Now that Daniel Larimer (aka bytemaster) is gone...

[okidoki]

Bitcoin has not had any innovation for 7 years and look where it is...

You are comparing apples and oranges. Bitcoin is successful despite its lack of innovation. That is how powerful the first mover advantage is.

Counterpoint to your argument: Ethereum has innovated a lot and isn't stopping yet and look at its marketcap rise.

Ethereum has a big market cap because for years everybody was fantasizing about what this could become. but in reality it is not used for anything right now... and as there is almost no scalability I think it will never be used for anything but speculation... Lisk is a lot smarter in several things than Ethereum and it might be used someday for something. But the real massive usecase in my eyes are the financial apps like BitShares, although there are and will be many issues with regulators.

Also Bitcoin is on top because of its liquidity. Chinese cannot enter and exit Bitshares without moving the price at this point. They use it for protection from devaluation from CNY... but you cannot pump even a million USD in Bitshares without doubling the market cap. So for this type of usage they have to use Bitcoin until volume and market cap goes up for BitShares.

[bitsharesbrazil]

Empirical arhag kencode always putting great questions over the table, love you all

[kenCode]

If I was a rich guy and wanted to park my money and assets somewhere safe, would I choose the BitShares blockchain? Or would I be a bit skiddish knowing that my assets and such would be visible on cryptofresh.com? Even sending money to people is easily visible.
 
edit: the only features we are going to add to BitShares right now is Stealth (as soon as we can afford it). Stealth is already done for the most part but it just needs an awesome gui plugged in and secure backups (we use IPFS/IPNS now). you want Whales? -give them some privacy.

[okidoki]

Bitcoin has not had any innovation for 7 years and look where it is...

You are comparing apples and oranges. Bitcoin is successful despite its lack of innovation. That is how powerful the first mover advantage is.

Counterpoint to your argument: Ethereum has innovated a lot and isn't stopping yet and look at its marketcap rise.

Besides first mover advantage it's because people want a lot stability & certainty from the pure digital currencies like BTC, LTC, PPC etc. so their lack of innovation (Change) is often a positive.

The decentralized companies who aim to bring something to the market other than a limited, immutable crypto-currency have to be more innovative, with additional revenue generating (in future) products/apps in order to increase their value. (However for both, increased utility, accessibility and third party integration often adds more value than more expensive development work. eg. Payment processor/exchange/bank/Azure integration etc.)

There is a limit for the normal user in terms of innovation... I mean you can add a Bond-Market, which would be a good thing because of the interest and so on... but not more Committees, worker proposals and stuff like this... it is enough now I think. Imo I think it is better to focus on educating the public about this great product. In Bitcoin the public has not to learn much... and what they know is enough to be on top for the next few years. In BitShares one had to learn and learn i order to know what at any point in time was going on. Many people do not have the time, to learn about rule changes, prepare themselves and so on.

So Bond-Market addition ok, bug removal of course, but for the rest of possible features, or above all changes in rules, better not do it and focus on getting the message out there what BitShares is today and will be for the foreseeable future.

[Empirical1.2]

Bitcoin has not had any innovation for 7 years and look where it is...

You are comparing apples and oranges. Bitcoin is successful despite its lack of innovation. That is how powerful the first mover advantage is.

Counterpoint to your argument: Ethereum has innovated a lot and isn't stopping yet and look at its marketcap rise.

Besides first mover advantage it's because people want a lot stability & certainty from the pure digital currencies like BTC, LTC, PPC etc. so their lack of innovation (Change) is often a positive.

The decentralized companies who aim to bring something to the market other than a limited, immutable crypto-currency have to be more innovative, with additional revenue generating (in future) products/apps in order to increase their value. (However for both, increased utility, accessibility and third party integration often adds more value than more expensive development work. eg. Payment processor/exchange/bank/Azure integration etc.)

[arhag]

Bitcoin has not had any innovation for 7 years and look where it is...

You are comparing apples and oranges. Bitcoin is successful despite its lack of innovation. That is how powerful the first mover advantage is.

Counterpoint to your argument: Ethereum has innovated a lot and isn't stopping yet and look at its marketcap rise.

[Empirical1.2]

I am against a rebranding... BitShares has an excellent brand and logo. Who would want to start from scratch?

Come on, we are talking about several million market cap and you are worried about a logo whose good replacement might cost at most a few thousand USD?

The logo is not bad, I agree but the problem is the name, not the logo.
Every single marketing professional on this forum has told us that the name is a nightmare for marketing purposes, both in terms of wider consumer adoption and for the purpose of business pitches.

Regrading the "excellent brand" - at this stage we have no brand to speak of.

I know you're very passionate about this topic and had the rebranding discussion previously when you ran the poll for changing BitShares to 'Graphene'  https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,17989.0.html and only 20% were in favour.

It would be a very divisive event imo & BitShares after 2.5 years is a very well established brand with loads of valuable BitShares content that will give the man in the street a lot of confidence that this isn't some fly by night blockchain once we become more user friendly.

What BitShares has been lacking is the clear brand message of 'What is BitShares' but that can and should be addressed without a full rebrand imo.

Unrelated but was just looking at Bitshares on google trends, interesting how high we spiked in March this year with the Mircrosoft Azure addition. https://www.google.co.uk/trends/explore#q=bitshares

(A relatively low cost easy integration/brand association that drove BTS interest to the third highest levels seen and our largest volume day ever I think. Imagine if the whales hadn't been selling into that. That's a good example of what we should be doing more of at this stage imo.)

[jakub]

Making rash decisions right now because the market cap sits is not a good idea.

I'm suggesting a name change not because of the low market cap.
It's meant to be an indication that our product has evolved from being a blockchain experiment to being an industrial grade exchange platform, on par with Ripple.

I'm asking you to think big, not at the level of the headache of finding a graphic designer to create a new logo.
If we keep having this mindset, than I wrong in my judgment about our business maturity: we are still *NOT* on par with Ripple and we should stick to the current name and "branding".

[jakub]

I am against a rebranding... BitShares has an excellent brand and logo. Who would want to start from scratch?

Come on, we are talking about several million market cap and you are worried about a logo whose good replacement might cost at most a few thousand USD?

The logo is not bad, I agree but the problem is the name, not the logo.
Every single marketing professional on this forum has told us that the name is a nightmare for marketing purposes, both in terms of wider consumer adoption and for the purpose of business pitches.

Regrading the "excellent brand" - at this stage we have no brand to speak of.

[ebit]

I see nothing wrong with the name BitShares, I'd like to leave it alone. The name itself screams what we do. "bit" saying something to the geeky minded that we are a digital company of some kind and "shares" which says company shares to me. It's a place for businesses to go.
 
Making rash decisions right now because the market cap sits is not a good idea. BitShares Munich is out there (as you can see everywhere) striking up relationships, deals, partners and bringing investors now for marketing and they LOVE our name.

 

[bitsharesbrazil]

HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLD

[okidoki]

I see nothing wrong with the name BitShares, I'd like to leave it alone. The name itself screams what we do. "bit" saying something to the geeky minded that we are a digital company of some kind and "shares" which says company shares to me. It's a place for businesses to go.
 
Making rash decisions right now because the market cap sits is not a good idea. BitShares Munich is out there (as you can see everywhere) striking up relationships, deals, partners and bringing investors now for marketing and they LOVE our name.

 

[kenCode]

I see nothing wrong with the name BitShares, I'd like to leave it alone. The name itself screams what we do. "bit" saying something to the geeky minded that we are a digital company of some kind and "shares" which says company shares to me. It's a place for businesses to go.
 
Making rash decisions right now because the market cap sits is not a good idea. BitShares Munich is out there (as you can see everywhere) striking up relationships, deals, partners and bringing investors now for marketing and they LOVE our name.

[jakub]

While I think bitshares best current and near future selling point is "The Dex", fact is Bitshares can be so much more than just a dex.  It may seem like the right move now to rename, but it would be pigeon holing bitshares when it starts to expand it's feature set.

DEX is (and most probably will always be) BitShares core functionality, it's the basis for everything else built on top of it.
Without DEX there is no BTS, whereas other features can (and probably will) evolve.

We could keep the name of the core asset as it is - it makes a lot of sense, BTS are (bit)shares in the DEX.

[arhag]

I nominate xeroc as community leader, now that Dan is busy with Steem.

Not sure about the rebrand. That is a pretty big change. And though I like the simplicity of the name DEX, but how does that affect SEO?

These changes however would require another pitch-fork, similar to that of 1.0 > 2.0, because the base functions are too radically different from our current code base. The steem experiment likely will reveal its potential successes/failures by September.. if what Dan offered previously is still at all feasible at that time, then I would list this as a pending 3rd event to coincide with a rebranding.

I don't think adding market liquidity subsidies (assuming funding comes from worker proposals) and rate-limited free transactions are big enough changes to warrant a version change to 3.0 (they are of course hard forking changes though).

And personally I don't agree with the Steem Dollar mechanism (the one change that really would be radical for BitShares) being used on BitShares (assuming BTS was the backing asset) as the new smartcoin implementation. Seigniorage can be an added mechanism to a smartcoins 2.0 to act as a last resort insurance to back the peg. But in that case each smartcoin would have its own token backing it (not BTS) that could be diluted to back the peg. The holders of the token are compensated for this inflation risk by receiving dividends (or buyback and burn) from profits made from the interest revenue paid by shorters. This is what MakerDao is doing with their Dai and MKR. There are valuable things to take from their approach for a smartcoins 2.0, including backing the smartcoin by more than one collateral type for greater diversity.

I suppose the only other radical change that can be borrowed from Steem and implemented in BitShares is the idea that only vested stake can vote, and they would be compensated for their lack of liquidity by a small but reasonable interest rate (see the post linked to in the footnote [1] for more details on a possible implementation). This is not radical or difficult to implement from a coding perspective, but it is socially radical because it changes the rules. That is a change that might perhaps require a "pitch-fork" (interesting term btw) to a 3.0 (or even a new rebranded blockchain). Or maybe the vast majority of stakeholders would think that is a really great idea and have no problem with it for a hard fork? Probably not.

[1]
https://steemit.com/bitshares/@xeroc/improvment-bitshares-workers-proposal-thedao#@arhag/re-xeroc-improvment-bitshares-workers-proposal-thedao-20160520t015315090z

EDIT: DAMN this forum for replacing the @ symbol followed by text with the member tag even when it clearly shouldn't (in a link for example). It makes it impossible to link to Steemit.