I have linked to this post in my comparison table for the BitShares column of the Research row.
That's nice, but you're largely discrediting the R&D Bitshares and other cryptocurrencies have done.
I've now separated the Research and Development into two rows on the comparison table upthread. I am recognizing the significant Development work done on all those coins.
As for the Research row of the table, I am definitely asserting that Dash's research is abysmal. Recent more detailed study on InstantX has further convinced me of my long-held "helicopter view" intuitions.
As for BitShares, let's discuss more below and I will adjust my perspective as necessary.
Afaics BitShares has introduced inferior systems such as DPOS which suffer from the flawed security model of Proof-of-Stake. They do some reasonably high-level tech (Daniel is smart dude) but afaics their focus has been incorrect. I remain somewhat opened-minded to BitShares, because at least Daniel is smart.
Crap like BitUSD failed afaik. As what I remember, many of Daniel's ideas have been not very well thought out. Nevertheless he is a smart dude, so I don't entirely ignore BitShares (unlike Dash which I totally ignored for the past year until they announced Evolution which purports to compete with my design, so then I had to investigate more closely).
You PoW zealots love to harp on PoS as being insecure, yet there has only ever been one successful attack on a PoS coin (and it was one that is dying with little community support- similar to how numerous PoW coins with low hash rate have been successfully attacked.) dPoS also allows for many great features.. it is the backbone for SmartAssets, Hire-able employees, high scalability, etc..
I can do all those features better than DPOS and with PoW. The insecurity of PoS has been explained in the prior couple of posts.
bitUSD has not failed- look at a historic graph and it has held its peg quite well. It did not work as it was originally designed, but it certainly works. You (wrongly) think you are omniscient and know what features are important for a cryptocurrency to succeed, and thus disregard all innovations Bitshares has invented/implemented as useless. At least I can admit when I am wrong or when I am speculating.
Before you posted, I had already edited my post as follows (to replace the underlined portion you quoted):
At least the original design for BitUSD failed afaik. Which is what I told him when he was proposing it.
I haven't had time to study what changes were made after the initial design was discovered to be flawed (as I told them it was back in 2013) and whether the new design works correctly.
No you are incorrect about my views. I know a peg can work by employing speculation, but it can never be lossless. I wanted to do some more work on quantifying that, but it is not high on my priority list. If BitShares has perfected the math and understanding, then kudos. But I don't assume they have without studying it. And I haven't had the time to study their latest design iteration on BitUSD. You know there is so much garbage released in altcoin land, nobody has enough time to study every shred of it in detail.
The above is not useless in my view, but devil is in the details on assets and programmable block chains, so I can't access that until I am ready to do a deep study. Their work may be trivial or deep. I do not know.
I recently tested the waters a bit on that structure to see if it could really motivate me to work on a new feature for them. I discovered precisely what I am warning you about, that politics will tend to diverge not converge (should I provide a link?). I predict that chaos will reign in DPOS eventually and a dictator will have to take control. I remain somewhat open-minded, but the theory of the power-law distribution seems irrefutable.
I am smirking. Perhaps yeah on "currently exists", but don't ask me to start digging on the flaws because I will probably accidentally blow up BitShares the same as I did Dash (I didn't even plan to find that broken math in Dash, it came out of a discussion about security of my design in my thread). I don't have the time to waste on that though. Otherwise the "currently exists" will always be a valid retort.
I already blew up their claimed 1000+ TX/sec and got everyone to realize it is only about 100+ TX/sec in reality on current hardware.
Smart contract stuff is very interesting. But I am not sure if hard-coded contracts or a programmable block chain is best.
So it is difficult for me to agree that this is research. Unless I study it and find a lot of innovation on math and sort, I will say this is a lot of obvious development that anyone would do if they were enumerating different hard-coded variants of things one could do with a more generalized programmable block chain.
I hope you realize my point is that a generalized paradigm in theory has exponentially more network effects.
So I am bumping up BitShare's development rating significantly, but I maintain their Research level is some where between average and above average. It isn't fundamental Satoshi-level research for crypto (which is the sort of research I have been attempting).
Stealth addresses + Confidential Transactions (more as to the Developmental side of R&D as these ideas were not original)
They copied that. I admit their accumulated development is quite high. And I even saw they had a contributor whip up some of that anonymity work very quickly, so it isn't just one guy on the development side. On research side, I think it is less impressive.
This is all apparently useless according to you. You must not fully understand how everything works, that it exists, and/or the implications of all the features listed.
I hope you realize now that I don't think it is entirely useless but it is rather my intuitions about priorities and scaling faster.
I think they've gone for the "I'll build every feature" approach. And I am going for the "I'll build the platform and let others build every feature" approach.
But I don't dismiss that they might get traction. We will see. As I said, I haven't entirely dismissed BitShares.