Bitcoin Forum

Hey guys.

Interesting to know more about this Bitcoin Bond that was around years ago.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Distributed_markets

Been looking for some examples of this hashmap file.

Are there any nodes running this still? Why was the project abandoned?

I have had a look over the Jgarzik bitcoin bond lib but I would be keen to know more about this

Rather than wait for specific bonds to become available and then manually evaluate each one by hand, we can construct a kind of distributed investment fund by sending money to a Bitcoin private key that is then encrypted under a policy and uploaded into the financial hashmap:


Policy-locked ciphertexts are potentially quite large, depending on the size of the policy (a comparison against a large number like a date can use over a kilobyte), so it makes sense to use the same hash disassociation used in the bond protocol above in order to minimize block chain size.

The hash would actually identify a data structure containing the ciphered private key:

}

As the bond market client crawls the block chain, it may encounter policy locked coins. By downloading the ciphertext from the hashmap, it can identify what conditions would unlock the coins and advertise that in the client. Somebody who is looking for business opportunities may see a message like this in their GUI.



Thanks in advance.

*cricket noises*

It was an old method of doing the more modern atomic swap construct that you see in some programs, but it's not used anymore.

One of the problems with the bond is that since it required adding more messages to the bitcoin network, it was never actually implemented or published to mainnet or even testnet.

Nowadays, most people are using OP_CHECKSEQUENCEVERIFY (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/BIP_0112) for this. Biggest project using this is the Lightning Network.

There were only working on building a distributed version of GLBSE - a centralized bitcoin stock market that was later killed in 2012 due to tax (https://bitcoinmagazine.com/markets/global-bitcoin-stock-exchange-shuts-down-for-good-1349879479). Technically, a distributed bond market would need smart property to operate perfectly, which won't be clear for properties owners to understand how to integrate their assets to run on the blockchain, unless they're technically trained.

In addition, Mike Hearn in this thread https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=92421.0 confirmed that smart properties still require more facilities to work properly in tackling loan and collateral, yet it's theoretically proven to be achieved. On the other hand Jgarzik (if i'm not mistaken) was only working on smartcoin (initially pybond) to prove that distributed market is achievable.

I would tag it as a fictional project, that can still be finished, but not when end users will have to do technical works to sign transactions on distributed contract. 

Some mod is harassing me.

Check on it!

It could be finished, but nobody is interested in doing so and most new devs have not even heard of this. Even so, it would be an uphill battle getting this in as a soft fork given that there is already a superior solution in place.

Thanks for the extra info on it.

I thought maybe it had made it's way to main net for testing at some point was curious to see if that was the case.

Thanks again!

Of course, developers enjoy working on the cutting edge of any project, not on existing ideas that has been abandoned for years. Notwithstanding, those old projects serves well as a reference to derive new objectives that could be innovated to solve problems in recent times. For example, smart cars are now here (self driven cars) which would be a great fit in helping smart properties work properly, also more innovative projects could immerge that'll drive developers to fetch up such a project and work it to their own taste.

However, what's the superior solution already in place for this?