RE: Why I think stealth, backups and sidechains shouldn't be added in BitShares
The model of BitShares isn't good for privacy and people have to understand this. Voting, is far more important than hiding some balances. When we grow, we can add these features. It is like joining a startup and expecting nobody to know who you are, how big your share is and what you are doing, even people within your business/startup.
Right now, I can see a few potential solutions before we move into Stealth and not all of them are great, but are worth mentioning:
1)Split BitShares into VoteBTS and PayBTS (NXT is going to do something similar and got into a lot of trouble)
2)Add CoinJoin/CoinSuffle/Ring Signatures so that people can keep on voting (CoinJoin and Coinshuffle are worthless without huge demand for mixing)
3)Make voting anonymous
The 3rd one is really important in my opinion. If voting is anonymous, then people can use the some simple stealth address implementation, without worrying about leaking information about the fact that they are voting. The main problem at the moment is that very few people are voting and their opinions are public. So even if someone could vote with his stealth balance, that would be very problematic, in the sense that his balance and address would visible by inspecting the votes that workers/witnesses/committee are getting.
Add stealth, only and only if any of the other protocols are useless and if anonymous voting is possible and people want it. But anonymous voting has many problems itself and probably is nearly impossible to achieve.