###EVERYTHING BELOW HERE IS OLD AND DOESN’T REPRESENT THE TEXT OF THE PROPOSAL, PLEASE VIEW THE LINK ABOVE ON DAOLOGY
I’m not putting up an address or an amount. I’d simply like to hear how people would feel about this idea in general.
I think it’s time to make a major change to our networks most prominent property NuBits.com. Two major reasons I think this is a worthwhile investment for the network.
Maintenance. Shareholders currently must pay the monthly cost for a server to host the website. Only a couple people have access to make updates and changes to the website. The site is built using Drupal which has proven to be difficult in allowing various changes for site content.
Now should be the time to start restructuring our most visible property to become more flexible and cheaper to maintain. As well as restructuring it to show off not only NuBits but our evolving platform of governance and suite of products that we offer.
My personal guidelines for the restructure:
Open source website that can be hosted from github pages (HTML, CSS, Javascript, (possibly Jekyll). This means we get free secure hosting for our website. The code will be available for anyone to see, or suggest updates through pull requests. If github stops offering github pages we can still take the code and move it back to our own host fairly easily. It’s much easier to have control over the entire look and feel of the site.
Restructure landing page layout to have more content on governance, and how a distributed organization is able to solve many of the problems other projects have faced (and failed to resolve). Maybe not all on the main page. Similar to how we have “Buying, selling, transferring, etc” on the front page for NuBits. With each leading to content and examples and pages where people can learn more about NuShares, voting, and NuLaws. We would still obviously have content about NuBits products of the Nu Network managed by people who are invested in the platform. I think it should also be structured to allow for showing off of other potential products besides stable coins.
I wanted to bring this up now as I think it’s a project that would require a lot of community feedback and take time to implement. It would be beneficial to have everything in place by the time NuLaws is in motion and the new NuBits products are released. Also before B&C Exchange is operational as many communities will have an interest in learning about it which in turn will draw a lot of attention towards Nu. Especially if NuBits becomes the de facto base pair.
I don’t think anyone on the team has time to undertake this ourselves, and I doubt anyone in the community has enough time to donate. Passing a grant to pay for someone like our previous web development team (SkyCatchFire) to produce a working base would take care of the hardest part which is building a solid framework to fill in with content.
I’m imagining the top portion of the website down until the blue download button staying the same (because it looks nice as is), but underneath that instead of just showing NuBits content, there is a split down the middle of the page. On the left side we see introductory information about NuBits and our various stablecoin products. On the right side we see introductory information about NuShares, distributed governance, a link to our motion history, etc… On both sides we will have links to expanded content, which can’t fit on the main page. This way we give equal focus to both aspects of the Nu Network.
I would also like to hear @tomjoad’s thoughts on this topic.
Tom and I have already shared our disagreements on taking this path privately but I would be more than happy to have him share those thoughts publicly.
My first impression can be put in a simple statement:
that’s how it should be!
Maybe I can provide more feedback after I’ve digested this more.
But both the change of focus towards governance and the change of hosting make sense - to me at least.
Details need to be evaluated, of course.
I like the road already. Let’s drive it along!
I agree with your suggestion. In particular, I think that regardless of the hosting, making a simple HTML and CSS site is best. Obviously it should be version controlled, but I don’t like the common tendency of mixing change management systems into a HTML/CSS generation system, and it sounds like there may be some issues here which make it an example for why I think that.
Everyone can write HTML and CSS and everything can read it (although their interpretations may differ wildly depending on how complicated it is). One of my proudest moments in web development was when I got a Wii and got it online, and opened a website I was running then and saw it loaded workably and presentably. I’ve similarly gotten a couple of reports and once seen a page I wrote display nicely on the limited display of a mobile device, despite the fact that I haven’t written for it. This is the advantage of keeping things simple. It’s an underrated virtue quite easy to overlook.
As part of my junior documentation developer proposal, I could certainly assist in a migration. I’m no CSS expert and not talented at making it pretty, but I can write clean code which is easily read by humans or machines.
Apologies if this is too forward, but I wanted to make sure to offer my services for this as well. I certainly have more prior experience in website development than in autonomous cryptocurrency exchange development!
Edit: Oops, first link was wrong tab. xD But I like the idea of NuLaw from what I’ve read of that thread so far too! Good documentation there is absolutely important and it sounds to me like that’s exactly what that project is. It’s going to be a very important thing for Nu. It just wasn’t what I’d meant to link there…
I would support this proposal even only on the base of the above, all the other things are good to have. It’s not about the free hosting which is nice, but the accessibility and maintainability by a wider group and the use of open standards providing flexibility. Also the opportunity to easily crowdsource translations is something I believe we need going forward.
I agree with much of what @CoinGame said, and have told him so privately on a few occasions. Having an open-source website that is hosted on GitHub or similar site would be a responsible choice for shareholders to make. I also agree that NuLaws is a worthwhile project that deserves to be showcased once it is complete. Codifying our motions into a master agreement that can be easily accessed is a great idea.
In regards to branding, I’m still not sure I agree with a primary NuShares focus. We aren’t selling a product that solves governance issues; we are the governance solution. Will users buy NuShares because we can more easily solve problems, or will they buy NuShares because of the network’s profits from NuBits sales? Opinions will vary, but I believe the second reason is more influential.
In the beginning of the network we made a decision to focus our brand messaging on NuBits because NBT sales would be the primary source of revenue for shareholders in the very long-term. Stable value digital currencies are our core product, whereas decentralized governance tools (NuShares) are a complementary tool used to provide those stable currencies. In fairness to @CoinGame and his Google example, if we start to provide more than just stable digital currencies, perhaps a focus on NuShares as our “Alphabet” is appropriate. Cryptocurrency is still not widely understood or used, so it shouldn’t surprise anyone that NuBits aren’t a world currency after only 1.5 years in operation. My belief all along has been that we need many years of demonstrated peg maintenance before we will be considered a true currency as opposed to a novel experiment. Our experiment only succeeds if NuBits are adopted widely in circulation as a tool for transferring value, not just if we have more demand for NuShares.
Of course, with all that said I think @CoinGame is correct that we should devote more efforts to marketing NuShares, because they should be attractive to people in other communities that are facing consensus issues. My only objection would be making the main focus of “nubits.com” as NuShares because it would create brand confusion.
On a separate but related note, I believe the primary reason NuShares aren’t more popular is because there is no perceived scarcity right now with unlimited Tier 6 NSR sales possible. Most shareholders don’t seem to be looking to increase their equity share, which is strange since this forum is optimistic about the future prospects of our network.
In the past I’ve introduced a couple ideas that would improve the value of NuShares by making them more scarce. This would be done by:
This suite of policies I introduced would increase the value of NuShares significantly. Shareholders don’t seem to support all these ideas yet, although I hope in time they will realize that NuShares aren’t worth much without perceived scarcity in the market.
Dilution at work. BitShares has certainly benefited from time in the market, as they gained a high number of users when there were fewer competitors. Their price performance however has been very poor, generally trending downwards the entire time.
Nothing about the risk of unlimited dilution, as is the case with NuShares, makes an asset more attractive to own. It is absurd to argue otherwise.
Unlimited buybacks makes the argument. To cease dilution is to cease buybacks. Looking at only one side of the coin of course will give you a skewed view. Besides, I’m completely unconvinced that there has ever been a sound theoretical underpinning for a decentralized peg other than share dilution.
Nushares represent the network worth. Scarcity is a commodities game, assets and stocks are not expected to have a fixed supply. Advertising the network means advertising nushares. Advertising nubits is asking for customers, but in my opinion we need a bigger community. We only have 3 data feeds and most of the active members are in FLOT or operate a pool or are devs. We need more normal people.
Sorry if I’m hijacking this topic but I wanted to add a few small things. I feel Nu is in a bit of a hiatus right now not because the fundamentals have changed but mainly because we’re waiting for B&C to develop. While B&C is being developed (which unfortunately is going slower than expected due to having less developers working on the project then anticipated) it also means less focus and progress for Nu. I think everyone can tell that for example @JordanLee has been very busy with the B&C project and thus can’t commit the same amount of time to Nu like before. Besides that crypto is bruising right now there is a lot going on at a lot of places at the same time, that makes it difficult for Nu to profile itself amidst all the chaos (Bitcoin) and excitement (Ethereum).
So this is where we are right now essentially waiting. I feel we should use this time to analyze Nu at a meta level in terms of where do we want to go from here? What business model do we want for the future?
Besides B&C I think adding more pegged currencies like CNY is a great new enterprise along with rebranding from Nubits to Nu-USD and have Nu become a basket of currencies.
Other than this we should try to think how we can develop lending schemes that are safe and relatively risk free for Nu but also easy and accessible to users. I see a model where for example customers can deposit Bitcoin and borrow up to 50% (number is an example) of the deposited Bitcoin value in Nu-USD, for such a service we would charge say an daily interest rate of say 0.033% (roughly 1% a month, again numbers are examples). This should not be too hard to set up and even automate to a large degree. With multi sig we can guarantee decentralized storage of customer assets without them having to rely on a single Nubits representative to hold their asset.
In terms of the website I feel as @desrever has pointed out we should try looking into the SAFE project. It has the potential to become a decentralized storage/server network that would fit in perfectly with the DAC philosophy we adhere to.
In terms of marketing we need to make good solid marketing plans for both B&C Exchange when it go’s live and additional Nu features that we would like to launch. What is the message we want to convey? How much funds are we willing to spend on it? What places do we want our message to show up? What other marketing tricks can we add to this? Of course there is always general marketing going on but for specific projects a specific plan would be good I feel. We can all contribute to writing such a plan and voting on it after we’re all contend with it. We need to use the power of our decentralized democracy
I’ve been talking with Ryan from SkyCatchFire (They built our website, branding, and logos). It looks like they have availability to work on this for us. They’ve recommended to migrate it over to a Jekyll based site which is what I also mentioned above so that’s great. It makes it possible that we can merge the docs page into our nubits.com source at some time in the future as well. I’ve created a custodial grant draft document for review (I think this is my first one, so plenty of feedback is appreciated).
They’ve projected the project to cost a total of $3,000 which would be funded through custodial grant if shareholders feel this is a worthwhile project.
The draft and the scope of the job look straight-forward.
I have no experience with that kind of work.
But I suppose you do and find the hours and the rate reasonable, otherwise you wouldn’t have posted this draft, right?
Post-launch support is appreciated - but how to request it? And who is allowed to request it?
I think they don’t want to get spammed by random people, but proxying all through you could create a kind of bottleneck.
Hi everyone. I’m the lead at SKYCATCHFIRE and the one working with CG to nail down the project scope for this. We’ve really appreciated working on the NuBits and B&C Exchange projects since both site inceptions and look forward to the opportunity to make the NuBits.com site easier for the community to update. We realize the importance of open source (wouldn’t be able to do our jobs efficiently without it!) so making this change is certainly understandable and supported here by our team.
@masterOfDisaster: Post launch support is something we offer for all projects. We feel it’s a fair way to permit any last minute and minor tweaks as well as assist with “how to” questions. Because it will be in a GitHub repo, using Issues seems like a logical place to handle those. The tagging system will be helpful here too (bug, request, etc). Please note that this support is for fixing things included in the migration scope that are broken and not for change requests. Since it will all be in GitHub, those changes should be able to be made my the community.
Success on this project means that the community can move the NuBits.com as fast as needed. Content, structure, and style changes can be made via Pull Requests and committed by the community. I really love this approach and commend you all for proposing it.
Thank you for your prompt reply and welcome to the forum!
That sounds like an obvious and professional approach, which is feasible for SKYCATCHFIRE and Nu.
I’m looking forward to seeing nubits.com converted by you.
We’ve been working with SCF since before NuBits was publicly launched and I think they are certainly worth their price tag. Once we get our main network property (NuBits.com) open sourced it will allow for more individuals to be involved in content and branding efforts than what is currently possible. We can also use a similar approach to NuLaws regarding content changes on the website. We can create motion hashes from Git diffs, and shareholders can vote on pull request changes.
So just to make sure I understand, the grant is for migrating the site over to Jekyll. Any content additions and improvements to the home page or other parts of the site would need to be done by shareholders. If this is correct, then I support this.
That is correct. It’s taking exactly the site as it is now, and restructuring it to Jekyll format. Which will be flat files people can view and edit on github.
I certainly have more prior experience in website development than in autonomous cryptocurrency exchange development!
