Bitcoin Forum

Litecoin Global Beta currently supports:

       * Trade Virtual STOCKS, BONDS, & FUTURES.
       * Receive email confirmations of your trades!
       * LIMITED TIME ONLY - create your own security for just 250 LTC..
       * Per-transaction fee of 0.2%.
       * Simple, easy to learn interface.
       * JSON API for security values and history.
       * Only LTC exchange you can own revenue shares in.
       * Google Authenticator 2-factor authentication support.
       * Withdrawal fee of 0.1 LTC per transaction.  (to cover fees the litecoin client automatically adds.)
       * Free transfer of LTC between accounts.
       * Free transfer of Assets between accounts.
       * Dividend scheduler.  Plan your future dividends where your shareholders can publicly see them.

Visit us at https://www.litecoinglobal.com!

Lots of development still in the works.  You can see the todo list on the main page.

Official forum/support thread here: http://forum.litecoin.net/index.php/topic,551.0.html

Looks good.

Thanks!

- SSL Cert is now installed.
- Asset History now visible from the Portfolio page.

Cheers.

Looks good but why do I get "Wrong username format" error?
Username was letter only

Updated the error to read: "Wrong username format. Username should be letters and numbers, 4-20 characters in length."

Was your username less than 4 characters?  Or more than 20?  Maybe I have a bug in my regular expression.  If it wasn't a length issue, can you PM me your attempted username and I'll see what I can do?

Cheers.

Can you pleas add the requirements for username and password to sign up page so they are visible BEFORE someone starts to sign up?

You got it.  ;)

Cheers.

Ill just post stuff here I find a bit odd.
If you do not mind, hopefully you can fix those too

1) No verification e-mail after signup?
2) please replace the default fav ico :)
3) I think your Buy box has to be above Ask column and Sell above Bid column.

Awesome, appreciate the input.

1) The DB schema is setup to support it, both that and captcha will be implemented on registration.  I'm not super worried about it because there's little damage a bad email or a spammer account can do at this point.
2) Haha, definitely.
3) I looked around a bit on this one.  GLBSE has it like I do.  BTC-e has it reverse.  Vircurex has it like I do.  I think I've seen people talk in the chat box about the BTC-e one being backwards and they don't want to change it now because it'll confuse people.
4) Didn't realize it, but the SSL cert wasn't working in all browsers.  Fixed it.  (needed an intermediate cert installed)

Cheers.

3)  BTC-e has the Bid and Ask columns reversed. In some eastern block countries this is considered correct btw.
Trade execution boxes are above correct column.

Most common order is "market order". This will get you the number of shares you want and this is executed form the Ask side of the order book.
Same applies to mos common sell orders (market order to sell) - you sell to the Bid side of the market.

http://i47.tinypic.com/2eoianp.png

Now, if you look at the order book and order execution boxes, you realise that you have to cross over to opposite side to see what's available in the order books for you trade.

Yes, people have gotten used to this absurdity but there is no need to copy bad usability. ;)


5) This is a feature request -  add maximum number of shares calculation if user enters the LTC amount to order box  "Total"
Do not forget to add the commission calculation when figuring out the max full number of shares one can get for the coin entered.   

Any plans to add google auth ?

I'm fairly certain that "withdrawl" should be "withdrawal".

I'll mull that over a bit.  The btc-e one confuses me more than the GLBSE, Vircurex, etc layout.  But you're right, there's the way it should be, and then there's the way it's always been.

5) I spent a bunch of time adding javascript calculations to the order entry on the security page.  Prices and Quantities are now click-able and there is a fill option and a calculate option.   That should help out a bit.  I really like your idea for plugging in an amount to spend and having it calculate the quantity.  Will see what I can do.


Absolutely.  (note that the todo list is on the main litecoinglobal.com page.)


Awesome.  I had it misspelled -everywhere-.  Thank you!

Not sure how this would work or anything, but would it be feasible to have some sort of way to integrate your pool into this and maybe buy shares directly with balance from pool, thus not having to pay a fee to withdraw?

It isn't a big difference, so it wouldn't really matter all that much in the grand scheme of things, but just thought I'd mention it.

The pool and the exchange would have to be on the same wallet.  Then I could do a "move" command instead of using the network to send the balances.  Problem is... I don't think it would be a very good idea to have the pool (code I didn't write, only modified) sharing a wallet with a very sensitive application that I did write.  (90% of anyway.  ;) )

The other issue is not so much technical, but ethical.  Should my two operations be able to benefit from each other?  I could say yes, I have that right, and I do, but it would almost certainly hurt the exchange if people see my assets getting special treatment.  I could say no, and then there is very little harm to my assets, but a huge reputation gain for the exchange.

My preference would be to figure out how to patch litecoind to not ever attach transaction fees.  Then I could just take the fee out on the pool.  :)

Our first LTC-GLOBAL dividend paid using the new LTC-GLOBAL dividend scheduling system!

Dividend paid: 11.55 LTC income, 10k shares.

It was paid in 4 actual dividends, three 1 LTC dividends that were tests, then a final 8.55 LTC dividend to make up the difference.

Exciting to see the system working.  Lots of work yet to go, but this was a big hurdle.

Cheers.

How many confirmations is the exchange going to want before accepting a deposit?

EDIT: Nevermind, decided to do a test deposit and saw the status on the site "2/10 Conf"  Thanks for giving that info, I like knowing for sure that the system sees my LTC coming in and being able to estimate how long it will be before I can use it.

I have been wondering why theres no mining pools listed on any stock exchanges. Maybe the revenue isnt there ?

is there any specific reason you chose 10 confirmations whereas the mainline litecoin client only waits for 6 before considering the transaction "confirmed"?

burnside, can you please explain IPO mechanics?

Create asset page says that I should create separate account per asset. (Am I allowed to reuse email address here, by the way?
OK, I understand, but it would be better if users and accounts would be separate things, i.e. one user can have multiple independent accounts.)

So let's say I will create a separate account and will issue 1000 shares. I guess this account will own those 1000 shares and will be able to sell them. Let's say it sells 250 shares so 750 shares are treasury stock.

But there is a problem: where are my shares, i.e. shares of a person who have created a company? I would like to have some, and it would be rather weird for me to buy them on an open market.

So, as I understand, with your ownership semantics treasury stock IS a stock of company's owner. You compute dividends per share by taking into account all shares issue, but a company does not pay dividend on shares it owns, so that money stays with the company and owner is free to spend it.

If my observations are true, this is very confusing.

I would recommend to implement it like this: company should be able to transfer shares into other account without selling them on market.

For example, let's say there are three founders and they decided that they should have equal share in company, also they decide to sell 25% of a company to get some money for operations.

To do this, they create a company with 1000 shares, then company transfers 250 shares to founders A, B, C (750 shares total) and tries to sell leftover 250 shares on the market. Let's say it was able to sell only 150 shares.

So, 900 out of 1000 shares are distributed, 100 is treasury stock. When company decides to pay dividends, it should not take treasury stock into account. I.e. if there is 900 LTC of dividends it should go to all shareholders, i.e. 1 LTC per share. Treasury stock exists simply to give company an ability to raise more money (or do a buyback), it should not earn any dividends.

A simple reality check: after a buyback dividends per share should rise, and it is only possible if treasury stock does not earn dividends.

If you change it this way it would be closer to how corporate ownership works in reality, and also it isn't significantly incompatible with your existing mechanics, it is just more flexible (i.e. allows company to have more than one founder/owner).

So please don't take it as a criticism but as a honest improvement recommendation. After all, I'm a Litecoin Global proud shareholder, so I'm interested in company's prosperity :)

Please check here:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasury_stock


Also this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Share_capital#Types_of_share_capital


I don't think you need full-blown share accounting on your exchange, but at least basics should be compatible.

Also I would like to learn difference between STOCK, BOND and FUTURES in your system, is it just about name?

Also see Martian Accounting (http://devtome.org/wiki/index.php?title=Martian_accounting_%28Galactic_Milieu%29)...

-MarkM-

Not really.  Just chose a number that seemed safe.  What do the other exchanges use?  6 as well?

Cheers.

I don't know why I don't have it on the todo list.  The part in bold has been my intention all along.  I intend to do free transfers of both shares and LTC between accounts from the portfolio / transfers pages respectively.

To answer your other questions:

I thought long and hard about doing a GLBSE-style master account with sub accounts and decided against it.  It's just not the corporate way.  For lots of reasons a corporate asset account should be a completely separate entity.  You can however have multiple accounts per email address, no problem.

Within the multiple account framework, dividends a company issues will only pay out to shares held by entities other than the account issuing the dividend.  I suspect that is how you were expecting it to work?  For example:

Account 1 is the Asset Issuer, has 10000 shares, has sold 8000 of them, issues a dividend.  The dividend gets divided out across the 8000 shares, and no part of it goes to the asset issuer's remaining 2000 shares.

A possible Account 2 could be a personal account for the asset issuer.  Account 1 could transfer the 2000 shares to Account 2, then the shares would collect the dividend.

Hope that all makes sense and answers your questions.

That's helpful, I'll try to re-word things where I can to clear things up.  I think in this case:

Shares authorized/Shares unissued = tracked in the contract or external (forum?) location.
Treasury shares = shares held in Litecoin Global by the Asset Issuer.
Shares outstanding = shares held in Litecoin Global by Asset Holders.

Does that work?

The STOCK/BOND/FUTURES is (right now) purely for display purposes.  Can you think of anything I should add?

Eventually it will also be used for customizing interfaces and/or sorting in various places.

Cheers.

Yeah, I don't think it is.  By the time you pay the hosting bill, it's mostly a labor of love at this point.  I setup my pool for LTC-MINING to use and offered it up for others to use to help stabilize the payouts.  It's grossed ~500 LTC (~$20) since I opened it up two months ago.  Definitely not enough to cover a dedicated server hosting bill.

That may change as LTC grows though.

Cheers.

Fixed a bug where asset purchases were getting logged backwards.  (as a sale)

It was a logging bug only, did not affect the transfer of the assets or the transfer of LTC.

Cheers.

Trade history now shows up on the security page.

You can now transfer LTC from account to account internally. (zero fee)

Scheduled the last couple days dividend as well.   :)

Well, I think a 'corporate' way to do this would be to decouple users from accounts. I.e. each user has his own login credentials, and he is authorized to work with certain accounts. User who have created a company account has full access and he can give other users access to this company's account. E.g. treasurer would be allowed to access to company's finances. If treasurer is replaces, owner would just revoke old treasurer's access rights and give them to other user, no change of credentials is ever needed.

But this might be seen as needlessly complex, sure.


Yeah, thanks.

Depends on how big the exchange gets.  If LTC and the exchange catches on in a big way, I would love to be able to justify development of that ability.

Thank you for the input.  It's appreciated.

Mostly.

Shares are initially unissued, then they become issued when they are sold or transferred. Then they might become treasury stock if they are bought back.

So technically shares which are held by asset issuer are either unissued or treasury. But I don't think there is any practical difference, except for accounting.


Futures are supposed to be standardized contracts with exchange itself as acting as a counterparty. What you have is likely no futures but, maybe, forwards, unless it is supposed to work on a meta-level.

In general, I guess, term 'derivative' would cover all kinds of stuff: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_(finance)#Common_derivative_contract_types

Looks like it might make sense to break out everything under the heading "Common derivative contract types" on that page.  At least everything that it makes sense to trade on the exchange?

Initially everyone will have to specify all of the details of their assets in the contracts, but down the road we could create fields specific to the various derivatives so that they would be easier to compare, etc.

New!  Pretty graphs: https://www.litecoinglobal.com/security?s=LTC-GLOBAL

New!  FAQ: https://www.litecoinglobal.com/faq

What other questions would you like to see answered on the FAQ?

I registered on the site https://www.litecoinglobal.com/
It said registered successfully & asked me to login.
When i tried to login with my username & password, i get wrong password or username error.
If i CLICK Lost password, i get 404 page not found error



Edit:
Login successful, but password length is only less than or equal to 20 characters.
Better have it clearly says in register page, if you cant increase password length.
ex: password MUST be less than 20 characters, not more than 20.

i have already wrote the same on the other forum (http://forum.litecoin.net/index.php/topic,551.19.html), i reposted here for more discussion
Actually, the idea can also be appliable for the GLBSE


I have a proposal for issuer promoting. Maybe you can give some of the trade fees to the issuer as a promotion at the end of the month.

To be more clearer , here is  what in my mind exactly:

If any security hits a threshold value lets say 100,000 LTC then the system works as below:

Monthly Volume < 100,000 LTC issuer gets nothing
100,000  LTC  =< Monthly Volume  < 500,000 LTC then issuer gets the 0.02 % of the traded volume
500,000  LTC  =< Monthly Volume  <1,000,000 LTC then issuer gets the 0.03 % of the traded volume
1,000,000  LTC  =< Monthly Volume   then issuer gets the 0.04 % of the traded volume

I know it is early about talking but  i think it is important to decide when there exists a LTC-GLBL fund. So shareholders of LTC-GLOBAL can approve or not.

Thank you for posting the follow-ups, I'll fix the registration page to be clearer!

I'll also get the password recovery and PIN recovery working today.  ;) 

IMPORTANT! Change in TERMS OF SERVICE

The terms of service have been modified to allow asset issuers access to your email address and quantity of assets owned. They will ONLY be able to see the quantity of THEIR asset you own and they will ONLY be able to see your email address IF you own shares of their asset.


Why are you making this change?

    It is for your protection. With this change we will be able to setup an API for asset issuers to download a list of who owns their asset. This will allow the asset issuer to continue operation in the unlikely event that anything should happen to LTC-GLOBAL. Hopefully everyone will sleep better at night, knowing that their shares will continue beyond the life span of LTC-GLOBAL.

When does this change take effect?

    October 1, 2012

Password recovery is up and working.

PIN recovery as well, which can be accessed from the Account page when you're logged in.

Internal asset transfers are up and going.

Can't wait to see more stuff on the market!  ;D

I introduced a PIN validation issue yesterday that kept people from registering.  It is now fixed.   :) 

I might be listing something there soon. Maybe 6-7 weeks.

Bunch of bug fixes & interface fine tuning.

Added email notifications of transfers, purchases, sales, and dividends.

We had a successful launch of a new security this week, LTC-CHARTS.

We've also rolled out a new notifications feature.  Asset owners can post notifications on their securities, and all shareholders of that particular asset automatically receive a copy via email.

The site also sustained lots of poking and prodding this week from people doing SQL injection and script injection attempts.  Please let me know if you're one of the culprits and you actually find any holes.  And for what it's worth, your IP's have been logged.  ;)

Cheers.

Changed the required confirmations on deposits from 10 to 6.  :)

Had a user buy a lot of shares of an asset, then sell a chunk of them way below market, then buy some back way above market.

I've sent an email to the account holder, I don't see anything in the logs that would indicate anything more than a possible account compromise, but I'm going to lock trading until I hear back from the account owner and can maybe figure out what might have happened.

Under normal operation I won't be shutting the site down for compromised accounts, but since we're still in beta, I think it make sense to be cautious.

Cheers.

User confirmed he was at the helm when the mistakes were made, so no compromised account.  I have promised him to make the trading interface clearer.

The trading interface should be clearer now.  I have added the text "BUY" and "SELL" to the "Place Order" buttons.  :)

I also added a PIN confirmation requirement to the order placement forms.  I know it'll slow down order placing a little bit, but I think it's worth it if it adds a little security and makes people think for another second or two before hitting the place order button.

Cheers.

New portfolio page.

Adds purchase history on a per-asset basis, along with approximate current value (based on quantity held and current bid price) and weighted purchase price.

Cheers.

Hah, forgot to push the new code from dev to live.  It's live now.  :)

The ltc-global stock price is looking healthy,have to be happy about that   :)

Something that might be good is a mini-forum for each asset which shareholders and asset issuers can post in for feedback and to provide updates.

I'm definitely stoked about how well it's been doing.  I sold the initial shares for 25 LTC, now they seem to go for more like 60 LTC, so that's good.  The people that took a risk early on are getting a good reward, that makes me happy.  :)  People that buy in now at 60 LTC, etc, will in turn hopefully see a similar reward as the exchange grows.  I've had lots of PM's asking if I have plans to take the site into BTC, so I'm very optimistic about the future of the site.

Just to give everyone an idea of where my current plans are, I do not have any short-term plans to go into BTC.  I have a couple of non-trivial security features that need to be integrated first, like Google Authenticator.  I want to make sure the site is tested, proven, and solid before even considering risking anyone's BTC.

It also seems to be good for LTC for the moment, having an exchange like this will bring value to LTC and hopefully in time we'll see a lot of cool LTC projects being funded through the exchange.  For LTC to succeed there needs to be a robust economy and I'm looking forward to providing a key tool at the core of that economy.

I do, briefly want to touch on one key difference between LTC-GLOBAL and GLBSE, which is that I am doing -zero- verification of the assets that are being posted there.  The only barriers to entry currently are:

- 250 LTC,
- that the contract be legible english,
- that the asset be legal in Benton County, Oregon, USA
- and that you agree to the LTC-Global Asset Issuer Terms.  (which mostly tells the issuers that if they lie, or do not fulfill the contract, etc, then the asset will be frozen.)

I know a possible verification system is on the TODO list, but I have to be honest, I do not believe that I could adequately verify applications in a way that would not be easy to forge.  Thus I am not currently certain that I will ever do a verification system.  It seems like a can of worms that could open up LTC-GLOBAL to possible litigation.  Maybe that will change down the road when LTC-GLOBAL is a full time job for someone and they can travel to visit each applicant to see their operation in person.   :D



The TL;DR version:

PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, do not invest more than you can afford to lose. LOOK CLOSELY at the assets before you hit the 'BUY' button.  Do some research, send the asset issuer an email, ask questions, BE CAREFUL, etc.

Cheers.

I thought about that.  I really wanted to do that, and asset issuers can already post notifications (which get sent to asset holders via email as well) but it seemed risky to me to allow asset holders to post back... it could really easily get ugly and I don't currently have time to moderate.

Maybe with a well defined policy of what's acceptable and a few volunteer moderators we could pull it off?

What if I required that you own XX number of shares to be able to post on an asset?  Eg, you have to own at least 0.05% of the outstanding shares before you can post?

Thus if there were 1000 shares outstanding, you'd have to own 5, or if there were 10,000 shares outstanding, you'd have to own 50.

It just seems that without identity verification the community needs some way to rate different securities.

One way to get around this is letting people link to their bitcoin-otc profile or other ways to import rep.

There is a business case for someone to start a verification company.

Comments I've seen from nefario suggest GLBSE would be interested in that, and would like to offload the verification process, expense, and risk.

+1

I read through a bunch of GLBSE threads about why they do the verification and the effect it has had on the system overall.  I've just about come full circle now.  LTC is a lesser target for scams/fraud at the moment because it is worth significantly less than BTC, but as that changes I'm pretty sure we're going to need some kind of verification requirements.  The types of verifications I've come up with:

(mostly stolen from GLBSE)
- LinkedIn profile  (require XX number of references?)
- Facebook profile (require XX number of friends?)
- Government issued ID
- Utility bill
- Phone call
- Fax number
- Email address

I have thought of a couple other creative verifications:

- Ebay feedback (require XX positive feedback)
- Credit Card address verification  (I charge their card $1, run the address, make sure it matches.)
- Postal mail (with a BOLD, "do not forward" on the letter)
- Using a paid phone number address search on top of the above mentioned phone call.
- For companies, BBB and DnB references.

And for asset issuers that really want their users trust, the ultimate would be:

- Granting access to an Equifax/etc credit report by providing access to their equifax.com or equivalent account.


Can anyone else think of any to add to the list?

If you are getting people to send their ID they should hold it next to their face so you can compare it to other photos they send.

Their Utility bills or other paperwork they should write down the date and their security name as a timestamp.

Sending a postcard to their address containing a code they need to enter onsite is also good.



http://www.greenid.com.au/  theres also services like this.

All of your orders are summarized on the portfolio page now.

Cheers.

An approach I am thinking of using is simply to make sure you have plenty of collateral of theirs on hand to confiscate in the event they default/scam.

That is, only allow people who have significant holdings on your server already to issue assets.

In a way this kind of comes back to the underwriter (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=92725.0) idea since if the person who wishes to issue and asset lacks collateral themselves they can find themselves an "underwriter" who is willing to put up the collateral...

-MarkM-

I like the idea of collateral on the exchange.  Unfortunately it works against the core function that the public offering is a mechanism to raise funds for the asset issuer to accomplish some goal that they couldn't accomplish on their own.

What ratio would you use?  10 to 1?  They have to have 1 LTC worth of collateral for every 10 LTC they raise?

What else could people put down as collateral?  I have a feeling that most of what someone could put down isn't going to translate well into international internet operations.

TL;DR if you cannot get professional / qualified investor capital to get your operation off the ground and profitable, you ought not be offered to the public on a stock exchange. On a crowdfunding site sure, go begging there, but public offerings should be proven successful companies looking to expand, not the latest scam someone made up and is starting from nothing.

The idea evidently still needs work, but basically I was thinking along the lines of margin accounts initially.

Certain of the assets on the system would be acceptable for use as collateral, and borrowed against.

This way an entity could build up a lot of collateral since each time they buy some they can immediately borrow again half the value of what they just bought. Assuming the things they buy actually go up in value this could grow quite nicely.

Eventually some huge holders of collateral would be in a position to consider branching out into doing the underwriting thing. They would find corps they consider creditworthy, and back them. Obviously they would be able to charge half as much interest if they simply loaned capital to the candidate company, so there would have to be really good reason to "go public" in order to justify also loaning them capital to act as surety to the exchange so they can "go public".

Hopefully this will keep many corps out of public trading entirely at their initial startup; which seems to me to make sense. Think about it, when facebook did their IPO were they a startup or had they already "proven" themselves? When google did their IPO were they a startup or had they already "proven" themselves? Etcetera. It seems a good idea to make it actually cheaper and easier to simply get a commercial loan to do your startup than to additionally borrow more to do an IPO. This way hopefully companies will first get themselves profitable before doing an IPO.

For startuip entrepeneurs there is crowdfunding. A stock exchange ought to be a more sober matter, not just another crowdfunding setup.

Let people get funded and get profitable then worry about whether to go public.

-MarkM-

That's a great argument.  I find myself wanting to agree.

The LTC exchange project in a lot of ways is very similar to a crowdfunding project though.  So with that in mind, I am thinking of maybe dividing things into two markets.

Market A:

A lower risk, higher profile collateral backed 'premium' market, where the asset issuers are required to have X shares in a 'COLLATERAL' fund on the exchange for every X amount of LTC they want to raise.  Funds deposited into this system would be shifted into an offsite cold wallet at regular intervals.

Market B:

A crowdfund (call it pink, to steal GLBSE's example) market, where the assets issued are considered extremely high risk, there is a funding cap, and the trades themselves are more expensive.  (Eg, 2% instead of 0.2%)  The difference in fees (1.8%) would feed an escrow fund dedicated to each asset.  If that asset goes poof, the escrow fund gets distributed to the shareholders.  If the dedicated escrow fund over time is traded enough to surpass the requirements for the collateral backed market, then the asset moves to the higher profile Market A.

Such a system in combination with some basic verification (as a stumbling block for scammers) could be fairly effective.

What might I be missing?  There's always a gotcha.  :)

It seems evident that identification isn't worth much, it might deter some scammers but serious offenders will either not give a damn (like pirate, possibly, if he is really Trendon Shavers as he is thought to be) or will have professionally forged ID.

So it seems much more important to be able to seize assets of theirs than to know or even care who they are.

This is actually all part of why I like to be able to set things within a virtual universe in which the assets of the players are where I can grab them and where the players who have invested in armies and fleets and so on can grab them. Seeing how much scamming happens in EVE Online I wanted to find a way to create a game universe in which not all investments would be scams. That is I wanted to finds ways to create non-scam investments. I figure that will be a good start toward eventually being able to compete with EVE Online; obviously I also will need to make enough capital with it to be able to also deploy art assets if I ever want to attract the folk to whom eyecandy is more important than fundamentals but if the fundamentals of finance are unsound raising that capital seems unlikely thus the starting with the financial fundamentals before worrying about the eyecandy.

You gotta make the potential scammers risk something, basically. Even then that will merely force them to plan their scam at a large enough scale for it to pay for that risk plus also make them a profit. For example if you require one bitcoin per share to be in escrow they will aim to pump their shares up to more than a bitcoin each in price so they can run with more than a bitcoin per leaving you holding the one bitcoin per to mollify their victims with.

Maybe you should just call the pink section "scams" and if any ever make it out of there explain "ha ha that one fooled us, the scam was that it was not a scam!" :)

(It is already clear there are sheetloads of coins out there urgently wishing to invest in scams so this should in no way be an obstacle to their raising vast sums of coins. :))

-MarkM-

I think seperation of securities according to their business type is more suitable rahter than just risk evaluation. After these seperation you can ask different requirements for different sectors. There also may exist such a scam market after some proof.

Possible markets:
Mining: Companies , Bonds
Commodity : Silver , Gold , Platinum
Investment Funds:
Pass Through Funds:
Real World Companies:

Possible Requirements:
Mining :
a) Proof of mining equipment (photos or mining performance)
b) Electricity bill( to understand really mines or not)

Commodities:
a) Photos of commodities periodically
b) Feedbacks from physically sold commodities

Investment Funds:
a) Maybe some api link for

Pass Through Funds:
a) ? Can be added

Real World Companies:
a) ? Can be added

Also please keep in mind that if you put so much regulation to the system , this can prevent people to issue new securities.

@markm: I dont know google's IPO , but I can talk about fb's one. Someone who bought shares from fb's IPO is either dont know economics or -dont offense- stupid. FB or companies like these ones are going to public just for being richer. They dont care public's benefits.
Also, there are ~10 million LTC around(~equals $400 k). Even as you said securities should go public after some good profit performance in past  , then I dont think $400k is not enough for 10 that kind of companies. So you cannot compare these companies with /litecoins ones. But I agree with you , their should be some mechanisms to prevent scams or at least decreasing them

Busy night of coding.

- Your own orders are now highlighted on the order book.
- The number of your shares that are reserved now show up next to the quantity on the ticker.
- All ask orders now get cancelled if your share balance is insufficient to cover them.
- Bid orders are now cancelled if your LTC balance is insufficient.  It cancels them starting with the lowest bid and works it's way up.  Thus leaving the orders most likely to be filled.

Cheers.

Bug causing multiple trade notification emails has been fixed.

I think it's better when trading platform is separate from verification/insurance/rating stuff.

When exchange is separate from these things you have a separate market for verification/insurance/ratings. Market means competition. So if one rating agency fucks up, another will replace it.

But if it is done for everybody by exchange, there is no big incentive for an exchange to offer best services because it already has monopolist position by being an exchange.

Also, insurance always cuts from profit, and so it should be investors/issuer's choice whether to use insurance. Again, if exchange enforces that, it would be like bundling a service nobody wants.

The idea with keeping collateral is simply bullshit. If 10% of money is reserved for compensation in case of failure, it would be just easier for investors to invest 90% of money they wanted to invest and keep 10% in their wallets. It's the safest.

Insurance implies existence of insurance pool. Which means that successful companies will subsidize failed ones. Do I need to explain why not everybody wants this?

It would be cool if equipment, land and other property could be used as collateral, but realistically that would require lawyers.

Announcing -- Google Authenticator 2-Factor Authentication Support!

- You can now turn on and manage Google Authenticator support on the account page.
- I have also added the ability to edit your email address on the account page.

Be careful not to lock yourself out!  However, if you do, you can get back in by going through the lost password process, which will also reset your Google Authenticator settings.

We have prettier URL's now.  ;)

eg: https://www.litecoinglobal.com/security/LTC-GLOBAL

Probably not super exciting nor glamorous news, but reading through various threads about GLBSE this morning I realized that a very important tool they do not have is the ability for an asset issuer to freeze trading on their assets for big announcements.  Those that have watched their investment in an asset go poof because an asset has declared some bad news while they were sleeping know what I am talking about.

  - Now in the interface an asset issuer can stop trading on their asset.  When they do all existing orders are wiped out.
  - Then the asset issuer can craft a notification to all shareholders explaining their actions.
  - After things are sorted out and everyone has been notified then the asset issuer can start trading again.

Implementing this (and the related admin override tools) was fairly in-depth in the trading code.  Please let me know if you get any unexpected "trading has been frozen" messages.   ;)

Cheers.

It doesn't seem to me that an asset issuer should have the ability to, in their sole discretion, halt trading on their issue. This seems like a recipe for disaster, fraud, and significant investor losses

The exchange should have a set policy on what will halt trading of an issue.

The issuer should be able to notify the exchange of a condition that will exist that should halt trading in the future (non-emergency halt) If the exchange deems that the halt request meets requirements, trading will be halted (and notice posted on the assets page)

If a condition should arise that meets the emergency halt requirements, trading should be halted by the exchange without the issuer's involvement

The exchange should further have a set policy for delisting assets, and once and issue no longer meets the qualifications for listing, notice is posted that trading will cease at some point in the future.

Just my 2 cobs :)

(cobs are the ltc equivalent of satoshis) ;)

I think the problem with that argument is that a scammer/fraudster wouldn't bother to notify the exchange and wait for us to halt trading anyway.  On the other hand, we save investors a significant amount in the case of the honest asset manager that has just defaulted due to some outside publicly known influence and can't wait for us.  Eg: a fund manager that has 50% of the fund in a certain company.  The company declares bankruptcy without prior warning.  To save his investors from significant loss, that fund manager would need to log in ASAP to clear the order book and stop trading.

Plus... being brutally honest... I have a day job, family, etc.  I go on vacations where there is no internet access.  LTC-GLOBAL is a long way from being able to afford to man the outpost 24/7.  I have to build it so that 99% of it can function without me.  I truly hope that that changes down the road, but for now my goal is to give the honest asset issuers all the tools they need to operate.

I agree that we need a delisting plan and policy.  Yet another weakness that GLBSE has exposed.  I have already laid out the qualifications for listing.  It can't be illegal, you cannot lie, etc.  (in the create asset ToS)  It warns that if you violate the ToS your assets will be frozen and you will be delisted.  So in that situation, what do you think would be the best delisting course of action?  Of course first thing you do is wipe the order book, but then do you stop trading immediately?  Do you give people a week of trading?  A month?

The scammers and fraudsters... that's the hardest thing to figure out...  I don't want people to lose their money but in the real world it's the SEC that deals with that, not the NYSE.  I don't know that I'm going to have the resources to be both.  I'll happily build integration for anyone wanting to setup a business as the C-SEC!  (Crypto-SEC :)  You could definitely make money doing it, not just for LTC assets, but for BTC ones on the three exchanges as well.

BTW, that cracked me up!

I like this in theory (I'm an asset issuer on LTC_GLOBAL) myself.

What I'd like to see is that asset issuers either include in their contract (if an IPO) or modify their contract (via motion) if it's already in the wild to include a statement of how they'll apply that change.

In the case of my fund (which day trades across a range of assets and is very exposed to the LTC/BTC exchange rate) I wouldn't foresee needing to halt trading other than in some VERY extreme circumstance (e.g. GLBSE getting hacked or shutdown).  Even in those circumstances I'd likely only halt trading very briefly - just to clear orders and post an update here/ in the ltctalk thread.  Thereafter investors all have the same information before they trade (except any idiots who trade without bothering to work out why their orders were cancelled) and can do what they want on the market.

But my situation is a bit different to most - as my fund buys/sells units and so is effectively the market-maker for the asset and I would expect it to usually form the bulk of orders itself (as the trading range moves up/down during the day as profits/losses are made and the exchange-rate varies).

The real argument on is between two competing points of view:

1.  That if something unexpected occurs, those with oustanding market orders should be prevented from loss.
2.  That anyone placing orders and leaving them unattended is already accepting the risk that the pricing of their orders may become severely wrong in some situations.

I don't have a strong belief on either side of those arguments - but I'd certainly like to know what an asset's policy was.  I'll sort my own policy on it out tomorrow - then see about passing it as a motion to amend the contract: not becasue I NEED it in the contract (I don't) but because i believe any investor reading the contract deserves to know my stance on it.

My policy will also definitely include that in the event something occurs which would cause me to impose a freeze the neither the asset itself or my personal LTC-GLOBAL account will trade my units before I press the freeze button: i.e. I won't exploit the situation myself before preventing anyone else doing so.

Brings up two good points.

1. We need a motion system!  For now, the notification system should work ok.  You can send a notification asking everyone to reply using your email address, then you can use their return email addresses to tally votes.

2. I've been thinking about exposing the asset issuer's trades.  Eg, highlight their orders on the order book and/or highlight them on the trade history.  How does this work in the real world?  Does a company have to reveal to it's shareholders/bondholders all of it's trade actions?

Thoughts?

Personally I'd love it if the trade of DeprivedAsset were highlighted in some colour in the order books - it would allow investors to be  sure they were buying/selling to one of my orders (or someone else's that was better).  As it stands, potentially someone could buy out my ASks then relist higher - and new investors could think it was my own offers and so was only 1% or so above nav/u.

I COULD just sling up a huge Ask-wall to stop that - but as I don't want to sell a whole ton of units at once I'm very reluctant to do that.

Do bear in mind that showing asset issuer's offers could be fairly easily worked around if they wanted to (by doing it via other accounts they transferred shares to) - but I don't see any legitimate reason why an asset issuer should want to hide trades made by the actual asset (trades made by their personal account is a slightly different issue - but I also don't see any good reason to hide those).

I didn't address this in my earlier post.

The notification system works far from OK for motions.

It DOES allow the asset issuer to see the results of a vote but noone else can confirm that unless the asset issuer posts a list of all email addresses and votes cast by that address.  This is bad because:

The asset lister posting such a list is (I would hope) obviously not a good idea - as it exposes the email addresses and number of shares held of people who may have just wanted to invest anonymously without their email addresses being published.

Without such a list, there's zero way to tell if the asset issuer is honestly passing on the results.  If we're going to assume that asset issuers will always act in good faith then we may as well not bother with motions and just let them change their contracts however and whenever they want.

It also means that noone can vote anonymously - there are circumstances where this can cause someone to vote other than they otherwise would have (or not vote) because of unrelated issues linking them with the asset issuer.

I'm an asset issuer myself AND an investor.  In both roles I want transparency on any motions without revealing who voted which way.  As an investor I want confidence that my vote was counted the way I actually voted.  As an asset issuer I want investors to be able to vote honestly without trying to suck up to me or being unduly influenced by others who would see how they voted were their email address (which is often traceable to a forum identity) exposed.

I am IN FAVOUR, however, of an addition - that in any motion the number of shares the asset issuer voted with (and how they voted) should be exposed.  This would ideally include any shares they voted with on their personal account.

Very good point with the need for animosity anonymity.

I'll make a motion system a priority.


Edit: did not mean what I meant it to mean.  :)

I'm hoping this new addition to the ToS won't be too controversial, given the unbelievable web of deceit that is being unravelled as the GLBSE implodes:

    * Funds will not be allowed to invest in other funds.  If a fund is caught investing in another fund your
      asset will be frozen until the issue is rectified.  In extreme cases assets will be subject to delisting.

What happens to LTCI? It was going to invest into LTC-ATF according to contract.

I see nothing wrong with it as long as there is no contract violation (i.e. if fund said it won't invest into other funds it shouldn't).

Its a much needed change, gblse has turned into a real shitstorm because of it.

there's been more discussion on it on the litecoin forums:

http://forum.litecoin.net/index.php/topic,551.0.html

towards end of that thread.

<In Palpatine's voice> Good.

With each such arbitrary restriction we are closer to decentralized exchanges. Centralized ones shot themselves in the foot: they inhibit survival of the fittest. Eventually they'll turn to the ghettos...

At the same time decentralized ones will effectively decouple trading itself from services like verification/rating agencies/audit, thus enabling competition in that sphere. Thus decentralized exchanges will be ones which will end up with fittest companies and fittest verification/rating/audit services.

That's how evolution works.

The motion system is now live.  Please note that you'll want to make sure you have your account timezone set properly when scheduling votes. 

I built it pretty fast.  Please let me know if you run into any issues!

Cheers.

We'll fix the wording so that it prevents what it is intended to prevent.

Open transactions will not prevent what we are trying to prevent.  I would respectfully ask that if you're not going to contribute in a positive way you find somewhere else to waste your time.

The problem is when two securities invest in each other.

I agree, the text needs re-worded.  But when two securities invest in each other they effectively prop up each other.  Then when one fails, both fail.  Add about 10 more into the mix, all failing at once, and you get the GLBSE.

Well. Do you know that public companies are required to notify investors about long-term risks to their business? (Particularly, in fillings... Form 10-K or something like that.)

For example, Microsoft mentioned that Linux is a potential threat to their OS business.

What I'm saying is that decentralized exchanges might be a threat to your business. This is in fact very relevant to LTC-GLOBAL the stock long term price target...

Or did you expect that people would only give your company praises? That's not how it works.

Am testing it now with a motion on LTC-ATF.

The motion was essentially that my investors believe that the motion system is working.

I then voted "NO" with the actual asset-issuing account.  If the 99,000 unissued units get to vote then it obviously is NOT working.  If the vote from them is ignored (as it should be) then the motion might pass :)

LOL, I saw that.  Thanks for catching that!  Should be fixed now.   :D

That's constructive criticism.  There was a definite change in the tone of your post.  I'm fine with that and outright encourage it.  I also highly encourage anyone posting facts that are informative and helpful to keep investors from getting the shaft on any one of the forum topics covering LTC-GLOBAL securities.  We NEED that.

Cheers.

Cross-post form my own asset's thread:


Yeah, guessed that was the case - only issued the motion to test the system.  Next one I'm gonna try is voting with the shares on my personal account, sending them back to main asset, returning them to my personal account and seeing if they get to vote again :)

Not sure how you do voting - if you just add up votes when someone clicks the vote button then you'll have same problem GLBSE has (you can end with more votes than shares - and by transferring shares the votes can be rigged).  Way i THINK you should do it is to register the vote for the person voting - and only convert it to actual share-votes when the motion ends (based on whatever shares they hold at that time).

Cross-posting this to your thread for the exchange in case you miss it here.

Awww man.... you're spot-on.  I'm storing vote counts when you click.  You can't vote twice on the same motion, but you could vote, then transfer, and that person could vote on the same shares.  Will fix that ASAP.

Thanks - saves me testing that :)

I have to track the votes as they're made to show a real-time tally, but I have set it up so that when the motion ends (and at regular intervals while it is open) it will iterate back through all the votes, tally the shares held at that time, and do a vote count update.

BTW... I didn't realize GLBSE was that broken.  That's horrible and not all that hard to fix.

Cheers.

New working version of the anti-incest clause:

* Securities holding long term investments are not to invest in other long term investment securities on LTC-GLOBAL.  (long term = holding assets greater than 30 days.)
* Securities created by the same issuer or organization, or in collusion with the issuer or organization are not to invest in each other on LTC-GLOBAL.
* Long-term investment securities are not to invest more than 20% of their portfolio into any other single security on LTC-GLOBAL.
* Long-term investment securities are not to own more than 20% of the outstanding shares of any other single security on LTC-GLOBAL.
* Securities on LTC-GLOBAL are allowed to invest in other securities outside LTC-GLOBAL without restraint.  Buyer beware.  (No way we could police this unfortunately...)
* If found in violation of these rules, you will be given a warning and will have 7 days to come into compliance.  If you do not comply your asset will be delisted.
* If repeatedly found in violation of these rules and you have received more than 3 warnings your asset will be delisted.

Please poke holes in it.   :)

Wouldn't it be better to just demand transparency?

If a LTC-GLOBAL security issuer invests more than x% into another LTC-GLOBAL security and holds this position for at least Y days, it MUST make details of trade open.

This way people can take this into account in their pricing computations. If they want to invest into incestuous ponzies, it's their right.

Failure to disclose should be punished. Perhaps you can also recommend disclosing positions on external exchanges, at least for funds.

If LTCI invests in LTC-ATF, there is nothing wrong with it: it's in contract. If LTC-ATF then day-trades on LTCI, nothing wrong either, at least if LTC-ATF is only a fraction of LTCI's holdings.

If LTC-ATF will hold a lot of LTCI shares it might be a problem, but it's also a violation of LTC-ATF's contract.

You can make a separate page with a list of positions which have to be disclosed. Then people can compute indirect ownership. (It's not trivial: company X might own parts of Y and Z which will own W which will invest into X. To solve this you need to solve a system of linear equations... I once implemented this for a large holding company.)

If people will detect "incestuous" relationship they can notify the public...

So it can be effective anti-pump&dump, no?

Problem with only having transparency is that its no use after you're invested.  e.g :

Asset owner runs 2 companies A and B with no investment etc in one another.

You invest in company A.
Companies A and B then do a share-swap of a large chunk of shares.
The asset owner can now control motions and fix the share prices - plus maybe you didn't invest in B because you don't believe its business will be profitable.

How does transparency help you?  It maybe makes it more obvious that you're screwed - but you're screwed nonetheless.

Now you could argue that companies A/B shouldn't be allowed to do a share-swap - but most contracts on here have very little restriction in them in terms of what the asset owner can do with handing out shares/trading them.

Where I agree with you to an extent is that there should likely be an additional part to the rules - that those restrictions can be waived in certain circumstances provided that:

1) The details of the proposed exemption are posted (either here or on LTC forums),
2) Share-holders are notified of the request,
3) No significant portion of shareholders (say no more than 10%) object - which can be verified by motion if necessary.
4) The exchange operator agrees.

So if someone has a genuinely good reason why they need a long-term exemption then they should clearly explain why they need it, how it benefits (or at least doesn't harm) their investors, why no conflict of interest arises from it and any other information of relevance.  By allowing well-reasoned exemptions, just about all problems with the rules vanish - as where some restriction doesn't make sense for your specific business, you have the option to explain why.  And if people can't properly explain WHY something makes sense for their investors (rather than just for themselves) then I'd rather they didn't run a company at all tbh.

I'm all for voluntary transparency.  Requiring it though would be impossible to enforce.

And even if you were successful enforcing it... Even the most responsible asset issuers would still cross-invest (usagi), disclose it (usagi), eventually tank, (usagi's getting there) and ultimately take down the exchange anyway.

I watched cross-investment behavior take down wall street in 2007 and watched it take down GLBSE in 2012.  That crap just doesn't work and even if it's transparent, people don't know what to watch for.

Big changes in the layout tonight.  Hope everyone likes it!

The most promising and useful Litecoin project.  :)

Could you please change the script so that mutiple bids and asks are possible?

Can you clarify?  Multiple bids are possible if you have the LTC.  Multiple asks are possible if you have the shares.  You can even (Unlike GLBSE) overlap bids on multiple securities with the same LTC.  You just cannot do it on a single security, as that would make it impossible to determine real depth.  (and thus impossible to determine the health of the market for that security.)

Cheers.

Rolled out a few new JSON api endpoints this evening:

Q: Do you have an API?
A: Now you can query JSON formatted ticker and historical trade data via the following URL's:

https://www.litecoinglobal.com/api/ticker/LTC-GLOBAL
https://www.litecoinglobal.com/api/history/LTC-GLOBAL

Replace out 'LTC-GLOBAL' with the name of the ticker you wish to view. In addition, if you browse to your account page, there is a custom URL there that you can use to view your portfolio. Do not share your portfolio URL with anyone!

Why would it make it impossible to determine the real depth? Why can't I place a buy order for 10 shares @ 1LTC and 10 shares @ 2LTC? It doesn't distort the market. Based that you have enought shares/ltcs.

Why is that allowed? That way you can flood litecoinglobal with fake buy orders.

I get the feeling that you haven't tried it.  That is exactly what you can do.


They're not fake.  They're standing orders backed by currency in your wallet.  When one is filled, your order list is re-evaluated and anything that you can no longer afford gets removed from your standing orders.  It's no different than more complex sites where you can setup lists of conditional orders, "if this happens, do this, if that happens, do that".  Except in this case we simplify it and handle it for you.

One of the biggest complaints about GLBSE was that you couldn't put conditional bids up on more than one security backed by the same coin.  We have solved that.

Cheers.

I am not sure if this has already been mentioned, but default contracts should be in place.  There are only so many investment types and having a default contract which an asset creator inputs their variables using a simple form would be great. 

Also, work on putting some kind of insurance on the assets.  I don't think central insurance "companies" would work for bitcoin assets at this stage.  Instead, my suggestion is to create a simple binary trading platform where investors can hedge their risk of a collapse of a security or failure of an operator to fulfill its contractual obligations.

I read through the thread on GLBSE about default contracts.  Because the contract is between the asset issuer and the share holder, I worry that having been in on the drafting of the contract, there may be some liability if something important gets missed.  Some contract examples for issuers to cut and paste would be really nice though.



I have been thinking very seriously about having a feature on assets that the asset issuers could turn on that would act as insurance on each individual asset.  It would work like this:

- asset issuer checks a box at creation time saying "I want insurance".
- asset issuer sets the value of insurance they want.  (should be roughly IPO price times number of initial shares released)
- the initial value of insurance desired results in an immediate up-front charge to pre-load the insurance fund.  (eg, 250 LTC on top of the 250 LTC creation fee)
- asset gets approved, and from there on every single trade has an "insurance fee" percentage tacked onto it of say, 0.1% or 0.2%.
- the insurance fee would go into an insurance wallet dedicated to that asset.  the value of the insurance wallet and the fact that the asset is insured would be prominently displayed on the interface.
- when the insurance wallet reaches the pre-determined value of the insurance requested, the insurance fee is no longer charged.
- if the asset issuer later defaults, the insurance fund is dispersed to current shareholders.

Thoughts?

I tend towards believing that sort of system is pretty pointless.  The funds that go into the insurance in effect come from investors (other than the token initial payment) - but are assigned to whoever currently owns the shares.  If we consider the two extreme cases first, it may make clear while the fund doesn't do much worthwhile:

1.  Right after IPO when all initial shares have been sold.  At this stage the insurance fund will hold 250 LTC +0.1-0.2% of share purchase price.  This is the point at which a quick scam is going to run off.  The 0.1-0.2% comes from the current investors - so if the fund defaults all they're getting back is 0.1-0.2% of what they originally paid + 250 LTC/number of shares.  Contributing the original 0.1-0.2% has gained them no benefit over just buying the shares at 0.1-0.2% less and keeping the other 0.1-0.2% themselves in tehir own wallet with the ability to use it at any time they choose.

2.  Now consider many years down the road - where the insurance pool covers the entire IPO price.  That money is not producing any revenue - but is assigned to the current share-holders.  That means that (if we take a share which dividends out all profits for simplicity) the price of those shares has to have doubled (as each share is now backed by twice the IPO price - half as working capital, half as insurance).  But income is only being generated from the half of that revenue which is in the hands of the company - AND there's no way shareholders can ever get hold of that half other than through the company defaulting.

COntinuing with case 2 - now consider this from the perspective of a new investor.  He has the option of investing in this insured company or in another company which has been running as long but doesn't have the insurance fund.

Company 1 (insured) - has shares costing 1 LTC and 1 LTC of insurance backing each share.  It trades at 2 LTC.
Company 2 (uninsured) - has shares costing 1 LTC and 0 LTC of insurance backing.  It trades at 1 LTC.

Both have the same apparent level of risk of default.

So he can buy the insured share - or instead but an insured 1 and keep the equivalent of the insurance money himself in his own wallet, accessible at any time (and able to be able to be used to produce more profits).

Obviously the share prices would NOT be double for company 1 than company 2 - but if it is NOT double then that just makes company 1 an even worse investment - as it means cash being spent on the purchase/transfer of company 1 shares is not ending up being reflected in the company's share-price.

A more likely scenario long-term is that company 1 ends up with shares only valued slightly higher than company 2.  I believe this would be the case - given they both have same assets and generate same revenue and the only premium on value for company 1 is in the insurance which MUST be valued at below 100% of value unless you KNOW an immediate default is going to occur - at which stage the REST of company's value becomes worthless.  What that means is that the vast majority of the insurance payments going into the fund have added no value to the stock - making company 2 the better investment all along UNLESS you believe the risk of default is high.  And if you believe the risk of default is high the NEITHER is worth investing in early.

In short : Company 1 only becomes a good investment when the insurance fund is maxed but has no great impact on the share price due to default being seen as highly unlikely.  Company 1 is a significantly worse investment in early stages because you get nothing of note back if it defaults - and the insurance premium (which can't have its full value rationally reflected in the share price) means you make a loss when you sell the share on (compared to company 2).

Looking at it from an entirely perspective, consider the following.

Investor one invests 1000 LTC every day in new shares - always in insured ones on which 0.1% (1 LTC) is taken for insurance.
Investor two always invests 999 LTC every day in new uninsured shares and puts 1 LTC into a cold-wallet every day.

Which of them is better off?  I'd say invest two is better off.  He has immediate access to LTC every day and doesn't have the (no matter how small, non-zero) risk of the exchange failing and keeping his insurance funds.  Investor 2 has actually "insured" himself not just against the share defaulting but also against the exchange defaulting. 

Personally I'd be investor 3 - who invested 1000 LTC in uninsured shares.  If I believe my investments will make a non-zero profit then it makes more sense than leaving any in an insurance fund (whether my own cold-wallet or an exchange-run one).

Any insurance plan which involves LTC sitting around generating no income is automatically bad value in my book.  There's actually a danger that such plans would HELP scammers - as it's a really cheap and easy way for a scammer to ptove (to those who don't think it through) that they're real.  Whilst the actual genuine businesses would reject it - as it's simply a bad way for their investors' funds to be used and devalues their shares in relation to the capital invested them compared to uninsured companies.

For similar reasons to the above paragraph I'm not a big fan of "ID verification" as a means to determining whether a company is legitimate.  It detracts from what I see as the two real things potential investors should be looking at:

Does the business have a plan which will actually make a profit?
Is the business verifiably able to do what it claims it would be doing?

From my perspective, looking at most of the scams, the red flag has nothing to do with whether they were verified or not.  The common thread to a lot of them is that they never provided any credible and verifiable means by which they would make money.  That includes pass-throughs to unidentified magic-money-making enterprises and the development of websites with no credible evidence that they could ever be monetarised sufficiently to generate the sort of revenue they'd need for the capital they were asking for.  If a company can make money doing what it says it'll be doing then that's a much better incentive for me to invest than whether they produced IF (fake or not) or have some sort of insurance policy that decreases my earnings whilst they don't default and doesn't give back much if they do.

What SHOULD be verified is when a company claims to be associated with a real world company -as one of the bonds on LTC-GLOBAL does.  Amazingly people are asking for proof of hardware - but not for the very basic prrof I'd want (before investing) that they actually ARE working in behalf of that company.  If something that is verifiable is claimed then no way am I investing until it's verified.  I'm not saying the exchange should do that - but it amazes me that investors will see someone say "I'm working for company X - here's their website" and not think "well OK - let's see something up on that website confirming what you say."

I had thought about that issue... that the costs would come from the shareholders.  But I guess no matter what you do the insurance would come from users directly as trades, or indirectly as a fee to the company.  There are many examples of companies that opted for insurance via CPA.  I think with this system you're better off because you know the funds are actually there. 

You're right too.  Some people would shy away from the insured companies because of the extra trade costs.  Other people would be attracted to them knowing that there's something there if they bet incorrectly.  That's 100% their call.

One of the other things you have to remember is that to a certain extent, this is to protect people from themselves.  People make "poor" investments on a regular basis.  I think it makes sense that these poor investments have a transaction tax to make you think before trading and provide a buffer when things go bad.

As for the funds sitting idle.  Not sure what to do with those.  Addressing the "many years down the road" question though, since the point of the insurance is against scamming, not business failure, then after 18 months or 24 months of proven stability a motion could be voted on to return the funds to the shareholders?  I'm not super worried about it because with cryptocoin it seems like there's more deflation than inflation.  Your coins gain value even just sitting there for the most part.  I don't think it would be a good idea to try investing them in anything. 

And my last argument for this is that the transaction fee would be very, very small.  0.1% is 0.1 LTC on a 100 LTC share.  Not nothing, but it shouldn't be enough to keep people from trading.



For the newly created companies, vulnerable to fraud immediately following the IPO, I think we would have to cap the funds you can raise on a new company.  Regardless of insurance or not and keeping in mind that this is one tool in what I hope to be a toolbox of many.  I think it could help mitigate some of the craziness because you dramatically increase the amount of trouble a scammer has to go through for a large payout.


I 100% agree that a business plan should be a requirement for verification.  I'm just not sure how to judge them pass/fail.

The business plan thing is a hard one.

If you start policing certain things you are the liable to police everything and if you let a scam through people will tend to say "but you vetted it"

Problem is that if the transaction fee is tiny - so is the insurance pay-out.

If I invest 1000 LTC in something, it fails/vanishes and I get 1 LTC back I wouldn't get a warm and fuzzy feeling that it had been insured.  It would feel more like adding insult to injury.  You can't have a tiny insurance charge that provides significant cover if every asset has its own pool (and you can't pool the insurance premiums from all assets or it just ends up with the good businesses paying off people who invested in scammers - making HYIP's the best investment).

I should in fairness point out that the proposed insurance has a downside for me that it doesn't for most others.  I mainly day trade - so I'd be paying this 0.1% every trade (or every other trade) without receiving any real benefit of it.  The (majority of the) benefit of insurance gos to those who hold securities long-term, not those whose hands it briefly passes through.  It thus acts as a disincentive to actively trade - as it automatically reduces your margin.

In most cases it wouldn't deter me from trading/investing in a security.  The exception being where someone proudly trumpeted that their IPO/security was "Insured" (unless they'd be trading for ages).  Those I'd stay a mile away from - as they were either scammers, lying or didn't realise just how irrelavnt being insured for 0.1% of your capital is.

Do also bear in mind that the actual time-scale before a 0.1% insurance fee fully covers the IPO is  immense.  to get 100% coverage every share issued has to change hands 1000 times.  i.e. nearly 3 years if every single share is traded every single day.  In practice the insurance cover would never get there - the asset issuer would die of old age first.


Not convinced a hard cap on funds for new companies is good.  Consider ASICMINER - think their IPO was 10k+ BTC.  That's going to be above any meaningful cap you'd set.  A cap actually deters the very IPOs we want to see.  The market really doesnt need more people trying to take 10-20% or so of profits from mining whilst passing the risk on to investors.  Nor does it need more "Investment Managers" whose plan is to dump cash into fairly random securities, take a cut of the dividends themselves whilst ignoring any loss to investors as the value of those investments plummets.  We need companies that will actually produce something tangible (be it hardware, software, a service or whatever).  And those companies won't be able to start with a cap on funds that is low enough to deter scammers.

Rather, I'd suggest you consider tiers of companies.  With each tier having increasingly difficult requirements (in terms of contract clarity, business plan, revenue forecasts etc) and also significantly larger fees (to cover the time you'd need to invest to check they met the requirements).

So bottom tier could  be 250 LTC fee, requirements just that they cover the basic elements in their contract (purpose of investment, type of security, rules on issuing new paper, profit-split/fees mechanism, closing-down process etc).  Maximum market cap for these maybe 20,000 LTC.

Next tier maybe 1000 LTC fee, market cap 250k LTC, requirements added of a more comprehensive contract, some form of business plan including at least a theoretical demonstration of long-term profit for investors, and a sample weekly or monthly report containing all essential figures investors would need to see).

Third tier, 10,000 LTC fee, requirements to include proof of incorporation, details of company's lawyer, proof of a place of business etc.  No market cap.

All you're asking for in reality is that if the asset issuer wants a decent amount of funds they demonstrate that they at least have the potential to make investors a long-term profit.  Any good asset issuer will already have produced that before even considering raising funds.  It'll not just reduce scammers - but get rid of all the just out of school wannabe millionaires who think that, by some magic means, if they can just raise a big chunk of cash then profits will just naturally fly in their direction.  The latter are in many worse more damaging to the community than scammers imo.

And obviously once a company's established they could move up to next tier by providing the additional information and paying the extra fee.

Just an idea on a different approach to it.  Upgrading companies market cap based on profits would obviously be the absolute worst way - as that would prevent genuine start-ups with a medium to long-term plan from incubating and allow ponzis free rein.

This is why I suggested having a simple binary market for insurance.  One party would may bet that the security would not pay its contractually obligated dividends, or bet that the bond would default, or whatever.  A speculator would bet that the operator would pay a dividend, or would not default.  It would have to be integrated into the exchange/brokerage site so that it would have maximum exposure.  It would allow investors to voluntarily purchase the insurance and have speculators take on the risk and not the exchange.

My messages get shorter the later it gets, heh, sorry, way past my bedtime here.


The assets would have to trade hands 500 times, not 1000.  The transaction fees are paid by both sides.

I thought about trying to pool the insurance... discounted it pretty quickly, it doesn't seem like a good idea.

I hear you with it hitting the day traders harder.  It would hit the bottom line for LTC-GLOBAL a little bit as well.  (reduced trades)  Without people wanting to invest long term though you wouldn't really have a platform to day trade on, so I suspect increasing confidence in the platform would ultimately benefit everyone.

I like the three tiered approach.  Makes it worth my time to do the verification process.  I liked where GLBSE was going with black, pink, and blue markets.  In part largely because people KNOW a black market is stupid high risk, a pink market is high risk, and a blue market would be medium risk.  (I don't consider any crypto-assets low risk.)


That's an interesting thought.  A little side market on every asset that pays or doesn't pay based on if the contract is met or not?  Can you detail how you would see it function?  Who determines when an asset defaults?  What if there's gray area due to contradictions in the contract?

Every time a security gets created   a "fail" or "succeed" asset is created on the "prediction market" people can bet on default.

Every time a security gets created   a "fail" or "succeed" asset is created on the "prediction market" people can bet on default.
[/quote]

Right, but who's the judge of when it is in default?  What if the contract is sufficiently generic as to have a large gray area where you could say it looks like it's in default, or you could say it has not?

Right, but who's the judge of when it is in default?  What if the contract is sufficiently generic as to have a large gray area where you could say it looks like it's in default, or you could say it has not?
[/quote]

Its true there is probably not a way to automate it. You can do something like if it misses 2 dividends in a row it is in default. But then some securities dont pay dividends. Theres probably a way to crowdsource it.

There are some things that could be set in stone.  For example, dividends will be paid every Monday, or 0.03 BTC (I don't know a realistic litecoin number) on Thursdays.

They could only be matched with very strict asset contracts.  Default is a grey area as many times in an asset contract default is not defined.  It could be all defined in the insurance contract.

I did give this a try on GLBSE but there was not a lot of demand.  I suspect it was because it was not marketed well.  Having the ability to bet right next to the asset's buy or sell page would drastically increase awareness.  There was also one problem with the contract as I did one for TYGRR-B Bond.  I stated that it would pay X bitcoins over the course of 30 days.  A floating point rounding error (I think) on GLBSE caused the total dividends to not equal X, so those kinds of issues need to be taken into account.

You can search for the assets under the Security forum by trying HEDGE.GIGAMINING.LONG

I also think these kinds of binary insurance betting should be very short term and may require the exchange to act as the counterparty.  There are some good and bad models to use for binary trading.  GLBSE had a beta binary trading platform for about a month.  It used a bad model.

The binary betting model does raise some interesting possibilities e.g :

For a low-dividend investment you could end up being better off betting on it paying than actually investing.

You could create an asset that appeared really terrible, buy up shares yourself (so that it had an obvious need to pay dividends), do absolutely nothing with it and just bet on the pay side.  As you'd have little liabilities (hardly anyone invested but yourself) you should make a decent profit off everyone betting against it.

Scammers could bet against their own assets on sock-puppets accounts to make even more profit.

And the last two are the real problem with it - the asset owner KNOWS what the outcome of the bet will be (if it's short-term) so can flood that side of the bet on a second account (or via a partner), meaning noone legitimately betting gets any sort of decent value.

These are all very good points, but one way to resolve this is by only listing reputable people with real companies.  Will it be any different when we are able to short these securities and the asset operator misses a dividend or gives some bad communication while he or she is shorting the asset?

Could you please add the server time to the header or footer and I think it is useful to see how many litecoins are actually available and how many are reserved for bids.
Balance: Ł10 (1000 reserved).

Well there's a few differences:

1.  In shorting the ultimate authority on who wins is the market.  In a binary market the asset operator can directly determine the outcome (and knows it in advance with near certainty).
2.  In shorting the benefit from shorting is restricted to a certain amount per security.  In a binary market it's based on the ratio between people on each side of the bet - which can be directly exploited by the asset operator.
3.  It's much harder for the asset operator to go long on their asset (sell shorts) without actually delivering something to satisfy the market.  In a binary market the asset operator makes most money betting ON their asset by giving the impression of doing badly whilst meeting their contractual obligations.

The real difference is that the operator can gain in the binary market irrespective of how they do - by manipulating market confidence in the OPPOSITE direction to where it should be going.  With shorts (on either side of the deal) at least that particular issue in no longer true.

Update tonight, added google auth support for asset transfers, coin withdrawals, and buy/sell orders.

Turn it on/off in the Account page with the "Google Auth for Transactions" checkbox.

Cheers.

If you set your timezone in the Account page, server time is your time.  ;)  Not a bad idea to put the current time up somewhere though.

The reserved balance is a little trickier.  Since you can have overlapping bids from one security to another what is reserved essentially becomes the sum of your bids on whatever security you have the most bids on.  I'll see what I can come up with to make this more clear in the interface.

Cheers.

You got it.  See the "Account" page when logged into your asset issuer account.  You'll find a link in there to an API output formatted in JSON like so:

{"owners":{"burnside@kattare.com":"1","example@example.com":"260","test@test.com":"80", ... },"ticker":"LTC-MINING.LTC","_comment":"cached up to 10 minutes","generated":"2012-10-06T23:32:59+01:00"}

DO NOT, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES SHARE THAT URL.  It has a very long API key, but if you let that get compromised, people will be able to see who holds your security.

This was the last piece to the "What do I do if LTC-GLOBAL ceases operation?" puzzle.  From here on out, all asset issuers can download their list of asset holders in an automated fashion at regular intervals.

I have also added the time to the top of the pages.  The time displayed takes into account your Account Timezone setting.

Cheers.

New PEER APPROVAL SYSTEM for new assets.

I will no longer be doing verification 100% myself.  From now on a vote of the shareholders of LTC-GLOBAL will determine whether new assets get approved or not.

The current rules are:
- You must have 10 shares of LTC-GLOBAL to vote.
- An asset gets flagged as ACTIVE when:
    (a) There are at least 5 YES votes, AND
    (b) There are more YES votes than NO votes.
- You can vote yes or no, and can change your vote at any time.
- NO votes carry twice the weight of YES votes.  (they count double)
- When you submit your vote, you can add a comment.  The asset issuer will get a copy of your comment via email.  So try to be selective!  If something doesn't add up, or needs clarification, vote NO, and ask them to fix their Prospectus, Business Plan, Contract, etc.

Even after the asset has been approved, you can still adjust your votes.  Hopefully we can use this as a vote of confidence, and over time maybe even set a trigger point where a certain number of NO votes will trigger a review of whether the asset is good for our exchange or not.

Cheers.

I like this idea.

been mining for hours and my balance still says zero

rate is 100khash

wrong thread?  :)

This should help tho: http://ltc.kattare.com/about.php

Read the part about how PPLNS round scoring works.

Cheers.

thanks got it. its slightly fun to do it but not profitable with current LTC price and electricity cost

my balance did update

There is now support for asset issuers to assemble and post their entire prospectus, or business plan, step by step.

Check out the "Contract & Prospectus" tab at https://www.litecoinglobal.com/security/LTC-GLOBAL for an example.

Hopefully this will help people determine the difference between a good asset issuer who has planned their success and an asset issuer that does not have a good plan.

Cheers.

Bug fixed.  If you had exactly 10 LTC-GLOBAL shares it wasn't letting you vote.  You had to have 11.  heh.  I fixed the conditional statement.   ;)

Did I miss something? "BTC Trading Corp. Avarua, Rarotonga"

https://btct.co/security/ESECURITY-SA2

Hey, where'd you find that?  That's the beta site.  :)

I'll plug in some IP restrictions until it's ready to roll.

is the site down ?

http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/www.litecoinglobal.com (http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/www.litecoinglobal.com)


and

http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/www.litecoinpool.org (http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/www.litecoinpool.org)

thank DiCE :)

no problem,

http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/ltc.kattare.com

is actually down too aswell   ???

It's back up now. 

Not a fun morning.  The DDoS against ltc.kattare.com took out the frontend webserver.  I'll be splitting the services up a bit over the next week or two.

Cheers.

Ahh, crap.  It wasn't quite back.  Had to update the firewall config.  It was having trouble getting to people's wallets.  :)

just a quick question why is every stock/share i bought from the stock exchange 6 company's in total now significantly lower than what i paid for them ?

Lots of factors.  I suspect it's because:

- GLBSE blew up.
    - Bunch of the funds were dealing in GLBSE assets.
    - Confidence in all the exchanges is down.
- LTC is up.  Since LTC is up, all the companies that are valued in currencies other than LTC would naturally drop in LTC price.
- LTC mining difficulty is up.  As difficulty goes up, LTC Mining stocks would naturally drop in price.

I think that should about sum it up?

Cheers.

Unless company isn't fully correlated with LTC its share price is going to go down when LTC goes up. To be fully correlated company needs to hold LTC and LTC-denominated debt with coupon fixed in LTC.

Otherwise it's hard to explain why value per share will go up.

Even for companies like LTC-GAMING and LTC-CHARTS which in theory deal only with LTC: why would we expect their revenue to rise?

Same thing happens on "traditional" exchanges: if dollar goes up stock market goes down, and vice versa.

O right thanks

so will it ever go up in value lol, or should i sell now ?

1. If LTC exchange rate will drop share prices are expected to go up.

2. It looks like market is fairly irrational now, you might wait a bit till it gets more rational.

It's possible that LTC exchange rate hike caused sell-off, considerable amount of litecoins have left exchange and what's left simply cannot keep asset prices reasonable. But if situation stabilizes you might see share prices recovering.

Wait out the storm then  :D

Thanks bro

There's another issue which may impact some of the securities you're invested in (don't know which you're in, so can't say for sure).

Some securities didn't sell out at IPO and still have an Ask-wall up of unsold shares.  When that happens the price MUST go down - as the unsold IPO shares form a ceiling on the price, so all trade has to occur below IPO price.

Also some of the assets on LTC-GLOBAL don't communicate at all with investors - so even if they're actually doing well it's hard for investors to have any confidence and the price will tend to fall.

EMIF.LTC-TRADING
ESECURITY-SA
ESECURITY-SA2
LTC-ATF
LTCI
OPCU

EMIF.LTC-TRADING -- In theory should be trading at least somewhere around IPO price, 0.50 IIRC. But dude haven't been communicating with us for a couple of weeks. On the bright side, he sent a good dividend on 2012-10-15. It corresponds to about 30% per year.

ESECURITY-SA, ESECURITY-SA2 -- with a current exchange rate issuer should be selling at about 3.3 LTC per bond, and since issuer haven't sold all bonds yet it's unlikely than it will go above 3.3 (assuming current exchange rate). However it is a great bond as long as you don't mind coupon fixed in USD :)

LTC-ATF -- here issuer forms price himself, and it's backed by calculation, so you might assume it's about right.

LTCI -- it is expected that fair price now is 0.64 (http://forum.litecoin.net/index.php/topic,676.msg1983.html#msg1983), but it might recover when other prices will recover (say, up to 1.0) since it just invests in other shares.

OPCU -- it is still doing IPO, don't expect price to go above 0.9 anytime soon. If you want to go out put an ask at 0.899, for example.

Yeah sounds about right.

EMIF - issuer got cold feet about doing what he originally intended to do after one week of trading.  He announced he would diverisy operations and give more details soon - but never did.  He's been paying dividends each week which suggests he hasn't made a loss (as, per his contract, he shouldn't pay dividends in a losing week) but the fear (to me) is that he's in over his head and paying out dividedns to keep people quiet while he tries to work out what to do next.

ESECURITIES - their income is in USD, so any rise in LTC (and there's been a big one) would tend to devalue them.

LTC-ATF.  I run this one.  The drop is entirely down to the exchange-rate rise - as initially we were mainly investing in BTC-denominated securities on GLBSE.  When the LTC price sky-rocketed, half our assets were frozen on GLBSE so there was no way I could do anything with them.  Whether it'll rise back up or fall down again depends to an extent on what happens with the exchange-rate - if it stays stable then I'd expect to make a profit from trading.  At the moment next difficulty change for LTC is projected to be downward - which SHOULD lead to a fall in LTC price.  But the real bugbear is what will happen when ASICs hit the BTC market and some GPU miners migrate to LTC - there's arguments that can be made for exchange-rate move in either direction then.

LTCI - the linked spreadsheet values everything based on bids.  I'd value its holdings in the .7-.85 range.  Certainly the .64 in the spreadsheet is the bottom of valuation range as thats pretty much what everything could be liquidated for now.  If you look at its investments it's clear a lot of the loss in value is caused directly by the exchange-rate change.  I'll tell you for free that the last transactions on that stock were me buying for my fund at 0.4 and .5 - as that was (and remains) very good value.  I'm not a huge fan of this type of passive investment (where you pay a management fee just for someone else to buy a few shares and then send you most of the dividends) but when it's that obviously underpriced compared to book value I'll happily buy some.

OPCU : still in IPO as mentioned.  It's not totally clear to me whether the asset issuer is selling his OWN shares in an existing enterprise or raising funds for a new one.  There's no list of current assets - but there IS a list of historical revenue.  Which leads to the fear (as a potential investor) that we may be being asked to provide 100% of the capital for a very small share of the profits.  Note that there's no mention anywhere of how any amount to be dividended would be calculated or what (if any) personal wages would be drawn prior to dividend.  One of the things I immediately look for in any asset is a clear definition of what part of profits go the asset owener and which to the shareholders - that's missing here.

Thank you for the in-depth info  ;)

Sorry for the extended absence.  Been busy on a bunch of things that I just released this evening:

- Several security improvements.
  - Now that it's done I can advertise that the litecoind process (and thus the wallet) has officially moved to a dedicated backend machine.
  - In addition, the litecoind process on the backend machine has been custom compiled to reduce rpc exposure and make a site-wide hack less painful.
  - Better separation of litecoinglobal.com and ltc.kattare.com, though there is still progress to be made here.  (need more servers!)
- Better exception handling.  I was catching mysql exceptions but not properly catching all litecoind exceptions.  This should be vastly improved now.
- Multiple coin support added to the codebase.  I'm still finding gotcha's every here and there, but the codebase is now 99% ready for the BTC release of the site.
- New fields on the securities.  Essentially everything you need to present a full and complete business plan.  I don't expect everyone to use them, but I can guarantee the moderators will like your security better if you do.
- New moderation options.
  - Moderators can now attach a publicly visible comment to their votes.
  - And they also have the option of displaying their login name next to their comment.
  - The publicly visible comments currently show up above the contract, though that may be changed later.
- New Terms of Service on registration and asset creation.  Trying to keep it real, crossing the t's and dotting the i's.  The legalese has received a major revamp to protect everyone involved.  I don't expect everyone to like it, but at least the way it's setup now, it should be legal to use the site in most global jurisdictions.

I think that about sums it up.  I have a bunch more work to do to release the BTC version of the site, but once the BTC version has been released, I will start implementing some of the great suggestions that have been posted in the last week or so.

As always, let me know if you find something broken.  With as many changes as I've made, there's bound to be something I've missed.

Cheers.

Bunch of improvements related to orders:

- Improved the order canceling function.
      - It had some flaws where sometimes it wasn't canceling some orders it should for NSF.
      - I improved the email you receive when a bid order is canceled.  It should now tell you exactly what order (qty@amt) got canceled.
- Improved the 'My Orders' table on the securities page.  It now shows reserved currency and shares based on your current orders.
- Improved the 'My Orders' tab on the portfolio page.  It now shows reserved currency and shares based on your current orders.

Cheers.

whats the differences from the defunct bitcoin stock exchange

https://www.litecoinglobal.com/faq

The biggest difference is that we are not trying to pretend we're the NYSE, the NASDAQ, etc.  We realize that such an operation trying to be "legit" and fully registered / legal, is way beyond the scope of our resources.

This will likely change how a lot of people look at it, but we don't really have much choice.  The biggest issue is whether or not the asset issuers will be taken seriously.  I think that some will and some will not, much like the GLBSE.  However, we hope to provide better tools for being able to tell the difference.  Starting with being able to put up a prospectus/business plan!

The other factor of course is that even if an asset issuer went defunct on the GLBSE, it's not like you had much recourse... So in practice, I don't think as much has changed as you would think.

Cheers.

What happens, if some goons from the 3 letter agencies are going to call you up and say: Close it down now or we will drag your ass to a prison (for violating a law X that someone dreamed up over 80 some year ago and is obviously served well all the rich fat fucks for generations)
I am still not sure that this really happened to GLBSE, but down they went and lots of honest people got fraked.
 

Right now:  I'd probably stop working on it and let them have their way.  For me it's not worth the risk.  However, all the assets could go on.  I just wrapped up a feature today where every 12 hours a copy of the current shareholder list gets emailed to asset issuers.

Down the road:  I plan to diversify the operation so that it doesn't depend on me.  The company itself is a Cook Islands company.  The next iteration will be hosted in Panama. (already have boxes there with the BTC site setup on them)  I'm optimistic that once it's all setup we can find a few major investors such that I can offload the corporate officer positions and major shareholder positions so that it's doesn't depend on me to survive.

Cheers.

just a question about dividends:
i have scheduled a dividend payment of LTC-CHARTS for 2012-11-03 12:00 at maybe 11:45 o clock but it wasnt triggered till now..

How far off from your scheduled time was it?  I think the scheduled job (via cron) checks for new dividends once every 10 minutes.

I see this on your post: "Posted on: November 03, 2012, 11:49:10 AM", so saying it was scheduled for 11:45 and having you post that it just ran at 11:49 I don't think it was off by too far?  ;)

On the other hand, if you scheduled it hours beforehand, there is an issue where the time picker works by the timezone you have set in the accounts page.  If you do not set it in the accounts page, it defaults to GMT.  Which means that if you go with the default, and you are not in a GMT timezone, then the times you pick may not be what you intended. 

Some day I'll try to auto-determine time zones by the user's browser time, but that's a ways off... lots of higher priorities.  :)

Hope that makes sense of things!

Cheers.

thank you :) that makes sense!
is it possible to make a "pay now" checkbox when entering a dividend?

I know it's not quite the same, but the calendar has a "now" button.  I usually just hit "now", "done".

Does it matter how long it takes after you set the time when you press "now"  ?

Not really sure what you're asking.  But guessing at an answer I'll throw out there that if it's any time in the past, it will also get processed immediately in the next batch.

Cheers.

I take it the cron job is set every few minutes ?

Correct.

Killed a big bug today with the help of one of our users.

Turned out that my type checking was stripping leading zeros off the PIN's.  I replaced the code with a regex check and now PIN's with leading zeros should work.

Cheers.

Great news.  BTC Trading Corp. has been approved and accepted for incorporation in Belize.

Our new corporate address:

BTC Trading Corp.
Suite 508, Marina Towers
Newton Barracks, Belize City
Belize

A motion has been posted for election of the corporate director.  You can start voting in ~30 mins.  Voting closes at 5 pm PST on Friday.

I recommend passing the motion.  Fidelity is the company I have chosen to operate BTC Trading Corp from Belize.

Cheers.

Fixed a bug in the voting system.  :)  It was only allowing one vote per security, not one vote per motion!

That is great news for LTC-GLOBAL users and the Litecoin community.
But what is the point of this motion? There is no alternative given and we don't know anything about the director and how he(they) will affect the running of LTC-Global.
Is he just a figurehead?

Do you hold any shares? I was just wondering because the motion is only just up for 12 hours and already 93.3% approval.
I don't know if you want to reveal this, but I was also wondering if there are only 17 shareholders?

What are the requirements for becoming a registered shareholder?

I can answer some of that for you.

Only a small minority of shares were sold to the public - burnside holds the majority (THINK I remember him saying he'd sold 10%).  So the vote passing is pretty automatic - but form demands a vote be held, as much to create a record of it passing as anything.

The director is almost certainly just a figurehead - likely a local representative is needed for the company.

Again, from memory last time brunside commented on it there were 18 shareholders who held 10 or more shares (and so can vote to approve assets).  There's likely a lot more shareholders holding less than 10 shares.

To become a shareholder you just buy 1 or more shares on the exchange.  Cheapest for sale at moment for LTC-GLOBAL are about 250 LTC.  Get 10 shares and you can vote to approve or deny new assets (or put messages about them up for everyone to see).

I apologize if this has been discussed already, but what makes this different from suffering the same fate as GLSBE?

It seems like if you were going to do something like this, you'd want to learn from GLSBE's mistakes so that such a thing doesn't happen again.

I am not updated on the GLBSE issue but I as far as I know GLBSE wasn't shut-down by any authority. Since he wasn't contacted by any authority either there are only three reasons why he shut-down GLBSE.
A. Some overcautious lawyer scared him.
B. The whole thing is a scam. He knows that the most users won't comply his "AML" requirements.
C. Includes B + He created the image that it is dangerous to run a stock exchange to scare potential competitors.
I tend to option B.

Furthermore I doubt that any government authority will come after LTC-Global because it is not even proven that a virtual stock exchange is illegal and there the are far worse websites like Liberty Reserve, Perfect Money or BTC-E. This websites probably violate AML laws worldwide. But no one cares. They are even hosted in the US.
To launder money with LTC-Global doesn't make any sense. LTC in LTC out. You can conver your Litecoin tracks but if this a problem we should worry about all wallet services too.

Check out http://www.slcapex.com/ (http://www.slcapex.com/). The owners say it is just a game/simulation and they haven't had any trouble since they started in 2008.
I think LTC-Global is going the same way.

It has definitely been discussed and is somewhat covered in the FAQ.

3 major differences that make this unlike any other sites available right now.

A) We are incorporated.  For real.

B) Legal wording is such that this is an entertainment/educational site only.  Assets are not real.  There is no recourse if an asset fails.  Etc.  This makes it more risky for "investors", but less risky for the asset issuers and most importantly, less risky to BTC Trading Corp.  This would seem like a huge issue at first, but realistically there is little recourse in an asset failure situation anyway.

C) Asset issuers are free to leave at any time.  I have made it simple (via website, json api, or email) to get a list of people holding your asset such that you can move to another exchange or to private management pretty much at will.  We even force it upon the asset issuers in the form of an email every 12 hours.  :)

There's lots of other differences, but those I think are the key ones.

Deprived summed it up pretty well.  It's as much a public notice for legal as anything.  I can confirm that I still hold the majority share of the company and can thus still act unilaterally.  It's not a power thing for me, I'm not opposed to giving up equity should the right investor come along with the right offer.  There's a thread on here where I offered it up for sale but most people choked on my price.  :)  In fact, I think it would be best for the Company if I were not a majority shareholder, just because I strongly believe that ownership should be spread out internationally so that decisions are legitimately made internationally.

The requirements for registering shares I believe would be:

- Assembly of AML documents.  Notarized copies of passport, proof of residential address, and a letter of reference from a legal or banking professional.
- A notarized copy of the company shareholder agreement whereby you allow your shares on litecoinglobal.com to be locked, such that the shares in your account on the site match up with the shares on file with the company.  Doesn't mean you can't sell them, just means when you do it has to be a little more formal.  This is because the company itself is not traded on an internationally recognized exchange.

To that end I am also going to have to adjust the contract somewhat on LTC-GLOBAL because I need to make it clear that unless you register your shares, you are essentially trading shares that are owned by the corporate management company (Fidelity) by proxy.

Depending on your locale, there may also be legal and tax issues you will need to take into consideration before registering shares.

Cheers.

Sorry but what is the

Internal Asset Transfer ?

And how do you sell Shares sorry for the noob question but im not sure if im doing it right ><

Internal asset transfer is for sending securities to another account.

You sell shares by filling in the sell dialog on on the right side of the individual asset screen. Simply enter Quantity, Price Each, and Auth Pin. Just make sure the information is correct before pressing the "Place SELL Order" button.

Ok ive done that but its not filling the order  :(

Must be borked. :)

It's a market bud. Sellers need buyers to complete a transaction. If you set a sell price equal or lower to a bid on the same security all or some of the order will fill. If there are no bids at the price you're selling a new ask entry is produced.

its at a equal price, not above or below the current market price if that makes sense

i guess i just have to wait until someone buys it  :(

Market has "buy" (bid) and "sell" (ask) price. If you're buying at current "buy" price, you have to wait. Potentially, forever.

If you want to buy immediately, you need to buy at "sell" price, in that case your buy order will be matched to that sell order.

There is a "fill" button for that -- it would allow you to buy right now (but you might want to edit quantity).

Ok but i want to sell not buy ..

And this is why most of the world uses "Bid" and "Ask" :) 

Its ok i sold my shares  :D

I understand thanks  ;)

Ok, the email validation code is in place.

As I mentioned before, this was the last holdup on the BTC site.  Feel free to load it up and poke around on it, the URL is:

https://btct.co/

I guess I'd consider this a soft launch.  ;)

Cheers.

wow nice work thank you burnside  ;)

Looks good!

I have been watching this site since a few days. I love the functional design. Will you issue shares for BTCTC or will LTC-Global be the only way to buy shares?

Thank you!  Glad you like it.  :)

LTC-Global will continue to be the only way to buy shares.  I know this will be a PITA for some, but shifting some BTC over to LTC is not really all that hard.  The client is very similar.  My favorite exchange is btc-e.com, but there is also Vircurex and I think bitparking might have one?

Hope that helps!

I wonder if you could talk to btc-e and setup some kind of "coupon" system so that you could redeem btc-e coupons on litecoinglobal or BTCT without the middle step of going through the blockchain. You could get a cut of the exchange action :D

We'll list any GLBSE refugee asset on BTCTC (https://btct.co/) for free.

We can't guarantee that they'll pass the approval voting process, as that's up to the mods.  PM me after re-creating your asset and we will refund the 5 BTC asset listing fee as soon as we confirm that your asset was listed on the GLBSE prior to it's closing.

I'll also note that picking up operations should be fairly painless.  The platform allows free transfers from account to account, so if you request the asset holder's BTCTC username as part of the claims process, it is quick and easy to transfer the appropriate shares to their BTCTC account.

Thanks!

That's a great idea!  I wonder how hard it is to redeem them... I'll look into it.

Thanks!

Wow that's terrific news for shareholders & issuers alike. Well played!

Along those lines, I wonder if it'd be possible to make the home page for moderators when opening LTC-GLOBAL and btct.co = Awaiting Moderator Approval. Anything to draw attention to that page so mods are aware of the issues in limbo.
 

- There's now a reminder that pops up at the top of the portfolio page when you need to vote on a motion.
- There's now a reminder at the top of the portfolio page listing all assets that have completed motions in the last week.
- A bug with the motions system was fixed that was using the current outstanding shares to calculate the percentages rather than the outstanding shares as of the time the motion voting completed.
- Slightly updated formatting on asset notification emails.

Cheers.

Dev update:

- Forced buyback is now available.  For the asset issuer it will show up below the bids section of the order book.
- Small tweaks to the purchase/sale emails.

Dev update:

Market: new "Trades" tab, shows last ~48 hours of trades
Market: slight tweaks to moderator score display
Market: split tabs left and right to improve usability
All pages: large tables: subtle alternating row colors
All pages: improved caching on several key functions
All pages: darker font, lighter table backgrounds

Cheers.

Today's Dev Update:

- New api endpoint /api/assetContract, gives you the contract and other details in json.
- Newly created assets are now "Issuer Locked" by default.  This way the issuer can fine tune them before opening them up for moderator voting.
- "Admin Locked" and "Issuer Locked" assets now show up with a reddish background in the Market.
- Bug fix to the Market "Trades" tab, the 24h high and 24h low columns were backwards.
- Bug fix to the textual depost/withdrawal history where the quantity of the sellers entire order was written into the trade log rather than the quantity of the bid the seller filled.  (important note... this was a textual history bug only, not a bug with the actual quantity in the trade itself.)

Cheers

Quick Dev Update.  I just finished adding protection against google auth replay attacks.  This means that you now cannot reuse the same google auth key in a 5 minute window.  If you want to do another transaction quickly, you just have to wait for a new key.  Please let me know ASAP if you find anything broken as a result of this.  eg, if you can't trade.  ;)

Today's Dev Updates:

- Cache strategy changes to the market page.  It should be cached slightly less now, and more up to the second with trades.
- New feature, public portfolios!  On the "Account" page you can now turn on public access to your portfolio.  When you turn it on, you are given a custom URL.  Anyone you give that URL will be able to view your portfolio, all they have to do is log in with their own account first.  This should be especially handy for FUNDS that want to make it easy for their users to see what assets they are holding.

Cheers.

Dev update:

- Withdrawal bug fixed.  (input submit form element was outside the <form></form>... doh.)
- Big formatting update on the Deposit/Withdraw page.
- Inline editing of orders on the security pages.

Cheers.

Noticed a user having trouble with the in-place order editing today.

Realized that following an order cancellation, the in-place order editing does not work.  Kind of obscure, but it's fixed now.  :)

Cheers.

Do you accept non LTC/BTC/*C related projects to your exchange?

There are no limitations in terms of the projects outside of the moral/legal realm.  It has to be legal in Belize, and obviously it has to be morally acceptable to the mods/voters.

Naturally, the trading of the asset will be in either LTC or BTC, depending on if you go with litecoinglobal.com or btct.co.

Cheers.

Big CSS facelift this evening.  You may have to purge your cache or CTRL-SHFT-R to see it.

Hope everyone likes it.

Dev update:

- Bunch of css bug fixes
- Big revamp of the Portfolio "Dividends" tab.  Now ordered by ticker, and gives all-time totals for the asset.

Cheers.

I submitted a new security but I am not sure was it sent or not.
After I clicked "I agree..." button,  I ended up on empty white page that had the sites top menu and that's it :)

If you submitted ART, it appears to have worked fine. Good luck.

The rounded corners look good but I think you really need to do something with the header/footer. I remember that style from the late 90s. You don't need a fancy header with logo but something more similar to the content style would look better. Like the Bitcointalk header.

A scalable value/volumen graph would be nice. This is the only thing where Bitfunder outclasses LTC-Global.

I agree.  I don't like the header either.  The colors from bitcointalk are just about right... hmmm... ;)

With the graphing, I've done scaling graphs before on a couple projects.  Would definitely be nice if you could zoom in and out.

Cheers.

Good charts are always welcome. But you can use something like: http://www.highcharts.com/ . No need to invent the wheel :)

Dev Update -- New Dividend Reinvestment Program!  (DRIP)

Here's how it works:

- You head to the Portfolio page, click on the My Dividends tab.
- It will show you all of your past dividends on any assets you have held.  You will also see the text: "Reinvest At Max Ł XXX Per Share"
- Check the box and set the maximum amount you are willing to pay for shares of the asset, then click "Go".
- As your dividends from that asset build up, you will see: "Dividend History: LTC-GLOBAL       Ł 4.184882 Has Accrued"
- When you accrue enough to afford a new share, the system will automatically purchase it for you at the lowest market ask price!

** Note that even if you show accrued dividends on the shares, we do not withhold this amount from your wallet balance.  Thus you have to leave your accrued dividends in your wallet if you want to have enough coin for the system to actually make the purchase when the time comes!

Cheers.

Hi
I listed a new security, ART,  at LTC-GLOBAL. It's been sitting there for days now, with no activity :)  Did I forget to click something to make it available for the approval process?   
If you are a moderator and you have questions, please feel free to send me a PM and I'll open up a new forum thread with the answers.

Cheers.

You have to unlock it before mods can vote on it.  :)

It defaults to being locked when created so that you can fine tune it in the interface and/or let it sit, reserving the ticker.

Cheers.

Since you unlocked the the asset I got already 4 votes in less than 12 hours.
The project seems interesting. I have three questions:
1. What is the minimum amount of shares you have to sell to buy your first equipment. What are further tranches?
2. Can you post pictures of the purchased equipment?
3. What city/country are you based?

Cheers, it's up and open fro trading as of now.

We need to sell about 40K shares but I rather not write this in stone. If we get close to 50K, in a reasonable time frame, I think we are better off selling additional 10-15K (depends, what the exchange rate is) shares and go for a larger purchase (saves on transportation etc). I'll play it by ear at the moment and see how well the shares sell. Lets see, how it goes and I'll adjust the plans accordingly. I already found some equipment that can be used in few weeks and it will serve us as backup in the future.

Yes, everything we buy, will be photographed and pictures posted.

I really like to keep it under the radar until the equipment is on it's way.  :)  Pictures of the shop, equipment etc  will be all published when time is right. I am not trying to be "mysterious" here. Hopefully you understand.

Big dividend this evening.

BTC-TC had 23.178 BTC in the fee gathering account.

11.45 BTC was used to reimburse the hosting fees.  (Oct, Nov, Dec)

The remainder was converted to 2004.78 LTC and added to the LTC in the LTC-GLOBAL fee gathering account for a total of a 2036.32 LTC dividend.

Cheers.

Nice. TYVM indeed. :)

It's been a long time since I've posted a dev update.  Here's a quick summary of the svn logs for the last couple weeks:

- New Locked tab for locked securities.
- The public portfolio feature now includes the ability to publicly display your wallet balance.
- Big reformat of the Account page.  It's now up to date and matches most of the rest of the site.  ;)
- API improvements on the ticker output, it now includes additional 7 day and 30 day data.
- Fixed a bug with address verification on the Wallet address entry forms.  I was calling the verification function incorrectly such that everything was being considered valid.
- Security Trade tab now has red/green buttons for buying and selling.  Hopefully makes things a little clearer.
- New support request form.  Sends an email to the support gurus.
- New Security Trade tab information bar, including shares outstanding, 7 day numbers, 30 day numbers, and the moderator score.
- Many, many email formatting and output improvements.
- New 30 day and 90 day per share dividend payouts calculated on the Security Dividends tab.
- ** Huge change ** - Implementation of manual withdrawals when the withdrawal amount exceeds a daily withdrawal cap of an equivalent of $300 USD in digital currency.  This should not impact trading much, and there are some good benefits.  The main ones are;
    (A) To protect the exchange.  I can now reduce the amount of coin in the hot wallet to a safer level.  This is a huge security exposure win.
    (B) To protect users from compromised account situations.  If an attacker tries to withdraw over the threshold, you will get an email saying a manual withdrawal
    was requested.  You then have some time to contact us and ask us to cancel the withdrawal.
- No longer prompt asset issuers to vote on their own motions in the Portfolio page, since when they get to the Asset page they couldn't vote on their own motions anyway.  :)
- Motions with a start date in the past will now automatically start immediately.  It was pretty common for people to use the "Now" button in the calendar, wait a few seconds, then submit, rendering a start date in the past, which popped up an annoying error.
- Many timezone related bug fixes.  I believe there are still many to go.  The problem is that many of the html code chunks are shared among users in multiple time zones, so I'm having to re-work the caching for a lot of them.
- My Trades tab on the Portfolio page now has a 500 trade limit, bumped up from 30.

I'm still working on the longer-term project of getting the API setup for trading.  It is based on oauth 1.0a, and should be pretty easy to program for if you're familiar with oauth.  Unfortunately the work is not progressing as quickly as I would like, between the GLBSE imports and my regular job things have been pretty busy.

Cheers.

Hey i have a yubikey and having trouble using it on your site its says

Account Yubikey support enabled. Account Yubikey support disabled, there were no more Yubikey identities available.

I mainly use it for mtgox can i also use it for LTC-Global ?

Gox yubikeys won't work unfortunately.  Gox runs it's own yubikey auth server, whereas we're pointed at the official Yubikey Yubicloud servers.

If anyone knows any tricks for getting a Gox yubikey to work on a 3rd party site, I'd love to implement the Gox keys.  ;)

Cheers.

understand cheers  ;)

Anyone else having problems seeing the buy and sell pages for assets when your logged in?

When I am not logged in I can see them fine. Of course I can't use them though.

Same for me since not long time, I guess burnside is working on something

I can't see my portfolio. It shows a blank page. everything else works, kind of scary to no be able to see things you own.

same problem   :(

Burnie's pool is acting up too.


BTC Trading Corp. seems fine.

Hi all, sorry about that.

There was a bug in the balance withholding feature of my new options code I'm testing.  It was one of those bugs where it all worked for me, but if you were logged in as everyone else it was broken.  Go figure.

Should all be back now!

Cheers.
 

Yes sir it is.

Thanks mate its working fine now  :D

Thank you for the fix Burnside :)