BitShares Witnesses Comment on Bitcoin United (BTCX) proposal.

I was recently invited to brief the BitShares Witnesses (Jedi Council) on their Telegram channel about the BTCX proposal and get their comments on it. Since they have a modicum of expected privacy there, I'm removing their names. But in the interest of not losing their comments in the Telegram haystack and getting broad support and ideas for how to proceed, I'm taking some of the best comments out of the chat and posting them here.

Please join in the discussion on what it takes to "Free the Fast Bitcoins!"

If you need spun up on the topic, you can read a summary here:

The Third Bitcoin is the One to Watch

This is not a general interest article.
Skip it unless you want unstructured comments on BTCX implementation issues.

This Meeting Began on August 1, 2017 - Great Fork Day, when both Bitcoin Cash (BTH) and Bitcoin United (BTCX) were born as twins in the same Bitcoin block snapshot. It continued through the night till the dawns' early light.

Witness T:
Guys, Stan is looking for input about best way to implement BTCX sharedrop. Can one of you invite him here? I suggested it would be better to ask witnesses rather than the random crowd in DEX channel.
I looked in group info but don't see a public invite link (which is good), so I can't invite him myself.

There are a few here that probably shouldn't be, but fortunately not too much noise and people generally are well behaved here.
Witness J: invited Stan Larimer

Witness J:

Witness T:
I looked in group info but don't see a public invite link (which
Welcome @StanLarimer everyone.. Stan.. Welcome to WitnessTank :)

Witness T:
We might also consider doing a live mumble session. We could see what best time would be for most participants here first.
Pretty quiet here on Telegram today I see. Busier than usual on PeerPlays tho...
I suggested we do a genesis on the testnet to gauge RAM impact. We need to process BTC addresses / balances and merge with current bts accounts to see what the RAM impact would be with the combination. I don't know who stan is working with that can grab the BTC snapshot and weed out all the undesirable accounts (such as addresses with zero balance)
Feels like a ghost town in here...

Stan Larimer:
I would love to brainstorm how to do this. If I've got BTCX as a claimable asset on the network, we can work our marketing magic on it. It's a simple gift, an olive branch, to the bitcoin community. It might be worth pennies, but when we teach millions of noobs about bitcoin and fast bitcoin for the first time, this can grow rapidly. Who cares if it starts out as a penny just like bitcoin did. We can use the fact that it grew out of the August 1 fork to turn it into something major. Worth a try?

Witness T:
I believe it is.

I am not knowledgeable enough to undertake the technical aspects of creating a BTC snapshot, well, at least not alone in a timely fashion. Who are you working with Stan to accomplish this? Did you do all that marketing and writing about this without dev talent to pull it off?

Stan Larimer:
Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
Read what Doc Brown said about lobbying the BitShares community. Get support there and the devs will emerge. Got to go through the right process and never appear to try to ram something through a decentralized system.

Witness T:
I read it, but I got lost in the fictitious story (I couldn't quite get how what doc said to Marty applies to 2017 BitShares in terms of lobbying)

Stan Larimer:
Well, if there is a general agreement from this group to support unlocking those BTCX and putting BitShares into the global discussion of today's fork, then we can proceed with recruiting some devs to figure out the best way to do it. I'll fund the work and then we move to a scheduled hard fork (if necessary). But it is this group that must decide whether doing the dev work is worth while. Do we want to have an asset that we can give to Aug 1 BTC holders in an attempt to get them to look seriously at BitShares and even download a wallet to try it out?

The fact that Bitcoin Cash is #3 on coin market cap with a market cap of 7 B proves that the fork is legitimate. If we are trying out two implementations of bitcoin in the markets, why not put BitShares technology into the mix and see what the market thinks of it.
It will start out slow, but we have the resources to market it now. Think about the opportunity of turning pennys into billions as we teach a whole new generation of users about the differences in performance of the Three Bitcoins.
Once in a life time opportunity!

And we simply schedule it for the next hard fork, whenever that is planned. Boom, instant traffic and a chance for everybody here to grab some early dumpings that our marketing can turn into gold.
This could be a major way to highlight BitShares to the world. What have we got to lose?

Witness T:
I fully agree with the premise Stan. I also don't think there's any question that a HF will be required, but as I think about that deeper actually a script could simply add accounts. How those accounts will get a balance is the question I believe a HF is required for.

Where will the BTS come from to populate those "BTCX" account balances, the reserve pool? If not will maximum supply need to be increased to cover those BTCX shares? This is the crucial question that needs to be addressed for shareholders.

Witness T:
Why not simply set the fee for that operation to zero, since this is first and foremost a campaign to attract new users to bitshares?

Witness F:
I have great respect for @StanLarimer and efforts dating back to his DAC essay. Cheers in the endeavor to fork XBT to DPOS tech stack. Respectfully, I do not feel the Witness Channel is the appropriate discussion forum. I feel this topic is best conducted elsewhere. Once code is available for the testnet, witness should apply their knowledge to prove it out prior to implementation on mainnet.

Stan Larimer:
Hmmm. If not here, where. I need to gauge witness support for the concept before doing a lot of marketing buzz on it. Pretty embarrassing to whip up a lot of publicity and then say never mind.

Witness T:
The fee for "that operation" ? I'm talking about the account balance. I presume from what I've read you want to have every BTS account that corresponds to a BTC address filled with the same number of BTS as they had BTC in the Bitcoin chain? That could amount to many millions of BTS to cover those balances.

Am I missing something? Do you only plan to supply a "token" amount of BTS for each BTC account? That will not be attractive to those who had lots of BTC

Stan Larimer:
No, it's a new asset that is real bitcoin, not BTS. As real as the BCH bitcoins anyway.

Witness T:
Ah, that makes so much more sense Stan, I jumped to the wrong conclusion. It's a UIA, not BTS

Stan Larimer:
A carbon copy of today's BTC ledger.
Yes. But it needs to be distributed to people who have bitcoin keys - just like we did protoshares so long ago.
Or for that matter, the BTS 2.0 upgrade.
Import your old wallet keys and use that to claim your shiny new BTCX.

Witness T:
So no impact on max BTS supply.

Respectfully @F, I disagree this is not correct forum.

Stan Larimer:
Only witnesses can approve a hard fork. No?
No impact on BTS at all.
Other that a million new users coming to claim their BTCX and using the exchange to trade them.
The only reason for the hard fork is to create a "genesis block" equivalent to place the BTCX in from which people with the right keys can claim them.
Just like vesting BTS long ago.

Witness T:
Issues like this are why BitShares needs a polling mechanism to help make decisions.

We have a way to do it, not the most straightforward tho.

You should create 2 worker proposals, a yeah & a nay. That way ALL shareholders have an opportunity to weigh in on this. It's been used before to gauge if an action should be taken, such as earlier this year when witness pay raise was considered.

Stan Larimer:
Makes sense.
Really, just one worker is enough. If it gets voted in, we are done.

Witness T:
Yep, one will do. There were several before as there were several pay rates being considered.
Any further info from Dan? I know he was quoted as saying he's opposed to it earlier, but no reasons were given.

Stan Larimer:
He hasn't taken the time to review the case I've made for doing it. Too busy reinventing cryptodom again.

Witness T:
At least now there is a GUI to add the worker proposal.
Has Chronos made a video on how to use that yet?

Witness T:
Here's the case I made is a series of Steemit posts, for those who missed it: https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@stan/the-third-bitcoin-is-the-one-to-watch

I'll point out that BCH has already added value to BTC holders - the two are up to 50B together. So there's bound to be some value to BTCX as we market it aggressively - especially to our new target - the mainstream public.
Only one way to find out.

Witness T:
Be cautious about using the "experimental" umbrella when marketing to the mainstream. It is perfectly applicable, but for some may translate to a sense of higher risk - risk upon risk - an experiment on a speculative thing.

Witness T:
Well, if new people come join the Billion Hero Campaign and score points by trying out all three Bitcoins, I think we'll find most of them will stick with the cheaper fast bitcoins that have all that growth potential. Especially when we point out how quickly the first two have grown. I don't expect to attract a lot of bitcoin classic die-hards. But those are just a drop in the bucket compared to those our marketing campaign will reach.

Witness F:
I believe this is consensus altering ask: create many new BTS accounts, each representing a XBT address, using a new genesis block: concat(BTS state + XBT state). Is this the ask?

Stan Larimer:
There will never be a better chance to take BitShares to a whole new level. And all we do is what Satoshi did. Give everyone a free token and suggest what it might be good for.

I'll leave it to you experts to figure out the best way. Just need to give one for one BTCX tokens to those who had BTC on August 1 fork block. And make sure that the BTCX UIA has no issuer that has any remaining control over it.

Witness T:
That's a good point Stan, how can you create a UIA and not have anyone be in control of it? Hope you're not planning to off yourself after you create it :flushed:

Witness F:
I feels like a "something for nothing" ask: Create a bunch of BTS accounts (which current consensus model charges a fee for) then validation nodes store this state in memory.

Stan Larimer:
However we did the 2.0 upgrade. Seems identical to me.

--- Wednesday, August 2, 2017 ---

Witness F:

Stan Larimer
However we did the 2.0 upgrade. Seems identical to me.
Agreed, the ask is a pitch fork. However, the BTSX and PTS stakes "paid" for their stakes in the BTS genesis. Not a single BTS nor account was created new in the pitch fork.

Witness T:
If done through a new genesis & HF, it would be the same. It doesn't have to be done thru a HF tho, now that the balance is only of a new BTCX UIA token. It could all be scripted.

@F is right though, that if done via a script there is a cost to create the accounts.

First thing we need is a BTC snapshot to process, so we can evaluate how may accounts need to be created. We already know the max number of the UIA (21 million).

Stan Larimer:
Well, like I say, I'll pay for the code change to store BTCX with their public keys in the blockchain where people can claim them. Since the fork work is done off-line and then simply adopted there should be no network fees other than the cost of the claiming transaction.
The BTC snapshot is well defined by the BCH folks. Use the same block.

Witness T:
Just need to get a copy of it into the hands of a dev who can evaluate it for our purposes.

Stan Larimer:
Yes and the 5M that have not been mined can either be burned or donated to a second Billion BTCX Price to attract interest in BTCX.

Awarding the 5M to 12 winning Good Causes when they reach $1B in value. Pretty great way to give them tangible value in the eyes of newcomers. That way, one promo campaign works to drive up both BTS and BTCX to 1000x growth. Pretty good buzz potential - our marketing gurus are drooling at the idea of presenting this to the public.

Witness F:
There are ~51M UTXO bitcoin addresses: https://blockchain.info/charts/utxo-count. Blockchain.info Number of Unspent Transaction Outputs. The number of unspent Bitcoin transactions outputs, also known as the UTXO set size.

Witness T:
The extra 5M? Sure, why not put them to good use.

The work you need to get done would be a good "bounty" task or a worker proposal. I will volunteer to describe the work to be done, using the worker proposal system. It is more of a problem description than a worker proposal.

Almost seems like an auction might be more appropriate. You name the max price you're willing to pay and people bid to get be awarded the work based on lowest bid & best expertise.

Stan Larimer:
Yeah, why not? Bring some life back into the dev pool.

Witness T:

Witness F:
There are ~51M UTXO bitcoin addresses: https://blockchain.info/c
That's good to know, thx F. Of those, do we create 51M new accounts, or do we apply some filtering? What is the filter criteria?

Witness F:
I feel you must honor all UTXO to make the attempt legit. I feel the sheer number of accounts makes it untenable.

Stan Larimer:
Good question. Should there be a tall poppy limit to cut out hostile agents or exchanges with too much power? Keep it about the little guys?

Witness T:

Witness F:
I feel you must honor all UTXO to make the attempt legit. I feel
Perhaps. Why do you feel 51M is "untenable"? I definitely agree we need to evaluate the impact such an increate will have, and you may be right that adding so many in one fell swoop may have a major impact on operating costs of witnesses.

This definitely needs to be evaluated.

Perhaps the accounts could be added in stages?

Stan Larimer:
We've got lots of geniuses here - someone will figure out an elegant solution...
I agree that we have to let the exchanges have theirs so they can honor their customers if they choose to.

Witness T:
Probably, just trying to bring it into real world rather than faith based beliefs.

Stan Larimer
I agree that we have to let the exchanges have theirs so they ca
Not sure I agree with that.

Stan Larimer:
Certainly worth debating. We don't need no hostile dumps.
Everyone was warned to get their keys off the exchanges. So it's kosher to burn the unwanted BTCX rather than leave them for future mischief.

Witness T:
I'd like to see the pros & cons of allowing exchanges to have these BTCX. I'm undecided, but am leary of that power. If you used UIA to blacklist them later you'd be acqused of being too centralized.
So yes, burning them is preferable

Stan Larimer:
Best solution is just to have a max gift per account, so you aren't picking on specific groups.

Witness T:
Hmm... not sure that makes sense. It smacks of an equalization process. Those with big balances will cry unfair

Witness F:
If we had 51M new BitShares accounts each with at least one satoshi of this UAI asset, the account would have no way to transfer it, as the account does not have any BTS to pay the transaction fee.

Stan Larimer:
Yes, which is worse? That or rank manipulation by maximalists.

Witness T:
Good point Stan, hadn't thought of that.

You too make a good point @F, this was raised in DEX channel recently.

Stan Larimer:
Look at the whales on steemit and how they use their power. Ve must be vewy, vewy caweful.
edited

Witness T:
Agreed stan. As to F's point, not sure how to resolve that. It's a major fly in the ointment. It is a significant disincentive to come & use BTSX, if they must buy BTS to use them.

Stan Larimer:
What kind of a fee pool would it take?
How hard is it to waive those fees for this special asset?

Witness T:
Well, that's hard to say. If you assume each of those accounts needs to be allowed only 1 transfer transaction, that's still a ton of BTS, right?

Stan Larimer:
Best to make it free. This is a promo anyway. Why make it harder than it has to be?

Witness T:
I suspect it wouldn't be easy, but I'm only guessing. It involves hard coding an exception for a specific asset

Stan Larimer:
Yep

Witness T:
These are questions for a higher pay grade than I command.

Stan Larimer:
Yep. We'll get a dev on it once a no-cost worker is approved.
I'll have to learn how to write one.

Witness T:
Interesting discussion. Hopefully others will chime in here with other input as well.

Stan Larimer:
hope so. g'night

Witness T:
Take care, sleep well.

Witness B:
You don't want to create the accounts in advance

Witness A:
I don't think this belongs to this channel at this point
witnesses are not decision makers nor people who can implement a hard fork

Witness D:

The general question for @StanLarimer who are these people who will build this and pay for this 51M *1,21 bts for creation = 61,71M bts
It's just for creation
And I see no reasons why DAC must do it for free

Stan Larimer:
I will pay for it. All I need is consensus to do it the best way possible.

Witness D:
So you will pay 61,71M bts for creation and you will pay for dedicated development?

Stan Larimer:
Where are you getting that crazy number?
There's just a bit of software development and a hard fork like to BTS 2.0. There were no such costs in that famous pitch fork.

Witness D:
Why DAC must do it for free?
Besides pr that from my point of view is worthless

Stan Larimer:
Yes. I'm counting on many people thinking it is worthless. :)

Witness T:

Stan Larimer
Where are you getting that crazy number?
That is coming from a non HF, script only approach to creating the accounts. I think its safe to say that isn't the best approach given that enormous cost. That pretty much dictates a HF / genesis, like pitch fork.
If it was a HF for ONLY this purpose might be a hard sell. However there are other features that will require a HF this can be rolled out with.

Stan Larimer:
When is the next planned update?

Witness T:
When the work gets done

Witness J:
the cheapest implementation would be to take a snapshot of btc addresses.. and create a process for being able to claim the new token via signed transactions like byteball does.. so only those that come over and claim their blance would get it.. rest would just be locked up... this all of course would require not only programming a UIA that can do this.. but also adding all BTC to the genesis.. we are talking dev for some time.. and witnesses here will have to accept the new code and genesis... aaand someone would have to maintain a BTC node to take signings

Witness T:
So accounts get created at run time when btc users present their priv key, or are accounts created thru genesis?

Witness J:

Witness T:
So accounts get created at run time when btc users present their
again.. has to be deved.. and it will take a fair amount of time.. I think the opportunity to start this may have been 2 months ago.

Witness P:
The biggest problem I see right now is that it will be difficult to handle P2SH addresses (those starting with a 3 not a 1).

Stan Larimer:
Not worried about starting two months ago. The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time is now.

Witness J:

Witness T:P
The biggest problem I see right now is that it will be difficult
OMG yes.. that will be a nightmare.. and all of kraken runs on those

Stan Larimer:
As long as everyone knows the Fast Bitcoins are sitting there waiting to be unlocked from the same fork as BCH we have an audit trail. The users of Fast Bitcoin will be the millions of first-timers we attract and teach in the Billion Hero Challenge.

Once they are using Fast Bitcoins they won't want slow bitcoins. And it will grow from there.
So it just has to be in the queue and available to Hero campaign players in a reasonable time.
edited
[10:54:22 AM] Witness T:

Witness T:J
again.. has to be deved.. and it will take a fair amount of time
I agree to a point, but it wasn't clear at all the split was definite. Plus Stan was quite busy with other marketing efforts. Sure, hindsight is always 20/20 but the idea wasn't even conceived 2 months ago.

You claim it will take (lots of) dev time. That is precisely what Stan is trying to characterize. It would be much more helpful to explain your claim, as you yourself are not a dev. You like to throw out quick sound bite statements without substantiating them, that is when you decide to respond.

Stan Larimer:
Compared to what it took to develop BTS in the first place, this is a cakewalk... And it will elevate BTS into the global discussion as it gains traction. All other usage and liquidity will follow.

BTH is proving Doc Brown right. Growing the Pie. We can grow the Pie even bigger.

Witness T:

Witness J
OMG yes.. that will be a nightmare.. and all of kraken runs on t
If it was doable & done for PTS I see no reason it should be any different for this now.

Stan Larimer:
Since the Fork Bitcoins combined at over 54B
There's plenty of traffic to support three bridges. Our bridge is in place. Let's get some traffic on it!

[11:01:05 AM] Witness P:

Witness T:
If it was doable & done for PTS I see no reason it should be any
"Classic" P2PKH addresses, as used in PTS/AGS, are easy to handle, because possession of the address can be proven with a simple signature of the matching secret key. That is already implemented, because that's how the "claim balance" operation works.

Witness J:

Witness T:
I agree to a point, but it wasn't clear at all the split was def
Just to segue off the recent image.. asking something like this is the equivilant of asking to just spec out engineering a bridge off the top of your head... its not that simple.

Witness P:
P2SH ("pay to script hash") addresses require execution of a script that must evaluate to true. This means you basically have to plug the scripting language + execution engine from BTC into BTS, which will not be easy.

Stan Larimer:
Well, everything starts with a beer and a napkin sketch...
But the opportunity here is huge. BTH has already set the precedent - You can have two bitcoins and gain value from slight changes. Imagine the value of lightspeed bitcoin. But its got to be and upgrade to bitcoin not a clone.

Stan Larimer:
Now that Bitcoin is multi platform the door is open to adding a super platform

Stan Larimer:
Anyhow, my main reason for coming here is to get a "sense of the network" from those who will have to adopt whatever is developed. I'm sure we can find developers willing to create whatever this group finds acceptable.

Witness T:
TBH, I expected you to have checked out the feasibility of this idea a bit more before you put so much effort into pushing it @stan. I wouldn't have that expectation of a pure marketer, or bus. managr, but you are an engineer, a freakn rocket scientist, so my expectations of you are higher.

I understand that your experience with PTS prbly gave you some confidence this idea was not so hard. But we're seeing some evidence in this convo it might not be so easy, and will take some time to figure out if it's feasible at a reasonable cost.

How much time do we have? How long before the public climate forgets about this split?

Stan Larimer:
You need to look at the Big Picture and play the cards you are dealt. The opportunity showed up on the radar a couple of weeks ago. The only critical action was to get an announcement footprint out there to point back to when the work is done.

We have enough time. As I said, the first adopters have never even heard of slow bitcoin. Slow bitcoin folks will be like a dog seeing a new dog nosing around his bone. Then they will become interested and the price will rise with that interest.

All that matters now is declaring that we are using the same BCH hard fork point and stimulating the discussion on the relative merits of BCH vs BTCX.

Think of EOS. It put a stake in the ground a whole year early. Most projects do.
So, we moved in the way we could move quickly. Lay the intellectual foundation and get articles on that date that can be linked to as we roll out the promos.

Witness T:

Stan Larimer
All that matters now is declaring that we are using the same BCH
Fair enough. I am in favor of the idea, but reman undecided until the cost to implement it and approach to do so is better known.

Witness T:
Now we are seeking to build consensus among those charged with implementing and executing the plan.
Only one way to find out...
That's what I'm doing here.

Witness T:
It's much easier to build consensus on a plan when the plan is known :)

Witness T:
After meeting my deadline to get the whole concept out there by Aug 1.
This is Aug 2.
First you need to paint the vision. Then the way forward can be planned.

---

Thanks to the Witness Counsel for entertaining my questions.

Stan Larimer
The Godfather of BitShares, Fast Bitcoin, and the Hero.