A feature that might be interesting for some but that has again a bit of lag risks:

Allow going short with a USD balance and long with a BTC balance as collateral.
Interest gets traded on the spot when needed and paid to the lender.

E.g. Bob the Bear is not even daring to exchange his precious precious USD a few BTC to get a loan. He has 1k USD though in his account and borrows 1 BTC with that at 1% per day rates.
Every day, a few USD are traded automatically by bitfinex from his balance to pay the lender in BTC. Once the price tanks, Bob decides he wants his profit and cashes out (in USD of course!). He never really had to have BTC in his posession and everybody is happy.

Same goes for bulls who might find it easier/faster to transfer BTC they already own into the platform to profit from a rally.

Risks: Bitfinex needs to make sure that in a flash crash the BTC as collateral from bulls or in a flash price explosion (?!) the USD from bears are enough to cover the interest of the day so far. This might be migitated by calculating and paying interest hourly, so there would be max. 1 hour of interest on the line to be lost which decreases the risk 24-fold... and also creates a steady stream of smaller trades compared to sudden action every day at midnight UTC.


Oh by the way I'm really happy to see that recently I don't always lend out huge positions, but now also a couple of 20 USD loans or so at VIR - seems like a few poeple are actively trying to learn how everything works which is definitely a good thing!

Edit: AAAND we're getting goxxed again! Put in an order, watch an episode of your favourite series and by the end it might actually have reached the order book!

Allerdings! Plötzlich wieder Cents zählen?! Entweder mal will was oder man lässt es bleiben!
Zahlung versandt (https://blockchain.info/address/15H2ic9KQ87XVWKJJEuRYkBcCPTjgSaqda), sollte dann je nachdem wie die Miner drauf sind auch bald mal inkludiert werden...

Addresse kommt per PM, frohes Grillen!

Edit: 0,1 BTC "Ösizuschlag" auch noch gesendet.
Verflixte Versandkosten, auf Amazon ist's auch immer wieder schrecklich (besonders Marketplace)...

Check out tradehill 2.0 then...

Begründung? Oder Bauchgefühl...

Mein argument (freier Markt) habe ich schon geschrieben.

The first exchange that manages to let people pay with PayPal and credit cards for btc at a profit will win.

B2b is nice, biggest demand is still b2c imho.

Well, even in the wiki server and validating node is used as synonym.

As the title here is about having a distributed exchange, I still wonder if ripple is really up for that task considering there might be a lot (!) of orders compared to transactions. Having only few validators in a market might make it possible to manipulate it, having a lot might be quite expensive memory wise... Also as I understand it I cannot just launch my own little validator at home, also existing validators need to trust mine. What's my incentive beyond being able to maybe cheat to privately run a validator for the mtgox order book and why should mtgox trust my validator?

Edit: if you sort by hash, you again create some kind of mining as there might be different ways to construct a transaction with lower hashes.

So in case node 1 gets offer 1 and then offer 2 with identical timestamps and node 2 the other way round, how is this resolved? Do they ask a third node?

A few seconds might be great for transfers, for trades however... just look at mtgox. Also who is the one running the order book? The server?

With domestic transfers I meant that ripple gateways would probably help in you getting a domestic transfer to your account instead of international wires. Instead of paying wire fees, you'd pay hopefully fewer fees to convert to IOUs that a domestic gateway accepts. Then withdraw there.

I know that ripple doesn't use proof of work for consensus, still there are quite some bottlenecks that I can think of. I really wanna know which parts handle which systems in the whole ripple idea.

Ich versteh das ja auch nicht, wie man sich zusätzlich zur Inflation ablaufendes Geld zulegen kann. Regional funktioniert das vermutlich mit Rabatten oder so, im Netz aber, wo ich einfach umtauschen kann...?

Dazu kommt dass die mit riesigem Abstand sicherste blockchain nun mal bitcoin ist. Wäre freicoin oder litecoin oder sonst was so viel besser, weiter verbreitet oder sonst irgendwie vorteilhafter würde ich es ja einsehen. Das ist aber eben nicht der Fall.

Domestic transfers would be probably cheaper. You could p2p exchange some trusted USD to some trusted Eur and withdraw them after moving to Cyprus.

Still I kinda have an issue with the idea that the more trust you have, the more funds you probably have in storage and then the easier it is to fail (e.g. 100k Eur insured bank account).
Once you get too big to fail like a bank that has to be bailed out its nice again - most likely gateways will be somewhere in between though.

Still, becoming a gateway seems to be quite interesting but I'm also not too sure how to handle all the associated risks like scams, payments being canceled and so on.
Also: how well does ripple actually scale? Can it actually reliably exchange USD to btc and vice versa, who actually does process the order book and how many transactions per second can it currently/max. handle? Also where are the limitations? CPU? HDD? Server side? Client side? Who decides if my order was first and gets taken?

Additionally you just described a Ripple gateway with less functionality than Ripple even in its current closed state offers.

I actually looked into such licenses and most companies with these seem to sit in Ireland or the Baltics in the Eu. Amongst them Google and Amazon btw.

Still: what does your proposed central entity do better than a simple Ripple gateway amongst potentially many others?
Also if there is already an usdcoin... and your chain would be better, cheaper, more transparent or whatnot - how do you enter that market?

Man muss ja nicht alles mit Bitcoin umsetzen... Schaut euch mal Freicoin an.

The info on the right.

My stance on the issue of lost interest is that it could have been worse probably. I had nearly all my loans cancelled on March 29th when vir exploded and got far worse returns percent wise for that day than yesterday. I'd write it off as 1 time event and growing pains. To put it into perspective: I earned with the interest that I still got more in a day than I would have gotten in a year in a traditional bank.

I hope on the other hand that this won't happen again, or if it does that it is possible to retroactively pay the due money. If I didn't get the correct amount, the remaining money probably also just staid with the traders, so bitfinex might not even have profited from that as they get commissions from interest...

Anyways I rather report these issues and deal with maybe a little grumpyness than risking that there are some issues overlooked and they go out of business...

That's one of my main issues with ripple still:
There are no "BTC-IOUs"!
I can issue Sukrim-BTC on ripple right now without any issues. Even more than currently exist! In that regard ripple is far more decentralized than btc since there is not one central currency.
No sane merchant would accept my btc however, or if they did, they would immediately ask for settlement here and now.

The nice thing however is if I find somebody who for example exchanges up to 5 btc from anyone to 99 bit cents each in well trusted MtGox BTC, this person might make a profit, will still settle with me immediately and another link in the chain might exchange MtGox BTC to AmazonUSD which the merchant then gets in the end. I see problems with exchanging within the same currency based on trust (10 USD from my bank are worth more than 10 USD that you promise to send via mail) but if there are enough players, it should even out.

Still I fear that a central bank scenario with one or few highly trusted gateways for major currencies is one of the possible and maybe even likely endgame scenarios.

If people then don't settle immediately (e.g. payout fees and the gateway is highly trusted anyways) there's a higher and higher risk of catastrophes. Just imagine MtGox having a cypriotic instead of polish bank account right now. Also once you are highly trusted you can start to gradually discourage settlement by introducing fees, KYC policies etc.

All on all: the higher the trust, the lower the need for settlement or debts and the higher the risk. The lower the trust,the higher the need for settlements and still the higher the risk of getting money that can't be settled.

Same for me, and also as I pointed out my lending positions are still showing up as taken and active since more than 1 day, so either this is a display issue with my loans or something went wrong in the calculation. With the data I have in my history tab I simply can't help by calculating that myself, so I just wanted to say that there seems to be something going on that might hint at a bug (maybe only actively used loans in open positions give interest?).

Same with VIR jumping wildly between 800% and 400-200%. This is something that happened before (and actually caused quite a crash in the lending market for 1 day on March 29th as someone managed to manipulate VIR to a few million% or so) and since then "myself" or Raphael said they implemented some smoothing by averaging over the last 30 days instead of just the current loans. Still there were some serious jumps, only this time downwards, not up. This could hint at errors or still some issues - if the next time this jumps up again suddenly instead, it might again force liquidate all VIR positions... far worse than me not earning a handful of dollars, so that's why I report that stuff.

Meh, Raphy shall have his beauty sleep and enjoy a session pondering over database logs on a nice Saturday morning!

On different news, people seem to buy coins again like crazy currently.

Mine got in an offer via auto-lend just fine. Try with one cent less (123.45 available = 123.44 offer), sometimes rounding is a bitch...

https://localbitcoins.com/accounts/profile/blazr/ <-- You? Then the country would be Ireland...

I got 1/3 of yesterday's high-roller rates (270% instead of ~800%)... Sounds a bit low to me too, especially considering that ~1/2 of my loans still exist (at 800%+ rates - even with 10% fees and if half of my funds were not lent out (they were!) I should have gotten ~350% returns today), but on the other hand it's not really possible from the data I have to calculate anything as I don't know how long and often positions were actually taken.

http://jheusser.github.io/2013/02/03/satcoin.html is also an interesting read, even though it might not help much with actual Bitcoin development.

I also lover this paper here though, great that people start thinking of new ways to make Bitcoin useful for some special purposes!