If GLBSE vanishes overnight and is never heard from again, there is a problem since there's no way to know who owns bonds.

But if GLBSE goes out of business for any reason, while its owner(s) are still alive and honest, they can share the information with issuers. What they do next is up to the issuer - the bond offerings assume GLBSE is working, so it might not be 100% business as usual but you will not lose your principal entirely.

As many as are required to keep the network decentralized. I'd say 3,000 is enough, but it's possible to make do with less.

Did you read the page in the wiki about scalability that was linked in a previous comment?

The solutions don't need to emerge, the solutions are known and just need to be implemented.

How many users is anyone's guess, depends also on whom you call a user. In the past 24 hours there were 20338 transactions.

PureMining will remain 1 MH/s per bond.

You can use for example a=39455940911, b=39719364610 or a=1172761792249825816554, b=2^70. If you require b to be a power of 2, a needs to be much higher to obtain the same accuracy, so you don't really gain much.

Anyway, as I mentioned it's more accurate to work with satoshis remaining.

Floating-point operations are inherently inexact, making the amount of bitcoins generated dependent on them is just asking for trouble. If anything it would be better to make integer multiplication/division once every several blocks.

Discontinuously diminishing block rewards is less mathematically elegant, but much simpler. The disruption it will cause is fairly minor.

You may also be interested in http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/1526/what-are-the-advantages-disadvantages-of-a-continuously-decreasing-block-reward.

EDIT: To improve accuracy when doing decay for every block, work by BTC remaining, not by BTC for this block. That is, in the beginning there are 2,100,000,000,000,000 satoshis remaining. In every block, multiply the amount remaining by 1120732551094 and divide by 1120736250303. The block reward will be the difference between the current remaining amount and the previous remaining amount. This ensures that exactly 2,100,000,000,000,000 satoshis total will be paid. It also means, though, that decay will be faster than intended when the rounding starts being significant, but by then we may move to a finer division than satoshis.

Any GPU miner will pull out sooner or later, does it matter if they do it one by one or many of them at once? Besides, people (should) take into account the future halving in current hardware purchase decisions, and variations in electricity costs mean that the halving alone won't cause everyone to quit.

Do you already have the card with no other use for it? If not I don't recommend doing this.

OS: Ubuntu works.
RAM: 1GB should do.
CPU: It won't, get the cheapest you can, usually an AMD single-core.
Mobo: The cheapest you can get.
PSU: 450W from a good brand should be enough.
Card, case: Ok.
HDD: OK but alternatively you can use a USB flash drive.

It's more like I asked you to pay me $1000 via PayPal, you do just that and I end up with $970 in my account because of PayPal fees. I still should deliver the product even though I didn't get $1000.

I believe the contracts were vague at best about this. It is your responsibility as a middleman to fairly interpret the contract and contact relevant parties if a potential issue arises. I find it hard to believe you didn't foresee this would be controversial.

I honestly doubt that. I'd like to see the SHORT holder who can say with a straight face that crediting SHORT instead of LONG was fair.

It is not public knowledge who owns bonds. You as an issuer have indirect knowledge of this via the buyback feature, and it is your responsibility to make proper use of it.

Besides, non sequitur. Believing something is unfair doesn't mean you should opt to send your money to strangers.


No such luck, according to my understanding of GLBSE it is indeed true that only .00799999 was received.

Exactly. TYGRR.BOND-B made its obligated dividend payments through GLBSE, 45.6+20 = 0.002*32800. How GLBSE goes on to represent it internally is not Goat's problem. I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on this one. If I were an HTBBL holder I'd be furious.

Did you contact Goat about this? Since clearly this is not what HTBBL holders had in mind (or HTBBS for that matter), and yet you still felt it triggers the letter of the HEDGE contract, you should have gone to great lengths to inform Goat about the situation and request that he makes an extra satoshi per bond payment to resolve this.

What. The. F.

You do know this is just a rounding problem with GLBSE, right? Goat put 45.6 in the payment field in GLBSE, then 20, total 65.6 = 0.002 * 32800. But because of the way GLBSE rounds things it came down to a bit less. Goat filled his obligations.

Even if this wasn't GLBSE's problem, this is stupid. You should make a 0.01% or something tolerance in your contract to account for rounding and other issues, we can't carry out all calculations to infinite precision.

You can use http://btctox.org/ to convert Bitcoin amounts to any other currency, and vice versa.

Personally I just go to http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/ and look at the last traded price on Mt. Gox ("Cl").

The variable is Deepbit's luck in finding blocks. Only miners at Deepbit have any reason to buy this bond, anyone else is simply not the target market.

You did make a good point though:
If miners diversified across pools, they'd have much less need for insurance like this.

I don't think GPUs are good for chess, but I could be wrong.

A chess pool would need a completely different structure than a mining pool, I don't think much can be reused from the existing code and infrastructure of mining pools.

I support the idea of (and had for a while an interest in) a distributed chess playing agent, if such a thing doesn't exist yet.

There are some chess-related grid computing projects, such as chess960@home.

BFL will offer a warranty on the units. I don't think they specified its length but it should be at least 6 months, if the Jalapeno is working at all you can assume it will continue working that long.

They didn't get that way by watching from the sidelines as opportunities pass by, either. By the time you know the investment is a sure thing it is already too late to profit from it. Being a smart investor consists in figuring out which of the risky investments have the best prospects of being profitable.

It is common knowledge that the stated performance specs are well within the capabilities of ASIC, and it is by a company that is already offering the best mining products on the market. If you don't think that's good enough, you're leaving an opportunity for those who do to profit.

No, the block reward will become BTC50 starting with block 210,000, regardless of what the difficulty will be at the time. Variations in the network hashrate can have an effect on the date of this, but only a minor one.

Bitcoin isn't communism or Robin hood. It's not supposed to stop people from being able to use their earned wealth. It's "just" a much better way to store and exchange this wealth. And, ASIC isn't changing the situation one bit, the amount of rigs you can buy is exactly proportional to your wealth whether they are based on CPU, GPU or ASIC.

You do know there's a 4 month waiting list, right? If you use the profit from the first Jalapeno to buy the second, you'll be waiting for a long time.

You'll be surprised.

Once the units are materialized and proven to have the stated specs, there will be an even greater stampede on orders, and possibly a longer waiting list (during which the difficulty will soar). Either you wait out and lose the opportunity for big profit, or you take a risk and either win big or lose big. For you it may seem a lot to spend $30K on this, but there are people with sufficiently deep pockets and enough experience with Bitcoin to do this.

I'm not saying that you should or shouldn't invest - I'm just saying it's not the get rich quick scheme you seem to think it is, you need to study this, make an informed decision, and own up to it.

It's BTC50 and BTC25, and it's unrelated to the difficulty.

In the first few days of the ASIC being out they can be quite profitable, but the difficulty will quickly increase to diminish the profits. And if you preorder now you're taking a risk with respect to the delivery time. Read up on all the information available and then decide if you want to make this investment. There's no free lunch, and there's no sustainable way to quadruple your wealth every month.

It's more accurate to say that every transaction is written to every copy of the block chain, but not everyone has a copy of the block chain.

A proper prediction market certainly creates value. It gives people with knowledge about an event, or the ability to obtain it, an incentive to obtain knowledge and share it with the world, which can then act upon it. Concepts such as Futarchy take this idea several steps further, just to give a hint on the usefulness.

In short: Prediction markets should come in the form of an asset that has a fixed payout conditioned on the underlying event, but not on any meta factors. Betsobitco.in don't offer traded assets, and your payout is affected by what other betters do in the future; your proposal is a traded asset, but its payout depends on the number of assets sold (if this number is fixed in advance the problem isn't as bad).

The classic asset is "pays out 1 BTC if X happens". If this asset is traded at p BTC but I think the probability of X happening is q, I can buy it and profit on average if q>p, or buy the complementary asset if q<p. By so doing the traded price becomes closer to p, so if I'm right the whole world now has better knowledge of the event. And if I'm wrong I'll lose on average and eventually not have any money left to feed bogus data to the market.

I don't think you understand what I'm talking about.

Yes, but not in an arbitrary way, in a way that guarantees that someone with more knowledge about an event than the market at a given time can profit on average (and thus is incentivized to share his knowledge with the world by investing accordingly). On betsofbitco.in I can have exact knowledge of the probability of the event, and still lose averaging on its instantiation.

Exchanging one decentralized digital currency for another is inherently cheaper than with physical/centralized currencies, and with a lower barrier of entry to service providers. What's more, there are protocol features that could allow atomic exchanges without any middleman. I don't see a problem with multiple decentralized digital currencies being employed for different purposes.