Topic: Communist Bitshares Wealth Redistribution IS THEFT! - page 14. (Read 28384 times)

It costs 59,881.19 BTS to register in delegate elections?

59,881.19 BTS x $0.01369 = $7102.53 USD!

I assume this fee goes to the existing delegates.    Don't you think requiring payment in the hopes of participating in the forging process is wrong and leads to the disenfranchisement of stakeholders?

Dan believes that nodes must be limited to 101 (centralized) because he claims it is "unprofitable" to run a node.  He bases this on ridiculous cost metrics and the flawed hypothesis that nodes must ROI from forging alone.  This is wrong because running a node is simply a minor expense for businesses.  I proved it is wrong because currently even though it is less profitable to run a NXT node than a Bitshares' node there are on average over two and a half times as many NXT nodes as Bitshares' delegates!

Again, you are basing "decentralization" on percentage of blocks forged by each node, not on participants in the system.

If a single corporation ran the entire economy, then yes, it would be Communism.  Communism is a highly elitist, hierarchical, centralized system of control which disenfranchises the people (aka stakeholders) to empower the ruling party (aka 101 delegates).  Communism is best described as STATE CAPITALISM.  I agree with Stan that Bitshares is a company, but it is a company that commands complete control over the Bitshares' economy.  This is why Bitshares is Communist.

As Vladimir Lenin stated:

"We recognise and will continue to recognise only state capitalism, and it is we — we conscious workers, we Communists — who are the state. That is why we should brand as good-for-nothing Communists those who have failed to understand their task of restricting, curbing, checking and catching red-handed and inflicting exemplary chastisement on any kind of capitalism that goes beyond the framework of state capitalism in our meaning of the concept and tasks of the state."

Bitshares is identical to Communism.  Unless you are a part of the "ruling class" (aka 101 delegates), you are subject to taxation via inflation.  "The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation." - Vladimir Lenin  These 101 delegates use their power to maintain a stranglehold on the system by taxing competing businesses and shareholders.  Lenin once again describes such a system as “nothing but state capitalist monopoly made to benefit the whole people."  The fallacy of such a statement is that it only benefits the "new master class" (aka 101 delegates).


Bitshares is a centrally administered corporation which controls the entire economy.  As I have said before, the delegates use their stake to maintain their position and form a monopoly over the system.  This is not a system which promotes free enterprise, but is the very definition of Supercapitalism (aka Crony Capitalism).

According http://bitsharesblocks.com we have 5 381 registered delegates (delegate registration costs 2 weeks of delegate income, to register 100% pay rate delegate will costs is 59 881.19 BTS) and 1061 of them already has shareholders votes.

Number of accounts: 32 209
Number of sub-accounts: 499

I ran the NXT wallet for some time.  In some ways it was better than Bitshares. Much faster synching it seems but in the end it still utilized too many resources in the background.  One time it appeared that I mined a block but then I realized it was only because I was on a fork! lol.

I guess my point would be that you guys have a lot of nodes just because every wallet is a node.  You posed this as a big question to Dan but that is basically the reason. We still don't know how many nodes control 51% of the network like the other guy brought up.

I would say that most of the points you have made in this post are still fair game for discussion and on the leading edge of BitShares community thinking.

No doubt we will continue to discuss optimizations along any of these lines and we would welcome your participation.

There is always a tension between limits of ideal and practical decentralization and, as you point out, there are degrees of decentralization.  The U.S. House of Representatives is really too big and unwieldy already, yet every year each representative spans more and more people.  That said, it would be totally impractical to ask every American citizen to become informed on every decision that must be made.

Companies have annual shareholder meetings where they elect a board of directors who hire key staff to make day to day decisions.  It's how humans organize themselves.

"Bitshares is decentralised" was the starting point. It turns out this is true only if you accept Bitshares definition of being "sufficiently decentralised". I don't I believe it is decentralised, I believe it to be distributed. Bytemaster describes it as the same in his blogpost "What is Bitshares". What you call "unproductive semantics", a near full consensus would see it as being "the difference between true and false". I think you will find very few people on this forum who will accept Bitshares definition of decentralised, so you will continue to run into friction for as long as you describe it as such.

With regard to "diminishing returns" and "no real benefit" of increasing above 101 node current cap, most crypto enthusiasts would call this increasing decentralisation.


I learned the cap can be lifted/made dynamic, so why a cap at all? Well if there were an uncapped number of nodes, the limited amount of funds being shared around would be spread very thinly between x nodes and it could be unprofitable to run a node. It would find an equilibrium (or fail) but I strongly suspect it would be a small fraction of the incomes right now. So the cap protects the profitability of the delegates, it keeps income higher than it would otherwise be.


To change the cap, shareholders would have to convince a dev to propose a fork (or series of forks) to choose from. The devs are the delegates, and always will be as otherwise they won't get any income for their work. These are the guys you will have to convince to accept losing a lot of their income if you want to have 0.1% inflation or 500 nodes, otherwise there would be no forks to choose from. Sure, you can vote devs out and other devs in but who knows Bitshares better than Bytemaster et al. I find it hard to believe that these and others would ever be voted out or that the new devs would know bitshares as well to continue development.


If businesses do end up running nodes, they should plan not to have the stream as the main source of income. Businesses will have an annual forecast, with expected income and expenses. If shareholders vote to half the inflation, suddenly many nodes may become unviable as their expected income has significantly decreased. Or worse, they wake up and find they have been voted out and have no income at all. This will always be the case for those hovering around the bottom with a lower share of votes. Some may decide it is not worth the risk or become so battered and bruised in a chaotic and unstable environment of being node 93-98-105-101-99-107-105... that they don't bother at all.


The distribution of nodes seems to be more concentrated than presented. I presumed init0 etc. are "initial", the start up nodes and Bitshares doesn't yet have 101 candidates for voting? Still in the bootstrapping phase would be a reasonable defence. But this demolishes the "more decentralised" claim.


If there is friction in the growth of nodes in relation to the growth of the network, this leads to increasing centralisation. Let us say that today, there are 1000 Bitshares users and we know there are 101 nodes/delegates. In a year, there are 2000 users but if there are still only 101 nodes then this is increasing centralisation: more people being subject to a decreasing minority. And there is an incentive for there to be friction, as the existing delegates would be protecting their income.


The basics I know paint a picture of conflicting incentives. The shareholders are in charge but only if the devs let them be. The devs are delegates so unless altruism lasts forever, they will increasingly act in their own interests to protect their income. The shareholders could vote them out at this point but they would be shooting themselves in the foot. Would bitcoiners sack Gavin and Herne? Or would Nxters force out Jean-Luc or Kushti?

If you accept these conflicting interests as true, the result is likely to be a system that will slowly degenerate with time.

They are getting slowly reduced as more and more paid delegates have started registering.

Regarding xeldel and others running multiples, its being allowed initially but we won't be supporting it in the future. Some of us already has several proposals outlining separation of block producers and employees, but we all agree this is not the biggest priority right now; getting a stable 1.0 protocol is.

Sorry, forgot to answer, init delegates it's a network bootstrap delegates it's was 101 init delegates, original BitSharesX network was launched by http://www.dacsunlimited.com, init it's their delegates. Some delegates stay in the 101 because shareholders was votes for it.

Ok, I got to go soon but I am gonna recap what I have learned...

Each time a delegate gets her turn to sign a block (every 17 minutes) she earns 50 BTS.  That's the max total stream size and every delegate runs for election based on what percent of that they are willing to work for.  People who just sign blocks work for 3% of that 50 BTS.  People who perform work (development, marketing, whatever) get paid some other percentage - usually 100% right now since the value of 50 BTS is still less than full time pay for most functions.

A vote for xeldel is a vote for his proposal to hire Stan for the blockchain.

Toast is a developer who runs his own delegate.  Guys like xeldel make it possible to hire marketers, celebrities, or old rocket scientists who don't have a clue how to run a delegate.

What do you mean by stream? It seems to mean 'income' in the first sentence, but then "each 'income' handles only part..." doesn't make sense in the second sentence.


So a vote for stan is a vote for xeldel? He is the one actually running the hardware/software that secures the network? Stan is just the one getting the money.

stan.delegate.xeldal (which got $2600) it's Stan delegate operated by Xeldal, Stan gets paid from this delegate, xeldal get 5% as operational expenses, look here: https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=11735.0
5% it's agreement between Stan and xeldal.

Our expectation is that, as the market cap grows, the value of each delegate stream will grow.  Right now, each stream handles only part time pay - so the devs are working at a fraction of what they are worth.  Over time, we expect each stream to grow to full time pay and eventually to pay for several people.

So, the end game when we reach Bitcoin Scale is to have each stream fund a small business with several million dollars annually.

At that point, each business will need to be competing to "land a deal" with the stakeholders by publishing a good proposal, performing well, and staying in the good graces of all BTS holders.

Of course it is still possible that one delegate slot could fund a single celebrity or even a single delegate who agrees to burn 99% of her pay (returning it to the stakeholders).

Ok, is there intended to be separation between devs and any other businesses than run nodes? I guess not, as how would they be paid, right?

Shareholders can propose dev(s) to do it, dev will do it and shareholders votes for hard fork. If some devs will not agree, shareholders can voted in the new devs which will do it and voted out devs which not want to do it.

Yes, shareholders trust him to do it and voted for this.

But Xeldal already runs 3 other nodes? Who got the $2600 from that node?


Are businesses intended to be delegates, rather than the devs?

Yes, I'm a "network" delegate (testz 3% pay rate), I also manage valzav.payroll.testz (100% pay) it's a dev delegate - details here: https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=12625.0

stan.delegate.xeldal it's a Stan 100% pay rate delegate managed by xeldal "network" delegate in same way as I manage valzav.payroll.testz
To be delegate it's responsible, to free dev - networks delegates manage their delegates.

That would be for me.  Xeldal is the delegate.  He runs on the platform of paying Stan Larimer to offload tasks from Bytemaster so he can do what only Bytemaster can do.  I get 4060 BTS ($55.22) from him like clockwork every day.