[Passed] Motion to provide seed funding for B&C Exchange - a decentralized exchange built on the Peershares platform

Nagalim 2015-04-24 16:03:23 UTC #194

30mil is only 3% of the total coinage. Maybe 1% would be better, but I’m not super worried about this personally. I would vote for a 10 mil cap amendment, but I wouldn’t particularly rally behind it.

tomjoad 2015-04-24 21:41:59 UTC #195

We’ve had some new questions asked on page 2 of the pre-announcement thread on Bitcointalk: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1033773.20 .

If you can, please help us keep this thread bumped if you have questions that can be asked there. Bitcointalk has a large audience that will be interested in the project if we can generate enough awareness.

JordanLee 2015-04-24 22:17:49 UTC #196

As development funds are converted to NuBits this will place liquidity on the buy side. It will be placed in tier 4 as needed to balance the liquidity walls. Later, it will be moved up to tier 1 as needed as NuBits are paid to contractors.

Funding of B&C Exchange / [discussion] paying for development

JordanLee 2015-04-24 22:40:31 UTC #197

I agree that all other things being equal, more distributed ownership is better. The issue is that the lower the limit is, the less money the auction will yield. Perhaps an amendment to this motion could be advanced that says something like:

If a bid size limit of a does not reduce the money raised by more than b, it shall be imposed.

Several such conditional limitations like this could be associated with different maximum bid sizes, such as 20 million, 10 million and 5 million. The question is, how much money should we leave on the table in exchange for a better distribution?

creon 2015-04-24 23:40:48 UTC #198

What if we fund the first part of the development (until blockchain launch) using an NSR grant and the second part using a BKS grant?

If really all BKS shareholders are the same people as the NSR shareholders after the BKS launch, then it won’t be any different.

This is a very important detail. So its not sure that the 35-50k per month will be required on the buy side?

I’d still like to see B&C partly to be funded through a BKS grant. I still would be in favor to burn your proposed amount of NSR, but then to use the additional development capacity for Nu related development efforts.

Cybnate 2015-04-24 23:55:57 UTC #199

After having absorbed and thought about all the discussion and arguments I’ve decided to add this motion to my datafeed.
I’ve enjoyed the discussion and I had to adjust my opinion a number of times in some areas.

My conclusion:
As said earlier I’m in the camp who would have liked to see a single set of Shares for both Nu and B&C. I think it is not a great thing when you weigh up:

the dilution of attention across inevitably two different communities,
the dilution of NuShares and
the risk that B&C might distance itself from Nu in the mid to long term and with that removing an excellent opportunity for another stream of income.

On the other hand:

I see an opportunity and a vision which is to good to let go as I haven’t seen any concrete alternatives for potential investments to improve the Nu business model (in this case lowering the costs) besides the one I’ve issued myself (Android wallet). At the end of the day the others had to do with maintaining the peg for liquidity or assuring listing on exchanges. My apologies if I missed a motion worth pursuing for the Shareholders.
A chance to have a stake in an exciting an innovative development which I think is crucial for the robustness of the crypto ecosystem
Continuation of a good and proven development/test team with Jordan in the lead and with that a better chance of further developments on NuNet then when the team would fall apart or focus on unrelated activities.
Improving the time and reducing the risk to deliver by forking Nu

So in the balance I have come to the conclusion that it is worth voting for.

BTW I would back a motion to reduce the maximum from 30 million to 15 million with terms as Jordan raised in his post to improve decentralisation of ownership, but won’t be leading it.

@Creon, with the strong focus on the Bitcoin community there will be new investors who don’t own Nu. Given the difficulties with the previous auction I wouldn’t be so sure that we would be able to raise this amount within our own community

[Discontinued] Cybnate's Nu datafeed - BETA

mhps 2015-04-25 00:59:44 UTC #200

You seem to assume Nu is safer than B&C, and current shareholders will own Nu forever. Neither is necessarily true. If BTC has an epic crash, to save the peg Nushare owner could be forced to print hundreds millions NSR to pay high fees for the loss of NBT/BTC LPCs. The NSR ownership will be full of new members, mostly speculators. There are ways to change the peg operations to avoid this scenario but generally, as long as new Nushares will be created to sell on the market, there is no guarantee that the current Nushares owners will be among majority even for Nu.

Cybnate 2015-04-25 01:35:38 UTC #201

@JordanLee, would you and the team still be available for Nu after the B&C motion has passed. Especially to maintain the repo when new issues come up, accept commits and contributions. And even for funded motions/grant from the NuShareholders? Or would you 100% dedicate the team and yourself to B&C Exchange?

I think it is important for NuShareholders to clarify what they can expect and what not realistically.

mhps 2015-04-25 01:52:30 UTC #202

Getting bitcoin community on board is very important. Any question that is not closely related to Nu should be posted at bitcointalk.

crypto_coiner 2015-04-25 02:28:08 UTC #203

That seems to balance the risks more upon the success and value created by BKS. Sounds fair.

CoinGame 2015-04-25 02:32:16 UTC #204

I will state for the record that I have no intention to remove my efforts from advancing the interests of Nu whether or not compensation is offered for those efforts. I can’t speak for everyone else involved but this is a project which I have a strong affinity for.

I can say that there are many Nu related projects cooking in the background but they will take time to be ready for consumption. I really don’t think B&C is intended to move the focus away from Nu, but rather the intention is to build a complementary service that exemplifies the true potential of NuBits.

We’re still very young. Everything we’re doing is evolving especially thanks to the rogue efforts of people like @creon and @woolly_sammoth with their trustless liquidity apps, and other efforts such as @Teehe (even though it did not meet its goals) . I know some people are looking at returns from month to month, though for me this is a project that I see years worth of efforts to realize the true potential.

I hope others see the complementary nature of B&C instead of a shifting focus. This is an opportunity to show NuBits as a viable base pair on one of the most needed technologies in cryto. There’s still a lot to discuss and debate regarding the implementation. I think it can be improved. I’m just a bit troubled to see the discussion turning to “the death of Nu”. I don’t think @JordanLee or anyone on the team would support an effort that lead to such an outcome. I certainly would not.

Sentinelrv 2015-04-25 02:46:57 UTC #205

I feel the same way. What we’re doing here is no simple task. It was easy to allow one or two LPCs to manage most of our liquidity operations using shareholder funds. We saw how that turned out though. Now we seem to be getting back on track with shareholders taking a more active role and responsibility in decentralizing our liquidity operations. It’s going to take a lot of time to get to where we need to be at, but at least we have a pretty good idea of what our goals are.

I think it’s more that people want to know whether there will be basic support from the team. I don’t believe Jordan or anybody from the team would want to abandon Nu.

Joe 2015-04-25 03:23:54 UTC #206

I believe that Jordan’s vision of the B&C Exchange will be a boon for Nubits and Cryptocurrencies in general. I believe that B&C and Nu will work together for a long time to come. However, I have not heard a compelling reason why Nu cannot fulfill the exact functions required of the B&C Exchange.

If the Nubit experiment fails (remember this disclaimer?), Nushares are worth nothing. I accept that risk because I believe that Nushares can become more than just Nubits. If we build B&C into the Nu blockchain where dividends are distributed to Nu shareholders than this allows for Nubits to fail and Nu shareholders to not be left holding the bag. This is not greed, it is common business sense.

cryptog 2015-04-25 03:41:04 UTC #207

Is the totality of those funds gonna be converted in nubits in a one-time sell or would it be done gradually?

How can we get to know b in advance without actually setting first a?

I would be more comfortable with a bid size limit of 15m NSR and I would vote for such a motion but such motion would need to pass before or very quickly after this motion to be applicable, I guess.
Can anyone create such a motion?

By the way, @JordanLee, if it is possible, can you share with us the distribution of shares yielded by the previous auction?
In other words, a corresponding question would be: did 90% of the 100m NSR go into the hands of 10% of the successful bidders?
I think revealing this info does not infringe the privacy of bidders and would be very helpful in order to convince shareholders that setting certain bid size limits is useful or not, for this present auction.

Tks.

CoinGame 2015-04-25 04:42:58 UTC #208

That is a fantastic reason why we should not tie these two ventures together. Not only are the goals of the projects completely different, the value of one could impact the other if they are hermetically attached and one fails to meet its goals.

That’s awesome. Everyone is aware that there’s more value to Nu than just NuShares/NuBits. They’ve been discussed for quite some time and once NuBits has its legs we can branch into other assets/services. We’re not there yet.

You’re thinking about this totally backwards. If both services are operating on the same chain and NuBits dies the entire project/blockchain has to carry that weight. It will be a marketing issue as well as a development issue.You didn’t respond to any of the criticisms I offered regarding utilizing a single chain before, so I would submit my previous post as the first place to start from.

Projects that try to do everything have struggled. Trying to integrate a concept that nobody has implemented before into an existing project that is still finding its legs is only asking for trouble. BitShares has been around for much longer than Nu has and people are still complaining about endless bugs in their infrastructure. We don’t have those same problems with our client. Let’s not introduce them now.

As the proposal states all NuShares holders would have an exact parity stake into B&C exchange. If B&C fails but Nu succeeds they have lost nothing more than the 12% dilution of shares to fund the project. If Nu fails and B&C succeeds they have a stake into the next generation decentralized exchange that could support every crypto project going forward. There’s also the possibility they both succeed beautifully and there’s champagne bottles popping all around, or they both end up miserably with everyone dumping at a loss.

Were the current proposal accepted the majority of individuals voting on B&C policy would also be NuShares holders. Their best interest would be to pursue (incoming buzzword) synergy between the projects. Whether or not they’re using the same blockchain does not matter at all. Ownership will be represented proportionally the same whether it’s in NuShares or BlockShares. If NuShares become worthless all NuShares holders will have the exact same amount of units in a bag related to a potentially more successful venture. Certainly nobody hopes that to be the case. I just want to refute your assertion that the only way to prevent individuals from being bag holders requires a merger of the projects. The perception impact of that failure (for either project) would have far more impact were they tied together. “Nu tried to make a NuExchange and they failed. The project sucks”. That’s a bit hyperbolic but putting all our eggs in one basket would leave yolk on all the other eggs even if only one egg broke. Having multiple baskets is not a bad idea.

I’m not sure what business sense you’re talking about. I would love for you to expound upon that. As I’ve stated before it’s very common for businesses to split apart. Take for instance E-Bay and PayPal splitting into two separate traded companies. You have two companies who thrived off each other from the start. One is an online exchange of assets (sound familiar?) while another company is an online payment and transaction service (again, familiar?). Let’s hear the official reasoning behind the split:

“As we’ve continued our annual assessment, looking forward three to five years about how we can best position eBay and PayPal, we think the competitive position and the competitive environment of commerce and payments are going through accelerating change. That creates new sets of opportunities and challenges for both eBay and PayPal and (we believe) that operating independently will give eBay and PayPal focused strategic flexibility and an ability to move quickly and decisively in this changing environment.”

I think that’s a pretty profound statement from individuals who have fairly strong business sense. Let me edit what I believe to be a very important sentence so that’s it’s a bit more relevant to the discussion.

“focused strategic flexibility and an ability to move quickly and decisively in this changing crypto environment.”

Separate parts that can evolve at their own pace while still functioning together is a strong schema. While I think there’s more to discuss regarding the implementation, I think the idea to separate the projects is prudent and fully aligns with other examples of good business sense.

Sentinelrv 2015-04-25 05:48:38 UTC #209

I was pushing along with Joe to merge B&C into Nu, but I have to admit that CoinGame’s arguments here are all very convincing. Therefore I submit to these arguments and will be voting in favor of Jordan’s current proposal to keep the two separate. If eBay and PayPal can both separate and work together, then we can as well. It makes sense to me that the goals of each project are completely different, therefore we should allow each project the freedom to move at their own pace while having the ability for shareholders to make their own separate, but focused decisions based on two different business environments.

Also @Joe, I’m not sure if you’re from the Peercoin community like most of us were, but in that community we praised Sunny King for having the foresight to design Peercoin in such a way that would keep the blockchain as tiny as possible. This meant not bogging it down by building lots and lots of things on top of the blockchain. We looked down on projects like Ethereum that wanted to build one blockchain to rule them all. Sunny King preferred a modular approach to design. Many of us are still waiting to see if he eventually builds sidechains for proof-of-stake. This would allow all these services to be built as sidechains, rather than on top of the main chain, preventing Peercoin from becoming too large and heavy. It’s very important that Nu shareholders keep in mind Sunny’s wisdom in blockchain design.

Joe 2015-04-25 06:14:04 UTC #210

Nu will always needs an exchange for all of its currencies to trade on that is also safe and cheap. The exchange wants currencies for people to trade to collect fees. The two projects have very much the same goals. Also as far as the value of one could impact the other, the same is true the opposite way as well. When Nu successfully complete projects that value of both go up (more confidence -> more volume -> more nubits sales -> more fees).

This is honestly insulting. My thinking is not backwards, it is different. As i said before:

If B&C Exchange is implemented into the Nu blockchain then the value of Nushares go up in relation to the value and utility that the B&C Exchange provides. In the future if the Nubit peg fails, the value of nushares will drop until nushares are worth the value of the B&C Exchange. Splitting the value into two separate markets is completely unnecessary.

Additionally, if Nu is the sole owner of the B&C exchange, shareholders would still have a source of revenue to hopefully try to pay off any debt remaining for failed projects. Who’s to say in the event of nubits failure current Nu shareholders would want to associate with Nu? Nu shareholders who own bks could just silently vote to disassociate from Nu.

So let’s instead fund projects that give Nubits legs?

I don’t think bitcoin is struggling to scale and this is the opinion of many core developers as well. Look up the lightning network and the bitcoin foundation scalability roadmap. Also what blockchain are you referring to with “one blockchain to rule them all”? I’m not asking for every project Nu is involved with to be attached to the blockchain, only ones that make sense. For instance a Coinbase for Nubits would make sense as a separate entity.

Nu is not bitshares. We don’t have the same code, we dont have the same developers, and we wont have the same bugs.

It will be in their best intereset until its not. Such as say, when Nu will need the revenue the most (ie: if nubits fails). If you can guarantee that the B&C Exchange will always and forever work in the interest of Nu then I will shut up!

You are aware they started as two separate entities? Also, Ebay as a business wants to have as many payment processors as possible to attract more customers. Paypal wants Ebay to push using Paypal so paypal can have more customers… this is not synergy and would not last. I stated above why I think the exchange and Nu are a perfect pair together.

masterOfDisaster 2015-04-25 10:57:42 UTC #211

Side chains are on the eve of emerging, because it is easier to run things on different chains, that are separated from each other, yet in some way tied to each other.

In terms of scalability it would be unwise to integrate the B&C block chain into the Nu block chain. It’d pose difficulties and security dependencies - each time you need to update the protocol, because you want to fix, update, add or remove something, both NSR and BKS are at stake; if THE block chain fails, all might fail.

By having two separate block chains with two protocols which can be altered independently from each other this is obviously easier and safer. Admittedly I’m no programmer and have only my common sense to asses this; I might be wrong, so please correct me if need be.

One other thing if you want to to project both Nu and B&C into the future is the block chain size.
If you only want to own NSR xor BKS, you only need to download and store the relevant block chain.
Have you recently tried to download the behemoth of Bitcoin block chain?
I did, because I wanted to test Emeth’s beta of Peermessage.
To be frankly, it’s a pain in the ass!
I’d be very happy not to download more than necessary…

There might be approaches to prune unnecessary information from the block chain in the future. I don’t know what message types are saved in the block chain at B&C and which are only processed in the memory pool. But I can imagine several message types to be pruned from the block chain after conditions are met (an order that is filled or canceled doesn’t need to be saved in the block chain, right?) or enough time has passed.
Once again it’s easier and safer to have separate block chains. If you mess up the pruning, you might wreck all.
If you apply the pruning to the block chains independently, you can’t affect the other!
I’d be very happy not to download more than necessary.
Once NBT are used frequently we can expect the block chain to grow faster than in the last months.

B&C might not be the last technology funded by NSR holders.
How many projects/DACs do NSR holders want to include into the Nu block chain until it becomes obvious that running different block chains and granting the funders (initial) ownership of the new DACs might be a clever, fair, convenient and safe way to go?

If the main reason for having all in one block chain is because of the control of the newly created DAC, I can only recommend to the NSR holders to hold the shares of the new DAC

CoinGame 2015-04-25 12:31:29 UTC #212

Just because the services complement each other does not mean that their goals are the same. The goals are not the same. The goal of one is to be the most decentralized crypto-asset exchange that has existed. The other is to maintain stable crypto assets for transaction use. They are complementary, but not the same goals. You’re conflating the two.

My apologies if you were insulted. Let me rephrase it. I think it’s entirely possible for the valuation impact to be greater were only one unit to exist. Having multiple units could even be seen as a hedge against failure to each service. They’re both entirely experimental but we know they both resolve issues within the crypto-asset ecosystem. I don’t believe NuShares would drop to zero at any point. Nobody would literally give the units away. Paycoin has done nothing more than regularly fail meet the goals of the project and it’s still trading with a marketcap higher than NuShares. I think what could also happen if one aspect for the project to fail in a major way, and they were linked together, it would reflect poorly on the entirety of the project.

Given that the intent and goals are very different for each project, the valuation impact of failure would be less localized per service (whether it’s the exchange, or transnational units), and the large benefit of focused development to optimize the protocol simply for the specific service being offered (to me) it makes way more sense to have them separated.

So would BlockShares.

I disagree. I think people would hear about a project with significant problems that they don’t want to get involved with. Isolating them as two separate projects offers some insulation to that perception.

The only reason i’m making these replies is because I wholeheartedly disagree. Well, maybe not entirely with your language. Is it necessary? Not completely. Are there significant marketing and development advantages in doing so? Totally.

That would be well within their right to do so, and a prudent decision. I’m not sure how closely you’ve followed the BitShares project but they’ve had many spin-off projects result that even had people calling out conflicts of interest. It’s a result of their “lets try to do everything and be everything” attitude. It has not served them well and their marketing has never had a consistent identity because of it. I would prefer people had a democratic way to move a project forward that was in the best interests of that specific project. What’s best for the Nu blockchain may not be best for a blockchain which intends to facilitate trading of assets. Every NuSharesholder will have an opportunity to be invested at the start, and I imagine they would want to see a positive return and cooperation between both projects. Ideally they would continue to complement each other, but if that’s not what allows each solution to be successful then why try to force the issue?

The points you’ve shared are still all discussion pieces, and they’re still highly debated. Even the Bitcoin “roadmap” is riddled with weasel words. There is nothing concrete. Even if I concede the that they can resolve their issues scaling you’ll notice a common denominator between the resources you shared. They have the benefit of only trying to scale the blockchain for one purpose (unit transaction service). Why would we want to potentially derail our ability to optimize our own blockchain for providing better transaction services by including asset exchange services which may require a different development direction? NuBits blockchain should be focused on transaction services. B&C can be focused on asset exchange.

Totally agree with you. We’ll have different code with different bugs. I would not like to see the services impact each other.

I disagree with this mentality. I would love for Nu and B&C to complement each other forever, but I don’t believe there are any guarantees in the crypto space. Even if you have six confirmations on a transaction the blockchain can be rolled back. Let’s be a bit more open minded to the realities of a fast pace development ecosystem. We have to be responsive to changing needs and separating the projects allows development to act quicker with fewer variables to consider. The proposal as designed allows all NuSharesholders to have a direct seat at the table for a partnership between the projects. If they choose not to accept this proposal and Jordan finds funding for the project otherwise we may not be able to ensure such a close relationship. I would prefer to see the immediate relationship form.

I am aware they started as separates entities. I think you’ve helped to prove my point. They were not working well together and it was a stifling relationship. What’s best for one was not best for the other, and it made sense to break apart. Bitshares has been through the same thing numerous times. Let’s not go through that with Nu.

crypto_coiner 2015-04-25 12:43:57 UTC #213

Nice PR phrasing

I agree