Several weeks ago I met an entrepreneur who is looking for opportunities in blockchain area, he appreciated Bitshares very much however he is not satisfied with the current status of it, mainly because of the lack of a powerful development team that can continue depict blueprint and execute.
"How about to fork Bitshares and update it based on our ideas on it? we can build a strong team and get investment from whales." he asked me.
If he is not satisfied with the development, he can certainly help with it. From my perspective, it doesn't make a lot of difference whether he helps develop BitShares, or forks it and puts the development into his own fork.
Advantages of having your own fork are control, and more stake, but the disadvantage of course is that BitShares has a network effect, businesses, userbase and an brand alreeady.
"Interesting" I replied, "I am not sure whether this is a good idea, however I'd like to share my ideas with you on what need to be changed if you really want to make a better Bitshares by forking."
“In my view, the core competence of BTS is DEX and smartcoins, it should be a general financial hub that connect the whole world. but it need a more solid base to play this role.
Agreed. We are working on it, and if you take a look into github, you will see that in the recent weeks, the development has been teared up quite a bit.
It will be better to do some change to DPOS, introduce coindays for collaterized BTS and make this coindays the voting weight for voting witness and comittee members. in detail, when an account put some BTS as collateral, the "coindays" of this account begin increasing as time elapse, but there is a up limit which should be collaterized_balance*max_days, max_days is a parameter controlled by committee.
This change will encourage long time investor, it reduce the risk that some short time whales manipulate the voting, and also it encourage smartcoin supply.
The problem here is that a) you cannot make sure that the collateralized assets result in a sell order (short position) and b) you don't want to force shareholders to participate in risk-taking trading.
It is also necessary to set that each witness need to put some BTS into collateral and only then can work as witness, if a witness do evil then the collaterized BTS will be confiscated.
I don't see the selling point. Witnesses cannot do any harm besides missing blocks and censoring transactions.
Another important thing is bond market, with bond market, Alice can borrow smartcoins from Bob with collaterized asset and paying interest, the deal will be reached if both agree the collateral asset, ratio, and interest, if when the bond expire but Alice do not pay back the fund and also the interest, the collaterized asset will be transfered to Bob and Alice will be recorded one bad credit record.
A bond market could be huge, all we need is funding and a development team to get this started.
It's not like there isn't enough work, it's the funding that is needed and a lot of people are working on this behind the scenes.
This is important to encourage smartcoin supply, we can see now bitUSD and bitCNY are good pegged to fiat, however there is little incentive for shorters to supply more smartcoins, now if one can make profit by lending smartcoins to others, many people will like to short more to increase smartcoins supply.
We are on it :)
DEX means decentralized exchange, however now there are some centralized parts inside it, if possible we need to try to make this part decentralized.
One is IOU, now OPEN.BTC is the popular BTC in DEX, however, if we can introduce the "real" BTC with crosschain interoperability, things will be much better.
Agreed. "people" are working on this. OPEN.BTC (IMHO) is just an intermediate thing that allows OpenLedger to grow and we need IOUs as they are part of the core value proposition.
Technically, whenever people want to trade something of "physical" value (value outside of BitShares), you can allow them to do that quickly by means of an IOU. Trust can be
reduced by means of legally binding contracts (not like Tether is doing it)
The other is fiat gateway, typically transwiser now is the CNY gateway that works well, however there is also risk that this kind of gateway be banned by goverment, we need P2P fiat gateway, and with "condition payment" P2P gateway is possible.
So we need a localbitshares.com ... there is no problem in building this ... except for legal.
Since I am in Germany and localbitcoin.com isn't permitted to run that business in Germany, I doubt that I can work on this anytime soon.
"Conditional payment" will be like this: when Alice and Bob agree that Bob provide off-chain merchant or service to Alice and Alice pay with on-chain assets, Alice can issue a conditional payment that some assets will be locked with Bob as the receiver, then when Alice receive the merchant/service then she can confirm the payment then Bob will receive the money, Bob can confirm “refund” for the money go back to Alice if they decide to cancel the order. an escrow will be called and judge while dispute happens.
Escrow would be huge. We can emulate this by means of a 2-of-3 multisig but I like the STEEM approach much more that does exactly what you described above.
Still, we need funding for that kind of stuff. It's not about the technology, it's about how to be able to build it.
The "conditional payment" can work in a lot of scenarios, such as outsourcing, P2P gateway, international purchasing.
the voting feature need to be refined, users can vote on a general topic based on account or any assets. positive and negative voting should be integrated."
FollowMyVote was working on stake-based voting .. @modprobe, what is the status of this?
"Great，I'll discuss with other guys and maybe will come back to you in recent future." He said.
"Nice, and better with money and team." I smiled.
Good job!
RE: Fork Bitshares?