BitShares Blockchain News and BitShares Dev Hangouts

The Source for BitShares Hangout Transcripts

[bitshares-news]

BitShares Dev Hangout Transcript - May 6th, 2016

Topics include : Steem, Graphene, Peerplays and OPENPOS.Today Bytemaster, Cryptoprometheus, Datasecuritynode, Kencode and others speak about various projects.Bytemaster and the community talk about the merits of the new Graphene blockchain Steem, as well a

[bitshares-news]

Social media meets virtual currency rewards

We’ve recently found out about Steem’s superior social media platform and have decided from this moment forward all BitShares Blockchain News content will be posted on Steemit.

If you would like to create an account on Steemit you can find an excellent guide from BitShares user puppies here ... https://steemit.com/spam/@dele-puppy/register-bot.

Please note that there is no fee to register an account, you are simply vesting STEEM for the right to post/vote on Steemit.com.

[bitshares-news]

BitShares Dev Hangout - April 22, 2016

The beyond bitcoin community converges for yet another week of amazing conversation. We speak more about Bitshares, the potential for Bitshares 3.0? And the new blockchain based social network - STEEM.

Transcript

The Transcript for this Hangout is now on Steemit ...

https://steemit.com/hangout-transcripts/@tuck-fheman/hangout-transcript--april-22-2016

[bitshares-news]

Under New Management

We will begin posting BitShares News and Dev Hangouts again soon!

[bitshares-news]

Bitshares Google Hangout - March 13, 2016 

JonnyBitcoin and Noisy discuss all things BitShares.

[bitshares-news]

Bitshares Google Hangout - March 6, 2016

JonnyBitcoin and Noisy dicussing the latest news and ideas from the world of Bitshares.

[bitshares-news]

BitShares Dev Hangout - March 11, 2016

Dan Larimer of Cryptonomex speaking with the BitShares community regarding BTS 2.0 updates, STEALTH milestones, Microsoft Azure, Virtual Machines, Ethereum, Mutual Aid Society, Bond Market, the DEX speed and sidechains.

Create a BitShares Account

Transcript

fuzzy: Does this put us in a completely different state than most other blockchains that seem to have this centralized crew that is the only one that works on it? Is this kind of like an attempt to move away from that?

bytemaster: Yeah, we like having decentralized development. It protects everyone involved. The regulatory environment is constantly shifting and as companies like Cryptonomex seek investment and growth my open transparency here without the disclaimer this is my personal opinion, can create liabilities for the company.

So I'm just trying to minimize the liabilities that I could place on Cryptonomex by speaking openly with everyone about what I'm thinking and what we're doing. It's purely a CYA [Cover Your Ass] move. So fundamentally I'm still here to offer my feedback on what I know is going on behind the scenes and we'll go from there.

Thom: Seems like it might be a good idea bytemaster if there was something posted in Mumble so people get that disclaimer so that you don't have to state it every time.

bytemaster: Correct. I was stating it at this time so that when fuzzy introduced me in the future he can state it or post it in the text log. Either way it's just here to protect everyone involved. It would be a shame if something happened to me.

That said, we have been very busy behind the scenes addressing a multitude of bugs that and enhancements for BitShares. There will be a new hard fork and it's got several things that are going to be addressed. One fix the serialization bug that prevented us from actually issuing the STEALTH asset like we wanted to. That's done and complete. It will be included in the next hard fork.

We've disabled negative Worker votes, that patches security holes. Fundamentally everyone's got the same amount of influence you just have to be less active in your voting. We've added an option to disable compression on the websocket API. Apparently some browsers are having issues with the repressed stream. But the good news is we've identified the bug that was causing the vast majority of the bandwidth hog for the updates between the server and the wallet. That fix is in there. And it has to do with updating the median feed more often than necessary.

And we're deprecating annual membership. That last one is in progress. abit has two patches, rate limited based transactions and the percentage based transfer fee is in progress. All those changes are going to be rolled out as a single hard fork to minimize the impact to exchanges and other parties. So some of abit's patches are going against the grain of overall Graphene design so they're being reworked and refactored.

Those are the list of things that' we're doing on the back end. On the front end I've identified a handful of issues that have been increasingly annoying to me and I'm sure if they're annoying me they are annoying others. It's part of eating my own dog food. I'm putting pressure on the team to fix the following.

We've increased the timeout on getting the API connection. I don't know how many of you have experienced if your connection is slow or the server is slow you can end up in this  infinite loop of hitting retry, getting the connection shortly after and then having to reload and start all over until you can actually do it fast enough. So we're increasing the timeout from 2 seconds to 5 seconds and that should make the wallet load correctly more often even if it is still slow.

We've identified that round trip times to the server between when you click to create a transaction, whether it's to place an order or do a transfer, there's two API calls that go round trip to the server. One to get the updated fees and the other to get the required authorities, which means that it can take several seconds and that makes the user interface feel sluggish if you're using a slow internet connection, a high latency connection or the servers are over loaded. So we're going to prefetch and cache those so that when you click transfer the dialog pops up quickly.

The other thing we're going to be doing is increasing the lifetime of a transaction so it's less likely to expire before getting included in a block. That gives it more time to propagate and gives the user more time to sign if a lot of signatures are required.

The end result of all of these changes should be a dramatic reduction in bandwidth, in cpu time, lower latency, and a more responsive user interface. So those are all of the updates that are going on as far as general enhancements.

Today we're going to be doing another rollout of the STEALTH. That seems to be working better and better. What's new with this rollout is we've got server side backups enabled. So you can actually save your wallet encrypted on the server and recover it. The server will not have the ability to access your private keys. So it will also automatically backup your wallet when things change. This is something that we've been working on for a while and should be coming out testing it in the current release of the testnet UI for STEALTH.

[00:08:08] Server Side Backup Options

[00:09:42] STEALTH UI & Backups

[00:11:44] Liquidity Rewards

[00:20:39] Bond Market Details

[00:24:10] Market Maker & Liquidity

[00:26:21] Sidechains & Regulation

[00:34:22] Mutual Aid Society

[00:35:09] Sidechains

[00:48:21] Virtual Machines, Ethereum & Sidechains

[00:51:09] Tau-Chain & EVM

[00:54:32] Flux Tradeoffs?

[00:56:11] Redundancy Bug Fix & Flux

[00:57:39] EVM & Sidechains

[01:11:00] Microsoft Azure

[01:14:00] Blockstream & Sidechains

[01:15:30] Authority & Sidechains

[01:19:30] Sidechains and Security

[01:22:00] Dan’s Sidechain with Charles Hoskinson

[01:23:20] Hosted Web Wallet

  This transcript is a work in progress.

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[bitshares-news]

Epic Dev Rap Battles on Twitter

Just a few days ago the @LilButerin account caught fire on Twitter droppin’ rhymes like blocks on the blockchain and today @Notorious_DEX appears to challenge Lil Buterin’s supremacy in the blockchain rap arena.

#cryptorapbattle

[bitshares-news]

Bitcoin, The Blockchain And The Future Of 'Decentralized' Conglomerates

The development around the Decentralized Conglomerate (DC), which is basically an idea that has existed since BitShares launched last October on OpenLedger, a universal shared platform based on the BitShares 2.0 MIT-licensed Graphene blockchain technology with a fully open source code base, is now being defined and documented in a crypto context.

(Image: Jan Kraus)

[bitshares-news]

BitShares Technical Analysis – Price Breaks Above Important Pivot Zone

Yesterday’s announcement concerning the addition of Bitshares to Microsoft’s Azure Blockchain-as-a-Service platform, propelled the BitShares exchange rate to a high of 0.00001747. Over the past two days, the market has broken above a very important pivot zone.

[bitshares-news]

BitShares Now on Microsoft Azure Blockchain as a Service (BaaS)

via Fox

This template delivers the BitShares network to your VM in about 15 minutes (PPA install).  Everything you need to get started using the BitShares blockchain from the command line is included. You may select to build from source or install from the community provided Personal Package Archive (PPA).  Once installed, the 'witnes_node' will begin syncing the public blockchain. You may then connect via SSH to the VM and launch the 'cli-wallet' to interface with the blockchain.

Source and Discussion

[bitshares-news]

BitShares Python Live Coding (Part I)

by xeroc

The session will take no more than 60 minutes and this is what I plan to do (let's see how far we can go):

running witness-node

running cli-wallet

installation of python-graphene

connecting with cli-wallet and calling methods

connecting with witness-node and calling method (database api and others) 

[bitshares-news]

Potential BitShares Roadmap for 2016

by Akado

This is a list of features that have been discussed lately and may or may not be implemented, and in no particular order. Before any of this is implemented it needs shareholder approval. Some info, namely estimated costs have been taken from here https://bitshares.org/roadmap.html. Note that these figures might have changed.

Maker / Taker

This is the first of many new proposals that don't cost the BTS stakeholders much of anything to get powerful new features.  In this case all the stakeholders must do is grant permission for a hardfork that implements a new feature. 100% of the new feature is self funded.

Discussion(s)

https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=20482.0 https://github.com/cryptonomex/graphene/issues/475

Status: Needs further discussion

Possible Developer: Cryptonomex (CNX)

Estimated Cost of Development and Implementation: 100000 BTS

Estimated Time of Development and Implementation: TBD

Rate Limited Fees

Free transactions proportional to user's stake and transaction frequency.

Discussion(s)

http://bytemaster.github.io/article/2016/02/10/How-to-build-a-decentralized-application-without-fees/

https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,21462.0.html

Status: Ongoing

Possible Developer: abit

Estimated Cost of Development and Implementation: TBD

Estimated Time of Development and Implementation: TBD

Negative Fees

As a means of Subsidizing Market Liquidity. Allows people to get paid for orders sitting on the order books for more than 24 hours for example. This is done to prevent abuse and people buying/selling to themselves. A worker is needed for a specific market. This worker will pay for this negative fees. I think this could be seen as a loan, we pay now, to increase liquidity which will reward BitShares later.

Discussion(s)

https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,21544.0.html

Status: Needs further discussion

Possible Developer: TBD

Estimated Cost of Development and Implementation: TBD

Estimated Time of Development and Implementation: TBD

Bitcoin Sidechain

Bitcoin could be used as collateral for example. It is speculated this would help improve liquidity as atm collateral for MPAs is currently ~200% and with Sidechains, collateral would be reduced to 100%. More MPAs on the market as its creation would have less restrictions.

Discussion(s)

https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,21263.0.html

Status: Needs further discussion

Possible Developer: CNX

Estimated Cost of Development and Implementation: $200,000

Estimated Time of Development and Implementation: 3 months

Bond Market

Seems to have been delayed. In order to properly work needs deep market depth. We are not there yet. Update: on the 2016-02-26 Hangout, bytemaster mentioned he would start to work on a Bond Market proposal. 

Discussion(s)

https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,21700.0.html

Status: Needs further discussion

Possible Developer: CNX

Estimated Cost of Development and Implementation: $60000

Estimated Time of Development and Implementation: TBD

Moonstone Wallet

Currently waiting to be released. Practically no Fees, Integrated Market with External Exchanges, One Click Sign Up to External Exchanges, Secure Client Side Encryption, Live Updating Interface, Ability to make your Own Backups.

Status: Ongoing

Developer: Bitsapphire

Estimated Time of Development and Implementation: Soon

MKR and DAI Focused BitShares Front End

Discussion(s)

https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,21778.msg283693.html#msg283693

Status: Unknown

Possible Developer: Nexus

Estimated Cost of Development and Implementation: TBD

Estimated Time of Development and Implementation: TBD

Smartcoins Point Of Sale (POS) & Mobile Wallet

Status: Ongoing

MetaTrader4 Integration

The key feature of MT4 is the ability to buy, create and run your own trading bots - this is a massive source of liquidity and trading volume and there are vast libraries of such bots available on the metatrader marketplace.

Discussion(s)

https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,19816.0.html

Status: Needs further discussion

Possible Developer: TBD

Estimated Cost of Development and Implementation: TBD

Estimated Time of Development and Implementation: TBD

Autobridging

The BTC → BTS and BTS → USD can be synthesized into a synthetic BTC → USD. The real and synthetic BTC → USD order books can be be further synthesized into single combined order book.

Discussion(s)

https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,21781.0.html

Status: Needs further discussion

Possible Developer: TBD

Estimated Cost of Development and Implementation: TBD

Estimated Time of Development and Implementation: TBD

Bitshares Blockchain to be available in Microsoft Azure

Discussion(s)

https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,21115.msg282759.html#msg282759

Status: Ongoing

Developer: Fox

Estimated Time of Development and Implementation: Soon

Others

- Ethereum Virtual Machine. Ethereum Contracts, but faster

Follow the ongoing Discussion

Image:  Charles Nadeau  Mod: BitShares News

[bitshares-news]

BitShares now has low fees.

View the Fee Schedule.

View the Reasons for Lowering Fees.

View the original idea or listen to the Hangout.

[bitshares-news]

BitShares Dev Hangout - March 4, 2016

Dan Larimer of Cryptonomex speaking with the BitShares community regarding BTS 2.0 updates, STEALTH milestones and sidechains.

Create a BitShares Account

Transcript

bytemaster: We posted a demo of the new STEALTH GUI. People have been testing it on the test network and have gotten some feedback on there and have continued to fix a lot of loose ends there. We ran into a problem updating the assets. A serialization bug is preventing us from finally enabling the STEALTH asset and transferring it to onceuponatime.

Unfortunately fixing the bug will require a hardfork. So rather than hard forking for that one issue we're going to incorporate several different features simultaneously in an upcoming hardfork. One of those is abit's work on free transactions or coindays to pay transaction fees. That seemed to be something that was very much liked in the Community.

The other thing that we're going to attempt to roll out at the same time is the removing of negative voting. We can talk about the rationale for that in this Mumble session. It creates a security risk. It doesn't fully reflect voters intention and it causes a game of cat and mouse where you just keep going. It requires more voter activity. So we had this discussion in the past and for whatever reason I momentarily forgot why we shouldn't have done it when I designed the negative voting for Workers. But we can talk about that in greater detail on this call.

So what you can expect in the coming week is a new pre-release of BitShares that has abit's changes, has removed downvoting for Workers and fixes the issue with onceuponatime's STEALTH asset. So that's that. As far as the GUI, like I said this past week we've been publicly testing the STEALTH feature so you can all see that work has been done and is being refined.

The major source of holdup right now is actually another feature which STEALTH depends upon, but is not necessarily part of STEALTH, and that is server side hosting of encrypted wallet files. This will allow you to login to your wallet from any computer on OpenLedger. It will mean you are automatically backed up even if you're using the lightwallet.

These features are designed to make it easier for people and ultimately more secure because you're less likely to forget your backup or delete something or your browser cache gets lost. There's just so many things that can go wrong when users are entirely responsible for making backups of their data in addition to remembering their password.

I apologize for the delays in the STEALTH but I think at the end of the day we're actually delivering more features at the same time and they all benefit each other in a form of synergy. So STEALTH in particular depends on backups a lot more than other systems because every time you receive a STEALTH transfer you get a transfer receipt and if you don't save that transfer receipt then and you restore a backup you won't have that money any more. So we definitely need this feature as a part of making STEALTH reliable.

The team's been working very hard on all of that and perhaps most importantly a lot of this work is being done without any compensation from the blockchain. There's a little bit of money that's coming in from the support worker for Blocktrades has hired us is going towards bug fixes and optimizations, not any new feature development.

One of the complaints that we've had is that there is too much bandwidth required to stream data to the light client. The Blocktrades guys have implemented a compression on the websocket connection which should dramatically reduce the bandwidth required on streaming the data. There's still work that we can do and we have looked into reducing the amount that we actually push. We more or less push every change, anything that changes during a block we push onto the client so that the client can update the user interface.

Not all clients need all data. You don't need to know when someone else's account has changed. But for consistency and reliability of the user interface we've just pushed everything right now, everything that changes. We're still going to look into reducing that to just pushing what you need and that will further reduce it.

But in the meantime the compression approach saves bandwidth. I don't have the exact numbers but considering how robust JSON is I wouldn't be surprised if we saved over 50% reduction in bandwidth usage on the light client. So these are all positive developments for BitShares.

[00:06:49] Initial STEALTH Fee

[00:10:34] Server Side Backups

[00:11:14] Mobile Wallet

[00:11:51] STEALTH GUI Difficulties

[00:18:07] STEALTH GUI Usability

[00:19:33] STEALTH Technicals

[00:21:53] STEALTH Maintenance

[00:23:22] STEALTH Specifications

[00:25:21] STEALTH Fee Backed Asset

[00:26:13] Sidechains

[00:30:45] Multiple Sidechains

[00:34:50] Sidechains and Ethereum's Proof of Stake

[00:36:59] Sidechain Witnesses

[00:37:55] Sidechain Resources

[00:42:07] Sidechain Witness Nodes

[00:44:55] Sidechain Funding

[00:47:07] Sidechain Use Case

[00:47:42] Sidechains Effect on bitAssets

[00:48:48] Sidechains and Plasma

[00:50:53] Sidechain Cost

[00:52:07] Sidechain Value and Marketing

[00:53:53] Sidechains and Bitcoin Unconfirmed Transactions

[00:58:52] Bitcoin on the BitShares Network

[01:04:59] Decentralized Satchel Bag

[01:12:35] Committee Proposal on Fees

[01:15:43] Cryptonomex Funding

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[bitshares-news]

Are you using some program to type up transcripts automatically?

Nope. You would be surprised how bad those programs are at transcribing audio, especially audio with specialized words or phrases like, “bitAssets, blockchain, smartcoins, fee backed assets and BitShares”. Not to mention other big words bytemaster uses that we ourselves have trouble figuring out, much less spelling.

Don’t believe Boston Dynamics or Elon Musk when they tell you robots will be taking over any day now. They may be able to destroy packages just as good as your local UPS driver, but they’re far from being able to transcribe a BitShares Dev Hangout.

So how do we do it? 

About 9 months ago we began developing our own in house solution we call BitChimp. BitChimp is currently in Beta, but is performing much better than anticipated (see video).

With only minor corrections we’re able to use our revolutionary BitChimp technology on a weekly basis (or until we run out of food) to assist us in creating BitShares Dev Hangout Transcripts.

If you would like to help fund BitChimp development, send donations to :

bit-chimp

Thanks for asking!

[bitshares-news]

BitShares Dev Hangout - February 26, 2016

Episode 136

Today Dan discusses the STEALTH hard fork, voting, Fee Backed Assets and answers Community questions.

Create a BitShares Account

Transcript

bytemaster: Alright, so brief update on STEALTH. I'll probably add a little bit more update on it by the end of this call. I'm still getting reports in from the team. We are deploying the STEALTH API and the user interface to the test network today.

So later today you'll be able to test the user interface on the test network that xeroc put together. And then we'll move it onto the BitShares network if there's no problems. We don't want people losing funds. It's a lot easier to lose money with STEALTH in terms of keys or losing receipts or things like that so we are being extra cautious on the rollout of this feature in the user interface. So there's that.

Other than that the other thing that is going on is I'm going to start working on a proposal for a bond market. This will be a high level specification of how the bond market could work, what the operations are and a high level guide for what would be required to implement it on the BitShares network for the Community to review.

This effort is being funded by Community members. So I'd like to thank the proactive support of people out there who are helping fund the research and development necessary to make this happen. The only thing that's funded so far is the building of the specification of the feature. Implementation is to be determined.

This transcript is a work in progress.

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