Market Report

[xeroc]

2. And for the idiots selling BTSX - first Thank you! and second, unfortunately I have broken all available piggy-banks in my house, so I after today I can no longer take advantage of your stupidity, but somebody else for sure will.

I am having the exact same issue here 

[tonyk]

1. Couple of posts above I said sell sell sell Bitshares Music....

I want to return on the topic.

You must be crazy to not be buying Bitshares Music at the current pre-sale. What the hell ... valuation of about $2,500,000...?

It is Nuts... sell your 2 large pizzas for 10K BTC wile you can.


2. And for the idiots selling BTSX - first Thank you! and second, unfortunately I have broken all available piggy-banks in my house, so I after today I can no longer take advantage of your stupidity, but somebody else for sure will.

0.002 BTSX

[oldman]

My questions would be, what about this music DAC makes it need to be decentralized?  Hit a chord with the kids at being anti-establishment?  Is someone trying to avoid intellectual property?  Why not just a centralized website with a db backend to keep track of shares ?

This is a good question! My thoughts are:

With a blockchain tracking the ownership of artistcoins people can exchange those coins outside the peertracks platform on exhanges and between phones.

Other devs can write applications around the open source software.

Artistcoins have value as long as the bitshares music blockchain exists no matter how long the peershares company exists.

Transparency: With a dentralized database you couldnt prove it if you had the feeling that some artistcons where stolen from your account, with a blockchain(explorer) you can.

Downsides:
User can loose his private keys and lose his shares? Might be possible to offer a service to backup private keys by peertracks optionally. You could see of peertracks company abused this on the blockchain.

Slightly more costly than running one cerntralized database. Might not be as many delegates might work for the several DACs.

Dependence on the DPOS network's security (potentially vunerable to attacks). Isnt a centralized database also vunerable to attacks .

What else?

iTunes.

That is all.

[cob]

One thing to keep in mind is PeerTracks' role in bootstrapping the whole thing.

Maybe regulations will change and come down hard on this corporation, or maybe a future lawsuit, basically anything can happen... but not to BitShares Music! It's a DAC. It'll go on as long as delegates are there to do their job.

So it could be centralized. But it would be fragile and far from immortal.

[santaclause102]

My questions would be, what about this music DAC makes it need to be decentralized?  Hit a chord with the kids at being anti-establishment?  Is someone trying to avoid intellectual property?  Why not just a centralized website with a db backend to keep track of shares ?

This is a good question! My thoughts are:

With a blockchain tracking the ownership of artistcoins people can exchange those coins outside the peertracks platform on exhanges and between phones.

Other devs can write applications around the open source software.

Artistcoins have value as long as the bitshares music blockchain exists no matter how long the peershares company exists.

Transparency: With a dentralized database you couldnt prove it if you had the feeling that some artistcons where stolen from your account, with a blockchain(explorer) you can.

Downsides:
User can loose his private keys and lose his shares? Might be possible to offer a service to backup private keys by peertracks optionally. You could see of peertracks company abused this on the blockchain.

Slightly more costly than running one cerntralized database. Might not be as many delegates might work for the several DACs.

Dependence on the DPOS network's security (potentially vunerable to attacks). Isnt a centralized database also vunerable to attacks .

What else?

[gamey]

I don't really want to pick sides but Tony has very valid points.

My questions would be, what about this music DAC makes it need to be decentralized?  Hit a chord with the kids at being anti-establishment?  Is someone trying to avoid intellectual property?  Why not just a centralized website with a db backend to keep track of shares ?

Is the music industry going to go after people ?

I'm on the fence about the crowdsale/AGS thing.  I didn't want to see it happen, but on the other hand I expected it to happen and it is better than the alternative.  I just hope the money is well spent.  I think because I don't understand why this is decentralized, I tend to have a more cynical view that is more in line with the BTC people and their view of most bitcoin2.0 projects.

[voldemort628]

I support the view that Cob should make the fundraising as close (and fair) to AGS style as possible. Because investors normally want to get an exact number (in case of a fundraising) or at least a good guess (in case of a donation i.e ags) of how much they are gonna get in return for the amount put in.

Anyway, eagerly waiting for official ann.

[tonyk]

Yeah what are you getting worked up about tonk? I really don't get it. Who cares how many units exist if your going to receive a fixed percentage. It doesn't matter how many of this alt or that alt you own, its about what % you own, everything else serves to trick noobs. I'm pretty excited for this project!

I am generally pissed off, as one of the most promising DACs is being screwed up, big time.
My self interest is not the main issue here.
Although, I can see scenarios where the unwillingness to express concern regarding such behavior can affect our main projects.

[smiley35]

Yeah what are you getting worked up about tonk? I really don't get it. Who cares how many units exist if your going to receive a fixed percentage. It doesn't matter how many of this alt or that alt you own, its about what % you own, everything else serves to trick noobs. I'm pretty excited for this project!

Edit: oh I get it. I was thinking in terms of AGS/PTS, but you were thinking the crowdsale. I still don't understand where you are coming from though, this seems like one of the better allocations of a blockchain to me.

[donkeypong]

I agree. Kudos to COB for the patient explanations. Looking forward to this launch!

[oldman]

  to Cob for putting in the time and effort to respond to the community's concerns so thoroughly.

I've found his responses to be well reasoned and highly informative.

Well done!

[tonyk]

OK I get it.

Not knowing what % of 10K I will get on any particular day (even though the numbers never deviated more than 2 times), and knowing that there will be a total of 2 Mill AGS 'shares', is the same as not knowing the % for the whole program I will get if I put my money into it.

So  20 times, 1/20 of the total amount with 50% error, is equal to 1 time with 100,000% error in the music business. Or at least, so you say....


PS
 I do hope you cob, have no technical education and you are just a music guy. Actually, I do hope you have no science education (formal or otherwise), cause if you do, the stuff you try to pass is not ridiculous, it is scary.

[cob]

How to put what you said to your level of arguments... Let's give it a try:

Shark Tank example: How many times do you think the sharks have taken a deal - '5 Million shares in a company, that represent unknown % of the company' ?

[Hint the number looks like 'O']

I do not know ... I hope in the music business, such reasoning has a better chance of to be taken seriously...

Funny you should mention Shark tank...

Alright, there is a P2P ledger out there that proves this event has happened from X-mas 2013 to July 2014. It happened EACH day, multiple times.

You can look up the AGS donation addresses. The PTS one, and the BTC one.

To take your exact quote and modify it to prove my point further:
"How many times do you think the Bitshares community member have taken a deal - '10 000 shares in a company, that represent unknown % of the company' ?"

[Hint the number looks like 'a shit ton']

Everybody reading this is most likely guilty of having done this exact thing. And guess what, we are all happy with the outcome. Those that didn't like it, DIDN'T SEND BTC to a pool of 10 000 AGS when they had NO clue how many shares they'd actually get.

So go ahead and attack AGS all you want. We are taking this "can't sell out / run out of shares" concept which is a great way to raise money, and using it.

Luckily for everyone, you won't buy any Notes since you've already told us your game plan would be to SELL SELL SELL

[tonyk]

I promised to share my thoughts on the market when I have one. Well today I do.

The topic is:
 

'BitShares Music'

Short Version:

Sell, sell, sell... whenever you get your hands on any bishashares Music shares (called Notes) sell. At whatever price the poor buyer is offering; do not give him a chance to think twice!

I don't give any financial advise so can't comment on this.

Let’s not talk about PTS/AGS holders – getting in 30 % of a worthless product is not much better than getting just 10%, I know getting 10% is insulting nevertheless.

That is why on the 8th day the lawd invented forking. PeerTracks does not have a monopoly on the BitShares toolkit.

The IPO is designed to follow all well-known path of ‘crypto space’ stupidity –Ethereum style, or ‘known number unknown quantity’ style IPO. In short you pay $5 for X number of shares, but you are totally unaware how many shares will be sold. With every passing day the new buyer get less number of shares per $5 but at least know how many other crazies have bought before them.  The total number of crazies still remains unknown, as there may be many more coming after them.

If by stupidity you mean most successful crypto IPO yet. Then yes!
Our first goal is to raise capital... effectively.
In the absence of price, this is the simplest model imo. We put up a random arbitrary price per Note. We don't know how many Notes will sell and so we can't sell out / run out. Now after the 6-8 week Note pre-sale, we use the number of sold notes to determine the total number of units this DAC will have.
If only 5 Notes sell, then the DAC will have a low unit number. If a million sell, then we base our DAC unit amount on this. People that bought Notes still get their percentage.
Similar to what AGS did really. Whenever I donated funds to the AGS addresses I never knew how many AGS I would get. I knew how many were sold that day but didn't know how many "crazies" as you put it where also going to jump in the pot.
This is the exact same thing only it's the other variable that is missing. In one case it's the fixed amount of "shares" the other case it's the % of shares.

If this is not enough, the wise DAC creators/founders not just keep the proceeds of the ipo, they also reward themselves with free shares (about 30% of the total DAC’s shares, never the less!)

Of course we are going to keep the proceeds. What do you think we would do? Give it to charity? We have an entire industry to revolutionize. We need all the funds we can get.

      -Well the IPO was the fun part, there the creators of this DAC just rob you in bright daylight and that is in a way honorable of them.
While they thought hard for their 30-35% free notes, in the business model we see that those Notes are not worth much. They entitle you to transactions fees… and that is pretty much it (well other than being a speculator and shorting musicUSDs at their own eXchange)

Yes, COB is taking around 2% of Notes. If it pleases you, I can just take all my bitcoin, send it to the Pre-Sale address so that it looks fair.
1. Seems like a waste of time to send my funds from my btc address, to the peertracks pre-sale address which I will also control...
2. this will just inflate our Pre-sale numbers. Kinda crooked imo
3. How is it so surprising that I would want stake in this project? I've been at this since Febuary it would be highly fishy if I didn't have any stake at all in this haha

As for the % going to the peertracks corporation, this is another entity.
These are the corporate funds. They are to be used in whatever way benefits the whole endeavour. We might need them for partnerships, marketing, getting big name artists to jump on, etc.
They also are used to generate revenue via transaction fees. If the fees are enough to cover Peertracks' expenses, we can then reduce (or possible even eliminate) the small fee the website charges on each song/album sale.

Also, keep in mind that at launch, Peertracks will pretty much be synonymous to BitShares Music. The blockchain itself NEEDS a platform that ties every coins together, that allows a place to actually browse and download music, etc. Without a user friendly front end, you'll only have Ode to Satoshi being downloaded lol. No offense to Lij and John. That song is badass. But a song here and a song there just is not going to get crypto to mass adoption.
At launch, no Peertracks, no BitShares Music... AT LAUNCH. Now give it a couple months or years and competitors will pop up, or maybe it'll be a site in china that does the same thing, or a spanish music focused website, or an audiobook store, etc.
PeerTracks will be the company bringing value to the BitShares Music Blockchain at first.
And yes, we are aware that no BitShares, no PeerTracks. This is a symbiotic relationship. PeerTracks will get high volume and exposure to BitShares Music, they BitShares music will be strong enough to survive even if PeerTracks disappears.

Think of a site that just sells bikes. Then a site that just sells cell phone cases. And another site that just sells 1 type of lamp.
Sure they get a bit of traffic...
Now think of ebay. The fact that it is a site where you can shop for anything is what gives everyone an advantage, buyers, sellers and ebay itself. It's a win / win / win. This is what PeerTracks aims to be.
Titiana coin was a great experiment but it lacks PeerTracks to make it successful.... not to mention our mechanism that brings value to the coin!

The other way to make money in this system are the following:
      – You lend money to a promising musician, he promises to give you something back (or not) if he is a success. Way to enforce such promises are something that the ‘founders’ will have to think of… but that is for later.

This is wrong. I'm sorry if I wasn't more clear. We'll get to the secret sauce soon. Before we start the Pre-Sale of course.
We don't have to think about it. We already have a working, regulation compatible model. Artistcoins will have value depending on the amount of content that is sold. They are not stock in the artists, they are not equity, they do not pay dividends.

     -The 3rd way the system makes money is buy selling music- on $1 dollar sales here are the proposed ratios:
95% for the musician;
4% for the ‘founders’ ? (as they have expenses for bandwidth, etc.)
1% transaction fees…

This is quote mining, cherry picking and a strawman.

First of all, the very first line in my post was

keep in mind these are fictitious %s and #s for the sake of simplicity

Then I say

If a song sells for 1 BitUSD (FROM the PeerTracks website), a couple of things happen.

So not only are you bashing the fictitious numbers I gave out to explain the concept. But also the big "IF"
In PeerTracks, the artist decides what price he sells his music for. It's none of our business!

Second, that fictitious 4% does not go to the founders at all. It goes to the PeerTracks corporation. And this is only on stuff PURCHASED ON PEERTRACKS. It has nothing to do with the Bitshares Music blockchain. ANYONE can start a website that uses this blockchain and charge whatever fees they want. We are betting on it!
It's like you are complaining that Bitpay takes a certain % out of merchant transaction. Well... Bitpay can do what it wants! If it screws up, a competitor will capitalize on their errors and take em over or just outcompete them.
You seam to be mixing up Bitpay with Bitcoin and PeerTracks with BitShares Music.

And to cover your final point, yes, the DAC makes money from transaction fees of of every piece of audio content sold. Be it, songs, albums, audiobooks, podcasts, lectures, etc. If you don't think that's a big enough market, look at the numbers more closely. Check out Pandora, spotify, itunes, google play, etc. Add up that potential.
Then realize that there are also transaction fees from anything else that isn't a sale. People trading around artistcoins for example. What if a band starts accepting it's artistcoin as currency for it's concerts? For it's merch? Think of the incentive artists and bands will have to make their coin worth more then the others.  We envision 1000 DOGEcoin type ecosystems all residing on the BitShares Music Blockchain.

By all means, sell sell sell ^^



To sum up.
This is going to be one hell of a game changer. Not only for the music world, but for BitShares and the crypto world. Whether you sell your Notes or not.

So you are sticking to the original plan, then?

If you stick to yours, I will stick to mine.

I will just post the particular arrogant quote below, even though the whole post is low quality, so it is not a big surprise but:

If only 5 Notes sell, then the DAC will have a low unit number. If a million sell, then we base our DAC unit amount on this. People that bought Notes still get their percentage.
Similar to what AGS did really. Whenever I donated funds to the AGS addresses I never knew how many AGS I would get. I knew how many were sold that day but didn't know how many "crazies" as you put it where also going to jump in the pot.
This is the exact same thing only it's the other variable that is missing. In one case it's the fixed amount of "shares" the other case it's the % of shares.

How to put what you said to your level of arguments... Let's give it a try:

Shark Tank example: How many times do you think the sharks have taken a deal - '5 Million shares in a company, that represent unknown % of the company' ?

[Hint the number looks like 'O']

I do not know ... I hope in the music business, such reasoning has a better chance of to be taken seriously...


[EDIT] BTW you have not included my other post, probably because it proves that your arguments are not well places, are cherry picking and outright twisting of the meaning I try to convey. Here is it for your (in)convenience.

tony it is very entertaining to read you sarcastic posts (not kidding) but it would give your critique more weight if you can come up with an alternative plan...

Removing the stupid  and or greedy parts of the plan will be a start.
1. If you want to give just 20% to AGS/PTS, fine, it your right. (The useless bastards are not a good marketing group anyway, why give them more).

2.If you think IPO is the best way to go - fine;
-Make a model that makes sense ('Here investor buy some notes', 'What PERCENT will 100 BTC buy me?' -'Well we do not know, but definitely 5Mil shares" - Does, not cut it! )
AGS style is a good start. Improve on it!
-Buy as much as you want through that IPO

3. Want a stability of a dollar, in the payments in the system? - Good - Make a gateway on BTSX exchange, to make trading Notes for bitUSD. (Building your own exchange for that purpose - Wistful overkill). You can have automatic Note<--> bitUSD on your site for the customer convenience if you would like.

4. Having 5% fee of every sell (for the bandwidth???, how did you calculate it will be enough?), in current form it just smells money grab, money grab. My solution leave 25% as delegate fee. Let the delegates/Note-holders decide what is a good split bandwidth/Profit (Burning)/Marketing etc. You will run quite a few of them delegates anyway.


That's me thinking 15min on the subject.
For 9 mo. the 'FOUNDERS" came with nothing but schemes to get bigger part of the pie for themselves.

[cob]

I'm just saying that as it is, the communications for this DAC are kind of shady and open for interpretation (interpreting is exactly what I'm doing right now), and compared to the other DACs that are currently online (or going to be), there's a lot of the "equity" that will be flowing in the direction of the founders/centralized corporation. Either they hoard those notes or they spend it, I don't care, but I'm not comfortable with the fact that approximately  30% of the total equity is in very few hands, pretty much like all the other premined altcoins (and I also include Bitcoin in that statement).

Appreciate the concern.
We have been pretty much non-existent in the public space, forums + reddit, etc. We've been focusing on the business side of things mainly. "Getting shit done" lol

This is a great moment to start a ASK ME ANYTHING Thread.

I will create it in the Music sub forum in a sec.

As for the 30% of Notes in very few hands. I address this about 4-5 posts above. And I totally understand. I took awhile before we got to these numbers.
We knew the crypto community would not particularly be thrilled about it, but the success of this project comes first. And this is aimed for the outside world, the music world, the teen world, the tween world, the fandom world, the fanclub world.
Everyone (PTS+AGS dudes) is getting their 10%+10% anyway. We are having a pre-sale to let people that can see the potential buy in further and of course raise much needed capital. Remember we are not funded by BitShares. At all. We aren't simply launching a DAC that they built. That would not have taken 6 months of our time! We are creating a competitor to itunes and google play! And it's got to plug in to what BitShares is bulding. Did I mention regulations!? Look up the Bitlicense, the SEC, fincen and OMG the complications with the IRS and CRA for an international partnership between Eddie and I.

We are not simply copy pasting some code here guys (: