Bitcoin Forum

I was thinking earlier about the possibility of a company or any asset based security to run off the blockchain and had one question. Is it theoretically possible to issue dividends on the blockchain without going through a hard fork? I'm sure smarter people than me would know the answer and are probably investigating the idea further. Thanks in advance!

What makes a dividend transaction any different from a normal bitcoin transaction?

I don't see any problem with it, unless the dividend payments are very small.

Dividends would be paid to all who held shares (or coins) relevant to how many are owned automatically without having to go through sending every single address their share. There is a possibility these could be newly generated coins as well. Think of what happens in the stock market when shares are added, but split among the entire user base. Take in mind this would be on command so not done steadily like blackcoin or other POS coins.

You can write some code to generate bitcoin transactions automatically. How do you think big corporations pay out their dividends, they have computers which process them automatically.

Dividends are usually paid out depending on profits so a human has to physically tell the computer how much profit has been made.

But I think you aren't really talking about dividends. I think you are talking about some weird process where you give more shares to people who already have shares which serves no real purpose whatsoever.

In real stock markets, when new shares are issued, people have to buy those shares, they aren't just split between existing share holders.

Did you check http://chromawallet.com/  http://www.mastercoin.org/ https://www.counterparty.co/ ?

This is a classic use case for colored coins. Since the share outputs are themselves bitcoin outputs, you simply look at the utxo set and send dividends to the current owners.

Counterparty already claims to do this.  There are people already marketing equities with dividend agreements.

http://blockscan.com/assetinfo.aspx?q=DUNNECAP

this particular stock is for a bitcoin exchange in london.  The 'CEO' will respond to your questions if you are interested.  His name is William Dunne.

-bm

Thank you for the plug. Its Dunne with an 'e' however.

Also counterparty is excellent, you should all try it out. The only 'issue' is that trading is not instant, it requires blockchain confirmations.

Mr. Dunne has a well prepared investment prospectus.  William, what was the link?

-bm

https://mimex.co.uk/wp/?page_id=21

This would be the main one, I can supply the short version (15 page) of our business plan if required. The 25 page one contains information not ready to go public.