I want to die before 65...

“Will you walk into my parlour?” said the Spider to the Fly,
'Tis the prettiest little parlour that ever you did spy;
The way into my parlour is up a winding stair,
And I've a many curious things to show when you are there.”

 

Come on Spoetnik,
You can come up with a lot bigger range of possibilities than that!

BitAssets (bitUSD, bitCNY, ... bitGold) are designed to track the price of those "real world" assets without counterparty risk on the blockchain.

So think of them as financial tools.  You can switch your exposure to price movements in 3 seconds by trading between them.

Think of BitShares as a special purpose currency factory that offers a way to create a variety of useful hybrid "smart coins" that breed desirable features from multiple currency strains.  Some are trustless.  Some engineer blockchain-assisted trust.  Some represent real assets mapped onto the blockchain by trust alone. Others are stable with respect to external assets that may or may not be stable themselves.  Some are deterministically self-contained mathematical constructs.  Others extract order from the unpredictable external consensus of generally clueless people.  Our industry is generating a Cambrian Explosion of new coin species. 

So, when you evaluate any particular coin, you shouldn't be comparing it to some preconceived idea of what your ideal one-size-fits-all universal coin should be.  That's like saying everyone should standardize on a single retirement mutual fund.   The blockchain world has moved waaaaaay beyond that.

BitAssets are just one of the enabling features of the platform infrastructure.

Marty, What are we going to do with that much power?

The first two industrial grade block chain platforms made the jump to light speed about six months ago.  Their 100 transactions per second throughput are scalable to 100,000 and their 3-second block times can be dialed to 1 second by public vote.  What are we going to do with that much power?

Foolish mortal!  Bitcoin gets along quite nicely with 10 minute block times and 7 transactions per second peak throughput.  Frankly, that much power seems to be complete overkill.  After all, “640K of RAM ought to be enough for anybody!”

Well, let’s do a little blues riff in “B” on that question!  

First, I’d better define some terms:

What is a blockchain platform?  It’s an incorruptible peer-to-peer ledger on which to build cryptocurrencies and other applications.  Most decentralized applications develop or clone their own dedicated platforms, but we now see intense competition to offer multi-application block chain platforms.  These act like operating systems to provide common services to applications developed by others.

What is a “real time” blockchain? Simply put, it is a peer-to-peer ledger whose transaction times are only limited by the speed of light and the dimensions of the planet. Its benefit is real-time performance, the ability to keep up with live events and react to them in time to influence their outcomes.  


Real time for global day trading must react in about 1 second, roughly the same as an aircraft carrier rudder. Other applications range from sports betting to live action video games.

•   Light speed chains can produce a new block in the time it takes to deal a playing card or for each slot machine tumbler to “clunk” into place.

•   One chain can process all transactions for all of the 600-plus coins now listed on coinmarketcap.com – with enough left over for Master Card or VISA.

•   The cost savings for Bitcoin alone could provide a $3 million grant to each of 100 new crypto-startups – or fund 30 Bitcoin Super Bowl ads.  Every year.

But the most important advantage of a blockchain fast enough to support many independent businesses is that you enter a frictionless economic environment where currencies, applications, smart contracts and entire enterprises can do business with greater liquidity, efficiency, market depth, network effect, and regulatory freedom.

Keeping all of the transactions with your application on the same blockchain means never having to encounter the regulatory and security hazards of passing through corruptible and fallible human institutions.  That’s an ideal worth pursuing! .

And it’s a jump that almost any coin, exchange or decentralized application in the cryptocurrency industry could choose to make.  All they need is an ordinary software upgrade.


In the cryptocurrency world it has long been considered kosher to clone somebody else’s open source platform when introducing a new coin.  It’s also OK to upgrade your own platform from time to time.  But it is much less common to see coins hopping from platform to platform as the technology advances.  Why is that?

One obvious reason is that some coins exist for the explicit purpose of advocating a particular platform technology.  Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ripple, and Peercoin come to mind as early examples.  Their raison d'être was originally to advance a certain technology.  Of course they are not going to jump to a better platform.  That would be conceding defeat.

Or would it?  Do we really believe that 100 years from now any of those coins will still be using the same platform technology?  What about in ten years?  If not, then why not upgrade next week?  To the extent that each of these enterprises has built up an ecosystem of users and supporters that are now more valuable than their original base technology, do they even need to keep their first prototype’s technology alive forever?  

Well some will.  And risk going the way of the dinosaur.  Others will adapt and leverage what really matters – their brand and user base – and go on to achieve great things!  Right now the Darwinian forces have never been stronger.  Transaction cost-effectiveness varies by ten orders of magnitude between the strongest platforms and today’s industry average.  Transaction times range from 10 minutes to 1 second. Bandwidth varies from 7 transactions per second to 100,000.  The industry spends over $300,000,000 on transaction processing when it could be less than $250,000.  Combined, that’s transaction cost-effectiveness range of 1 to 10,000,000,000.  That’s a pretty good incentive to jump!



There are many validations of the surprisingly elusive idea that it’s ok to jump to a new platform.   Stellar started as a Ripple clone, developed its own platform and then jumped to it.  NXT rolled its own version of Peercoin’s POS. Ethereum is starting on a POW platform with a pre-planned jump to POS or even DPOS.  BitShares started as a POW surrogate called ProtoShares and has since jumped to DPOS and now to Graphene.  BanxShares is jumping from POS to Graphene.  Muse is jumping to Graphene.  Most of the leading teams are getting jumpy!

Early coins were synonymous with the platforms they were built upon. Some coins only came into existence because they were trying to offer a better platform.  Most altcoins simply cloned an existing platform and focused on their real mission:


Most such coins are imminently upgradable to better technology without losing what really matters – the brand and community that grew up around them.

Coins like Dogecoin ought to be leading this immanent megatrend.  It is ideally situated as a “platform surfer”.  The reasons its community loves it have little to do with the platform on which it resides.  It ought to always be able to claim the very best technology and the most cost-effective performance because it has no particular technical axe to grind.  


And before our very eyes, that inertia is evaporating.  As soon as the bulk of the world’s cryptocurrency communities realize that it’s easy and ok to change platforms, Katie bar the door!  Everybody will be looking to use a platform upgrade as an easy way to move up the totem pole at coinmarketcap.com (or avoid being passed by others).  

On many platforms you can launch a new coin in less than one hour and immediately have it listed on multiple exchanges with a rich set of on and off ramps already in place for you.  And you don’t have to be a new coin. Any coin can upgrade.  Instead of publishing the next incremental version of its existing software, it does a “pitch fork”  (Pitch the old software while initializing same accounts and asset ownership on the new platform).  Users switch wallets and voilà!  Nothing else about the coin’s distinctive community or ownership structure needs to change, including its representation on coinmarketcap.com.


Given the Darwinian imperative of remaining competitive, applications should always be evaluating their choice of platform.  Some of the top considerations are cost-effectiveness (a function of speed, bandwidth, operating costs), network effect (the number of users a platform has) and reduced economic friction (the ease of doing business with other players).  Here, I’d like to focus on Larimer’s Fifth Blinding Flash of the Obvious:


Of course, if your business is popular and unique enough, it may be worthwhile for people to fly out to your island to interact with you.  But that’s still unnecessary economic friction. Moving your customer’s funds between exchanges or blockchains is like flying between islands.  The associated delays, costs and limited local interactions inhibit what opportunities you can profitably pursue.  This is the same reason car dealers, restaurants, and high-tech firms tend to cluster together with their competitors and suppliers to attract customers.  Reduced economic friction.  



Ethereum offers an environment that will attract developers to populate its ecosystem with innovative applications.  It might be viewed as the Silicon Valley of blockchain ecosystems.  BitShares aims to be New York City, where transactions take place at New York economic speeds.  Muse, a platform supporting custom coins for every artist, athlete, and political celebrity, offers an ecosystem more like Hollywood.

Choosing your ideal economic platform.

So we are looking for platforms that are designed to be general-purpose ecosystems that support frictionless economic interactions between many complementary and competing players.  Early platforms only needed to support the needs of a single currency.  There was no thought given to facilitating efficient interactions with other products and services.  Most coins relied on external privately owned exchanges for that purpose.  But proprietary stovepipe exchanges are themselves islands, with their own barriers to getting between them and their own internal regulatory and security friction.  

The best economic platforms, whether cities or block chains, are designed to minimize this friction.  They are “superconductors” reducing economic resistance for transactions of every kind.  They provide instant access to common services and infrastructure that can take years to build out on your own island.   They provide instant teaming with other service providers without having to negotiate individual deals.   Each new arrival enriches the set of services and products available for everyone else to build on.


Blockchain based platforms designed to do the accounting ledgers for many assets and applications at the same time can be thought of as many chains woven together into one compound chain.  Counterparty-free atomic cross-application trading is built in!  Smart contracts between member “chains” are completely frictionless.


For example, the OpenLedger™ Network (OpenLedger.info) allows multiple traditional exchanges to share the same transparent order books on the BitShares Platform.  This gives them access to deeper, more liquid markets and access to more financial products and services than they could enjoy in a stovepipe by themselves. And they get built-in accounting that captures the revenue from every customer they bring to the table.   It also puts an end to the bane of our industry - exchanges getting hacked.  This is because customers retain the keys to their own funds even while they are on the exchange!  Multi-signature keys are configurable for any corporate or personal access control strategy.

Joining a common blockchain-based network is a great way for new exchanges to reach critical mass together – by sharing market depth and liquidity drawn from completely different demographics or their own pre-existing user bases.  Startups in eight countries have publicly or privately indicated plans to join when this network goes live this month.  


That’s like saying my individual car doesn’t need the bandwidth of a six-lane beltway to get around well in a big city.  You do if you want to share that resource with a lot of other people – which is the whole point of moving to the Big City in the first place.  

You also want to be on a fast platform so that a lot of other applications can join you there.  In particular, so that applications that do need speed can thrive while serving you.  A good example is day traders.  They need the fastest possible trading times so they can exploit their specialized knowledge and tools.  They will gravitate to the fastest platforms and, in turn, will generate the liquidity, market depth and specialized services that your application probably does need.


Each platform will give your application a wealth of new features for free.  I won’t attempt to represent them all, but here’s a sampling of the ones you can read about at BitShares.org.  Each platform will have its own set of features you can inherit to make your own project more successful.


Reasons why you might still need a separate platform.

Of course, there are some things that might not go together on the same chain due to differences in rate structure, by-laws, governance or philosophy.  We still need diversity!  And besides, New York City traders might not feel comfortable on the same platform with a Caribbean gaming business.  To each his own!

While it is best to keep assets with compatible business models on the same chain wherever possible, Cryptonomex.com has and will release multilple independent chains based on its rapidly advancing technology for these very reasons.  

BitShares upgraded to Graphene technology to provide a real-time decentralized exchange platform supporting a network of traditional exchanges that have agreed to share their order books, products, and services on an open public ledger for improved security, transparency, and combined network effect.

MUSE is a Graphene based platform developed by Cryptonomex for PeerTracks which serves as a real-time platform for every artist, athlete, politician, and other celebrity to issue their own interoperable coins.  It needs a different micro-transaction fee structure than a network intended to support high-value financial transactions.

Identabit is a Graphene based platform developed for Identabit.com that emphasizes a unique mix of positive identity, regulatory compliance, government accountability and banking privacy targeting the remittance industry.  It can’t co-exist with BitShares’ dogged insistence on anonymous transactions as a philosophical, nay existential, necessity.

Some alternative platforms might be too complex to make the jump to light speed, but that doesn’t mean synergies won’t exist.  Many smart contracts will probably appear first on Ethereum because of its flexible prototyping environment.  But what developer of a profitable Ethereum smart contract application will fail to quickly optimize a matching light speed version on BitShares before some cheeky competitor does it for her?  

The Bottom Line.

Developers should consider a number of new platforms that can accelerate their time to market for new or existing coins, applications, and decentralized autonomous currencies/companies/cooperatives/communities/countries (DACs).  It can take a lot of work to get (or keep) traction on your own isolated platform.  That’s so 2012.  Don’t do it, unless you have a compelling reason.

Here's a draft article I've had laying around for a while.
I haven't published it anywhere yet because:

1.  I got busy and forgot about it until some other current threads made me think of it.
2.  It mentions many other chains and that always generates controversy.
3.  I've been saving it for just the right occasion, perhaps my retirement from the industry in 2037.

So, at the obvious risk of upstaging myself if and when I actually do publish it somewhere, I'll preview it here (just among friends) so you can:

1.  Use it to stimulate the discussions going on in the other threads here and here.
2.  Tell me where I've missed the mark or have risked offending some other community.
3.  Suggest where I might best be published - if anywhere.  (Newsletter, Blog Article, Inner city graffiti wall...?)

Stay tuned, it will take me a minute or two to format it for this venue...

And I see someone has posted a nice summary of other cool stuff going on a parallel thread in this forum.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1389426.msg14115561#msg14115561


I can't keep track of it all any more because so many other people are running their own things.

And that doesn't even count the stuff going on behind the scenes at Cryptonomex that my dog Ellie Mae ain't talkin' about!

Stan

Oh and BitShares Blockchain News

Lots of activity on BitSharestalk.org now that the community is running everything.

Bytemaster's 90 minute weekly press conferences are usually mind blowing.  Last Friday was about a new breakthrough in side chains.

You can find them here.

BitShares is one of the highest performance industrial grade blockchain platforms and lots of people are building on it.   We just had the Maker from Ethereum list two assets on BitShares, for example.  It just takes time for those applications to build up and gain traction.

Current discussions:

We just dropped transfer and market fees to negligible and shareholders will soon get free transactions proportional to their stake.

Shareholders are busy discussing which new project proposals to sponsor.

Stealth privacy is about to be added.  The list goes on...

The only reason you haven't heard much lately is because, frankly, I've been delightfully too busy to come by here to shill
(and the usual trolls haven't goaded me into it lately.)

Check it out here.

Introducing Cryptonomex International


Cryptonomex (CNX), a Delaware company based in Blacksburg, Virginia is pleased to announce the first of several new Joint Ventures. 

Cryptonomex, International (CNI) will be based in Amsterdam, Netherlands as an independent consulting and engineering services company for blockchain applications leveraging multiple leading blockchain technologies for public and private applications as well as providing training, local governance, and regulatory compliance services. 

CNI will be cofounded by CEO Manuela Krull-Mancinelli and CFO Ronald Kramer who are seasoned experts in Finance and IT. They will be bringing strong business development expertise, contacts and resources to the task of proliferating blockchain technology and the global Cryptonomex brand.   Some of our best known European BitSharestalk.org heroes have already joined in the ground-floor founding activities.


Manuela and Ronald will leverage Cryptonomex expertise and focus on finding investors, clients and partners for new blockchain applications, with an emphasis on forging partnerships with other blockchain communities interested in cooperation more than competition.

So, what does this mean to you?

•   If you are a talented developer (or team) looking for full or part time employment leveraging multiple blockchain technologies, CNI wants to know all about you.

•   If you have a mature idea looking for funding, CNI may want to team with you to find funding for your project.

•   If you have funding and are looking for good investments, CNI will be preparing a portfolio of ready-to-go projects ranging from small but lucrative Fee Backed Assets (FBA) to full-scale multi-chain startup companies.

•   If you have a funded idea and are looking for someone with the skills to implement it, CNI can put a team together to make it happen on a contract basis.

•   If you are a steely-eyed BitsharesHODLer, you finally have a funded group of full time professionals looking to leverage the Graphene ecosystem while seeking synergies with other leading communities.

•   If you have a nose for business leads and the ability to refer potential clients to us on commission, CNI would love to have you out there scouring the globe for opportunities.

•   And if you just wanted more decentralization and professionalism in the management and marketing of BitShares and the Blockchain Universe Writ Large, grab some popcorn and a cold beer!

Meanwhile, Bytemaster and the original Virginia team of Core Developers at CNX will serve as an independent common technology laboratory for CNI and other startups on our drawing board.  They will be working on new breakthroughs and serving as mentors and reinforcements to the new profit centers that CNI will be incubating. 

This upgrade permits private transfers between accounts.

Fees paid to do these stealthy transfers go to holders of the "STEALTH" Fee Backed Asset (FBA).

Rumor has it that the investing sponsor of this FBA will be putting some of them up for sale, so be watching for that.

Discussion occurs here:  https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,21500.msg279820.html#msg279820

Stan

DEFINITION of 'Helicopter Drop'
A hypothetical, unconventional tool of monetary policy that involves printing large sums of money and distributing it to the public in order to stimulate the economy. Helicopter drop is largely a metaphor for unconventional measures to jumpstart the economy during deflationary periods. While “helicopter drop” was first mentioned by noted economist Milton Friedman, it gained popularity after Ben Bernanke made a passing reference to it in a November 2002 speech, when he was a new Federal Reserve governor. That single reference earned Bernanke the sobriquet of “Helicopter Ben,” a nickname that stayed with him during much of his tenure as a Fed member and Fed chairman.


Read more: Helicopter Drop Definition | Investopedia http://www.investopedia.com/terms/h/helicopter-drop.asp#ixzz3ybBGVPEC
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You erect false strawman assumptions and then attack them.

Our lawyers require me to pass all public remarks on this subject through them, so I'm afraid I'll have to decline further comment.

I do appreciate your interest.  At least your posts have elevated the discussion far beyond what we usually get in threads like this.

We have consulted some of the biggest law firms in New York, Washington and Virginia.  I'll refer you to the following white paper.

Members of policy group Coin Center, law firm Perkins Coie as well as Harvard and MIT have released a new working paper that aims to illuminate legal questions surrounding the non-financial use of the bitcoin: 
   

...and this higher level Coindesk article:  Token Security Research Analyzes Blockchain US Law

These top tier firms explicitly considered Howie and what we and others are doing. Quoting from the above Working Paper:


Cryptonomex does not issue tokens or operate any blockchain.
We publish and maintain open source accounting software that others are free to use for public and private applications.

We also provide consulting services to help others develop public and private blockchains with all kinds of different specs for their own purposes.  This is no different than companies that sell accounting software to banks and firms on wall street.  It is those banks and firms that are regulated.

There are multiple independent software providers contributing to the body of open source software and multiple organizations using it for their own businesses.  We do not restrict, nor are we able to control, what others do with that public domain software.

We scrupulously adhere to this bright line limitation to our activities.

People who use the public domain software are naturally presumed to comply with all applicable regulations in their various jurisdictions.

Non sequitur.  We are not designing a cryptocurrency.  We are designing blockchain based accounting software for businesses that offer a variety of financial products. Some need a self-governing model.  You continue to project your preconceptions on our products and then expect us to comply with them.  They only have to meet the business needs of entrepreneurs who choose to use our free software.  There is no intent or need to comply with your particular philosophy - which we agree is valid, but not exclusive.

We are totally aware of the Howey test and have scrupulously avoided engaging in any business governed by it.  Our only activity is developing an open source software toolkit which others have used or are using to deploy their own applications including BitShares, MUSE, PLAY and Identabit.  We do not operate any of these businesses or pay ourselves anything.  We do accept contracts to provide and maintain software for other manned and unmanned entities.  At no time have we sold anything.

Funny how so many people think that crypto is limited to only one application.  The ideal design for an autonomous cryptocurrency does not necessarily apply to other business applications, including private applications which have no need to be decentralized at all.  One should avoid imposing a one-size-fits-all set of requirements on every use of the blockchain.  That's way to limiting to its potential and will cause you to miss out on many opportunities to provide the world with something new and useful.

We agree that the application level has huge potential.  BitShares is a real-time platform with a built in decentralized exchange (DEX) as it's first app which also serves as important support infrastructure for many other applications by us and others.  Think of the DEX as an anchor store at a mall where we plan to add and attract other businesses over time.  The platform gets a small share of the fees from each business in exchange for providing and infrastructure and ecosystem that accelerates the time to market for new businesses.

That DEX has a variety of products including Market Pegged Assets (MPA), User Issued Assets (UIA), and Fee Backed Assets (FBA).  But BitShares is not defined by any particular single business or business product.

BitShares meets all our threshold design objectives for a practical engineering solution to a secure self-governing real-time blockchain.  We expect to continue evolution of our free public domain software, but this was not a reason to delay releasing it to the public for others to start building a user base and providing useful services.  It has run for 18 months in two generations without any serious problems.  It is blazing fast, scalable to 1 second transactions and 100,000 transactions per second (when eventually needed), and completely controlled by its token owners proportional to their stake in the system.

We understand that others may have other design criteria, for other applications.

So do we.  

No, I don't concede that.

I agree that we are in a never ending arms race and there will always be more problems to solve.

But the progress being made and the roadmaps I've seen give me confidence that the goal of improving, if not perfecting, the security of life, liberty, and property (or at least two out of those three) is within reach.

You don't need to achieve perfection to have something be worth doing, and the first solution you come up with is not a limitation on what can be achieved through persistence over time.  The battle is asymmetrical and a small innovation can have a disproportionately large impact on the balance of power.

I prefer to encourage fellow members of the crypto community to continue to innovate rather than engaging in the fratricide that so many on this forum seem to think is useful or somehow gratifying.  Our brothers and sisters in the other tribes of cryptodom are not the enemy, and pouring cold water on everyone else's efforts (clearly without knowing what you are talking about) is self defeating. 

I won't be a part of that nasty parochial attitude.

It is safer than a Swiss Bank when it comes to all the corruption associated with the modern banking system.


It used to be, back in the Day, that Swiss Banks were famous for their privacy and immunity from unscrupulous acts by governments and the global banksters.  Not anymore.  All the Swiss banking laws have been updated to comply with The Global System which no longer recognizes a banking customer's privacy or even property rights.

Nowhere am I saying that there are zero risks.  BitShares (and other cryptos) just provide a new form of safety that consumer's should consider for diversification against these risks.  And since the "Safer than a Swiss Bank" is aiming to get the attention of non-crypto-savvy consumers, it is a perfectly reasonable attention getting headline.  Naturally, when used, it is important to make sure that the other risks are clearly stated.

But we haven't used this slogan yet in any advertisement anywhere.  We just discussed it on bitsharestalk.org as a possible way to reach the unwashed masses.  A few of The Usual Suspects grabbed it from there and tried to make something of it out of context here.  Nice try.

Just like the general public knows (or should know) that they should diversify against the risk of any single investment vehicle, crypto's provide diversification from many the common mode risks of the Global Financial System.

Surely you know all this.

While I was at it, I found this one right beside it that I kind of liked...