I noted with surprise and disappointment that all of the BitShares committee members except the three shown below have voted to reject the incorporation of the bitHero as a new bitAsset after it had been running in that mode for many months. The rationale used was apparently that we didn't ask formally enough when we handed it over to go public.
The HERO was, we thought, a small gesture of generosity and an attempt to continue contributing to the growth of BitShares while maintaining our long-standing policy to avoid centralizing anything on us after development is complete. We've supported this product's growth with over $1.2M in donated resources for the benefit of BitShares without asking for anything in return.
One would have expected that the company that developed BitShares and gave the it away for free to the world would have been given the courtesy of addressing the Committee before such a precipitous action was taken.
While we would have been happy to go through any more formal process, we did coordinate it via xeroc who is a high ranking trusted committee member with outstanding credentials. (That was the process as we understood it at the time.) We assumed that if there were any issues we would be contacted. None ensued for many months until this week.
There is really no imposition on the Committee or anyone else to sustain the Hero in that status. Independent feed producers were up for over a year without incident. The Hero had proven itself as a solid addition to the BitShares family of bitAssets and was configured by a highly credible and independent source, xeroc.
There was apparently some discussion about "managing regulatory risks". But once installed as a bitAsset, the Hero represented exactly the same regulatory risks as bitCNY, bitEUR, or bitUSD. They work exactly the same way. The fact that the Committee singled out the HERO for "special regulatory treatment" merely puts the whole concept of bitAssets at further risk of regulatory misunderstanding.
Clearly, there was no additional risk involved. BitAssets are as decentralized as possible, representing merely a built-in smart contract that anyone can engage in with anyone else. There is no central issuer, we just provided a product definition that anyone can use. The only continuing function for the supervising account is quality control on the block producers, something that the Committee was designed to do (by us) in the first place.
Given these considerations, I am asking the Committee to reconsider. I'll be happy to provide whatever formal paperwork may be deemed necessary and am always willing to appear before the Committee if there are questions.
In the mean time, functioning of the Hero is not effected as long as we have at least 7 feed data stream producers. I encourage those wishing to make a positive technical contribution to BitShares consider becoming a feed data producer. Xeroc has documentation that shows how easy it is.
Respectfully,
Stan Larimer
The same people wonder why bytemaster moved on...
Hello are you aware of the only post @god has ever made?
He said some things about @dan that you might be interested to read.
The decision making process at bitshares seems to be very slow and bureaucratic. The committee members should be fired and new elections held imo.
I agree with this, there should be a process to fire committee members otherwise we risk a dictatorship
I believe the committe members are voted in and out by the share holders.
@stan, you've done so much for all bitshares holders and I am confident that this will be sorted out. Anything done to dampen your enthusiasm will harm everyone!
Heh. Thanks. Nothing can dampen my enthusiasm!
I think Hero is an important asset to the BitShares ecosystem. I'm confident that formalities won't prevent Hero from becoming a formal bitasset if that is the community's wish.
To be fair, the HERO ABA does have available permissions/flags which have associated centralized risk (transfer back to issuer, whitelist/blacklist, market fees) which was imposed on the Bitshares committee without their full consent (AFAIK - no offence intended).
These risks may not be any worse than any of the existing 'committee owned smartcoins' however it's still additional risk on top of their current responsibilities.
If you don't want responsibility of controlling the HERO ABA then would you consider transfering ownership of the asset to null? Unless there is a necessity for asset owner interaction during global settlement recovery scenarios?
Time to disable the following flags?
Of course, the committee is in charge of setting parameters and had full control to set these switches themselves as they saw fit. I'll ask xeroc to set them appropriately.
"null" have owner, the correct account to transfer is "null-account".
Hmm seems like BENCH might be a solution. 😀
Here's the recent dialog over at bitsharestalk.org
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=26819.msg320040#msg320040
Actions like the committee just took should be carefully considered and subject to wide-ranging public discussion - no sudden moves. An asset that others may be relying on should not be degraded overnight. Irresponsible.
Something that Xeroc and I worked on for over a year should not have the rug pulled out from under it overnight.
Wow, Hero is phenomenal. I hope the revisit and reconsider. Formalities alone shouldn't make them miss this opportunity, only pessimists complain of noise when opportunity knocks.
This is a leveraged ground for bits. I hope they see the light and not allow this slip through their hands.
Because its too good to be true.
Stay strong @stan i understand how it can feel, to have worked and made it work and then for the minutest of reasons, to be denied approval. I celebrate your creativity and capacity. It might not mean much, but you're an outlier.
Yeah, this adds huge value to Bitshares. It boggles the mind why they would reject it. Vote these people out!
Took my votes away from everyone who voted against it.
@stan bitshares seems to be amazing one.
This is inaccurate. I have previously pointed out periods where the feed stopped due to one or more feed producers dropping out. And I checked today there was only 6.
What is inaccurate? I said as long as we have 7...
😕