... I ensure you it is worth your time.... There are already really strong indications about that...   
I bet many of future steemit user's would love to be on our position and have so early the information's we "luckily" have right NOW... And don't expect the Larimer's to make an official post somewhere to promise you they will upvote many of your  post's because they ow you their existence in crypto world!!! That would be bad PR for steemit ... Don't forget that for the first time Graphene get recognition from many community’s outside BTS...
We must think outside the box... We must see it like a great OPPORTUNITY  ... like a "half" full glass of water !!!  If you are thirsty you should drink it ... and not complaining it is half empty 

[btswildpig]

I need to upgrade my brain buffer in order to understand long sentence above

[gamey]

Parts of this story sound familiar, but one glaring fallacy is "most of the stuff of the headbuilder left in secret from the cargo". Steem doesn't compete with BitShares: as has been pointed out already, it only supports trading its own fixed set of assets (Steem and Steem-backed dollars).

It does compete when Dan started asking BitShares forum users to stop using the bitsharestalk forum that has a community used by everyone in favor of his latest project. It would be one thing if steemit was at least rebranded in some way, but no, the only value is Larimer backed promises on things to happen.  (Whether your Steemit bucks or future development on BitShares exchange..)  If Steemit is some successful project, I can't even see Dan being motivated to go back to Bitshares.

[dannotestein]

thanks dan for your thoughts.

call me naive, but i believed this stuff "we had to sell for pay our staff " thing etc. so i didn't considered this
kind of ANN on April 1.

sorry, maybe you know more, because you get more information from the inner circles, but for me as an outsider it was not a well placed move. If i had BTS as an interest i would have done it differently, i think we as a community deserved better.

not one big move was discussed openly and we just had to swollow anything. Maybe it is a good thing that now new blood is stepping up, but it will cost 1-2 year time for adaption. i didn't see this happen.

I won't try to argue with you that things could have been handled better. From early on, I think a lot of mistakes were made, and those rippled out over time to cause further problems.

The biggest mistake in my opinion was rushing out BitShares 1.0, before it was really ready, and simultaneously causing a major decline in AGS funding as it froze the snapshot date. I argued with Stan and Dan for several hours in an early meeting on this decision as I thought it needed to be pushed back several months (I got 2 weeks). That loss in funding, coupled with some serious misallocations of the funds received (poor marketing efforts + heavy legal and accounting bills), put a significant crimp in the development of the BTS code base and adoption rate. I hope this won't upset anyone that I think BitShares needed to raise even more funds, but look at how much ethereum raised and think how much better we would be if we had raised more of that money before ethereum ever had a product to show.

The merger (#2 on my list) was also a crippling blow that crushed the marketcap (which in turn further devastated the potential funds for development). From what Stan claimed in another post, this was because they were running out of funds raised for the first sharedrop (BTSX), but I never heard that argument made at the time the merger proposal was made. But if it is true, it only highlights more the original mistake of taking the snapshot too early. The merger in particular also led to a loss of faith in BM's leadership which ultimately led us to where we are now. Where we go from here is up to all of us.