The centralized exchanges the world has known throughout history have proven unreliable and untrustworthy time and again. Whether it is MF Global, Mt. Gox, or BitStamp we have seen all of the perils of allowing a 3rd party to hold your money. It doesn’t matter how big they are or how many auditors, regulators, or insurers are involved every kind of fraud, abuse, and theft occurs on a daily basis on centralized banks and exchanges around the world. It is time for a change. Today I would like to introduce the benefits you get by using the worlds first fully decentralized exchange, BitShares.

All too often I see people making the claim that Delegated Proof of Stake is too centralized, but centralization is all relative. Today I would like to explore the meaning of decentralization as it relates to Proof of Stake systems and compare the top 3 approaches: BitShares, Nxt, and Peercoin. My aim is to be as objective as possible.

The good folks at bitsharestalk can always be relied upon to provide a solid critique. Their critique of my last post, “Why I am an Austrian Economist - Take 1”, has convinced me it was a terrible post. So I am going to give it a second attempt that I feel is much better at answering the question at hand.

I started BitShares in response to Mt. Gox having its US bank accounts seized. Since then a number of major crypto currency exchanges have been hacked or shutdown. Just this weekend my favorite bitcoin exchange, Bitstamp, had its hot wallet compromised and has temporarily suspended service. Time and again we are reminded that so long as we are relying on 3rd parties to hold value on our behalf our wealth is at risk. Today I would like to present a better approach to crypto-currency exchange.

The good folks at bitsharestalk can always be relied upon to provide a solid critique. Their critique of this post convinced me to make a second attempt which I feel does a much better job. The original article can be found here.

Today’s post is an excerpt from “BitShares 101” talking about the benefits of Delegated Proof of Stake vs Proof of Work.

When people talk about inflation they generally refer to the government published consumer price index. The Federal Reserve uses this CPI number to set monetary policy and declares this to be the official “inflation rate” which in turn is used to set all kinds of government benefit adjustments. Currently Stocks are not included as part of the CPI and this makes sense if you consider the name Consumer price index. Consumers don’t buy stocks. What this post would like to explore is the idea that either the CPI must include stocks OR it is not an accurate measure of price inflation.

Many people have been confused about how to create and register their BitShares account. This tutorial will walk you through the process of getting a fully functional registered account on the BitShares blockchain.

Vitalik Butern produced yet another great blog post titled “On Silos” where he called for projects to work together on common infrastructure while focusing on their unique components rather than reinvent the wheel a dozen times. The primary concern is that there is a lot of duplicated effort among all of the various projects and we should focus on reusing components where possible.

Today we have a guest post by Adam Ernest who is taking over bitshares.org and our social media.