Transcript of the 2/5/16 BitShares Dev Hangout on Zero Fees
Listen to Episode 132 - Create a BitShares Account
Transcript
[00:00 - 14:25] Committee Update with DataSecurityNode.
bytemaster: So this week James Calfee and Ben have made additional progress on the STEALTH feature. I believe everything from the management account that's doing all the voting on the STEALTH fees to the buy-back has been implemented at the blockchain level.
The JavaScript side of the equation is actually transferring to blind and doing blind transfers. I've been working a lot with James this week on helping understand the details of that. We've made some progress in integrating the wallet storage system that we're using to keep track of wallet data. It abstracts out the difference between storing the wallet locally and storing it on the server. We really wanted to make sure that we had backups working well as part of the STEALTH rollout.
Because if you lose track of a transfer receipt you can lose track of your balance. It's not like BitShares where you've got one key and as long as you back it up once you're good forever. When you're doing this confidential stuff you need to be much more on top of making backups every time you receive funds. So we're integrating that in there and it's looking good.
I've asked James if he thinks things can be done in the next two weeks and he's optimistic that would be the case. We'll be working with Ben to roll out a hardfork that has the new features in it. And the hardfork date will probably be about two weeks from now. And we're going to hardfork the blockchain with or without the GUI updates. [inaudible] that part of it is ready and that takes the most coordination. The GUI updates can then come out as they get finished.
But overall steady progress. The guys are going as fast as they can on the STEALTH and I'm pretty happy with what they've done. Other than that I guess I'll take some questions.
Thom: Will the hardfork change the way that the CLI STEALTH works currently?
bytemaster: No.
fuzzy: When you were talking about the nodes that host the wallet, is this just with respect to STEALTH transactions?
bytemaster: Correct.
fuzzy: So whenever you receive STEALTH transactions you have to back it up.
bytemaster: Correct. In the wallet that we're putting together we're automatically backing it up to the server if you enable that feature.
CryptoPrometheus: You mentioned a couple of weeks ago about a scheme for dividend payments that was new and superior to the buy-back scheme. I'm wondering if you can talk a little about that and what exactly it would be? And for the Fee Backed Assets, that's just going to be the same buy-back mechanism type thing that we use right now. There's not going to be any new dividend payment system worked into the Fee Backed Assets?
bytemaster: Correct. It's going to use the buy-back as we've always done. The new dividend system is based on the idea, you separate out the currency which people are paid from the shares that are being tracked. So imagine you've got an global account that's accumulating a bunch of money. Any time there's a dividend payment, at any time a user can convert their equity, so if they own 1% of the User Issued Asset or the Fee Backed Asset or whatever, it can convert that to 1% of the balance of the pool.
Now the pool just continues accumulating and when they do the conversion you're reducing the supply and reducing the pool proportionally. So under that model it's slightly different from buy-back. When you do a buy-back you're taking the entire pool and auction it off to the highest bidder leaving the pool empty after every buy-back. Under this model the stakeholders accrue equity in a growing pool but when they cash out they only get to cash out their cut of what happened in the past.
So it's like a company. Everyone's got shares in the company and the company's got a bank account. All the profits go into the company's bank account and at any time a shareholder can turn in their shares and get their percentage of the company's bank account. That's probably a more concise analogy of how it works.
Under such a system, rather than getting your dividends distributed to you when they're paid, you have the right to claim your dividends at any point in time.
bytemaster: Could we imagine a scenario where the blockchain had no fees at all and instead all accounts were rate limited proportional to their balance?
fuzzy: What do you mean rate limited, as far as?
bytemaster: As far as viewing your BitShares as owning a percentage of the available network capacity. So someone owns 1% of BitShares could consume 1% of the network capacity.
fuzzy: So kind of like miners and mining pools?
bytemaster: Completely unrelated to that. There are no fees. Imagine a system where if you own 1%, you can consume 1% of every block, worst case. Imagine everyone's doing timeshare on the blockchain space and everyone who owns shares can consume some of the blockchain space when they want to do a transaction. With this method no one would be able to flood the network because they can consume their allotted allocation of the bandwidth.
Not everyone wants to use the network at the same time. The network can support regular users transacting more or less whenever they want. The only thing it won't allow you to do is to flood the network with a large amount.
fuzzy: How would the profitability be found there?
bytemaster: The profitability comes from network effect more than anything else. The tiny little amounts that we're collecting in fees are insignificant to lost network effect and or complexity.
Thom: How do Witnesses get paid?
bytemaster: The same way they do now, via dilution.
fuzzy: But it would always dilute instead of burning any?
bytemaster: Yes. We're effectively recognizing the fact we could create an exchange that had no fees, yet still had no abuse and was completely decentralized. When people come and use the exchange, if we wanted to have some fees on market orders and that would be our only fee source we could do that. Versus right now we have people saying, "Hey I don't want to build on your exchange because people don't like paying that fraction of a cent to cancel their order".
Thom: What would happen if a group of whales got together to try and absorb a lot of bandwidth, would that be able to lock out people with very small amounts of shares in the network from transacting or would it slow them down?
bytemaster: There are algorithms that we can use to make sure that people who haven't transacted in a while have more weight. Basically we make it proportional to coin-days accumulated. So someone with a small balance that doesn't transact but once a week would be like someone with 1/7th of the balance transacting everyday.
fuzzy: So the more you use it the less priority you have?
bytemaster: Correct. And you can do certain things like penalizing people for use during high loads and an automatic scaling of the fees. So it's not a fixed thing. The goal here would be to create a system that has lower cost in terms of Committee oversight. It allows you to advertise free. Nothing in life is really free. Anything that's advertised as free is fundamentally rate limited. It allows people to use the network and we don't have to put fees in people's face all the time.
Thom: What role would the Committee have in a fee-less scheme like this?
bytemaster: Controlling block size, block intervals, maintenance intervals and various other mechanics. Committee members would make far less frequent discussions. If you wanted to change market fees, that might be the only fee that you would discuss. But such a system would get BitShares one step closer to having the same user experience of a decentralized exchange.
xeroc: Would this be mostly for transactions? For example, creating an asset is still going to cost a fee, right?
bytemaster: True, anything that's scarce like that. One is bandwidth which is transient and the other is real estate, which is permanent. So account names and asset symbols would still have fees associated with them.
xeroc: Would the Committee account still be adjusting smartcoin parameters to be collecting income optrade fees?
bytemaster: Yes.
Thom: What does this doe to the upcoming STEALTH feature?
bytemaster: STEALTH is something where the network doesn't know the balance, so a fee still has to be charged. It wouldn't eliminate all fees, but it would eliminate the majority of fees that people are complaining about.
Thom: How does it impact the registration incentives or referral program?
bytemaster: Right now the referral program is setup to be based on fees, a percentage of future fees. So that creates incentives to sign up new users. We could still have fees, but we can choose where and when and how much to charge fees versus right now we have to charge fees on absolutely everything in order to prevent spam. I guess look at it as an alternative minimum fee to prevent spam and allowing the Committee to pick and choose where we actually want to charge users and where we don't want to charge users.
So there's the new proposal for percentage based transfer fees that I think has been approved and is going through that abit is working on. I think that charging people for transfers proportional to the value of the transfer is great. I think for low value transfers you can get rid of the minimum because we have an alternative way of charging people for small amounts. So there would have to be no minimum fee for the percentage based transfer which would leave us only with percentage plus maximum. It gives us more options in our toolbox and can allow micropayments as long as you don't flood the network with them and things like that.
Thom: Fee Backed Assets would also be affected I guess in the same way that STEALTH is?
bytemaster: Correct.
bytemaster: Someone says, "A big whale will continuously flood the network". Well there's two things here. One, the network will target a fraction of the available capacity. If we're able to do a thousand transactions per second, anything over 100 TPS will start to have very high fees. Basically it will consume a user's transaction power very rapidly.
So a whale who attempts to flood will quickly get rate limited without rate limiting the smaller parties who transact less frequently. So transacting constantly has power proportional to their stake as time approaches zero. But someone who transacts only once a week, well they've got 7 times the transaction power when they do transact, because they didn't transact for an entire week.
Any whale who attempts to save their transaction power for a year and then flood the network all at once will also rapidly deplete. So there are algorithms available to prevent abuse. Effectively the networks fully loaded, everyone gets to transact proportional to their stake. So someone who has 1% of stake can transact 1% of the time.
Thom: So bandwidth then is basically a function of magnitude versus time or magnitude and time together?
bytemaster: Correct. So a whale would not be able to consume every single block because non-whales save up until they get priority over a whale. So it's kind of like, if you use the mining analogy, the low power miners periodically get a chance to produce a block and a high power miner might produce more frequently but the ratio is always proportional to actual stake. There are things we can do here I'm just throwing it out as ways that we can reduce market order fees, order placing and canceling fees.
Thom: It seems like there is a strong analogy between the use of bandwidth on the network, you know a satellite provider network or whatever, any bandwidth type of thing. Schemes have been devised of all types to manage that and it seems like there's a lot that we can take advantage of in terms of those models.
bytemaster: Yes. There are lots of systems out there that do this type of thing and I really like the timeshare analogy. You get a bunch of people, they all go in for a timeshare on a condo. There's 52 weekends a year and there's 52 people. They can freely pick any weekend as long as there's no conflict. But as soon as there is a conflict then it basically starts a bidding war where people get less network time if they tried to go on a holiday weekend, they get less time in the timeshare because they went when it was buys. Which encourages people to utilize their time.
But at the same time with the timeshare, if it was empty one week, well there's no way to go back in time and reclaim that week in a future week. So there's algorithms and incentive programs to do that. So rather than viewing it as like a customer coming in and paying the network for a service, view it as the stakeholders are owners of the network and they can utilize the network for free, like we're all part of the club and we can all use the club for free proportional to our equity in the club. And then if we would like to have more transactions we can increase capacity, we can add new wings to our club so we can support more users and then we can all transact more frequently. That's the model. So instead of viewing it as we're charging someone to use ours, we say no, the owners of the system can use the system for free, but only to the extent that they own it.
fuzzy: And then after that point there would be transaction fees?
bytemaster: Right. Even in clubs where things are free you still charge for things like drinks. There are certain aspects of things that have to be charged, premium names and trading fees. You still have to cover expenses somehow and make money, but we can choose where we want to make money and what we want to have be complimentary.
fuzzy: Is this something we can try on the testnet or would it be something that it wouldn't really matter if we tried it on the testnet?
bytemaster: This is something that should be tested on a testnet, yes.
fuzzy: Would the economic incentives still be aligned on the testnet? Do you think that might change the outcome a little bit?
bytemaster: It should work perfectly on any blockchain with any valuation without having to worry about spamming.
Community: Is there some flexibility being written into the code as to how STEALTH fees are charged because if it's just 3 times the regular fee then that cuts out all of the income for the STEALTH?
bytemaster: The STEALTH fees are being set by the management account for the STEALTH asset. The Committee has no say over the STEALTH fees.
Community: And that's totally flexible? The management account can charge whatever it wants in any format, like in bitUSD or in BitShares or whatever?
bytemaster: It charges things in BitShares, that's the only asset that fees can be paid in. If there's a fee pool available it will convert through the fee pool into BitShares. The network is guaranteed 20% of whatever fee is charged. Which means the blockchain automatically profits 20% off of all STEALTH that is actually utilized. And the incentives are aligned for the management account to price things to maximize revenue for themselves which will simultaneously maximize revenue for the blockchain.
STEALTH is a feature that, like I said earlier, cannot be rate limited. There must be transaction fees because we don't know what the balance is or how long it's been there. And so there's no way to rate limit STEALTH transfers so that's an example of something you'll have to still pay a fee for. But the people who care about STEALTH that are willing to go through that, they won't mind paying a fee, they know what they're paying for, they know what they're getting. What we want to do is eliminate fees that people do mind paying. Because no one else makes them pay to place an order.
fuzzy: Is this the case for only STEALTH or for any project that has Fee Backed Assets?
bytemaster: Any Fee Backed Asset, the way I would see things going in the future is the network will always at the very least enforce the rationing to the extent that it knows the accounts involved in the transaction, but any additional fees will be subject [mic cut out].
bytemaster: So people can buy and trade and do whatever they want to do in the LSMR prediction market, but all the individual actions, we're basically giving Fee Backed Assets more power. We're telling businesses, look your users can use the blockchain for free if they've got some BitShares. And as long as you pre-fund their account with a minimum number of BitShares they'll be able to earn the right to transact at some rate.
And that gives people sort of this idea, do you want to transact once a week, then you need to maintain this minimum balance. Do you want to transact every day, this minimum balance. You want to transact a thousand times a day to run a bot then you're going to have to have a larger stake.
So there's till a fee being charged here, but the fee is not in burning your BTS, it's in holding your BTS on the network.
fuzzy: Yeah, locking it away.
bytemaster: Yeah, except it's sort of retroactive. So it's, how long did you hold it in the past? So you're not even giving up liquidity. It's just a simple question of, how long have you been committed to the network? Thank you, you can transact with the network. It's' a type of fee that people don't feel like they're paying anything for because they automatically earn the right to transact just by holding. And the normal user should be able to transact anytime they want because their stake will be, even a small stake of $5 should earn enough transaction power to go to and from exchanges, to pay people periodically. So they don't feel like they're being charged anything.
And it's sort of like micropayments that cost, the mental load, the mental cost of a transaction is actually larger than the micropayment. Well that's sort of the problem we have with fees. The mental cost or the appearance of this fraction of a cent is enough to send some Community members crazy. Even though the traders might say well a fraction of a cent is nothing, even if I update it a thousand times a day I'm paying less than a $1 a day in fees. Its' still cheaper than the fees on centralized exchanges. It's just the way that you present the fee impacts everything dramatically.
[00:46:12]
bytemaster: So the only question we have to remain is, how do we continue to incentivize user acquisition? So there's still fees, so allocating a percentage of market fees or trading BTS against other things to the referral program would probably be the most effective way of rewarding people who refer people to trade on BitShares. Using percentage based transfer fees can continue to maintain that.
So I really like percentage based transfer fees with a maximum and market fees being the only two fees, and the STEALTH fees, but STEALTH fees can't be used in the referral program. But as far as the referral program goes, I guess account names, asset registration and market trading and transfers can all continue to fund that. But everything else we're doing doesn't mean that you can update your collateral position without paying a fee for example. Those would completely change the feel of the blockchain from a users perspective.
bytemaster: So let's talk about what makes a cryptocurrency grow in value. A cryptocurrency is valued based on network effect. Network effect is the number of people holding it times the length of time that they hold it. The length of time someone holds a currency is known as the velocity of money. If you get a currency and you immediately sell it that's considered a very high velocity money. Hyperinflation is when velocity goes to infinity and then price deflation is when velocity slows way down.
So to say it another way, slowing the velocity represents an increase in steady stake demand, it's taking the currency off of the market which causes the people who want to get into bid it up in order to encourage people to transfer it to them. We want to attract users who will hold their wealth in the system. So there's that.
The other aspect that gives a cryptocurrency money is liquidity. Litecoin, Dogecoin are primarily successful because of the large amount of liquidity that they provide which allows them to be transferred as hedging between exchanges and there's various things that people use them for. Liquidity is very important.
I think that by incentivizing liquidity within our markets it can grow the value of BitShares and bitUSD and bitCNY as an alternative to things like Dogecoin and Litecoin. And liquidity is very important. In fact, let's just look at it from a high level perspective. Paying 1% of the market cap for liquidity will likely add more than 1% of value to the market cap. So that's how important liquidity is to the parties involved. People don't like to buy an asset that they aren't confident that they can get out of in a timely manner and at a price close to what they paid for it.
The transaction cost are dominated by market spread. So anything you do to minimize market spread is also reducing transaction fees more or less. I would suggest that we can take the ideas of the MAKER proposal where we allocate a percentage of future trading fees, but at the same time we can use the same accounting measure to distribute payment from a worker to fund liquidity using the same algorithm. The goal is to have an algorithm that cannot be gamed by people self-trading. But that's solvable.
So I would suggest that we pick ... that we could have a worker for each ... USD worker, CNY worker, GOLD or SILVER worker and as the stakeholders vote they can vote to fund the budget to reward the liquidity providers in each of those markets against BTS. And if we do that you'll find lots of people will come in and leave orders on the books. So you need to pay for what you want, if we want lots of orders on the books that are very deep and very close to the price feed or very narrow spread, we've got to reward or incentivize that; and we can do so with a fixed budget.
So rather than paying people interest or anything that's an unbounded amount of inflation, you auction it off. Kind of like Bitcoin auctions off block rewards for hash power. You get whatever amount of liquidity you can fund for a fixed amount. That minimizes the cost risk to the blockchain and can be funded by Worker Proposals to fund that liquidity.
But at the end of the day it will cause more people to enter the market to place orders on the books just so they can earn the interest and the result of the liquidity is to increase the value of both bitUSD and BitShares. More people will be willing to go short in a market that is highly liquid.
Those are two things that I've been thinking about for BitShares. Reducing the fees ...
fuzzy: Have you thought of the numbers at all?
bytemaster: Well BitShares has a hard inflation cap in terms of 5 BTS per second is the maximum. So we can allocate that budget. I don't want to change that part of the social consensus or anything because changing that would ... no matter how beneficial it might be to say, well we should inflate so much to do x, y and z, it's just not worth it in terms of changing the deal on what the inflation rates and what the users expect. So the bottom line is all this stuff would have to be funded through the Worker Proposal system and voted to make happen.
Akado: Two weeks ago I asked Dan if he had an idea about the cost of bond markets. He said he would need some time because it's something complex. Did he have any time to give it a thought and does he have an idea now or a rough estimate?
bytemaster: I've been thinking about it periodically. I obviously don't' spend whole days thinking about it. But sometimes when I'm just sitting there thinking I think about how can I do a bond market. The challenge with the bond market is always making sure that ... I think I addressed this last week but maybe I'm wrong ... that all positions can be covered. It adds an increased cost on every order matched in the market.
fuzzy: I think that what he was wondering though was a rough estimate on the actual cost.
bytemaster: The cost to development?
fuzzy: Yeah. You did discuss this a little bit but you weren't sure how much it would cost.
bytemaster: Correct. I don't know how much it would cost, I haven't broken it down to fully specify the features. I'd say that progress that has been made on that front is I believe it is possible to do now and to do in a way that is computationally reasonable. It would limit lending to the depth of the market, but that's a reasonable thing to do, particularly in a decentralized market.
Pursing that further, it's a lower priority. I've been more concerned with solving the problems with respect to fees and liquidity. And so that's where a lot of my thoughts have been.
fuzzy: Whenever I was reading this I was thinking would bond markets be a priority over this type of fee system and checking this system out?
bytemaster: I think that bond markets are a niche market that benefit from increased liquidity and lower market fees or no market fees as far as order placement and cancel fees than ...
fuzzy: So it's something very positive but something that you think would be better to hold off for awhile on?
bytemaster: Well I think bond market is like the second story of the house. You still have to get the foundation and first story in place first and the foundation is a liquid market with appropriate fees. And once you have that foundation, market liquidity in turn will increase the order book depth which will increase the lending capacity of the network.
So if you don't have a lot of market depth then the total amount of depth ... you can't have more depth in the bond market than can be covered with the current active order book. So we need to grow the order books before we can have a successful bond market.
Thom: Yeah we don't want to get the cart before the horse.
bytemaster: Correct.
Thom: What's kind of related to this is the discussion about should we drop DPOS from the marketing. Obviously you're thinking in high level terms in regards to fees, schedules and the marketing of BitShares to increase market cap. Could you fold that into the discussion a little bit and see where that has led you to think?
bytemaster: Right, so the benefits of the Proof of Work blog post I did a while back has really been a part of my trying to get into the mindset of all the Bitcoin people who see Proof of Work as the only way for things to actually work. And so I've been trolling the different forums and discussions and blog post talking about why Proof of Work is the only way. And what I realized is that most people attacking Proof of Stake are attacking a strawman or if they're not attacking a strawman they're attacking a particular version of Proof of Stake that doesn't apply to NXT or BitShares. And when they attack ...
fuzzy: And how does this argument generally go?
bytemaster: Well it's usually some variation of the nothing at stake attack or the ... imagine DataSecurityNode's in there in his bunker without any of the communication only looking at the input coming into him through messages trying to figure out what the consensus is. There's various things, but it all boils down to whether or not a consensus can actually be reached and whether or not it's possible to forge an alternative ledger.
We know through experience that BitShares has been working, that NXT has been working. We know these systems work in practice, but people are attacking the PeerCoin style Proof of Stake where you're mining with your hashpower and so on. And basically Proof of Stake, there are significant problems with the Proof of Stake they're attacking, but when we adopt the Proof of Stake mantle people are painting us with the same brush without looking any closer.
The goal of the post was to brainstorm, if there is a better terminology for what we have. Not so much just for marketing purposes but for our own understanding of what we have created. The names that you give something is very powerful. Calling it shares versus coins. The underlying technology is the same but the impact of the way you think about the problem changes completely. So I was looking for a way of describing our consensus approach without using the words Proof of Stake.
Thom: Have you come to any conclusions from that discussion?
bytemaster: I haven't drawn any conclusions. Some people have offered Proof of Votes, Proof of Participation. There's various things in there that people have proposed. I haven't read the thread to see what all the latest is since I made the post.
Thom: One thing that comes to mind with that is the whole "Proof of" is where I think that ... "Proof of Vote" is not really what substantiates the network, that's a component of it. That's where Bitcoin is very powerful and it's Proof of Work because the algorithm for mining is the work and it's the proof, it's mathematical proof. So when you start using the term "Proof of Something", it gets a little bit weird that you would use that term, like "Proof of Vote" doesn't make a lot of sense in my view.
bytemaster: That's a powerful insight. "Proof of" is a misnomer. What we really have is Proof of Consensus. Basically everyone's signed off on it and therefore I've got proof that everyone agreed. Rather than trying to infer consensus I've proved there's consensus. We've got 51%, so the combination of transaction is Proof of Stake, is direct Proof of Consensus and the delegates is indirect Proof of Consensus.
So what we really have, the arguments against Proof of Stake, that's all been debunked. The goal is to figure out a way of describing it in a way that gets past people's knee jerk reactions. Lots of people have dismissed anything but Proof of Work and they're not engaging their rational minds long enough to consider alternatives.
We all do this every single day in every area of our life right. We adopt a belief and we don't even consider anything that's contrary to the belief because we've already ruled it out. We have to make these simplifications in order to actually live. An example of places where I've done that is the belief that inflation is bad and there should never be any dilution under any circumstances. A lot of people hold that belief, we still have that belief very strongly even within the BitShares Community.
Thom: Bitcoin set that precedent.
bytemaster: But at the same time Bitcoin is inflating.
Thom: How is Bitcoin inflating? Because the total number of coins is staying the same, that's my understanding, am I wrong?
bytemaster: Well by that measure BitShares isn't inflating either. The total number of coins isn't changing and hasn't changed since we did the merger.
Thom: Then that's how I measure inflation, but where is that an incorrect assessment of what inflation is?
bytemaster: It depends upon what you call the currency supply. Is it the liquid supply or the potential supply? But that's an example where depending upon how you look at it there's rational arguments that don't violate property rights and are completely consistent with a non-violent world view and with Austrian economics and everything that I understand about what makes for good money as a country and whatnot.
But when we don't engage our rational thought because we dismiss things, we lose opportunities and we are all each and every day facing this dilemma. So recognizing that when you deal with other people, you don't win them over by being rational first, you have to have a rational argument in the end. But in order to get through their defenses you need to be sneaky. You have to sneak in so that they engage their brain long enough to hear your rational argument and then you can persuade them.
And that's the challenge and so when we have a message like Proof of Stake, we're trying to butt up against a hard wall. We need to find a softer way to enter the discussion that causes them to start thinking and evaluating what we're actually saying.
Community: So how about we break out of the stereotype "Proof of" and call it "Witness Certified"?
Thom: If you're going to really address the whole naming of the consensus algorithm I think there's going to be a problem with that. People are going to say, "there's nothing different with the way BitShares operates, it's still the same old Proof of Stake, the same old Distributed Proof of Stake". That's what the allegation will be if we came up with another buzzword to describe it. That's what I think, we would get this pushback.
BrindleSwan: We've been playing with the idea of Proof of Effort. Which allows the individual to see effort in their own eyes. It could be Proof of Work mining a coin. It could be Proof of having the money to buy the Bitcoin in the first place from which their stake would render their power.
It's also our attempt to capture productivity. That's going to be the basis of the currency we envision. So what's a nice way of saying productivity? Keeping productivity away from the stereotype of building Ford's and Chevy's and airplanes to maybe creating art. It's all productivity. We can expand the definition of productivity by using a word like effort and I think that's where we're going to go and I'm wondering if that has any credence in this discussion?
Thom: I think Proof of Productivity sounds like a better buzzword to me.
bytemaster: I think Proof of Contribution. So this is what sort of changed my view of things. You're trying to build something, so everyone goes and brings what they have and they put it in a pot. The more things that you have that you put in the pot the bigger the thing that you're building is collectively. And because of network effects, 1+1 does not equal 2 it equals 3.
So we want to encourage people to bring what they have, whether it's money or effort and make contributions to the Community. And we want to recognize everyone who's made a contribution to the Community proportional to their contribution. And this is the foundation of growing a fair Community.
The alternative is to say, we've got this pot and we want people to contribute to the pot without getting any ownership in the pot. With that model that's like a business that's trying to sell a product. When you sell a product you give a service, they give you the money, the money goes into the pot. That's a business.
But early on all businesses start out with a couple of founders, they contribute [inaudible] and you get some with some money, they contribute some capital and the pots growing. So there's a difference depending upon what stage you're in. And the no dilution phase of a currency applies primarily when the pot is so big that any individual contribution is infinitesimally small that you might as well not even give it to them. It doesn't even matter any more.
BrindleSwan: That's a problem that Curiosome solves. Curiosome is converting someone's resume into cryptography, turning it into a key. And that key can open and close doors theoretically. And the resume is actually an account of future productivity. This is what I can do, this is what I intend to do and likewise debt is a form of future productivity as well. So we have two currencies backed by the same underlying asset, they should be convertible and that's the underlying thesis. But it helps people define what contribution can they make, did they make, have they made, do they intend to make in a Community and then it helps them find each other algorithmically.
So by contributing your Curiosome to a network, you are in fact contributing your intentions to behave in that network or contribute to that network.
bytemaster: Exactly. So right along this point is allowing people to earn their way in so people mention getting network effect with bitUSD. The more people that can earn the currency the faster the system will grow. So those are some steps that as a Community BitShares should think about how to encourage and promote. One way that people can earn it would be to provide liquidity in the markets. That's something that we can actually measure and reward proportionally. So that's a good candidate that allows anyone to participate.
But there are other things that we can do to reward people for participating, allow people to earn their way into the BitShares Community. Currently unless you're a Worker or a Witness you can only buy your way into our Community and that is a major slow down on our network effect.
fuzzy: And this is a reason why I really like the referral program as well and what Kencode is doing, because they're going to have this wallet that's going to be available in multiple languages. And some of the places where we're going to get the most adoption I believe are going to be the mobile market and 2nd and 3rd world countries. Because people can work for BitShares and bitUSD at a lower rate and still get more money than they would in their local economy. Just a thought.
[01:17:23] bytemaster: [Closing comments].