There has been a lot of confusion over how Invictus will handle our product roadmap with BitShares X, PTS, and AGS honoring. We have spent some time discussing the roadmap and upgrade path and would like to share with you all our current thinking. As always, this roadmap is subject to change as necessary to adjust to market conditions.- The Experimental Test Network for BitShares X will be launched as soon as we have a minimal viable product. In the goal of launching a minimal viable product we have stripped features that would delay release and which complicate the system. As such BitShares XT has removed certain features: Ripple Consensus, Interest on BitAssets, Escrow Transaction, Etc.- Will be our experimental network to see what happens if BitAssets pay a Fixed Interest rate.- Will be our experimental network to see what happens if BitAssets set their interest rate via a parallel prediction market.- WIll replace TaPOS with the consensus algorithm and may come an variants with I, V, and T.Of course others such as Toast have suggested that once BitShares XT has launched successfully they would like to launch versions for stocks, commodities, and other items and his plan was to honor AGS and PTS 50/50 just like BitShares XT. We have thought long and hard about the implications of this roadmap on the demand for BitShares XT with the potential to be competing with what may be perceived as upgrades (but which could be complete failures...) and concluded that this entire product line of decentralized banks and exchanges are all derived from a single PTS/AGS honoring DAC concept.If our goal is to see the value of BitShares XT to grow then we need to future-proof peoples investment in BitShares XT after launch against being devalued by one of our planned upgrades or the flood of variants with different assets. For this reason we have decided to recommend that all future chains based upon the concept behind BitShares X be initialized with a snapshot (100%) of the state of BitShares XT around the time of their launch. Thus the primary vehicle for investing in future BitShares X chains will be to own BitShares XT.... likewise, chains that are variants of BitShares XI or XV should honor their parent with 100% stake.When honoring a prior BitShares X chain only the BTS is honored and NOT the BitAssets. BitAsset owners do not own a stake in the chain, they are hedged against the chain and there is no way to honor their positions in the new chain because the prices and collateral etc would not be proper.Because BitShares XT is a test chain, there is potential for catastrophic bugs that result in invalid allocation of shares. If this misallocation cannot be easily remedied by fixing a few transactions then we will recommend reverting back to the original genesis block and try again. Therefore, the Feb 28th snapshot will be the most important snapshot for BitShares X investment.However, all investments in BitShares XT proper should hold off until the likelihood of a reset to genesis due to catastrophic failure has passed. Remember this is an economic experiment with new software with minimal testing and so I do not recommend investing anything you cannot afford to lose between Feb 28th and when XT has enough time under its belt that it has earned its valuation. This is Bitcoin 2008...We will be developing additional blockchains not based upon BitShares X business model.These chains include:BitShares DNSBitShares BingoBitShares MusicBitShares Vote...And many others that we have designs for. In the interest of giving one experiment time to run without competing with yourselves, we are considering focusing on one of these other DACs while the BitShares XT experiment runs before moving ahead with XI, XV, or XC. We will however encourage others to implement these variants and experiment with them in parallel if they are so inclined.It means that in a free market where many variants will be launched of every idea under the sun and to maximize the value of your chain and the acceptance of new variants on the initial idea, the stake holders of the parent chain should be honored 100%.PTS & AGS are the parent chain for all NEW DAC ideas and not for all instances of these ideas. Once a chain is spawned from PTS and AGS future variants should honor that chain rather than going back to PTS & AGS. This is keeping with our model where we said that honoring a AGS and PTS honoring DAC with 100% is just as good as honoring AGS and PTS directly.In the interest of keeping Invictus focused on developing software and free of any regulatory risks associated with actually launching these potentially controversial businesses, we have decided that we will not actually launch any blockchains or host any servers for them. We will produce the software and it will be up to some enterprising individual to take our code, make the minimal modifications necessary to package it, set up the seed server, and host a site to download it. In the opinion of our lawyers and advisors there is a significant regulatory difference between writing and publishing open source software and deploying software. A company that develops software for Bitstamp, Mt.Gox, or the New York Stock Exchange is not subject to the regulation that the exchanges are subject to. That said, I am sure there are people who live in more enlightened countries who can legally take this step.We will market and promote the potential of our software independent of any particular instance that is deployed. Therefore, from our perspective the launch of BitShares XT is merely a stable 'release' tag in our github repository and nothing more. We feel it is in the best interest of everyone in the community (PTS and AGS holders) if Invictus can take as many steps as possible to avoid any