This is just a Preliminary Rough Draft.
Don't read it yet unless you want to help us improve it.
When polished, this will be an ongoing multipart blog series on bitshares.org
If you are wondering what you may missed in the first year,
or want to ponder how we got to where we are, read on…
The History of BitShares
Part One
Today is the one-year anniversary of the invention of BitShares. On the second day of June 2013, a rogue entrepreneur named Dan “Bytemaster” Larimer was struck on the head by a proverbial migrating coconut. When he regained consciousness, he realized that he had invented bit-USD, the key insight that makes BitShares possible. Before sundown he had reworked his original BitShares whitepaper and published the whole new concept at bitcointalk.org:
Over the next five weeks, Bytemaster engaged in a series of vigorous forum discussions defending and refining the concept. There he met Charles Hoskinson who helped to vet the idea and develop a business plan. Charles presented the plan to Li Xiaolai in China who agreed to fund the development. On American Independence Day, the Fourth of July 2013, Invictus Innovations was incorporated in the state of Virginia.
The next several months were spent bootstrapping the company and publishing articles, many of which may be found on the bitsharestalk.org thread at
In September, the concept of a Distributed Autonomous Company (DAC) was invented and introduced to the world in two groundbreaking
LetsTalkBitcoin.com articles:
Invictus introduced the BitShares Vision to the world via presentations by Hoskinson and Larimer at the Atlanta Bitcoin Conference in October 2013. It is here that the plans for Keyhotee were first introduced – an integrated multi-wallet, communication, and DAC interface application intended to defend privacy and help spread knowledge of BitShares technologies outside the crypto-currency community.
Hoskinson and Larimer parted company at this point. They each agreed to keep their reasons confidential and there is no bad blood from our point of view. The only official statement on the subject was made by CEO Bo Shen to end a minor forum firestorm here:
It is our opinion that Charles Hoskinson is the best dealmaker we have ever seen, and we miss his vision and talent for recruiting allies. No doubt he will help make his new Ethereum team very successful.
Despite this loss, all of this activity was beginning to create a buzz that would soon explode on the scene with a sequence of revolutionary innovations at roughly monthly intervals that continue to this very day.
The first was ProtoShares…
