Merger of STEEM and BTS

[cylonmaker2053]

Thanks danno to question regard to stealth...... My point of view......marketing shouldnt be a priority...

Lets take facebook example facebook was viral early days because of spreading word people around university.....it was growth mainly this way before reach angel investor....

Lets look poloniex, was a small.exchange, was hacked, it was pretty much fucked, until.xmr come on board n.brought a good volume after that started to pick more users, more volume e picking the best volume for the best coins. No.campaing, no promotion, just strong volume n low fee n.probably a pretty god deal with whales n market makers,

You top guys from bitshares should make some network with big vern, people from dead mintpal, n others n try to get some.contatcs with big player n see what they wnat to make dex come.true

@dannotestein has a great point and interesting perspective from being in the trenches with bitshares.us; there's likely a decent number of people in the crypto community that have privacy as one of the major features they value. in that respect, STEALTH could add value to our network.

[cylonmaker2053]

A straight merger will never happen, just forget about that. What could happen however is Bitshares deciding to adopt some of the features developed for Steem once they've proven that they work, like rate limited free transactions, market maker incentives and possibly the new pegged asset model.

One of the main issues Bitshares faces right now is the lack of interest around the market pegged assets; although the peg works fairly well the generation process through shorting/borrowing is failing to generate enough supply to make the assets viable. Steem has a new solution for this problem that could be ported to Bitshares if it turns out to be more successful. Bitshares currently does not have an ETH asset, perhaps a bitasset 2.0 could be implemented first using ETH, that could generate a lot of interest and would make it very easy for ETH holders to come trade on Bitshares. Anyway, we first need to see the new model in action in Steem, which will happen after the 4th of July..

svk, the new Steem model could not possibly overlap our market and become a competitor...
And it surely can't be used by BitShares...

I wanted to make sure Steem didn't compete with BitShares market.  In fact, one of the reasons I was willing to help with Steem was that its feature set is fundamentally incompatible with BitShares and we could not hardfork BitShares to implement what Steem does.

I never said anything about Steem becoming a competitor.

There's nothing stopping us from paying CNX through worker proposal to add some features from Steem if they work out well though, like the rate limited transactions. Steem is based on Graphene so the code changes needed would not be overwhelming. What features to implement is a discussion for another day though, I'm just saying it's an option that we should consider.

great point. i like the idea of keeping the CNX crew around for paid dev work. not to mention they likely still have enormous BTS positions and so are very motivated stakeholders.

too bad STEEM was built on top of Bitshares instead of a separate venture. we need devs and entrepreneurs to start building useful apps on top of our network.

[svk]

A straight merger will never happen, just forget about that. What could happen however is Bitshares deciding to adopt some of the features developed for Steem once they've proven that they work, like rate limited free transactions, market maker incentives and possibly the new pegged asset model.

One of the main issues Bitshares faces right now is the lack of interest around the market pegged assets; although the peg works fairly well the generation process through shorting/borrowing is failing to generate enough supply to make the assets viable. Steem has a new solution for this problem that could be ported to Bitshares if it turns out to be more successful. Bitshares currently does not have an ETH asset, perhaps a bitasset 2.0 could be implemented first using ETH, that could generate a lot of interest and would make it very easy for ETH holders to come trade on Bitshares. Anyway, we first need to see the new model in action in Steem, which will happen after the 4th of July..

svk, the new Steem model could not possibly overlap our market and become a competitor...
And it surely can't be used by BitShares...

I wanted to make sure Steem didn't compete with BitShares market.  In fact, one of the reasons I was willing to help with Steem was that its feature set is fundamentally incompatible with BitShares and we could not hardfork BitShares to implement what Steem does.

I never said anything about Steem becoming a competitor.

There's nothing stopping us from paying CNX through worker proposal to add some features from Steem if they work out well though, like the rate limited transactions. Steem is based on Graphene so the code changes needed would not be overwhelming. What features to implement is a discussion for another day though, I'm just saying it's an option that we should consider.

[bitsharesbrazil]

Thanks danno to question regard to stealth...... My point of view......marketing shouldnt be a priority...

Lets take facebook example facebook was viral early days because of spreading word people around university.....it was growth mainly this way before reach angel investor....

Lets look poloniex, was a small.exchange, was hacked, it was pretty much fucked, until.xmr come on board n.brought a good volume after that started to pick more users, more volume e picking the best volume for the best coins. No.campaing, no promotion, just strong volume n low fee n.probably a pretty god deal with whales n market makers,

You top guys from bitshares should make some network with big vern, people from dead mintpal, n others n try to get some.contatcs with big player n see what they wnat to make dex come.true

[dannotestein]

Furthermore, a good part of the reason people want to avoid using centralized exchanges is due to privacy concerns, and given that the trail is completely transparent on bitshares.......

[...]
No, I stand by my assertion that the biggest use for the platform was to act as a stablecoin bank. And without stealth, it's never taking off.
Would you use your bank if anyone in the world could check your balance online?

Me neither. Nor would 99.999% of the people.

Anonymity comes from "how" you obtain BTS to transfer in, and "how" you exit BTS, by gatewaying it out.

You shouldn't need anonymity within the Dex itself.

I really don't think that's the problem.

I think the problem is soley limited to: 

a) Ease of Use

b) Popularity (you need to use the Dex because everyone else is using the Dex scenario, just like facebook)

c) Education and Advertising as an ongoing effort.

The DAC and DAO, and DEX, all have one fatal flaw.  There's nothing in its design that encourages ongoing promotion of itself.

This is why large corporations (even Coke and Pepsi) to this day, spend gazillions promoting themselves.  Do you think if Coke & Pepsi stopped advertising they would lose market share?  They're industry leaders already.   Yet they don't chance it.

Sure, someone could make an offer to do promotion in exchange for payment. But this is a tragedy of the commons problem.  No one wants to spend BTS on something that may not yield a return, so they wait for "the other guy" to do it.  Problem is, we're all "the other guy", and none of us is doing it either.

BitShares as a Dex is a tool that is hoping to go viral without any significant adoption plan.   You don't create a tool hoping smart people will discover the tool.   If that was the case, the next infomercial on TV showing the latest gadget would be non-existent.  They'd simply create a new gadget, put it on store shelves, and "hope" that smart people would discover it in the store, or go by word of mouth.

Word of mouth, and smart people, are very limited ways of growing adoption, and are doomed to fail.

As soon as we realize this problem, perhaps we can fix it.

(Oh, and everytime we get a little "blurb" somewhere in an online article, that is nothing to throw a party about.  That's the very minimal of what we really require)

I do think anonymity is an important issue for the DEX and one that needs a solution. I'm basing this opinion on changes I saw in usage of BlockTrades when BitShares switched from 1.0 which was closer to "bitcoin-level" anonymity to 2.0 (everyone sees everything). BlockTrades "lost" several of our larger customers, including our biggest customer at that time (no, it wasn't anyone related to CNX, but it was a prominent figure in BTS). But, from my understanding of it, I think "blinded transactions" would be sufficient to address the issue.

That said, I do agree that another of the biggest issues facing the DEX is marketing at this point. Most of the active marketing to date is being done by Ronny from OpenLedger, but I think we as a community can do more. I was really happy to see Chronos' worker proposal as it looks like a reasonably priced worker to help out in one of our weak spots: video documentation about various aspects of BitShares. I want to encourage anyone who hasn't voted yet to vote for his proposal and see how it goes.

[nomoreheroes7]

STEEM is a Reddit-esque social media platform. What is Reddit's problem?

http://www.recode.net/2014/3/3/11624114/still-in-the-red-reddit-to-donate-one-tenth-of-ad-revenue-to-charity

Reddit's problem is that even with a massive userbase their costs are too high and their revenues are too low.
After ten years Reddit is still a loss making business model despite being the 14th most visited site in the US & 36th in the world in 2015. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit

As of 2015, Reddit had 542 million monthly visitors (234 million unique users), ranking 14th most visited web-site in US and 36th in the world.[6] Across 2015, Reddit saw 82.54 billion pageviews, 73.15 million submissions, 725.85 million comments, and 6.89 billion upvotes from its users.[7]

So for STEEM to be an improvement on a Reddit-esque  platform they would have to find a way to drastically increase the revenue and/or reduce the costs of that business model. STEEM have done the opposite...

Reddit hypothesized that its platform would be improved if everyone who contributed to reddit.com by posting stories, adding comments or voting were rewarded with a fair share in Reddit, Inc1. Steem aims to support social media and online communities by returning much of its value to the people who provide valuable contributions

By paying users for popular content and even for comments/voting they've drastically increased the costs of that business model. Reddit earned <$10 million in 2014, which wasn't even enough to cover expenses. (Crunch some numbers using the wiki to see why it's not worthwhile paying for content on this type of platform and/or how much you'd have to increase revenue by to justify it.)

STEEM also reduces potential revenue per user as their initial user-base will be even less likely to give up personal info, allow targeted advertising or the censoring of board content to make it more advertiser friendly & I won't even go into the differences in the PR approaches.

In practical terms this means STEEM's burn rate (monthly expenses) will presumably be extremely high (paying to acquire users and for their content) but it will achieve no/low revenue and no meaningful longer term valuation from serious investors because the potential value per user, is if anything likely negative, so it will likely run into financial issues very rapidly. 

(It also deliberately went against all the crypto-currency community's cultural regulations, which is fine, but means as a result it's unlikely to be popular/adopted as a crypto-currency in it's own right.)

This is just a personal opinon, feel free to disagree and or make counter arguments especially those more familiar with the business model and future plans but I don't see a Steem merger being an issue as I don't see it being around for long.

(Other than keeping an inflated value for long enough to justify a high percentage stake in some sort of merger I can't see the point.)

 

[Empirical1.2]

STEEM is a Reddit-esque social media platform. What is Reddit's problem?

http://www.recode.net/2014/3/3/11624114/still-in-the-red-reddit-to-donate-one-tenth-of-ad-revenue-to-charity

Reddit's problem is that even with a massive userbase their costs are too high and their revenues are too low.
After ten years Reddit is still a loss making business model despite being the 14th most visited site in the US & 36th in the world in 2015. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit

As of 2015, Reddit had 542 million monthly visitors (234 million unique users), ranking 14th most visited web-site in US and 36th in the world.[6] Across 2015, Reddit saw 82.54 billion pageviews, 73.15 million submissions, 725.85 million comments, and 6.89 billion upvotes from its users.[7]

So for STEEM to be an improvement on a Reddit-esque  platform they would have to find a way to drastically increase the revenue and/or reduce the costs of that business model. STEEM have done the opposite...

Reddit hypothesized that its platform would be improved if everyone who contributed to reddit.com by posting stories, adding comments or voting were rewarded with a fair share in Reddit, Inc1. Steem aims to support social media and online communities by returning much of its value to the people who provide valuable contributions

By paying users for popular content and even for comments/voting they've drastically increased the costs of that business model. Reddit earned <$10 million in 2014, which wasn't even enough to cover expenses. (Crunch some numbers using the wiki to see why it's not worthwhile paying for content on this type of platform and/or how much you'd have to increase revenue by to justify it.)

STEEM also reduces potential revenue per user as their initial user-base will be even less likely to give up personal info, allow targeted advertising or the censoring of board content to make it more advertiser friendly & I won't even go into the differences in the PR approaches.

In practical terms this means STEEM's burn rate (monthly expenses) will presumably be extremely high (paying to acquire users and for their content) but it will achieve no/low revenue and no meaningful longer term valuation from serious investors because the potential value per user, is if anything likely negative, so it will likely run into financial issues very rapidly. 

(It also deliberately went against all the crypto-currency community's cultural regulations, which is fine, but means as a result it's unlikely to be popular/adopted as a crypto-currency in it's own right.)

This is just a personal opinon, feel free to disagree and or make counter arguments especially those more familiar with the business model and future plans but I don't see a Steem merger being an issue as I don't see it being around for long.

(Other than keeping an inflated value for long enough to justify a high percentage stake in some sort of merger I can't see the point.)

[crypto4ever]

Furthermore, a good part of the reason people want to avoid using centralized exchanges is due to privacy concerns, and given that the trail is completely transparent on bitshares.......

[...]
No, I stand by my assertion that the biggest use for the platform was to act as a stablecoin bank. And without stealth, it's never taking off.
Would you use your bank if anyone in the world could check your balance online?

Me neither. Nor would 99.999% of the people.

Anonymity comes from "how" you obtain BTS to transfer in, and "how" you exit BTS, by gatewaying it out.

You shouldn't need anonymity within the Dex itself.

I really don't think that's the problem.

I think the problem is soley limited to: 

a) Ease of Use

b) Popularity (you need to use the Dex because everyone else is using the Dex scenario, just like facebook)

c) Education and Advertising as an ongoing effort.

The DAC and DAO, and DEX, all have one fatal flaw.  There's nothing in its design that encourages ongoing promotion of itself.

This is why large corporations (even Coke and Pepsi) to this day, spend gazillions promoting themselves.  Do you think if Coke & Pepsi stopped advertising they would lose market share?  They're industry leaders already.   Yet they don't chance it.

Sure, someone could make an offer to do promotion in exchange for payment. But this is a tragedy of the commons problem.  No one wants to spend BTS on something that may not yield a return, so they wait for "the other guy" to do it.  Problem is, we're all "the other guy", and none of us is doing it either.

BitShares as a Dex is a tool that is hoping to go viral without any significant adoption plan.   You don't create a tool hoping smart people will discover the tool.   If that was the case, the next infomercial on TV showing the latest gadget would be non-existent.  They'd simply create a new gadget, put it on store shelves, and "hope" that smart people would discover it in the store, or go by word of mouth.

Word of mouth, and smart people, are very limited ways of growing adoption, and are doomed to fail.

As soon as we realize this problem, perhaps we can fix it.

(Oh, and everytime we get a little "blurb" somewhere in an online article, that is nothing to throw a party about.  That's the very minimal of what we really require)

[cylonmaker2053]

One of the main issues Bitshares faces right now is the lack of interest around the market pegged assets

Don't underestimate the fact that nobody will want to use money without any privacy at all. Stealth not being here in June is a giant blunder (imo).

I wouldn't hold my breath for stealth to be added to Bitshares anytime soon, the current implementation was always far too clunky and difficult to use to be of any real value. Semi-anonymity is easy to achieve by just using a random account name, that should be enough for most users.

The main use case emerging for Bitshares is as an exchange, so that's where our efforts should be focused. That means finding out what the obstacles are to Bitshares being adopted as a real exchange. Here are some issues I can think of off the top of my head:

- Marketmaker incentives
- Too "big" of a GUI -> a more focused exchange GUI is needed with less features
- Bitassets generation -> needs a new approach to stimulate supply

i don't think we have much of an issue with system specs that prevents traders from using the DEX. We have a bit of a marketing problem, both for end users of our smartcoins and for traders who just haven't yet ventured into our playground. I postulate that we already have a good enough system and we need to focus more on marketing. we really just need to draw in our first big player. we're one interested hedge fund away from really coming alive.

that said, i can also see value in some sort of direct subsidy model for posting collateral to short smartcoins into existence. i don't think it's necessary, but if there's a big urge to experiment with some way of incentivizing shorts, that's the way to go.

[bitsharesbrazil]

We just have to stabilish priorities.....what we want with dex? Make it more widespread.....ok, what do we really need to make atract more, what is really lacking? Is stealth? Is a huuuuge market maker? Is improving mpa? Lets just focus in priorities, if dex start putting strong volume people will surrender to it,  n.stakeholders will start to have the control of the game, its hatd for dan to.start from.zero without big money behind him to.make a new dex for steem, we have the money, we can develop n focus n priorities n make things happen.

Regards to open assets, no problem with them, we help then then help us, we will.have gateway all around the world, that is cool, lets help them n make smartcoins happen too.

Time to.setup the train n make it left the station so we will means more hype n more money for development.

[mint chocolate chip]

A straight merger will never happen, just forget about that. What could happen however is Bitshares deciding to adopt some of the features developed for Steem once they've proven that they work, like rate limited free transactions, market maker incentives and possibly the new pegged asset model.

One of the main issues Bitshares faces right now is the lack of interest around the market pegged assets; although the peg works fairly well the generation process through shorting/borrowing is failing to generate enough supply to make the assets viable. Steem has a new solution for this problem that could be ported to Bitshares if it turns out to be more successful. Bitshares currently does not have an ETH asset, perhaps a bitasset 2.0 could be implemented first using ETH, that could generate a lot of interest and would make it very easy for ETH holders to come trade on Bitshares. Anyway, we first need to see the new model in action in Steem, which will happen after the 4th of July..

svk, the new Steem model could not possibly overlap our market and become a competitor...
And it surely can't be used by BitShares...

I wanted to make sure Steem didn't compete with BitShares market.  In fact, one of the reasons I was willing to help with Steem was that its feature set is fundamentally incompatible with BitShares and we could not hardfork BitShares to implement what Steem does.

[karnal]

@svk:

That goes against what's been discussed by @kenCode and others recently.

The DEX idea is alright and everything, but since bitassets aren't really being used either, is it really any better than poloniex? All these UIAs floating around have just as much counterparty risk - in fact, even greater, as they are much smaller companies with much less resources than polo and all the other big exchanges.

Do you seriously think many people will give polo up for trading at the dex?

And sure, nice to have these ICO/IPOs happening on the Bitshares platform, but how is that going to raise the market cap?
Anyone in their right mind (or who at least understands the counterparty risk) will immediately trade these UIAs off for real deal.

Furthermore, a good part of the reason people want to avoid using centralized exchanges is due to privacy concerns, and given that the trail is completely transparent on bitshares.......

Furthermore, there is no proxying support to this day on the gui, so it is very trivial for any of the centralized endpoints to correlate IPs to usernames.

And it makes little sense to keep generating random accounts to transfer, besides bloating the wallet beyond belief (to say nothing of practicality), wasn't that exactly what this scheme of having unique names was meant to solve?


No, I stand by my assertion that the biggest use for the platform was to act as a stablecoin bank. And without stealth, it's never taking off.
Would you use your bank if anyone in the world could check your balance online?

Me neither. Nor would 99.999% of the people.

[blahblah7up]

What could happen however is Bitshares deciding to adopt some of the features developed for Steem once they've proven that they work

It should be made clear that many of the features developed for Steem were effectively stolen from the BitShares community who were actively contributing ideas to improve BITSHARES.

Steem has many innovations that have been discussed here on bitsharestalk and in the mumble sessions including:

1. Only vesting stake can vote for witnesses (19 by approval voting)
2. One witness slot time shared with remaining witnesses (not in the top 19)
3. One witness slot is selected via Proof of Work
4. No transaction fees
5. Vesting stake is protected from any inflation / dilution caused by witnesses / miners.

And this without remuneration.

[svk]

One of the main issues Bitshares faces right now is the lack of interest around the market pegged assets

Don't underestimate the fact that nobody will want to use money without any privacy at all. Stealth not being here in June is a giant blunder (imo).

I wouldn't hold my breath for stealth to be added to Bitshares anytime soon, the current implementation was always far too clunky and difficult to use to be of any real value. Semi-anonymity is easy to achieve by just using a random account name, that should be enough for most users.

The main use case emerging for Bitshares is as an exchange, so that's where our efforts should be focused. That means finding out what the obstacles are to Bitshares being adopted as a real exchange. Here are some issues I can think of off the top of my head:

- Marketmaker incentives
- Too "big" of a GUI -> a more focused exchange GUI is needed with less features
- Bitassets generation -> needs a new approach to stimulate supply

[karnal]

One of the main issues Bitshares faces right now is the lack of interest around the market pegged assets

Don't underestimate the fact that nobody will want to use money without any privacy at all. Stealth not being here in June is a giant blunder (imo).