DecentralizedEconomics, you seem to be under the impression that if you call Bitshares enough words that people associate to negative things, that you can make reality bend to your will, and the Bitshares codebase will somehow morph into some monstrosity.
I don't have to morph it into anything. It's already a monstrosity. You can call it whatever you want, but that doesn't change its fundamental mode of operation.
I am not sure what your gameplan is, whether you are an NXT supporter who desires to hurt Bitshares as a perceived competitor, or what. Personally NXT and Bitshares are my two favorites, and I wish both communities could get along better. They are the most similar coins to each other, and yet we bicker, when we should all be ganging up against Ripple!
My gameplan is to expose Bitshares' consensus mechanism for what it really is. I3 keeps marketing Bitshares as some type of Libertarian free market platform. It is nothing of the sort. Imo, Bitshares' delegate voting was intentionally made to be confusing and susceptible to covert manipulation by the wealthiest stakeholders. I don't think the majority of people truly understand "approval voting" and its implications on blockchain control. I intend on making it clear how easy it is for a coalition of wealthy stakeholders to completely control Bitshares' blockchain.
Anyway, a corporation governed by the vote of its shareholders is hardly "communist". Calling it such is a misrepresentation of Orwellian terms, like saying 'slavery is freedom'. You claim to want to have a rational discussion of Bitshares, and yet your choice of terms reveals a very strong and clear bias against it. Wouldn't it be much more productive to analyze the Bitshares consensus system in a fair and balanced, academic way? (Of course, on the other side Stan Larimer is not exactly an impartial voice here either. I'm pretty sure the truth lies somewhere in between you two).
If Bitshares is a successful implementation of a corporate voting structure on a blockchain, then that is an important innovation! It is important just like NXT's asset exchange is an important innovation.
If Bitshares was just a company using the blockchain, then of course, it would not be Communist, but this is not the case. Bitshares' delegates run the blockchain. This is different. Since approval voting allows multiple delegates to be covertly controlled by a small coalition of the wealthiest stakeholders, it creates a blockchain monopoly. Monopoly is the menace of free enterprise. Communism is simply a state monopoly.
It is entirely different than companies on the NXT blockchain. Companies on the NXT blockchain do NOT control chain security. They cannot impose taxation upon other business to create a monopoly.
Your claim that Bitshares inflaiton is "theft" does not pass the test of reason. Were participation in the Bitshares blockchain compulsory, then you could claim that taxation is theft and make this case. But being a Bitshares holder and using the Bitshares blockchain is an entirely voluntary act. One can choose to take their business elsewhere and use NXT or Bitcoin or anything else if one desires. Thus, even in the very worst case, in which Bitshares delegates have locked themselves in place and issue themselves free BTS, one could not make the case that it was "theft", only that this inflation was a fee that a user would need to voluntarily pay in order to use the service of BTS.
Granted, no one is forced to own Bitshares and be subject to "taxation without representation". (It's taxation WITHOUT REPRESENTATION because approval voting allows coalitions of the wealthy to strategically vote giving them an unfair advantage effectively disenfranchising individual actors.) Because, imo, people who participate in Bitshares have flawed notions of how delegate voting really works, they participate under a ruse. When Stan Larimer starts quoting the US Constitution, the voting process is represented and analogized to the political voting process used to select politicians in representative government. Bitshares' approval voting system is in no way, shape or form akin to representative politics.
It is a known fact that approval voting is unworkable in contested elections.In reality, most delegates are probably going to be providing value to Bitshares. If delegates act as parasites and shareholders cannot remove them, then that is a flaw in Bitshares, and would make it clearly worse than NXT, but it would be no more of a flaw than Bitcoin inflating itself 10% a year for miners. Until we see such parasitical behavior, we should not assume it will be the case, rather we should treat Bitshares as an experiment, which might work or might not. So far Bitshares voters have already kicked out one paid delegate who didnt provide updates on their progress. That seems to be a positive sign.
Yes, things would be better if a greater percentage of the total stake was voting. 18% for top delegate and 8% for 101st delegate is too low, and this means that one could execute an attack with only 10% of stake or so, whereas ideally we would want it to require 51%. But is that better than in the alternatives? What percentage of NXT are used to forge?
These numbers have been rising slowly over time. A few months back it was around 12% for top delegate and 5% for the bottom. The Bitshares system scales up as people care more. If the price rises, if the market cap were to grow by an order of magnitude, how much more would people care?
With 18% of the vote for the top delegate and 8% of the vote for the bottom delegate, it requires only 10% of the vote to completely control all delegate elections. I imagine that I3 owns at least 10% and I suspect they own a lot more than that. You don't even have to have 10% to completely dominate the blockchain, if you can convince others to unwittingly vote in accordance with your coalition.
NXT has over 40% of the stake forging, but NXT is not susceptible to this type of manipulation. NXT is truly a representative form of blockchain governance. One NXT = One Vote.
I definitely feel that the Bitshares team has made some mistakes. Their product is too complicated and difficult to explain, they have not delivered on time on some promises, and they hurt their community with the 'merger'. But I do not see them as malevolent as you imply. Rather, I think they are too idealistic, they lack a get it done type who pressures them to execute on their schedule and meet deadlines. The Bitshares devs are too fond of dreaming up new ideas when they haven't finished the old ones yet.
To refer to such libertarian idealists as 'communist' is unfair and absurd. Few coin developers embody libertarian ideals as much as Bytemaster does on his blog. It would be much more reasonable to accuse the Bitshares devs of being libertarian dreamers than 'communists'. Perhaps some day they will succeed in actually getting a product released that is as usable as NXT. I find it strange sometimes that Bitshares has a higher market cap than NXT when I think NXT is further along in its development, but I still invest in it because I can see the potential and I believe in diversification. Bitshares is more highly valued only because it is popular among the chinese, I think, but as a result it has the potential to catch on in china which would make it huge.
At the very least we should be fair to each coin and rationally analyze their strengths and weaknesses. Being a communist engine of oppression is not Bitshares' weakness, it is simply a gross misrepresentation.
Anyone can claim or say anything, but that doesn't necessarily reveal their true intentions. Ask yourself why did they choose to use an approval voting system to select delegates? Why didn't they use "one stake = one vote" in a plurality voting system?