VOTE HERE: https://wallet.bitshares.org/#/account/michaelx/voting
I am open to editing this proposal as needed, the reason for the amount being higher than 250k is due to BTS price fluctuations and some chance of unforseen costs of escrow and remitting funds. All money spent will be presented to the BTS community for transparency.
Also, @stan asked me to post this proposal as he is out of the country and very under the weather at the moment.
We must secure the Bitshares.com domain for several reasons. There are already offers by unknown parties (not us) on the table for purchase, however, we have secured a deal to purchase the domain. They have offered a substantial amount to the owners of the domain. What we know is this, they are not us nor do they represent the community, and that is a problem.
We have reached out previously in the years before - and they have always wanted a premium price for it. The price they want has increased due to the surge in BTS value, and value of the brand. If we continue to rise, the price will as well, if it is ever available to buy again that is.
I will state many reasons for purchasing Bitshares.com here:
Brand Security.
-- Potential to become a phishing site. Imagine what will happen to our brand and price if that were to happen.
-- We cannot allow a competitor to secure the domain name.
-- A bad actor could purchase and post content there to hurt our brand, etc.
-- Anyone could get this domain and damage Bitshares. Imagine our biggest detractors getting ahold of it and posting derogatory information or misinformation.
-- Have you seen what has happened because of Bitcoin.com and Bitcoin.org having different owners, etc? Bitcoin Cash lovers hating Bitcoin, using their leverage of brand to drive competition into the dirt, and more.
http://bitcoinist.com/bitcoin-com-cto-sells-bitcoin/
https://www.investopedia.com/news/bitcoincom-cofounder-dumps-bitcoin-bitcoin-cash/
http://nordic.businessinsider.com/the-swedish-founder-of-bitcoin.com-one-of-the-largest-sites-in-the-industry-has-sold-all-his-bitcoins-because-its-as-good-as-useless--/
~~~ embed:btc/comments/76wngm/bitcoincom_bitcoin_cash_is_bitcoin/ reddit metadata:fGJ0Y3xodHRwczovL3d3dy5yZWRkaXQuY29tL3IvYnRjL2NvbW1lbnRzLzc2d25nbS9iaXRjb2luY29tX2JpdGNvaW5fY2FzaF9pc19iaXRjb2luL3w= ~~~
THIS IS WHAT COULD HAPPEN TO US JUST LIKE BITCOIN.COM DID TO BITCOIN:
Consumer Awareness.
-- Most users type in .com for any brand. And if they have no idea the .com is not owned by the brand, this could cause major problems.
-- Read about Peter Schiff and his comment below. Imagine if we DID own Bitshares.com when he typed it into Google and he saw that we already built and perfected what he is trying to conceptually describe.
-- Consumers don't want to think. They are trained to type in .com. They trust.com No matter how much we don't think it matters, it matters to them.
Common Sense.
-- We are currently worth approximately 2 Billion usd Marketcap. We need to secure our name and brand on the most used domain extension in the world (.com)
-- If we become worth 20 billion or even 200 billion or more, this case is just that much more compelling.
-- Why on earth would we allow other entities or persons to control the most valuable .com in our brand?
MAJOR EXAMPLE ON WHY WE SHOULD ALREADY OWN THIS AND NEED IT RIGHT NOW:
Peter Schiff - Financial Analyst and Advisor mentioned exactly what Bitshares technology does and can do two weeks ago on his Youtube show. He even calls Bitshares by name and says he looked up WHOIS on Bitshares.com and it is for sale. He says that at 25.15 into his video found here:
Here we have a former advisor to Ron Paul talking about all the features that Bitshares CAN ALREADY DO, even by mentioning bitshares.com would be a good name for this sort of thing, and he's oblivious that not only is this already a reality, but that its decentralized AND built around the fundamentals of austrian economics.
"If you believe in blockchain, which is separate from bitcoin, I mentioned how other assets could be on a blockchain. Central banks could have their currencies in a blockchain, you could have assets, bonds, stocks, shares of stock to trade. I looked up online ‘Bitshares.com’ is actually for sale."
"Who would want that? Bitshares... maybe somebody who was providing a marketplace for crypto stock.
IBM, General Motors, Apple could make their stock available on crypto form. Then you would find exchanges where you could trade shares of stock without a broker, low transaction costs...
Then if someone on a country was worried about their money and wanted it to move out the country, would they prefer apple stock or bitcoin?
Digital "something's" have more value than a digital nothing (bitcoin)"
"I was also thinking how companies could use it. What about airlines?
With air miles issued as digital currency.
You could use it to buy miles or an upgrade for free ticket, or you could sell it to someone else.
Airmiles are worth like $0.02 a mile, if someone owed me $100 I could accept 10,000 airline miles instead. Sounds a good deal. "
"Everybody could have an accountX and just own a cryptocurrency that was delta, or American Airlines."
THE TERMS/HOW WE WILL SPEND FUNDS
Funds will be held in escrow by Stan. Stan will use the BTS to acquire the bitUSD needed and send to Cryptonomex account.
Cryptonomex will use the funds created will be to pay up to $250,000 USD for the domain, and any fees associated with converting the bitUSD to a crypto the seller prefers payment.
Any surplus funds in BTS or bitUSD format will be returned/burned.
We will set referrer to the BTS fee pool account and pay back the Worker Proposal until paid in full. This is more like a loan to acquire this valuable asset than a permanent expenditure.
The wallet will continue to be hosted on .org and a link to that wallet will be on .com
We have already secured the price and the domain will be transferred immediately upon sale and clearing escrow.
We will place the new site: http://www.is1.co/ that our community member @richcg created on the domain: https://steemit.com/bitshares/@richcg/bitshares-new-website-update
No milestones other than acceptance of the offer and escrow.
Cryptonomex will cover the cost of hosting and any other associated cost going forward.
Time is of the essense on this as they already have another offer on the table and they were going to accept until we contacted them.
so this would be cool for a crowdfunding, but not for the reserve fund in my opinion.
I support Fav.
No need to waste time and money on this .com domain. Put the fund into development and marketing.
ETH uses https://www.ethereum.org/
NEM uses https://nem.io/
NEO uses https://neo.org/
Are they trying to switch to .com domain?
Interesting perspective. The whole distributed concept of ownership and how it applies here is something that I didn't think about right away.
In any case, I think it's important that people vested in Bitshares' success have control of the domain.
To Answer @ash
It sure would suck if Charles Hoskinson bought it and wrote an ode to Daniel Larimer.
It sure would suck if someone bought it and setup a phishing site.
It sure would suck if someone bought it and cloned DEX and gets all of the traffic from the people that don't know any better...
It sure would suck to lose all of these potential customers being driven by the celebrity campaigns we are setting up.
What if whoever receives ownership goes rogue? Even more a reason to not buy
Also, Bitshares.org can be seized, how is that part relevant?
Then the wallet will be copy pasted on another domain, and it did not cost 250k.
In my opinion, eventually many if not all assets will be owned using a blockchain of some sort. It's likely that there will be a way to have a multisig distributed ownership of this type of asset. So, get the name now and transfer ownership once the capability exists.
That's not possible in the .com namespace. Those domains need to be owned by legal entities, which BitShares DAC is not.
Idk, a domain's TLD doesn't mean much these days, are we to buy all future tld's at a high premium? Bitshares.life Bitshares.science etc, I'm not confident that this is a worthwhile expenditure at $250k, a tenth of that perhaps.
Totally needed and wanted. Everyman and his dog is trained to think .com. Godaddy as well trains everyone to value .com you only have to check premium domains. They are called premium domains for a reason. I will support this 100%
man, Peter Schiff used to be a hero of mine. Now i'm glad that I"ll never work for him again.
This is a worthy investment that will eventually pay for itself. This should be approved without a doubt.
Thanks for spearheading this initiative.
I support .com as premium ownership, since it's authentic value for the brand, but I do endorse new gTLD's as Google has never seen them, indexed them or someone was owner in the past. Buying .com domain name nowadays is like a buying a second hand car with no history of previous owners, especially such as Bitshares.com who is old for 15 years.
We'll do a research on alexa and others how they see health of bitshares.com and let you know more.
Basically, my new gTLD's part of comment is pretty much agreement on @cm-steem's comment.
Cheers,
DL.
Absolutely needed. Let's do this!
Lets do it. Makes sense. What's happening to bitcoin now should not happen to us.
With a real risk the domain could be hijacked therefore risking using the money in reserve for damage control instead. Spend to save is my moto where prudent where this is!
I echo Kimchi-King and would like to thank you for spearheading this initiative.
re-posted → translated
https://steemit.com/polish/@fractalnode/upewnij-sie-ze-twoje-bts-robia-robote-czyli-aktywnie-glosuja-na-rozwoj-bitshares
I find no clear explanation in this article as to what to do or how to help in this matter.
You've issued a call for action without specifying the action to take. Please advise.
There’s a voting link at the top.
Thanks, I saw that, and am still entirely lost.
That link takes me to a bitshares page with a long list of Witnesses?
Yes, I have a bitshares account... But what do I do on that linked page to help with this issue? I am sympathetic with the desire and the cause to secure bitshares.com for all the described reasons, but it is still completely unclear as to what I can do to assist.
Thanks, @crazyfishman, for trying to help...
@creatr, a couple of things. First, I sympathize with your frustration. Second, if you vote via proxy, as I do, then I believe your proxy will take care of this for you. You don't need to do anything except maybe reach out to your proxy and express your desire. If you do not vote via proxy then you should go vote. So when you enter your voting area in bitshares, you'll see three tabs across the top. Select Workers. Then filter on 'Proposed.' You'll see this proposal is listed as #7 in the list of worker proposals. From here you can vote. If you need help on how to vote or how to select a proxy there are a number of tutorials in Steem that speak to this. Hope this helps.
Greetings, @dlwagner,
Thank you very much. Yes, this is an extremely helpful answer.
I have found the Proposed issue and been able to vote for it.
Fantastic!
I'd vote for that proposal.
It's live
I would vote for this. All you have to do is look at the story from what happened a while back when a good samaritan bought google.com because they messed up and forgot to re-register. It could have cost google big time. They need to get on this.
Not sure if I even can vote, if not treat me as a bystander yelling "Go for it".
Most of enterprises, when they're fairly small, tend to think about being big, but fail to take simple actions that can help avoid huge problems when they actually become big.
I'm glad Bitshares community have forward-thinkers like You.
IMO this domain should be secured asap. What to do with it is now of secondary importance and can be discussed along the way.
Full support from simple medium-sized hodler :-)
This is a fantastic idea, when people hear bitshares the first thing they will try is the .com. This is just smart business, I'm a proud bts holder
You have my support
We saw in the past the consequences of not doing it. Without any doubt, We should not repeat the errors of other blockchain. If such a proposal is launch you can count on my support!!!
I'll vote for it.
Great idea, Michael. It will help to boost the adoption of the site.
This is important. Go for it!
Absolutely needed!!!
Awesome, you've got my vote brotha!
Great plan! Where can I go to learn more about voting? I read the help section in the platform about it but I find it unclear on how it works and would really like to help out with this initiative. Just point me in the right direction. Thanks!
I agree it would be a good purchase. The next thing comes down to price. I don't know how much they want for it. There is a point where it may not be worth it. If price becomes a sticking point maybe we can be an option to buy, down the road with with an immediate redirect. On the "legal" issues, anyone can set an organization with a few trustees to legally hold the name and give full use of it to the blockchain organization. That said, it is a disadvantage in negoiating that everything is public here...
Owning the .com domain is MAJOR KEY.
$250K might sound a lot for some, but it's so worth it.
Honestly I'm surprised that they don't ask for more. Clearly they don't see the future of BitShares like we do..
Can Stan declare that he will not get a kick back fee?
Get the dang domain!!
There are several questions on this proposal in bitshares talk
(https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,25774.msg314990.html)
@michealx Did you abandon this proposal or will there be an update?