RE: Peer Review of Cardano's Ouroboros
Thank you, Dan. I've had a number of people ask me about this and though I've watched a video or two from Charles Hoskinson about Cardano, I felt a pause when I looked into some history.
Is it true you and him had a big falling out in the early days of BitShares? Is there somewhere people can read about this history?
Related to that, do you have somewhere you send people who are concerned about the BitShares "Great Consolidation" history? I know many investors who avoid BitShares, STEEM, and EOS because they are convinced investors will be screwed. I've been trying to find out more about this, but it's difficult to find the whole story. Currently, it seems to me, a bad decision was made to consolidate BitShares related projects (forgive me if this was during the protoshares/angelshares era, I don't know the timeline well) instead of letting them compete and run free which hurt a lot of investors. It could also be argued that was a necessary action to save BitShares during a time when all cryptocurrency markets were in massive decline. Do you have thoughts you could share or a history you could point to for people with these concerns?
Thanks again for doing so much for the cryptocurrency space to build awesome stuff that actually works.
@stan has a series of posts called "origins of bitshares." I haven't read most of them (yet), but I think what you're asking for might be covered there.
I've read this history but it only has a very small section on The Great Consolidation. To me, if that was a mistake, it's something to be highlighted and explained in detail. This is how we grow and learn. Instead of hiding our mistakes, we can highlight them and demonstrate how we learned from them and rebuilt trust through the process. If this event keeps investors away, why not explain it in detail as to what worked and what didn't and how investors and speculators were handled and how they profited or had losses. Showing how STEEM and EOS learned from that could also be very enlightening. Also, does it relate at all to the disagreement between @ned and @dan related to Smart Media Tokens? Could similar "mistakes" (if they were mistakes) be made with EOS which might harm investors? These are things I'd love to see openly discussed.
I meant posts on steem. There are way more posts here. Here's one of latest ones with list of earlier posts at the bottom. I don't know if it has any more info on The Great Consolidation though.
@sim31 thanks again for posting that. I especially like this BitSharesTalk post @stan links to there. There's a lot of good detail in there explaining the history involved.
Thanks. I've read through many of those, but will go through the latest ones as well.
Thank you, @lukestokes.
I would love to hear these things discussed in more depth as well.
It's frustrating as some people recognize how amazing DPOS technology is but think Dan (or people connected to him) took advantage of investors and so they don't want to invest now. If those people had a complete history, I wonder if they would choose to invest and by doing so, bring more resources to the DPOS community.
i love to here all this things
It would be rather ironic if dan opts not to share after his recent post about transparency.
That aisde, though. I agree with this philosophy wholeheartedly, Of course, it's not always easy to admit our mistakes, because many of us like to appear infallible. I have been guilty of this myself more times than I care to remember. But, if we can overcome this sense of competition that drives the current economy, then that wouldn't matter so much, and perhaps we could step into a world like you just described, with a new, fairer, better way of doing things.
I did learn. I learned to reserve inflation for growth and to not force the community to adopt my radical changes in thinking. I attempt to avoid repeating mistakes.
Thank you, Dan.
Would you consider doing a full, deep-dive post about this history? I would personally love to have a post I could send to potential investors with a detailed perspective on the mistakes made, the lessons learned, and the harsh realities which were unavoidable. I don't mean to sound accusatory, I just want more truth out there and some people are avoiding investment in DPOS technology purely because of their subjective (and possibly incorrect) understanding of the past. I've had conversations with people who admit DPOS is by far the best blockchain technology in existence today, but they still don't want to see it succeed because of their personal experiences. If there was a post I could send them with a detailed history of what happened, why, and what the results/lessons learned were, that would be quite helpful.
Thanks again for the amazing things you've already done and are continuing to do. I truly believe these are historic times, and you are doing historically significant work.
It shows maturity to just avoid the drama that would be caused by filling people in on the details of what happened between two people of different perspectives. They parted. The end.
We're talking billions of dollars at stake here between EOS, Cardona, STEEM, ETH, and BitShares. To not understand the perspectives of the individuals with most of the power within those systems is to be an uniformed investor, trader, or speculator.
Those who can stomach the drama and distill it to facts which give hints about future actions are the ones who do well. Those who blindly invest along with the crowd often get rekt in the long-run.
True maturity involves having difficult conversations about difficult topics without creating drama.
Trillions
Really Luke, don't you think Dan's time is better spent on solving the issues of the present and future? If those investor friends want to cut their noses off to spite their faces, isn't that up to them. They have all the information they need to make reasonable decisions just like you, don't they?
This is what I'm trying to obtain, because the information isn't (IMO) readily available. Some people were part of this from the beginning and experienced this all first-hand. What baffles me is I know people on both sides of this situation that were part of BitShares from the beginning who have opposite perspectives. Some trust Dan completely and see no wrong doing (other than some forgivable mistakes) while others are convinced he and those associated with him are money-grabbing scammers. Clearly there's some information asymmetry going on here. They both can't be right.
I want to bridge that gap by seeing more facts.
As to Dan's time, he's smarter than I am, so I'll leave it to him to determine how to best spend his time. I'm simply making a request as an investor and someone who talks to other investors. An hour or two to write down a history with a lessons learned from his perspective might bring in more support for the things he wants to build which could multiply his efforts.
Does it honestly scan with you that dan is a money grabbing scammer? It saddens me that some have this perspective and I wish it wasn't so for their sake more than anything. What I saw during Bitshares lifetime so far was a person doing his best to navigate the rapidly shifting sands of this new frontier with integrity. Bear in mind that from the outset, there were attacks from trolls and those attempting to manipulate the situation for their benefit. They were sometimes successful in exploiting any weakness or mistake that the team behind Bitshares made. The simple truth is that you will never be able to unpick the genuine gerievance from the faux grievance, you will never be able to unpick the truth of Dan's motivations from the troll slander. Investors who felt they didn't make what they thought they would in the time-scale they wanted feel agrieved and that is their right. However, those experiences do not make Dan responsible or a scammer. It is a waste of time to dig around in the past when subjective positioning is unlikely to change whatever. There will simply be a raking over of old wounds and a loss of precious time. The smart thing to do is move on and concern ourselves with the present (there's enough going on that needs analysis right now) for the sake of the future. Lessons have been learned, Dan has said so himself. Investment is ideally done objectively and dispassionately. Dan's tech speaks for itself. I suggest an investor that is not interested in that, at this embryonic stage, is not making an objective decision.
Finally, I believe Dan has been audited and he was most certainly not revealed to be a money grabbing scammer. Though plenty of those do exist and are continually preying upon people in this space....many of them on Steemit.
Plenty here would love to see a public story from your point of view. No matter how well/poorly handled anything ended up being, it's obvious that it ended with a solid product being created. One that's still getting better, at that.
Are you talking about how changes are made to Steem?
@adinofri1111
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great questions, Luke. I hope @dan can clear some of this up for us.
You might enjoy this post which @sim31 linked to in a comment above. That post links to this post which has a lot of interesting details. Also, see Ned's comment above. Interesting times. :)
I really don't understand the argument for investors getting screwed. Bitshares has performed admirably and is only getting stronger. Back in the earlier days, in the Bitshares forum, many of us suggested that success could only be judged through the lens of a little more time. That being said, Dan has acknowledged mistakes and attempted to learn from them. Isn't his word enough? Dan's tech is being peer reviewed in the public domain against user adoption and it's competition.....the most rigorous kind of peer review there is. I can't see what good can come from dissecting the past any further than that. Where is the value unless it is to stir up acrimony?
Exactly. Every investor is risking their own money on their own initiative out of SPECULATION for the future. When you hear an announcement that something is going to happen that you didn't predict and the price crashes, that's your own fault for investing speculatively and not expecting anything to change. You have to be willing to lose any money you put in and not be bitter about the project going a direction you weren't expecting. Do your due diligence people.
Thanks for commenting. I've had similar feelings that there may have been some differences in timescale (maybe speculator verses investor thinking?).
That said, where can I find a full post about mistakes and lessons learned? I don't necessarily think that would stir up acrimony (though it might), but I do think it might clarify historical reality and hopefully bring peace and harmony to those who are still upset (maybe unjustifiably so?) about the past. I've been told "just read bitsharestalk" when I ask for clarification on what people were so frustrated about. Maybe some specific links might help, but to me, a well thought out post would be best.
Use this wisely, Gresham's law, seems insightful here, (worth googling) , remember the market is highly irrational , especially now. It is consistent with this irrationality that marketing trumps reality and ADA is priced higher than EOS.
I'm digging the Steemit more and more, finding threads like this @lukestokes. I think I need 1 year vacation to spend 8 hours a day on steemit!