Topic: BitShares Loves Puppies - page 15. (Read 23201 times)

We use approval voting. 
Everybody indicates all the candidates they approve of.
The 101 most approved of candidates are hired.
No need to make it any more complicated than that.

In the current version voting results are applied on the fly. To follow the criterion you need something like modern president elections (when the 2nd round is used if none of the candidates gets at least 51%):

1. All shareholders cast votes
2. If new top 101 don't get the overwhelming majority then part of delegates with lowest vote count is removed from the list of candidates and goto #1
3. Old 101 delegates are replaced with the new ones

PS: Also, you use "vote-outs". This mixes two different voting systems and may lead to a worse situation.

Voting rounds are continuous and voters can change their votes at any time.  The top 101 delegates are always those with the most number of shares approving them and everyone can look at that set and decide to change their approvals at any time.

So by your criterion, if "extra voting rounds" are needed to make things more "fair/democratic", then BitShares is infinitely fair and democratic because new voting rounds happen every 10 seconds forever.  

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem

TL;DR: BitShares ought to do extra voting rounds if total number of votes for outsiders is higher than number of votes for at least one of top 101 delegates. Otherwise you can't claim that the delegates are chosen in a fair/democratic manner.

Here's another quick thought experiment on the above topic.

Suppose you have 10 accounts each with 10 shares and you decide that each account gets 1 vote.
One of the account holders divides her shares among 10 puppet accounts.  Now she has 10 votes.
So the rest of the account holders are forced to divide up their shares as much as possible too.

What do you wind up with?  1 vote per share!   

Over on The Thread That Must Not Be Named, DE has raised some legitimate questions and presented them rationally, so I am happy to address them.


1.  Non-voting owner's who are happy to accept the decisions of active voters are effectively delegating decisions to those who do vote.  It is their choice.  In the 17% voter turnout example given, it is clear that most owners are happy to go with delegate selection by those who do vote.  I will speculate that they do this for the following reasons:

a.  Rational Ignorance.  It's not worth their time to figure out who to vote for.  It doesn't matter to them which subset of generally acceptable candidates get elected because delegate ability to do something undesirable is negligible.  A delegate either signs blocks and includes transactions faithfully or not, and everyone can tell if they don't.  Those in full-time positions need to avoid having a lynch mob form to vote them out and so they need to continuously answer the question, "What have you done for us lately?"

b.  They have no objection to any of the delegates that are being elected by those who vote.  If an issue comes up, then they presumably are reserving the right to weigh in.  Low participation means owners are generally satisfied.  I don't vote my stake in cold storage for this reason, but if I'm not happy at some point, I will go to that extra trouble.  So that could also be the case for many of the other non-voting stake out there.  Similarly, smaller stakeholders can go to the extra trouble of rallying others to their cause (i.e. "colluding").

c.  In general, a large voter cannot vote in a delegate that doesn't already have broad support from everyone else.  It is true that a large voter can swing which of the otherwise lesser approved delegates get picked.  It is even true that a very small voter can switch who is in positions 101 and 102 by changing one vote.  Similarly, if many small voters agree on certain delegates, there is nothing a big owner can do about it.  This is how it should be.  The bigger your stake, the more you have at risk, and the more say you should have in who runs the business.  This is far more fair than many traditional business that are intentionally structured to disproportionately favor the big guys.

Yes, and another coalition of 11% of the remaining stakeholders is able to override them.  

2.  Owners have a right to form political alliances to achieve their objectives.  You can call it "collusion" if you want.  The rest of the owners have a similar right to team up (collude) to overrule them.  If an owner doesn't like what the "ruling collation" decides, she can sell her stake.  The company is, by definition, only owned by people who approve of how it is being run.  It is the right of those owners to run it that way.  Blockchain technology is there to ensure transparency in whether the agreed upon rules are being followed.

Bottom Line:  BitShares has been implemented with a well-defined transparent form of decentralized government.  We have tried to make it be fair enough to attract a large number of happy owners.  (We would be fools to do otherwise.)  Those who find that acceptable and profitable will own it.  Those who don't, won't.  If there are enough who want it run differently, they will actively vote for changes or clone a competitor.  So far, the current community seems happy with what they have.

Here's a tiny 30 second video sample:

Bytemaster on How Much Decentralization is Enough

   

 
I&E 550: Innovation and Cryptoventures

Today Bytemaster had the opportunity to present a two-hour lecture at the Duke University School of Business in Durham, North Carolina under invitation from Professor Campbell R. Harvey (the guy with the necktie).  The forty students taking this course are a mixture of computer science, business, and law majors who are interested in learning about starting entrepreneurial businesses in the crypto industry. The class is divided into eleven teams, each of which is required to develop a crypto business as part of their course objectives.


As you can probably imagine, Dan talked about Decentralized Autonomous Companies (DACs) and how to make them profitable.  Among the opportunities he discussed were:

1.  Cloning the BitShares block chain using the BitShares Toolkit to produce independent businesses like MUSIC and PLAY.
2.  Adding your own business logic like VOTE and DNS to BitShares itself to leverage it's delegates, community, currencies and network effect.
3.  Using BitShares User Issued Assets (UIA) to issue regulation compliant shares in a brick and mortar and flesh and blood company.
4.  What it takes to add your own Market Pegged Asset (MPA) to BitShares.
5.  The opportunity to create a business based on issuing one or more Prediction Market Assets (PMA).
6.  Becoming a BitShares Delegate and using that to bootstrap a startup business.
7.  Creating supporting business for third party add-ons, services, and products inside the emerging ecosystem.
8.  Crowd Funding vs. Crowd Hiring to bootstrap and sustain block chain based businesses.

Unfortunately there are no notes or slides to give you since Dan's lecture was given "off the cuff," but we did record it and hope to publish some or all of his best riffs before long.

For some reason I found Professor Harvey's course reading list particularly interesting, but you should check out all the other resource links on the course web site as well.


Perhaps the most amazing thing to me was that a university group of that size and diversity could reach unanimous consensus on anything.  But not a single person in that entire lecture hall expressed one shred of disagreement with Dan's unspoken assertion that dogs are much better than cats.

Here's a series of articles I wrote for this forum to provide some background on The Origin of BitShares:

Part 1   - It Began with ProtoShares
Part 2   - The Death of Mining
Part 3   - The Ideal Mining Pool
Part 4   - AngelShares and Virtual Mining
Part 5   - POW to POS to TaPOS to DPOS!
Part 6   - Sharedrops and Snapshots
Part 7   - BitShares Sharedrop Theory
Part 8   - Experimenting and Pivoting
Part 9   - What is a SuperDAC?
Part 10 - BitShares Unleashed

I've reposted the links here for your convenience.

I knew NXT champions would eventually come to their senses.  This is a great start! 

Among the so called 2.0 projects, only BTS has gone that far, so yeah props for that. The rest of the arguments are pretty much political and based on opinions not fact..

Here's an excerpt:

Site is now the fastest way to buy or sell BTS and BitUSD assets online

Canton, Geneva (PRWEB) February 02, 2015

ShapeShift.io has integrated the BitUSD and BTS digital assets into its instant exchange platform. Consumers can now buy and sell BTS and BitUSD anywhere in the world instantly with Bitcoin, Ripple, Dogecoin, NXT, or over 15 other leading cryptocurrencies with ShapeShift.io.

The speed and convenience comes from the platform's minimalist design, with no signup process or account required.

As the digital currency ecosystem continues to rapidly grow, integration between platforms is accelerating. ShapeShift.io, which launched in August 2014, has risen quickly as the most convenient way to buy or sell the leading digital assets. The site has integrated over a dozen of these currencies to date, enabling instant conversion between all of them directly.

Actually I linked to media.boreme.com/post_media/2013/thomas-jefferson-banking.jpg

But, Cool!  Anybody that quotes Thomas Jefferson and recognizes who the real Bad Guys are is a friend of mine!

Here's a quick summary of four efficient ways to step off the crypto elevator on down-swings and back onto it each swing up without having to exit to fiat.

1.  Use a Centralized Exchange to trade between real BTC and your favorite BitAsset (BitUSD, BitGOLD, BitEUR, BitSilver, BitCNY).

This stays in crypto (and does incur larger fees and counterparty risk while the exchange is holding your assets for you) but you are hedged against volatility while you are sitting in a BitAsset on that exchange.

2.  Use a BitShares Gateway to to trade between real BTC and your favorite BitAsset on the BitShares Decentralized Exchange.

This stays in crypto (and does incur exchange-like fees) but eliminates counterparty risk except the moments your are actually passing through the gateway to get to the safety of a decentralized exchange and the stability and yield of a BitAsset.

3.  Stay on the BitShares Decentralized Exchange and trade BitBTC against your favorite BitAsset.

This stays in the low fee / counterparty-free trade zone while letting your purchasing power track BTC when it is climbing and sitting out any down drafts by tracking some other BitAsset and earning yield.  This is the cheapest way to toggle risk-on/risk-off.  Pennies per toggle.

4.  Use a smart wallet with integrated ShapeShift technology to switch between real BTC and a BitAsset on the fly.  

You move between BitAssets and real Bitcoin at the touch of a button - just in time to spend it.  The rest of the time you are in BitAssets, safe from volatility and earning a yield.  You are only exposed to ShapeShift counterparty risk and fees during the moments it takes to transition through their gateway.

This most certainly isn't a puppy.

You've resorted to copying my opening line???

bitcredits.website

For the record, BitShares loves groundhogs too.