Profits, Performance, Trust & Efficiency

[cryptosig]

So who has better security BTS or BTC?

Who cares.  Neither have been compromised nor have exhibited any clear incentive for anyone to do so.

WTH are you talking about, you can't compare the two in security. BTS doesn't exist, the amount of people who have actually run any test transactions are in the 10's or 100's. You simply cannot compare a system that has 5 years of proof with one that is in an alpha state. Handing over control to people is going to have consequences.  Your never going to convince real people in finance that it is in there best interest to invest in some complicated scheme, consisting of PTS/AGS, DACs, and Chains, and that has some anonymous guy in charge of the money and trading. Do this and wallstreet will dump millions into Etherium or some other technology.

Don't talk ripple up, it has no volume and is a complete premine.

[dipplum]

several questions are not clear from the discussions:
1) what is the process to vote for a trustee, how many candidates will we have and how long will the election take?
2) how to fire a trustee? Is a hard fork absolutely required for adopting a new trustee?
3) is the trustee server also open source? how can we be sure if it is actually running that code? how can we validate that the process that the trustee follows to select the next block is actually fair?

[cryptosig]

I don't think centralization is a good idea.

The cryptocurrency grave yard is littered with centralized schemes. Make no mistake that there is enough pressure already IMO on I3 to be indicted for securities violations, whether that is the case will be up to a court to decide. You have taken steps to stop the regulators from stopping your work, but they can arrest you and accuse you at any time. They know they have a better than 80% chance to get a conviction at trial, just because of the psychology of an authority saying you did something wrong. I can deal with that element of centralization, but just barely.

I think that any trustee that reveals their identity and lives in a country with strong financial regulations, such as the US, will go to jail for operating with out a license, selling securities with out a license, conspiracy to commit security fraud, money transmission without a licence, running a money services business without a license, the litany of charges will go on forever in some cases.

This will basically only leave trustees in countries where regulations are lax to operate the trustee scheme. This type of system will ensure that wall street and most of main street will not participate. This is bad for my and others' investment in PTS,AGS, and BTS. I will not participate in such a scheme, I believe the only reason that Bitcoin is any different than any prior is because of the blockchain decentralization invention. You are literally taking the greatest invention of the century and throwing it out the window for centralized control. Make no mistake you are taking a step backward.

If you are serious about this thing you have created, you would spend the time to do it right. Satoshi took years crafting his system, you can't take a few extra months?

[bytemaster]

One additional point. If it were possible to design the BTX DAC so that the trustee mechanisms are scriptable this could allow for people the freedom of expression to try many different organizational models. Trial and error lead to algorithmic optimization over time but you need enough flexibility and ease for different DACs to try many different models.

So I would say if possible add a scripting layer to this so that for example the amount of power a trustee has is something which can be voted on, revoked, with a very fine level of granularity. The fear is that the community might not be able to keep track of the source code and the trustee could somehow become a dictator.

If we want the trustee to be able to act in a way which is in the best interest of the majority of shareholders but the trustee does not have the explicit power to do so, perhaps this would be an area for a script to create a sort of digital contract which gives the trustee certain privileges. The principle of least privilege can be followed so the trustee never has any more privileges than is necessary, but voting or some other mechanism such as a prediction market has to allow for feedback.

Ideally the trustee and the maintainer of the source are two different individuals.   Like bitcoin every update to the source has the potential for a hard fork of the network.  Remember, people don't just 'trust' the trustee on the validity of the block.  They verify every block follows the rules and the first time the trustee produces an invalid block the user's client is notified that one of two things has happened:

 1) They have not updated and the trustee went down a hard fork without also maintaining the old fork.
 2) The trustee is bad and is using non-standard code that violates the rules... a new trustee is needed.

  In either case the user knows immediately that they need to take some action.

[luckybit]

One additional point. If it were possible to design the BTX DAC so that the trustee mechanisms are scriptable this could allow for people the freedom of expression to try many different organizational models. Trial and error lead to algorithmic optimization over time but you need enough flexibility and ease for different DACs to try many different models.

So I would say if possible add a scripting layer to this so that for example the amount of power a trustee has is something which can be voted on, revoked, with a very fine level of granularity. The fear is that the community might not be able to keep track of the source code and the trustee could somehow become a dictator.

If we want the trustee to be able to act in a way which is in the best interest of the majority of shareholders but the trustee does not have the explicit power to do so, perhaps this would be an area for a script to create a sort of digital contract which gives the trustee certain privileges. The principle of least privilege can be followed so the trustee never has any more privileges than is necessary, but voting or some other mechanism such as a prediction market has to allow for feedback.

[ebit]

Trustee is one people or one team?
I think one team is good.Such as,whoever has 10000bts then is the member of the team.
If forked ,then ,the team can make a vote in  keyhotee or anywhere.

[luckybit]

I want to thank everyone for their feedback so lets address some things:

1) Delegation of your stake is the way most people will prefer to operate.  Lets assume that any successful design will depend upon this delegation of votes to 'voting keys' which are independent of 'spending keys'.

2) A single Trustee can periodically abuse their power in 'politically acceptable ways'.... I can see them blocking any transaction attempting to spend funds stolen by the FBI without generating enough uproar to vote them out of office.  In effect, the trustee has defacto power to freeze funds of minorities so long as it was politically acceptable of the majority.   This is a potential problem, but one that is solved by competition.

3) If viewed as companies, each company is competing in the market and the value of its shares will be based upon how secure their network is and how 'fair' it is.  A network run by someone who refused to play politics would gain value much like low-regulation economic regions. 

4) There are many ways to select such a trustee and the result of market competition and eliminating barriers to entry would be the best form of decentralization.

Lets think in terms of 'value to customer'  vs 'risk to customer' and what is the customer willing to pay?   

Lets also realize that this particular problem is very hard and that the *real answer* is to have many competing systems and let the market sort it out.  Given the goal of competing systems, it is hard to compete with something when all you have is nothing.   So proving the business models work (BTS X anyone?) and then committing to improve DACs is the way to go.   I could see the trustee working to decentralize his block production process via Ripple Consensus.      I could see voting systems set up.

In bitcoin land, the mining pools are 'delegates' which then direct the voting power of the masses to rapidly resolve forks.   Shareholders should delegate their power in similar ways.  So long as it is easy to change and unambiguous we would have a solid system.   This delegation could even occur on the block chain itself.     If it happened on the blockchain the trustee could block votes for anyone else, but this type of hostile takeover is the grounds upon which a fork will be started with a new trustee.  Subverting the 'democratic' process supported by the chain would be clear signs that the trustee is no longer in charge.

99% of the time if a hard-fork is required to correct the problem, there will only be a single hard fork and a leader will step up to champion the cause.  The market will follow the chain with the most support.

Market is decentralization.

This is a lot more palatable than before. Inclusion of mining pools is a good move. If it's a democratic process and is as decentralized as possible, and if there is a legitimate reason which you can explain for having a trustee then I can get behind the idea.

I think the difficult part isn't to get people on this forum behind the idea though. You're going to have to make a compelling case for this because this is the sort of alien thinking that will be beyond most people conceptually.

Just as Stan had to write articles about what a DAC is, you're going to have to describe this trustee system using a metaphor which people can make sense of. My understanding of the idea is that the trustee is the primary DAC operator. The roles have to be set and the limited power of the trustee must be made explicit.

You will probably need an entire article just on the trustee, their role, why the trustee is a necessary evil, and have some numbers to prove it's actually better for performance, security, and so on. If you have statistics which back the case and the concepts are explained then the most knowledgeable will get it and over time it can be explained deeper in videos, interviews, and more.

I think in the initial article you're going to have to make it very visual. An info graphic may be necessary to accompany this initial article. We need to see at a glance what shape the network will look like, what the roles are, in visual form, and then make the case in the article.

See how that is received in my opinion. I think it's risky to do this but if the rewards are great and reasoning made clear a lot of people in the decentralization community are risk takers and open to experimentation.

[bytemaster]

Would you please give a brief indication of the implications of using both. Would you be releasing two versions of of each DAC at the same time, and PTS/AGS holders would get at least 10% in each version, and must run two blockchains simultaneously for every DAC?

I would release the one I think is best, competitors would probably fork it and still honor AGS/PTS.  Remember we can fork them if they don't .    If they produce a better product / solution then I will adopt it for future DACs.    My goal is most value, best results.   Competition makes us all stronger and I welcome it.

[onceuponatime]

Would you please give a brief indication of the implications of using both. Would you be releasing two versions of of each DAC at the same time, and PTS/AGS holders would get at least 10% in each version, and must run two blockchains simultaneously for every DAC?

[jae208]

Greetings Bitshares community, I'm a longtime lurker, first time poster.

I have to agree with Dan on this simply for the fact that the bitcoin centralization argument has thus far been nullified in practice, by the realization that the central mining power has little financial incentive to double spend because it will drive down the price of its stake.  Yet countless hours have been spent debating this.  According to the current market cap of BTC, some amount of centralization works in a real world crypto.  If Sato had held back the launch of bitcoin because it was not perfectly 100% decentralized, then many of us would still have our wealth stored in the bank of Cyprus.

If you could quantify and compare the actual real world decentralization flaw risk models between bitcoin and bitshares (with the trustee system), what is the quantitative result?  Are we more or less at risk to attack than bitcoin?  That is the only question potential investors will have about this since they are simply comparing BTS to the current BTC benchmark, and not some theoretical 100% decentralized, 100% secure Bank of Star Trek crypto yet to be invented.

If this trustee system is at least as secure as centralized ASIC BTC, then we should implement this ASAP.  We are not trying to be perfect; we are trying to beat bitcoin.  Who is the top crypto out there? Ripple? Can you put a Ripple private key in cold storage? Ethereum? When? In the third quarter?  MSC? XCP?  Maybe if the bitcoin central authority modifies the code to assist them.  NXT?  PPC?  If you want your private keys exposed.

Yes, all of us have high hopes, and yes, of course a perfectly decentralized model is the ultimate goal of Dan’s DACs.  However, the more tangible, and realistic goal which Dan is trying to achieve here is simply a better bitcoin model where the risk imposed by the central authority is simply less.

The Bit-“share” meme conjures up an owner participation alternative to bitcoin, much like Memory Coin, FTC, DOGE, etc.  One where the active community of responsible stakeholders is operating like an ant colony under the major incentive which is to ensure a robust system.  As with most investments, you cannot simply buy and hold, but must perform due diligence on occasion, and the added effort we must apply because of this trustee model can be considered the necessary due diligence that we must do to ensure the robustness of the system. 

We all want our coins sit in cold storage forever and reap mad rewards.  This is not Mike Judge’s Idiocracy just yet; today’s investors must still apply effort on occasion.  You will still need to move your BTS annually or be penalized with a 5% laziness hit, so vote your shares when you do that.  It’s ok to strive for perfection, and maybe Dan will be the first to launch it, but right now, I will settle for being “better than bitcoin”.
 
Let's help him design the “best” trustee structure, or else that will be the first part of BTS that gets changed in the first “Lightshares” fork.  In fact, by opening this to discussion, Dan has just tipped his hand revealing to his competitors what an incredible shortcut in the BTS development process this could be, and that if utilized in the way Dan envisions, would let our competitors get a working “better than bitcoin” product to the market before our perfectly decentralized BTS is launched.   

Time is money, and Dan’s time is cutting edge crypto.  He possess the vision of Tesla (Ethereum) who was designing a free energy wire around the planet, with the practicality of Edison (BTC), who worked to make the average human’s life easier today.  Furthermore, Dan is asking (not telling) us where he should spend his time.  Please feel grateful he doesn’t abandon this project all together to go do whatever he wants.  He certainly seems capable of that to me.  I vote for launch imperfection like Edison, and let Vatalik go insane struggling for perfection if and only if the BTS trustee system is arguably at least as secure as BTC.  If it is not as secure, then we must debate the pros and cons.
 
In short, the main questions crypto investors care about today is this: Where can I get the security of blockchain cold storage at the lowest security cost relative to bitcoin?  As soon as that answer is bitshares, then launch it.  If I understand Dan correctly, I believe that is what he is saying here.  My apologies if I’m wrong.
 
This seems like we are at a critical fork in the road to the successful BTS launch.  A fork that our competitors will be the first to exploit by offering countless alternatives to.   

I’ve been lurking here for 5 months without a peep.  Why? Simply because I see that the man actually reads these posts.  What is five minutes of Dan’s time worth to us?

 

Whoa... you should probably contribute more often.
I'm sold
Maybe using .dac's post will convince everyone, I really like this post.

[bytemaster]

[NewMine]

Greetings Bitshares community, I'm a longtime lurker, first time poster.

I have to agree with Dan on this simply for the fact that the bitcoin centralization argument has thus far been nullified in practice, by the realization that the central mining power has little financial incentive to double spend because it will drive down the price of its stake.  Yet countless hours have been spent debating this.  According to the current market cap of BTC, some amount of centralization works in a real world crypto.  If Sato had held back the launch of bitcoin because it was not perfectly 100% decentralized, then many of us would still have our wealth stored in the bank of Cyprus.

If you could quantify and compare the actual real world decentralization flaw risk models between bitcoin and bitshares (with the trustee system), what is the quantitative result?  Are we more or less at risk to attack than bitcoin?  That is the only question potential investors will have about this since they are simply comparing BTS to the current BTC benchmark, and not some theoretical 100% decentralized, 100% secure Bank of Star Trek crypto yet to be invented.

If this trustee system is at least as secure as centralized ASIC BTC, then we should implement this ASAP.  We are not trying to be perfect; we are trying to beat bitcoin.  Who is the top crypto out there? Ripple? Can you put a Ripple private key in cold storage? Ethereum? When? In the third quarter?  MSC? XCP?  Maybe if the bitcoin central authority modifies the code to assist them.  NXT?  PPC?  If you want your private keys exposed.

Yes, all of us have high hopes, and yes, of course a perfectly decentralized model is the ultimate goal of Dan’s DACs.  However, the more tangible, and realistic goal which Dan is trying to achieve here is simply a better bitcoin model where the risk imposed by the central authority is simply less.

The Bit-“share” meme conjures up an owner participation alternative to bitcoin, much like Memory Coin, FTC, DOGE, etc.  One where the active community of responsible stakeholders is operating like an ant colony under the major incentive which is to ensure a robust system.  As with most investments, you cannot simply buy and hold, but must perform due diligence on occasion, and the added effort we must apply because of this trustee model can be considered the necessary due diligence that we must do to ensure the robustness of the system. 

We all want our coins sit in cold storage forever and reap mad rewards.  This is not Mike Judge’s Idiocracy just yet; today’s investors must still apply effort on occasion.  You will still need to move your BTS annually or be penalized with a 5% laziness hit, so vote your shares when you do that.  It’s ok to strive for perfection, and maybe Dan will be the first to launch it, but right now, I will settle for being “better than bitcoin”.
 
Let's help him design the “best” trustee structure, or else that will be the first part of BTS that gets changed in the first “Lightshares” fork.  In fact, by opening this to discussion, Dan has just tipped his hand revealing to his competitors what an incredible shortcut in the BTS development process this could be, and that if utilized in the way Dan envisions, would let our competitors get a working “better than bitcoin” product to the market before our perfectly decentralized BTS is launched.   

Time is money, and Dan’s time is cutting edge crypto.  He possess the vision of Tesla (Ethereum) who was designing a free energy wire around the planet, with the practicality of Edison (BTC), who worked to make the average human’s life easier today.  Furthermore, Dan is asking (not telling) us where he should spend his time.  Please feel grateful he doesn’t abandon this project all together to go do whatever he wants.  He certainly seems capable of that to me.  I vote for launch imperfection like Edison, and let Vatalik go insane struggling for perfection if and only if the BTS trustee system is arguably at least as secure as BTC.  If it is not as secure, then we must debate the pros and cons.
 
In short, the main questions crypto investors care about today is this: Where can I get the security of blockchain cold storage at the lowest security cost relative to bitcoin?  As soon as that answer is bitshares, then launch it.  If I understand Dan correctly, I believe that is what he is saying here.  My apologies if I’m wrong.
 
This seems like we are at a critical fork in the road to the successful BTS launch.  A fork that our competitors will be the first to exploit by offering countless alternatives to.   

I’ve been lurking here for 5 months without a peep.  Why? Simply because I see that the man actually reads these posts.  What is five minutes of Dan’s time worth to us?

holy shit... 

Thanks for signing up and posting!   Your feed back and support is appreciated.   I think the biggest problem with the trustee approach isn't technical, but pure marketing.  There needs to be a clear and concise way to address the FUD that such an approach would be sure to draw.

Simply stating 'better than bitcoin' and 'better than ripple' may be good enough.  Perhaps a focus on UTILITY... which system provides the most value to the users?   I think we can then classify the value equation as:

VALUE = UTILITY * RISK

With the systems we are building we want to grow UTILITY faster than RISK.   If RISK is already very low and you can double UTILITY by sacrificing something far out on the risk curve then the overall VALUE of the system goes up.     People don't value bitcoin because it is decentralized... they value it because of what it can do for them. 

In most cases the alternatives to the trustee system seem to trade one RISK for another RISK at the cost of much UTILITY.    With a solid, responsible, well distributed trustee with backup plans in place the network can gain a lot of VALUE from the UTILITY provided by the TRUST.   

Of course UTILITY and RISK are both values that are in the eye of the beholder.  For this reason I am convinced that each DAC needs to have two parallel chains one that uses the trustee and one that uses some other system.  The market will quickly determine the value of the trustee over the more decentralized approach.   If governments start attacking the trustee in a way that the trustee cannot defend against, then the relative value of the two systems will shift.

Don't think for one second that someone wont take your open source work and release the alternative to whatever route you choose.

[hank]

Dan， I support you

[bytemaster]

Greetings Bitshares community, I'm a longtime lurker, first time poster.

I have to agree with Dan on this simply for the fact that the bitcoin centralization argument has thus far been nullified in practice, by the realization that the central mining power has little financial incentive to double spend because it will drive down the price of its stake.  Yet countless hours have been spent debating this.  According to the current market cap of BTC, some amount of centralization works in a real world crypto.  If Sato had held back the launch of bitcoin because it was not perfectly 100% decentralized, then many of us would still have our wealth stored in the bank of Cyprus.

If you could quantify and compare the actual real world decentralization flaw risk models between bitcoin and bitshares (with the trustee system), what is the quantitative result?  Are we more or less at risk to attack than bitcoin?  That is the only question potential investors will have about this since they are simply comparing BTS to the current BTC benchmark, and not some theoretical 100% decentralized, 100% secure Bank of Star Trek crypto yet to be invented.

If this trustee system is at least as secure as centralized ASIC BTC, then we should implement this ASAP.  We are not trying to be perfect; we are trying to beat bitcoin.  Who is the top crypto out there? Ripple? Can you put a Ripple private key in cold storage? Ethereum? When? In the third quarter?  MSC? XCP?  Maybe if the bitcoin central authority modifies the code to assist them.  NXT?  PPC?  If you want your private keys exposed.

Yes, all of us have high hopes, and yes, of course a perfectly decentralized model is the ultimate goal of Dan’s DACs.  However, the more tangible, and realistic goal which Dan is trying to achieve here is simply a better bitcoin model where the risk imposed by the central authority is simply less.

The Bit-“share” meme conjures up an owner participation alternative to bitcoin, much like Memory Coin, FTC, DOGE, etc.  One where the active community of responsible stakeholders is operating like an ant colony under the major incentive which is to ensure a robust system.  As with most investments, you cannot simply buy and hold, but must perform due diligence on occasion, and the added effort we must apply because of this trustee model can be considered the necessary due diligence that we must do to ensure the robustness of the system. 

We all want our coins sit in cold storage forever and reap mad rewards.  This is not Mike Judge’s Idiocracy just yet; today’s investors must still apply effort on occasion.  You will still need to move your BTS annually or be penalized with a 5% laziness hit, so vote your shares when you do that.  It’s ok to strive for perfection, and maybe Dan will be the first to launch it, but right now, I will settle for being “better than bitcoin”.
 
Let's help him design the “best” trustee structure, or else that will be the first part of BTS that gets changed in the first “Lightshares” fork.  In fact, by opening this to discussion, Dan has just tipped his hand revealing to his competitors what an incredible shortcut in the BTS development process this could be, and that if utilized in the way Dan envisions, would let our competitors get a working “better than bitcoin” product to the market before our perfectly decentralized BTS is launched.   

Time is money, and Dan’s time is cutting edge crypto.  He possess the vision of Tesla (Ethereum) who was designing a free energy wire around the planet, with the practicality of Edison (BTC), who worked to make the average human’s life easier today.  Furthermore, Dan is asking (not telling) us where he should spend his time.  Please feel grateful he doesn’t abandon this project all together to go do whatever he wants.  He certainly seems capable of that to me.  I vote for launch imperfection like Edison, and let Vatalik go insane struggling for perfection if and only if the BTS trustee system is arguably at least as secure as BTC.  If it is not as secure, then we must debate the pros and cons.
 
In short, the main questions crypto investors care about today is this: Where can I get the security of blockchain cold storage at the lowest security cost relative to bitcoin?  As soon as that answer is bitshares, then launch it.  If I understand Dan correctly, I believe that is what he is saying here.  My apologies if I’m wrong.
 
This seems like we are at a critical fork in the road to the successful BTS launch.  A fork that our competitors will be the first to exploit by offering countless alternatives to.   

I’ve been lurking here for 5 months without a peep.  Why? Simply because I see that the man actually reads these posts.  What is five minutes of Dan’s time worth to us?

holy shit... 

Thanks for signing up and posting!   Your feed back and support is appreciated.   I think the biggest problem with the trustee approach isn't technical, but pure marketing.  There needs to be a clear and concise way to address the FUD that such an approach would be sure to draw.

Simply stating 'better than bitcoin' and 'better than ripple' may be good enough.  Perhaps a focus on UTILITY... which system provides the most value to the users?   I think we can then classify the value equation as:

VALUE = UTILITY * RISK

With the systems we are building we want to grow UTILITY faster than RISK.   If RISK is already very low and you can double UTILITY by sacrificing something far out on the risk curve then the overall VALUE of the system goes up.     People don't value bitcoin because it is decentralized... they value it because of what it can do for them. 

In most cases the alternatives to the trustee system seem to trade one RISK for another RISK at the cost of much UTILITY.    With a solid, responsible, well distributed trustee with backup plans in place the network can gain a lot of VALUE from the UTILITY provided by the TRUST.   

Of course UTILITY and RISK are both values that are in the eye of the beholder.  For this reason I am convinced that each DAC needs to have two parallel chains one that uses the trustee and one that uses some other system.  The market will quickly determine the value of the trustee over the more decentralized approach.   If governments start attacking the trustee in a way that the trustee cannot defend against, then the relative value of the two systems will shift.   

 

[sfinder]

Greetings Bitshares community, I'm a longtime lurker, first time poster.
 
This seems like we are at a critical fork in the road to the successful BTS launch.  A fork that our competitors will be the first to exploit by offering countless alternatives to.   

I’ve been lurking here for 5 months without a peep.  Why? Simply because I see that the man actually reads these posts.  What is five minutes of Dan’s time worth to us?

Dan， do whatever you think is the best to the successful BTS launch...  you have the best judgement for what we can achieve