It's become clear in this long thread that a year of "Fibs and Fud" from people who have little personal honor have left many fair minded folks with deep misunderstandings about BitShares. Rather than continuing to answer them piecemeal, I've decided to author a series of posts that explain everything from the beginning. I hope some of you find this useful.The Origin of BitShares
Part 4
On Christmas Eve, 2013 we proposed a revolutionary companion to ProtoShares (PTS) called AngelShares (AGS). Just like PTS, AGS would be good for free upgrades to all future DACs. We wanted it to be a pure virtual mining pool that would work just like a black box PTS mining pool except instead of burning the money it would put the money into a development fund to grow the industry. It didn't conflict with PTS because it was upgradable to receive a separate 10% slice of the BitShares free samples pie.
PTS formed our community. AGS would fund its development!
Sigh. Nothing is ever easy. While the concept of simulated, virtual, or "angel" mining had been easy to explain, its actual implementation was not. Regulatory authorities are, as they say, happy to indict a ham sandwich. The U.S. Supreme court ruled back in the world war era that you can't even sell somebody a row of orange trees if you also offer to maintain them and split the harvest. Why, that would be creating an unlicensed security and we can't have that!
So, simply put, we couldn't implement something simple. If you ever see us implement something that is not brain dead simple, it can only be for one of two reasons: 1) because regulations in over 250 jurisdictions around the world preclude doing anything simple, or 2) because we are hopeless geeks who inherently love complexity.
So, instead, we had to structure the Angel Shares as pure, no strings attached, donations to build the community. We offered a proposed Social Consensus that suggested to developers of new DACs that it would be in their
best interest to distribute their new shares to Angel Shares donors instead of Big Mining, but it had to be left entirely up to them.
After spending close to a hundred thousand dollars consulting several teams of crypto-space lawyers, here's how the deal turned out. (In
Stop the Crowd Sales! Bytemaster has since recommended against this approach as well as all forms of crowd sales because we've since found better ways. But at the time this was state of the art fund raising!)
Introducing Angel Shares
We are introducing a general AGS Consensus recommendation that mirrors the PTS Social Consensus except that wasteful mining is replaced with productive donations in either PTS or BTC.
We are also recommending the share allocation of the first release of BitShares X to have 4 million total shares. 2 million will be allocated proportional to PTS holders and 2 million proportional to AGS donors. Developers are of course free to change the total in their ultimate releases as long as they do so proportionally.
How to Get Recognized as a Donor via Angel Shares
AGS is just a public ledger of donors you can get on by donating to a development trust,
to build the industry and try to get targeted by developers
who see promotional advantages in a free airdrop of their new product samples
to a demographic of people who donate to developers!
Unlike PTS, AGS do not have their own block chain and are not actually issued as any form of asset. They exist only notionally in that anyone can compute what the conceptual distribution would be using the proposed virtual mining algorithm below. This algorithm is intended only for use by developers wishing to identify who has donated toward developing the BitShares industry for the purpose of targeting them as a demographic with free promotional tokens in their new DAC releases.
AGS Virtual Mining Algorithm
Beginning New Year’s Day 2014,
the algorithm will allocate 10,000 new AGS in a new virtual mining competition every day for 200 days.
5000 of them will be allocated to PTS donors.
5000 of them will be allocated to Bitcoin donors.
That's ultimately 2,000,000 total, just like PTS.
Those who donate bitcoins to this address will notionally split 5000 AGS proportionally:
1ANGELwQwWxMmbdaSWhWLqBEtPTkWb8uDc
Those who donate PTS to this address will notionally split 5000 AGS proportionally:
PaNGELmZgzRQCKeEKM6ifgTqNkC4ceiAWw
Every day the virtual shares are notionally divided among those who donated that day.
"What happens to all the donations?"
100% of the proceeds go to growing the crypto-equity industry.
Zero percent will be retained as profits by Invictus.
Funds will be used to encourage new developers with salaries, grants, contracts, and bounties to build everything from small components to entire new DACs. They will be used provide a free high-quality Developer's Toolkit giving DAC developers a huge head start. They will be used for advertisements, conferences, promotions and give-aways to stimulate interest in the new industry and to provide opportunities for everyone to contribute. They will be used for legal advocacy for the ecosystem in many jurisdictions. Anything is fair game that we believe will grow the value of PTS and all DACs that honor the contributions of PTS and AGS holders.
That said, these are pure donations for which your only expectation must be
that we will use our best judgement to apply them toward these purposes.
It is beyond our control to prevent an unethical developer from forking our open source code in a way that fails to recognize your donations. It is up to the market to reject this, or not. If you do not like our recommended allocation, do not trust the market to reject copycats, or do not trust us to use your donations wisely, then please take your money, fund competition, and build your own DACs that fit your preferred allocation strategy.
Remember - your donations are recorded in a public block chain which developers may or may not use to target 10% or more of their products as a promotion to gain your support for their projects. It is their choice - we merely define the public ledger documenting your contributions and a recommended formula for computing a fair share proportional to everyone's contribution. Our free open source genesis-block initialization software will implement the recommended formula, but we cannot prevent any developer from modifying or replacing this software with their own algorithms or none at all.
Well, the donations came rolling in and over the entire year of 2014 the community spent them to develop the BitShares Toolkit and a whole family of DACs, including the BitShares Exchange, BitShares Music, BitShares Play, BitShares DNS and BitShares VOTE and several others. An entire ecosystem has grown up that would never have existed without this innovation.
The Developers of each of these DACs did decide to follow the BitShares Social Consensus, and as a result owners of PTS and donors of AGS have received "share drops" of free samples from each of them.
We had done it! We had eliminated the need for mining to get a fair initial distribution of tokens and had seen it used in all kinds of new block chains. Now, instead of distributing your initial coins to the demographic of rich miners and technically savvy geeks, you could target any demographic you like. Just like a mailing list to specialized zip codes.
It’s like dropping shares with terminal homing seekers for DAC-savvy supporters!
You could target dog lovers or mars colonizers or permaculture enthusiasts if you wanted to. We recommended that developers target the PTS and AGS mailing lists because those demographics already understood DACs. You would get an instant fan club of people more likely to hold your shares than dump them.
So that was it. We had accomplished our goal of eliminating the need for mining in fair share distribution. Now we just had to figure out how get rid of the need for it in securing the block chain.
The obvious answer was Proof of Stake!
(To be Continued)