Topic: More Bitshares Greed - page 6. (Read 12233 times)

ISSUE 4 Your website says different.





Bitshares' Logo Trademarked on BitsharesWiki


What's the deal Stan?  Is Bitshares trademarked or not?  If it is not trademarked why on all your logos are you using the TM mark?  The only reason you would be using TM while not "trademarked" is that you are applying for a trademark on the name.  If you are currently in the application process for trademarking Bitshares and it is your intention to do so, don't you think claiming Bitshares isn't trademarked is misleading?

Sounds like you're being disingenuous.

Really? Because he posted this 2 days before the above post.
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=10148.msg132915#msg132915
It is quite clear that before the merger was proposed, finances were in line for the year.

If Bytemaster was obligated to work on the DAC's, why was he not involved in the DNS previous to the merger, or NOTE/Play currently? VOTE was to be developed by other people just as NOTE/Play is and just as Toast was developing DNS/KeyID.

Bytemaster saw a chance for more money and threatened to jump ship and build a competitor to his original project. That's all I am pointing out. It seems each response of your gets more and more convoluted with circle talk, far fetched improbable qualifications and hypothetical justifications which is just fancy BS talk. Something you are pretty good at.

EDIT:  Here it is, written literally overnight...

Here I will clean up a few remaining issues extracted from your post above.  (I've labeled them for reference.)


ISSUE 1.  I discussed this in my previous post.  Establishing a trusted reputation is much harder than establishing hashpower.  Competition to build a reputation - the most precious of commodities - is what makes the difference.  (This coupled with the certainty of getting caught misbehaving.)

ISSUE 2.  Without the reputation ingredient, more forgers are better because that's all you've got working for you is numbers.  Adding reputation and delegated authority to the "forgers" lets you get the same security with far fewer of them.  And actually, having too many forgers works against you because it waters down how well you can vet each one of them. 

ISSUE 3.  People voluntarily hold BitShares knowing that it operates like a startup company with employees working for newly issued equity.  People who don't understand that this is how most startups work, won't hold BitShares.  Those who do understand, will profit from its ability to fund its own growth.  It's a personal preference - invest accordingly.

ISSUE 4.  BitShares is not trademarked and is not a corporate creation of any government.  It is a free-space blockchain just like Bitcoin with zero footprint in fiat space.  References to it being like a company are metaphorical to help people constrained by the Bitcoin currency metaphor to break free from that perspective and see that other uses of blockchain technology are possible.

Your question 1 would be a great question to bring to Friday's world-wide mumble session and ask Bytemaster himself in front of God and everybody.  These sessions are recorded so anybody can get a download of you putting Bytemaster on the hot seat.  They are usually wide ranging and full of info like what you are looking for.  I've tried my best to explain it for you, but as I said, I'm just an old retired rocket scientist.  I'm sure Bytemaster will do a better job.  I will say that our evolution from POW to POS to TAPOS to DPOS is well documented in the bitsharestalk.org forum discussions last spring.  Each step was done to eliminate problems discovered along the way.  DPOS was judged by all involved as the most highly evolved we have come up with to date.


Your question 2 points to a period in our early history where delegates did not get enough vetting because... it was early in our history.  Back then, some delegates got elected without proper vetting since it wasn't hard to get into the top 101.  Now it is increasingly harder to get elected as a delegate and every time a new vetted delegate takes her slot, a less vetted delegate is bumped.  So it's an on-going Darwinian distillation process where over time the delegates that survive at the top get vetted better and better and have reputations that are worth more and more, making them unlikely to risk those hard-earned reputations on misbehavior that can instantly be detected.  A Sybil attack at the delegate level would produce candidate with no reputation from vetting. Who would vote for it?  Right now our star developers have taken days or even weeks to accumulate enough votes. Further, it costs two week's non-refundable salary (about $1100 right now) to apply to be vetted as a delegate, making  any attempt to flood the system with nefarious delegates impractical and unaffordable. 

Finally, because of the competition, every delegate gets challenged from time to time by people who want their job. 


Thus, we have engineered a system where it is very competitive to become a delegate, and only the most trusted best of the best survive.  Thus BitShares grows stronger every day.

I consider them both BROKEN AND NOT DECENTRALIZED!

The truth of the matter is that no one can be sure that he only controlled those five delegates.  He could very well still control multiple delegates.  As Stan Larimer says, If multiple delegates being controlled by one individual isn't an issue, then why is Bytemaster trying to figure out how many delegates he controls by asking the community?

Someone having multiple delegate positions is not an attack.  It increases centralisation so is best avoided, but is not an attack.  Would you consider the moment gigahash.io briefly had over 51% of the hashpower on bitcoin an attack even though they didn't actually attack?  Having 5 delegates is no where near enough to even potentially attack the network so please refrain from making wild exaggerations.

I argue that it's IMPOSSIBLE to individually vet delegates as unique IN BITSHARES because DPOS is vulnerable to SYBIL ATTACKS.  This is not true for Bitcoin or NXT because you either have to own the hashpower or the stake.  The ownership of the hashpower or stake is what provides the resiliency against sybil attacks in these two systems.

Bitshares DPOS is NOT "the best decentralized system by far out there".  This is an OUTRAGEOUS statement.  You are either misinformed or being disingenuous.  Are you going to try to convince everyone that limiting forgers is in the best interest of decentralization?  NXT's PoS system DOES NOT LIMIT FORGERS!  There are over 101 forgers securing the NXT blockchain.


Bitshares is imposing a TAX which redistributes wealth from currency holders to businesses.  This is the very definition of Communism / Crony Capitalism.  Being a NXT stakeholder, I would be upset if my stake was subject to a TAX imposed AGAINST MY FREE WILL to fund businesses in which I have NO INTEREST!


The fact of the matter is that Bitcoin and NXT are NOT shares in a company.  They are decentralized systems which have no incorporated entity behind them.  They are simply a token which are used between like-minded individuals.

Bitshares(TM) is a corporation based in the United States dealing, as you say, in "products" such as "currency and commodity derivatives" and "trading services".  From your explanation it seems that Bitshares is a trademarked "COMPANY, NOT A CURRENCY" selling "shares" that attempts to pass itself off as a currency to avoid US security regulations.


Actually, you didn't answer all of these questions.


From this statement, I am going to assume you believe multiple delegates being controlled by one individual, which is the very definition of a Sybil attack, isn't an issue.

Can you please explain then why Bitshares needs any type of consensus mechanism at all?  I assume you know the purpose of all consensus mechanisms is to prevent Sybil attacks.


How can you be SURE that you eliminate all delegates controlled by the misbehaving individual even if some of their delegates don't misbehave?

Can you please prove for all parties that this attack on your consensus mechanism, referenced to on YOUR FORUM at https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=10937.0;all, has been thwarted and that this individual no longer controls a delegate?  Please provide verifiable blockchain proof.

You didn't answer these questions:

1 - How is DPoS an "improved" version of PoS seeing that it is clearly a more centralized consensus mechanism?
2 - How does Bitshares rationalize that it is "decentralized" when it is susceptible to and previously undergone a Sybil attack, where actually, Bytemaster voted ONE person into FIVE delegate positions?

We've had lots of fun with metaphors over at bitsharestalk.org and bitshares.org.  Two of the classics, written by Dr. Charles Evans, are linked here:

http://bitshares.org/decentralized-autonomous-jedi-mind-tricks/
http://letstalkbitcoin.com/a-bitrose-by-any-other-name/

Bottom line is that metaphors are helpful in explaining certain concepts until the light bulb comes on for people.  There is a duality to BitShares that allows you to view it as a currency or a company.  Both are true, depending upon the context.  

My favorite way to look at it is that BitShares are shares in a company just like Bitcoin are shares in a company.  (Just because I called Bitcoin a company in the classic article that introduced the concept of a Decentralized Autonomous Company (DAC) -- http://letstalkbitcoin.com/bitcoin-and-the-three-laws-of-robotics/ doesn't suddenly make Bitcoin subject to securities laws.)

Both Bitcoin and BitShares are volatile crypto-currencies on their faces.  But, BitShares viewed as a company (a blockchain like Bitcoin) does much more.  It runs a full-up unmanned crypto-exchange providing decentralized trading services and the ability for users to create currency and commodity derivatives backed by BitShares collateral.  That's what we call BitAssets (BitUSD, BitGLD, BitBTC, etc.)  These are the real currencies we are aiming for.  Products of BitShares "the company".  These are what give you stability (pegging to real world assets) and pay you interest.  So, inside a single Bitcoin 2.0 currency you have a whole new financial system on a blockchain.  Speculators can use the built-in exchange and trade BitShares tokens thinking of them either as shares or coins or fuel tokens, or whatever metaphor makes sense to them.  Consumers just deal with the BitAsset products - the "smart coins".

So simultaneously you can find BitShares in the top 5 on coinmarketcap.com and BitUSD at around #35 as a non-volatile "smart coin" that tracks the value of the US dollar.

So we shouldn't get wrapped around the axle about the implications of a particular metaphor someone is using to explain a particular concept about BitShares.  I personally jump between metaphors a lot when explaining things to people.   My intent is to show that the design decisions are reasonable when viewed in the right perspective.  It helps people escape from preconceived mindsets and appreciate what we have here.

In reality, BitShares is a Whole New Animal.  We can only describe it like the classic story of blind men describing an elephant while touching its many dissimilar individual parts.  Hope this helps.

OP topic is not being implemented.  End of discussion:

http://thevalueswan.com/is-bitshares-undervalued-by-60-times-60x/

oops, wrong link:


Wow, that was easy.  Vote for what features you want implemented in your coin.  Eat your heart out bitcoin (and BitStamp too:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wczMKASQk6s&index=2&list=PLjgfpSQFJTLqbgHm8mkgPdD-ma7t0bRhK

).

I personally view BitShares as currency/company hybrid.

I want voting control, I don't want miners or anyone else to have it. BitShares gives me that. Hashers care about profits at the expense of Bitcoin holders hence why Ghash.io got over 40%. If Bitcoin holders had the voting power that wouldn't have happened.

You argue that 101 delegates is not decentralised enough but also argue that it's hard to individually vet delegates as unique. This process gets harder for the collective the more delegates you have. In a 500 delegate system it would be easier to get 251 fake delegates in place because the average shareholder simply couldn't process that many. With 101 we know who the majority are and at this stage are sometimes more happy with a high reputation, high trust individual having two positions. Over time the 101 number could change depending on what the free market deems optimal. I can't say it's immune from attack ever but it's the best decentralised system by far out there atm imo.

Your last point about it being a communist system is wrong. Whereas Bitcoin's distribution makes miners money, our distribution will be spent on developing & marketing BitShares. Imagine if the $500 million spent on miners a year was spent on developing & marketing Bitcoin. I think it's a tragedy that some of the best Bitcoin developers have to worry about making rent. Our maximum dilution is much lower than Bitcoin and I expect shareholders will keep it much, much lower in practice.

Over the last year, BitShares has made some decisions I vehemently disagreed with but there was no malicious intent. They felt they were adding value for shareholders every step of the way. Now that the funds have been spent and development is funded via the blockchain, it's up to us as a decentralised collective to
decide our future & make those decisions going forward.

The BitShares decentralised exchange & BitAssets are a technological triumph, arguably the most advanced blockchain in crypto. All accomplished in a year. Besides Daniel Larimer, the reason is because we have a lot of highly talented, well salaried developers. I'm certain BitShares will continue to pull away from the competition as it is able to innovate and develop at a much faster pace than competitors.

As per your own words, since "Bitshares is a company, not a currency", I can only assume Bitshares are a form of equity.  This fact should be most unsettling to any Bitshares' holders who believe the Bitshares' platform is dependent on I3's continued development.  It is my guess that Bitshares, the company, is in violation of numerous US securities laws.


This seems like some type of poorly designed Communist ploy to provide subsidies to businesses paid for by the stakeholders.

You are assuming with your figures that each delegate is unique.  It is my understanding that there is no way to prove the delegates are independent.   Furthermore, I don't agree with your rational that limiting delegates is "a case of diminishing returns" because the cost of paying for security in PoS is negligible.  The ONLY reason PoW exists in Bitcoin or PoS exists in NXT is to prevent sybil attacks.  It seems that since DPoS cannot prevent such attacks that it is FUNDAMENTALLY FLAWED and therefore, Bitshares is NOT A CRYPTOCURRENCY.


You are assuming that all stakeholders will be diligently watching the chain for bad actors.  I can guarantee you this isn't the case.  Of course, there is "little damage A rogue delegate can do", but as I assume you know, the issue lies in multiple delegates colluding together and the fact that with DPoS it is IMPOSSIBLE to know how many delegates one individual controls.


You are doing so at the expense of chain security.  This is a TERRIBLE IDEA.


No, it's not.  PoW and PoS will always be more decentralized and secure than DPoS because it is mathematically provable through PoW and PoS that the chain is secured by a verifiable amount of hashpower or stake.

If I want to attack Bitcoin's PoW algo, I have to acquire 51% of the hashpower.
If I want to attack NXT's PoS algo, I have to acquire 51% of the stake.
If I want to attack Bitshare's DPoS algo, ALL I have to do is convince the stakeholders to vote me in.

This will become a bigger problem if the Bitshares ecosystem grows and it becomes more profitable for a malevolent actor to pursuade stakeholders to vote them into multiple delegate positions.

Can you please answer my previous questions?

1 - How is DPoS an "improved" version of PoS seeing that it is clearly a more centralized consensus mechanism?
2 - How does Bitshares rationalize that it is "decentralized" when it is susceptible to and previously undergone a Sybil attack, where actually, Bytemaster voted ONE person into FIVE delegate positions?
3 - Can you please prove for all parties that this attack on your consensus mechanism has been thwarted and that this individual no longer controls a delegate?  Please provide verifiable blockchain proof.
4 - Are you of the same opinion as Toast, that multiple delegates being controlled by one individual aren't a problem?   If you agree, please explain why having any type of consensus mechanism is needed for Bitshares at all.  If not, why does one of Bitshares' devs mislead people to believe otherwise.

Ok, these are legitimate questions which I will try to help with, although I'm just an old retired rocket scientist.  We'll probably have to get one of the devs in here to cover the fine points when one of them comes up for air.

But here's a good recent post that can provide a starting point:

http://bytemaster.bitshares.org/bitshares/2015/01/04/Delegated-Proof-of-Stake-vs-Proof-of-Work/

The essence behind our thinking is that all systems tend toward centralization, and it is best to recognize this fact and specifically engineer controls into the system to manage it.  Without such controls, Bitcoin has centralized into about six or so entities who decide what software is "official".  People who join pools don't really provide any decentralization.  They just lend (delegate) their processing power to somebody running the actual signing software.  Pretty centralized and nothing really anyone can do about it.

Bytemaster recognized that providing a mechanism where stakeholders explicitly delegate their signing authority to authorized signers would allow token owners to reclaim that control - rather than leaving it to those who have unilaterally claimed the role by virtue of their ability to assemble a large centralized mining operation.  If one of those Bitcoin central miners start's misbehaving, well there's not much the community can do about it.   If the two biggest collude, well, game over.

Why 101 for DPOS?  Well, its less centralized than six!  But anyway, going from 1 to 2 delegates doubles your security.  Going from 100 to 101 adds less than 1%.  Yet each delegate added increases the cost linearly.  So its simply a case of diminishing returns on how much you want to pay for security.  Going beyond 101 simply doesn't buy you much.  We chose it as the sweet spot, but 50 or 150 would still be reasonable.

Another factor he recognized is that there is really very little damage that a rogue delegate can do.  Producing an invalid block simply gets her fired.  Recognizing that everything a delegate does is inspectable and detectable, the shareholders can quickly detect any misbehaviors and summarily fire the offender.  Again, stakeholders control their own destiny.

You do raise a valid temporary concern.  What happens if the community of stakeholders decides to vest trust in fewer than 101 unique delegates?  What breaks?

Well, 101 is just an arbitrary number that is much, much greater than six.  It's entirely possible for the community of stakeholders to decide that, for a period of time, they want to hire the services of an individual or small business that brings so much value to the ecosystem that its worth assigning more than one delegate slot to that individual.  Think of your favorite big name in the crypto industry.  What if the block chain could hire her at the expense of multiple slots?  Would the shareholders want to do that?  Should they have the authority to do that?

Of course.  BitShares is a company!  If the owning stakeholders think that will make them more profitable and grow faster, why can't a company decide to do that?  

In the short term, while shares are worth pennies, the hard limits on how much a single delegate can earn sometimes requires combining several delegate revenue streams to come up with a full time salary for a highly sought-after individual.  By the time those shares reach 5 cents apiece, there should be no further need to merge streams and things will settle down to 101 independent delegates.

In fact, by the time BitShares reaches Bitcoin's market cap, each delegate will be one of 101 small businesses, selected by the stakeholders, each using a revenue stream of several million dollars apiece to grow the ecosystem.  Powerful stuff to look forward to!

So your concern is really a harmless startup transient.  Security is already far better than it was for Bitcoin at this stage in its development.

As for Bytemaster having a lot of voting influence?  Not really.  He controls a small percent of the votes and usually waits for the community to show a strong liking for a candidate before deciding how he will vote.  He can easily be overridden (in ten seconds) by any small coalition of voters, should they get the urge to do so.   Most of the time they are content to rely on his judgement, but that is under constant vocal review every day at bitsharestalk.org.

Remember, BitShares is a company, not a currency.  It is a unmanned, decentralized company that produces and trades interest-paying "smart currencies" as its product.  So judge it by whether it is a good idea and implementation for a company, not a currency.  Then you can get past all the accepted rules that (may or may not) apply to future currencies and see clearly what the investment opportunity truly is here.

If you want to get really excited about where this is going, read Bytemaster's latest article about BitShares as the future of exchanges.  http://bytemaster.bitshares.org/article/2015/01/05/The-Future-of-Crypto-Currency-Exchanges/

And if you'd like to get your questions answered in person, Bytemaster hosts a public meetup using Mumble every Friday at 10 or 11 Eastern Standard Time. It's not unusual to have 50 people attending from most time zones around the world.   Join us and ask your questions there.  Then evaluate whether his live answers to a world-wide audience measure up to your expectations of a serious industry leader.

You really need to lay off the BTS devs.  You know they're practically a charity case.  I don't know how they make it.

Now, I'll be the last one to say that making money is a bad thing.  I think it is safe to say we all got involved in cryptocurrency, regardless of our ideology, to at least make a little money.  It comes down to the issue of figuring out who is being honest and who is being disingenuous.

Since Stan is hanging around here, I'd like to here his response to a post I made earlier.

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.10009591

I'd specifically like to hear him address how he figures that DPoS is an "improved" version of PoS seeing that it is clearly a more centralized consensus mechanism.  In addition, how does Bitshares rationalize that it is "decentralized" when it is susceptible to and previously undergone a Sybil attack, where actually, Bytemaster voted ONE person into FIVE delegate positions?  Can you please prove for all parties that this attack on your consensus mechanism has been thwarted and that this individual no longer controls a delegate?  Please provide verifiable blockchain proof.

Although, maybe you are of the same opinion as one of your developers, toast.  He believes that multiple delegates being controlled by one individual isn't a problem.  If you agree, please explain why having any type of consensus mechanism is needed for Bitshares at all.  If not, why does one of Bitshares' devs mislead people to believe otherwise.

No one ever indicated any intention to leave for any reason.  Inconceivable. That's another total fabrication.

All of the funds donated have been spent carefully and documented on public spreadsheets.
They were spent in the most tax-efficient way possible with the understanding that time is of the essence in this industry.  Admittedly they didn't go as far as hoped due to the steady decline of Bitcoin's purchasing power, but they got the job done.  And we got innovation after innovation as a result.  In fact, there is a whole family of independent blockchain businesses based on the resulting BitShares Toolkit.  Check them out.

But a project leader needs to look after his team and make sure they are funded.  Expecially one with Bytemaster's grand vision.  There is much to do in a very competitive arena.  There is really no limit to what can be done with the BitShares model.   We are engineering a whole new alternative financial system - inside the secure and incorruptible confines of a blockchain.  The sooner we recognize the need for a sustainable growth funding model the faster we can get there.

That led to the most recent and best innovation (and most obvious in hindsight). If BitShares is a decentralized company, then it ought to act like one.  Startups often pay their employees in equity. BitShares is a decentralized start-up. The ability to allow its employees to work for equity gives BitShares a unique advantage (until everyone else realizes this is the obvious way to grow the entire industry).  It  adds a few percent of new equity each year (far less than Bitcoin's inflation rate) to pay developers and marketers to grow the pie for all stakeholders - increasing the value of its equity.  This strategy ensures a sustainable funding model for robust growth -- as long as the shareholder continue to vote for it.  And why wouldn't they?  If they get even a few percent annual growth they are ahead of the game.  We expect it to be more like a few hundred percent.   Time will tell, but I think its a great bet.

Read all about our lessons learned here:  http://bytemaster.bitshares.org/article/2014/12/26/Stop-the-Crowd-Sales-Long-Live-Crowd-Funding/

Read some of the many detailed posts at bytemaster.bitshares.org or listen to a few interviews with Max Wright at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtCVRIwcBYU&index=1&list=PLjgfpSQFJTLqbgHm8mkgPdD-ma7t0bRhK

That's the best way to judge this team's integrity for yourself and see that all of this is for real.  I hope to see you over at bitsharestalk.org once in a while.  You owe it to yourself. 

Gosh Stan, you're just posting air. If you already bother to come here and reply, then at least pick one of the many issues he raised and answer.

I mean, I don't care either way - just watching this like I would watch an Breaking Bad episode. A guy that says repeatedly how he's all in to help humanity - fully motivated - with "integrity and passion in his eyes"... but then demands more money on top of the millions he got already, else he'll leave for better pastures.... well... interesting complex character. I'll definitely wanna stay and watch where that plot goes.