There are about $2500 of BlockShares available at a small spread right now at CCEDK.

B&C Exchange exclusively uses native blockchain assets, whereas OpenLedger uses proxy assets that bring with them high counterparty risk. When Bitcoin is traded on B&C Exchange, it is real blockchain BTC that never leaves the Bitcoin blockchain. When "Bitcoin" is traded on OpenLedger, it is actually a user issued asset on the Bitshares blockchain. It has nothing in common with Bitcoin except that it is supposed to maintain the value of Bitcoin, which it may in fact not maintain due to counterparty risk from the asset issuer.


Signers don't have any voting power at all, while shareholders collectively hold all the voting power.



Just like any business that has shareholders, B&C Exchange shareholders will lose money if they don't please users. The question has the same answer as the question "How do Delta Airlines shareholders defend the interests of Delta Airline passengers?". 



I don't believe users want power. With power comes responsibility, and that can be an unwanted hassle. Users want to trade one asset for another quickly, easily and at a good price without the counterparty risk present at most cryptoasset exchanges. If there are individual users who do want power, they should become shareholders. If I wanted to become a passenger on Delta Airlines, I wouldn't want any power within Delta Airlines. I would only want an inexpensive and hassle free trip to my destination.

Our governance model is absolutely superb. The governance model of Peershares (B&C Exchange is a Peershare) is better than all other blockchain governance models. All shareholders are true peers and there is no authority in our system other than the collective will of shareholders. Shareholders can choose to compensate developers or any one else with grants of BlockShares or BlockCredits in any amount. Shareholders can pass motions that set various rules of operation. For example, a completely decentralised vote to halt BlockShare sales was passed by shareholders some time ago. B&C Exchange's governance is decentralised, flexible and powerful.

Peershares such as NuBits and B&C Exchange are the most advanced form of decentralised blockchain governance to date. The work I have already done establishes me as the leading innovator in decentralised blockchain governance.

I am excited to be able to announce the 4.0 release of B&C Exchange. It contains major protocol changes centering around the reputation system for signers, which is fully functional in this release.

We have implemented protocol voting in B&C, so when 90% of minted blocks have the upgraded protocol, the two week countdown to the actual protocol switch date will begin.

Once the switch occurs, shareholders will begin using the reputation voting system to elect reputed signers. @TomJoad has already indicated he will seek to be a signer. I am very interested to see who else will seek to become a B&C reputed signer. For those who are interested in becoming a signer, here is a summary of how to do that. Additional details can be found in the B&C Exchange design document.

Until now, active participation in B&C Exchange has been mostly restricted to developers. This release will change that as shareholders vote for reputed signers and reputed signers work with developers to bring B&C Exchange to full functionality in a 5.0 release.

I'm excited to be able to see the reputation system in action in just a few short weeks. I expect we will see quite a bit of discussion in the community about the reputation system and reputed signers going forward.

Here are the builds:

Download B&C Exchange 4.0 for Windows

Download B&C Exchange 4.0 for Linux

An OS X release will be available soon.

Here are some details about the features included in 4.0 and how to use them, provided by @CoinGame.

Here is some content from a similar discussion on discuss.nubits.com that addresses your concern and some related issues:

To become a signer, you first need to appeal to shareholders to vote to increase your reputation. You, in this case, actually refers to your BlockShares public key you wish to use as your reputed signer identity.

I would recommend starting a new thread in the B&C Exchange section of discuss.nubits.com where you explain all the reasons why shareholders should vote for you as a signer.

Reputation voting will start once the protocol switch to 4.0 is complete.

Assuming you have success persuading shareholders to vote to raise your reputation, then you will need to decide which blockchains you wish to support. Only the Nu, B&C and Bitcoin blockchains will be supported at first. Let's say you decide to be a signer for only the B&C and Bitcoin blockchains, but not Nu. In that case, you will need to run a full Bitcoin client in addition to your B&C client. To have high availability, you will need to rent a VPS or dedicated server. You will need to configure your B&C Exchange client to work with your Bitcoin client. You will need to set up and back up wallets that you will use for signing.

Once you have your server or servers set up, you are ready to publish your deposit public key list for BlockShares, BlockCredits and Bitcoins. We will have an RPC that will allow you to do this. These deposit public keys will be consumed by exchange users, so you will need to publish new ones from time to time.

Everything else is automated. On a daily basis, you don't need to do anything except ensure your B&C client and Bitcoin client continue to run and communicate with one another. Signing and validations are all automated.

I'm pleased to be able to announce that we have added Xiaochuan Wu as a Senior C++ Developer to the B&C Exchange development team. Xiaochuan successfully led a team of developers in the creation of the Huobi Bitcoin wallet. I asked him a series of difficult blockchain technical questions related to an upgrade scenario and he answered each perfectly, whereas other previous candidates had displayed mostly ignorance of the intracacies of blockchains. I can certify that he is a blockchain expert, as well as being well versed in C++.

Xiaochuan is on contract as a Senior C++ Developer from March 14th to August 13th, having committed to completing an average of 20 to 30 hours of billable work per week. He is interested in extending past August if funding permits. He is dedicated to B&C Exchange and is not expected to work on NuBits any time soon.

Please welcome Xiaochuan to the team! We now have significant development work on B&C Exchange occurring in North America, Europe and China.

B&C Exchange is hiring two full time C++ developers.

Progress has been slower than expected because developers (most of whom had agreed to work about half time) haven't put in the quantity of hours that were discussed when the project began. Fortunately, this means little funding has been consumed, so we get another chance without needing any additional funding. The best way to resolve the issue is to simply require full time developers, so they don't have any other work competing for their time and attention. Additionally, these two full time developers won't be working on the NuBit project at all. There has been a dynamic where the shared team for B&C Exchange and NuBits tends to put more time than expected on NuBits because it is a live and operational network, which means issues tend to seem more urgent than they do for the not yet operational B&C Exchange.

Previously, the strategy had been to use the same team members that had accomplished the amazing technical feats we see in the NuBits project. This approach hasn't worked. During NuBit development, we had a team of 5 or 6 people working full time. The NuBit budget experienced an 80% reduction in funding before B&C Exchange funding was successfully obtained. So, the team was mostly disbanded. Getting funding for B&C Exchange was not sufficient to pull the team back together for a second project.

With two full time developers, a full time QA resource, most of my attention going to my architect role, and a number of veteran part time developers, the project should be well positioned to be completed the middle of this year.

I am still very confident the design of B&C Exchange is practical and viable. Major progress has been made, particularly in the form of our 4.0 RC2 build, which contains a large percentage of the features needed in B&C Exchange. The change in direction toward new full time developers is likely to bring the core software to completion in a timely manner. While there is still a good chance we will be able to complete non-core infrastructure such as a web interface with our current budget, the chances appear lower than they did a number of months ago.

Much will hinge on the quality and devotion of the developers who have yet to be hired. Active shareholders should do their best to encourage excellent candidates to reach out to me.

I just asked the block explorer developer, Johny, about this. But yes, it is safe to say that it is an error in the block explorer display.

We have a new release candidate for B&C Exchange 4.0 that will enter testing tomorrow:

https://bitbucket.org/JordanLeePeershares/bcexchange/downloads/bcexchange-4.0.0-RC2-win-gitian.zip
https://bitbucket.org/JordanLeePeershares/bcexchange/downloads/bcexchange-4.0.0-RC2-linux-gitian.zip

4.0 will allow shareholders to vote for signers and allows signers to prepare for trading operations in the following production release.

CoinGame will keep us informed in the coming days regarding what he finds while testing.

Shareholders will be able to set the number of confirmations required for each blockchain by voting with their stake. The number of confirmations required applies to orders placed. The blockchain has already famously solved the double spend problem. We will use the same approach to detect and invalidate double orders.

On a separate note, we have added woodstockmerkle as a developer to the NuBits/B&C Exchange team. He will be helping us 5 to 10 hours a week. While his first assignment is working on a NuBit release, having him do so will increase sigmike's availability to work on B&C Exchange.

We are also looking for another developer. Details about the opening are available here.

The NuBits explorer at https://blockexplorer.nu/ has been open sourced. The B&C Exchange explorer is a fork of that, I believe. Here is the NuBit explorer source code:

https://github.com/JetJet13/NuExplorerOS

These are completely fraudulent, or counterfeit, Blockshares. And not very convincing counterfeits at that. They contain none of the properties of Blockshares except that they have the label "BKS". You can't mint with them. You can't vote with them. They are not even remotely connected to the B&C Exchange network. And you can't sell them at any exchange trading Blockshares. So don't buy them.

This is a scam.

NuBits and B&C Exchange share the same team. This gives B&C the advantage of having people work on it that have worked with the code base for a year or two in most cases. It has the disadvantage of meaning that when the team is focused on NuBit development, B&C Exchange development necessarily gets less attention and work.

The NuBit 2.1 release has been a major undertaking. We thought we were nearly done with it a month ago, but testing revealed some important performance issues that were difficult and time consuming to track down and remedy. The NuBits 2.1 release is very close to being ready for beta release. As a result, the team is once again turning its focus to B&C Exchange. The B&C Exchange 4.0 release will receive additional testing in the coming days. Over the course of the last month, glv has continued to make progress on developing the exchange messages (to be released after 4.0).

Sigmike and I are discussing a couple ways we could bring additional developers to the project to speed implementation. While I regard the pace of development as a disappointment to date, we have effectively conserved our funding and I am more convinced that B&C Exchange has a viable design than I was six months ago. Progress has taken longer than expected due to lower availability of developers than was expected, but the project is still very viable and is in fact moving forward.

NuShares have risen 92% in BTC since September 1.

B&C Exchange client version 4.0 is now code complete, although that code has not yet been merged into the master branch of the BCExchange repository which masterOfDisaster was observing. We will begin testing shortly. Version 4.0  includes complete implementations of all voting features needed for the exchange and a fully functional reputation voting system. That is major progress. I estimate we are 35% code complete at this point.

sigmike has spent the last month on Nu version 2.1, which is also now code complete and partially tested. So there are no contributions from sigmike in the last month on B&C Exchange. I have mentioned in posts in the past about how the Nu and B&C team are shared resources. He is just turning his attention to B&C Exchange again, now that Nu 2.1 is code complete.

About a month ago I began recruiting an additional developer for B&C Exchange. Obviously, such a vacancy means progress is not occurring at the optimal speed. However, it also implies the pace will increase once the position is filled. That position was recently filled by glv, and he has just completed his first successful set of tasks, or pull request.

So, most of the progress that has been made was understandably overlooked by masterOfDisaster. Additionally, today we have glv and sigmike focusing on B&C Exchange where over most of the last month they weren't working on it because glv just joined the project days ago and sigmike was working on Nu 2.1.

I'm happy to be able to announce that glv (glv2 on GitHub) has joined the B&C Exchange development team. He has done excellent work in the Peercoin and Peerunity code repositories, so there is no doubt about his technical qualifications for the tasks at hand. He has already worked successfully and efficiently with the team on other projects, so I'm confident this is an important win for B&C Exchange.

Please welcome glv to the team with me. I'm excited about the increase in development speed he will bring to the project!

Based on some brief research, Coinffeine is a desktop application focusing on facilitating fiat and Bitcoin exchange. The fiat must be offered by an irreversible payment processor, specifically OKPay at this time. Prior to commencement of a trade, both parties must submit a deposit. Their website says if one party does not complete their part of the trade, they lose their deposit. This raises the question of who is holding the deposit and who decides whether a deposit is forfeited. I don't see a way to have that occur without a trusted authority. Perhaps someone who understands Coinffeine better can explain that to us.

Their project is over a year and half old and I couldn't find a way to download their software, though I did see a report that it has been deployed in 70 countries as a technical preview in July.

To compare with B&C Exchange, we only facilitate trading of blockchain assets while Coinffeine is designed to facilitate Bitcoin to fiat transfer. B&C Exchange doesn't require any funds other than those being traded and small amount of BlockCredits as fees, while Coinffeine requires an additional deposit. B&C Exchange will use a number of multisig signers dynamically voted for by shareholders to hold funds, while I am unaware of how Coinffiene deposits are held. B&C gets revenue from BlockCredits burned as transaction fees in every transaction. I saw an article claim "Coinffeine is not currently charging fees, but the CEO noted that OKPay would charge a 0.5% commission for bitcoin purchases". I don't know how they will charge fees in a decentralised manner in the future. B&C Exchange will offer trading access via an open source web app that uses no database other than the blockchain that can be hosted by anyone and likely an Android app, while Coinffeine will employ a thick client.

I'm certainly no expert on Coinffeine, so if I missed something or if someone can explain how their deposits work and how they will receive revenue, please enlighten us.

I agree. It appears there is general agreement among NuShare holders that additional currencies should be supported by the Nu network, which would permit B&C Exchange to host trading pairs denominated in Yuan and Euro pegged currencies, for instance. The main barrier to adding additional currencies is supporting them with liquidity operations. Decentralised liquidity operations have been developing and growing rapidly in recent months in terms of the number of users, number of pools and the total quantity of liquidity offered. It is likely that continued growth in this area will facilitate the support of additional pegged currencies relatively soon, which would open the way for their use on B&C Exchange.

There is definitely a synergy in the development of the two code bases. The benefit goes both ways: Nu 3.0 will contain innovations first seen in B&C Exchange, while B&C Exchange contains many innovations first seen in Nu. I expect this back and forth sharing to continue. And of course, the synergy and sharing is broader than that. Besides B&C Exchange and Nu being a fork of Bitcoin and then Peercoin, we regularly include innovations first seen in the Bitcoin network. Similarly, anyone is free to benefit from our open source code. We exist in the new sharing economy. Its very healthy and efficient. Innovations spread broadly and quickly.

The backend functionality for the voting features unique to B&C Exchange has been completed since the last update. All that remains for the 4.0 release is the user interface for those new voting features, which John Jegutanis is currently working on.