Update 19/08: I've kept the title but since I read the initial forum post, it's clear that it is more the potential for informal collaboration. Saw this post was from Vitalik -

Quote from: vbuterin on August 19, 2014, 02:41:37 AM

So as an update on possible collaboration, I think we agreed that keeping things informal is the best way forward at this point. No official partnerships or mergers of any companies or any coins/projects, and it doesn't really make sense to copy-paste codebases in either direction either. But we are happy to participate in standardization efforts and collaborative discussions on technical issues as long as it's an open tent where any crypto-2.0 project can participate. I think there definitely are a few areas (eg. proof of stake algos, client standardization) where that would be quite beneficial.

Thank you for having us over, Bitshares team! Look forward to talking more online and offline in the future.

https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=6990.msg94298#msg94298

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Just read this on the BitShares forums from Bytemaster (Daniel Larimer), the founder & main developer of BitShares, it his just perspective & not be construed as being from Vitalik/Ethereum directly but...

(As far as I'm concerned two heads are better than one and the two best heads in crypto are considering working together on areas of mutual benefit!)

Quote from: bytemaster on August 15, 2014, 06:06:29 PM

This week I am meeting with Vitalik to discuss a partnership between our two projects. We spent several hours last night and 5 hours to day talking about blockchain technology and challenges we both face. I am happy to report that we are finding some common ground and are planning more regular collaboration.

Some of the things we have discussed is:

Moving Ethereum to DPOS
Honoring AGS/PTS with some of the stake saved by not mining Ether.
Distributing the Mining Rewards via Delegates
Improving the performance of Ethereum
BitAssets, DNS, and other market algorithms.

Vitalik seems to be of the opinion that DPOS is the way to go and the best overall compromise. He appears to recognize proof of work as dead and I have shown him that the "nothing at stake" argument does not apply to DPOS. We will be working to improve upon DPOS.

With respect to Turing Completeness and claims that Ether can do everything and anything, we had a deep discussion regarding the lack of first class data structures (heaps & trees) in Ether and even had some discussion on alternative abstraction on their data store. DPOS could significantly enhance the types of contracts ethereum could run by greatly increasing speed and effectively eliminating the potential for chain reorganizations.

Effectively my goal is to make both projects better and to secure AGS/PTS holders a stake in Ether. Our two communities can then work together to fill the various niches in the DAC ecosystem as we both agree that in its current incarnation Ethereum is not well suited to implementing many of the algorithms we have proposed for BitShares DACs.

Other areas of potential collaboration is our wallet technology. Our architectures are very similar and there is potential we may be able to combine resources here.

Vatalik is a smart guy and the two of us working together really helps sharpen both of us.

Nothing final at this stage, but I am optimistic a lot of good will come out of this.

Quote from: bytemaster on August 15, 2014, 06:12:28 PM

Quote from: Empirical1 on August 15, 2014, 06:09:35 PM

+5% +5% That sounds great! Thanks for letting us know!

I guess Vitalik must be happy for us to share that info? - That Vitalik/Ethereum is strongly considering DPOS?

Vitalik and I are not very "political" and mostly care about the best technology for the job. I am merely expressing my perspective on the conversation and will let him speak for himself.

https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=6990.msg93035;boardseen#new