This is such a game changer, very excited about this project.
is there any progress on Peershare? it seems there is some competition, http://letstalkbitcoin.com/dacs-that-spawn-dacs/
I see that something exists on github (as part of Jordan’s phase 1) but it appears to be a duplicate named project of something else?
https://github.com/vnodecg/peerShare
Perhaps that was his first kink?
Yes!
I had mentioned on October 12th that I would begin development in two weeks after attending to some prior commitments. Unfortunately, it took longer to attend to those prior commitments than I expected. However, I pleased to be able to report that I have begun working on the development phase in earnest over the last few days.
I’ve been able to build Bitcoin from source code and am currently modifying the makefile for Peercoin in an attempt to get Peercoin building. Once I have that building, I will post it on GitHub and then begin the task of removing proof of work from it.
I’m pleased that others are working on giving businesses a decentralized platform to attract and reward investors. I view them like team mates in a sport – of course I would prefer to be the MVP at the end of the game, but I would also cheer their success in our common struggle against the centralized team. The solution they propose will be much more difficult to implement than Peershare (meaning there is a high chance it won’t be completed) and it is wedded to a proof of work currency which I think will prove to be problematic over time. Still, I will watch with interest to see what I can learn from the project.
I see that something exists on github (as part of Jordan’s phase 1) but it appears to be a duplicate named project of something else?
https://github.com/vnodecg/peerShare
Perhaps that was his first kink?[/quote]
This is not my project nor is it associated with it.
Jordan, please let me know if there is anything you’d like me to assist on, particularly around QA or UI cleanup (labels, descriptions, etc.) I’m starting to do that for the Peercoin-Qt client, so I can see it being something I can contribute to the Peershare client as well.
I would be delighted to have your help. Along the lines of UI cleanup, you could change UI text that related to PPCoin or Bitcoin to display Peershare instead.
If you feel really ambitious, you could take on Phase Two as described in a previous post. It can be developed in parallel with Phase One by a different developer in a separate branch.
The Peershare code is located at: GitHub - Peershares/Peershares: Peershares Template
Jordan, is this concept related to Bitshares, which are also under development? White paper here https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RLcjSXWuU9vBJzzqLEXVACSCdn8zXKTTJRN_LfoCjNY/edit
Bitshares is promising to develop a wide variety of banking, exchange and securities related functionality. It is a very ambitious project. The scope of Peershare is much more narrow, which makes its completion more practical. So far Bitshare has not detailed how its wide array of functionality will be implemented to the extent that I have detailed the proposed implementation of Peershare.
I would be delighted if they succeeded in their objectives as it would completely transform the crypto economy, multiplying its usefulness many times. I hope they succeed. To date they have only produced a CPU mined proof of work altcoin called Protoshares, which they say represents the value of all the innovations that will be produced by Bitshares by way of a “social contract” according to Daniel Larimer in an interview on Let’s Talk Bitcoin. A cynical person might say this narrative is a way to pump their rather ordinary altcoin (promising it will be developed into much more than an ordinary altcoin). A less cynical person might say they are really focused on delivering functionality and that Protoshares provides people a way to buy a stake in its success in just the way that buying a stake in Bitcoin encourages people to develop it further to increase the value of their stake. I hope they are able to deliver but it is also possible that as time passes the consensus that develops will be that this is a scam.
I will remind everyone that I have not asked for people’s money or asked them to invest in anything of my creation.
Well the investment part of bit share and mastercoin might be the key of success. I remember seeing open transaction having a working prototype since the San Jose conference, but it seems nobody talks about it anymore, similar situation with colorcoin. The catch is ppl who invest or having some pieces in these MSC or bitshare are the ones who would try to push their protocol to mainstream users.
I have most of Phase One coded at this point 
Doing so has prompted me to propose some design changes that I would like feedback on, especially from Sunny. Rather than remove proof of work altogether, I am coding it to create the initial IPO shares using solely proof of work after which only proof of stake can be used… For instance, 100000 shares can be created by having 500 shares created in each of the first 200 blocks. The issuer will mine these proof of work blocks before releasing their Peershare client to the public. When the block height is 200 or less, proof of stake blocks are not allowed, whereas with a block height of more than 200, proof of work is not allowed. This will require a large reduction in the value of STAKE_MIN_AGE in main.h, to 2 days from its current value of 30 days. Likewise, I have reduced COINBASE_MATURITY_PPC to 100 (like Bitcoin) from it’s Peercoin value of 500. These changes will allow the switch to Proof of Stake to occur quickly. Have I overlooked any hazards in this approach?
This is really interesting.
I wonder about security: presumably initial adoption of Peershare would be by relatively small companies wanting to raise a little bit of startup money. Wouldn’t maintaining their network and security be a challenge for them and their investors (and a turnoff for investors)? From my limited understanding this is the appeal of colored coins etc that piggyback on a major block chain. I imagine there could be alternative ways of ensuring maintaining small distributed blockchains. It would be nice if something like this could deal with the smallest companies such as startups in poorer countries.
[quote=“Eugen, post:32, topic:382”]This is really interesting.
I wonder about security: presumably initial adoption of Peershare would be by relatively small companies wanting to raise a little bit of startup money. Wouldn’t maintaining their network and security be a challenge for them and their investors (and a turnoff for investors)? From my limited understanding this is the appeal of colored coins etc that piggyback on a major block chain. I imagine there could be alternative ways of ensuring maintaining small distributed blockchains. It would be nice if something like this could deal with the smallest companies such as startups in poorer countries.[/quote]
I understand your concern as we have seen small Proof of Work networks such as Terracoin regularly beat up with 51% attacks. This occurs as a modest quantity of SHA-256 mining equipment normally used in the Bitcoin network is suddenly applied to the Terracoin network. No SHA-256 coin be secured in the shadow of Bitcoin. Likewise, no scrypt coin can be successfully secured in the shadow of Litecoin. With Proof of Work, a network can only be secured if the majority of mining hardware that could be used to mine the coin is in fact perpetually mining the coin.
One of the wonderful attributes of Proof of Stake is that it does not permit miners to switch networks like Proof of Work does. Peercoins are what is required to control the transaction processing of the Peercoin network. Even though a particular Peershare implementation will share the same Proof of Stake algorithm as Peercoin, Peercoins can in no way be used to have any effect whatsoever on the transaction processing of a presumably smaller Peershare network. An unlimited number of Proof of Stake networks can all be securely maintained side by side.
So, Peershare is very suitable for tiny companies to use and secure. They can initially secure it with a single ordinary server which need not be solely dedicated to its Peershare network. As they issue shares, the network will become decentralized and transaction processing will occur without reliance on the issuing company. Piggybacking on the Bitcoin network as coloured coins do is a liability and not a source of strength. If the Proof of Work market fragments more than it already has Bitcoin could have a successful 51% attack launched against it, and coloured coins piggybacking on the Bitcoin network would be compromised. A similar fragmentation of the Proof of Stake market presents no security risk at all.
Jordan, you are completely on the right track with your thought process about other coins and the way you understand proof-of-stake and Peercoin.
Keep developing, it is going to work out.
So many people are running around panicking about all coins right now, it is hard to get anything constructive done.
I can’t wait to see your progress.
This group kicks ass! I love the buzz here.
This sounds amazing - ambitious but achievable. Is there anyway to stay up to date on these details without following this thread? If not, no biggie…
Yes, there is. You can follow the coding details at GitHub - Peershare/Peershare: PPCoin Official Development Tree. Sometime in the future I will start a thread in the Securities section of bitcointalk.org, but not yet.
I have the initial coding of Phase One complete now, and will begin testing later today. It will be ready for deployment at the conclusion of Phase Three.
Hi Jordan
Great work pushing this project forward. Couple of questions from a business perspective. Young companies often go through multiple rounds of funding before they begin to be publicly traded requiring they issue many rounds of shares. Likewise even after an IPO they will often make secondary share offerings later. Using PoS means that a company will expose itself to an activist investor with the spirit of Carl Icahn who might attempt to execute a literal hostile takeover of the peershare blockchain and throw the accounts of other investors in the chain into disarray by owning a majority of shares. So, other an never floating > 50% of the existing shares, how does a company guard against this?
How can you the protocol quickly deal with these situations? Can a company quickly generate many additional shares for secondary offerings or B C and D investment rounds?? Similarly, how can a company make sure it issues shares in such a way that it never floats more than 50%? Or otherwise protects itself from activist investors?
Second issue - Using PoS rewards of additional peershares dilutes the company share float in a predictable way and may not be desirable for many reasons, including the need to make large secondary offerings mentioned above. As an alternative to using PoS to produce 1% additional peershares per anumn, is it possible to instead have PoS miners receive a dividend in Peercoins upon successfully finding a block, (the exact number of peeroins should set by the issuing company, and paid out of the issuing company’s designated wallet (rather than be newly generated as with mined blocks). This setup would require share holders to engage in PoS mining and secure the blockchain in order to receive any dividend payments, rather than have the company manually push out peercoins from time to time. I suspect that this would better align incentives and also improve blockchain security. The transaction fee function of the original block chain concept could be repurposed to implement this idea, instead of being paid a transaction fee for finding a block, the miner is paid a flat dividendfee from the core wallet address of the share issuer
One caveat of course to all of this is that many companies don’t offer dividends as part of their corporate strategy, so this system would be limited only to companies who wish to offer dividends. If there were a way to manage the shares and encourage block mining without a dividend payment, that would be very interesting as well. However even if we don’t come up with a clever solution to do that, this concept still has huge potential and value.
Thanks Iheartcrypto, there were exactly the sort of issues I was thinking of in my earlier question about security. The dividend solution is nice, but any apparent complexity like this might scare people off. At least, secure and easy-to-use online wallets providing PoS mining would be required, I’d think. It’s hard to conceive of solutions that wouldn’t be somehow deemed centralised. Perhaps it might be OK if the share issuer could somehow secure the network even without having 50% stake, considering that trust in them is implicit in the stock.
Nevertheless, I think this is all very promising, perhaps even more-so with the recent uncertainties about the stability of Bitcoin etc.
[quote=“iheartcryptocoin, post:38, topic:382”]Hi Jordan
Great work pushing this project forward. Couple of questions from a business perspective. Young companies often go through multiple rounds of funding before they begin to be publicly traded requiring they issue many rounds of shares. Likewise even after an IPO they will often make secondary share offerings later. Using PoS means that a company will expose itself to an activist investor with the spirit of Carl Icahn who might attempt to execute a literal hostile takeover of the peershare blockchain and throw the accounts of other investors in the chain into disarray by owning a majority of shares. So, other an never floating > 50% of the existing shares, how does a company guard against this?
How can you the protocol quickly deal with these situations? Can a company quickly generate many additional shares for secondary offerings or B C and D investment rounds?? Similarly, how can a company make sure it issues shares in such a way that it never floats more than 50%? Or otherwise protects itself from activist investors?
Second issue - Using PoS rewards of additional peershares dilutes the company share float in a predictable way and may not be desirable for many reasons, including the need to make large secondary offerings mentioned above. As an alternative to using PoS to produce 1% additional peershares per anumn, is it possible to instead have PoS miners receive a dividend in Peercoins upon successfully finding a block, (the exact number of peeroins should set by the issuing company, and paid out of the issuing company’s designated wallet (rather than be newly generated as with mined blocks). This setup would require share holders to engage in PoS mining and secure the blockchain in order to receive any dividend payments, rather than have the company manually push out peercoins from time to time. I suspect that this would better align incentives and also improve blockchain security. The transaction fee function of the original block chain concept could be repurposed to implement this idea, instead of being paid a transaction fee for finding a block, the miner is paid a flat dividendfee from the core wallet address of the share issuer
One caveat of course to all of this is that many companies don’t offer dividends as part of their corporate strategy, so this system would be limited only to companies who wish to offer dividends. If there were a way to manage the shares and encourage block mining without a dividend payment, that would be very interesting as well. However even if we don’t come up with a clever solution to do that, this concept still has huge potential and value.[/quote]
Thanks for thinking this through iheartcryptocoin.
Multiple rounds of funding could be handled in two ways: The best way is to anticipate and announce multiple rounds before the first one begins and before the genesis block is created. For instance, create 100,000 shares of which only 10,000 will be included in the initial IPO, and 40,000 of which will sold in later rounds of funding. The second way is to create more shares with a code change and a hard fork, though this may violate the contract.
Having control of the network by holding 50% of shares is by design. It allows companies that maintain a controlling stake to modify the network. Most companies would not float enough shares to allow someone to gain 50%, but it is possible that they would and that a single shareholder could get 50% of the shares. In this case they would have a powerful interest in maximizing the value of their shares, although they could choose to be malicious and destroy their investment. They would be able to control the network in many ways and pass whatever motions they desire. Peershare does not attempt to create a completely trustless network. Given that a CEO could take company funds and cease to disburse dividends at any time, there is tremendous trust placed in the company regardless of the architecture of the network. You shouldn’t invest in a company you don’t trust.
Your suggestion to reward dividends only when a block is found is intriguing to me. Some problems I see with it are that a person cannot know when they will receive a dividend. It would also force everyone to mine, which some are not inclined to do. Finally, the technical implementation of this is not trivial would add to the scope of the project considerably.