I think stochastic offers on his dropbox account a CSV of all trade data since GLBSE 2.0 started... check out his statistics threads in this forum section.

I bought a few dozen shares from Bitfoo at 1.0 BTC, so I get the full 7% there...

Since you charge fixed fees per transaction, it only makes sense to invest in BIB.PIRATE with big sums at once (or withdraw big sums at once), otherwise the fees would be higher than other "investments".

I would offer trade-ins ("1 share of FOO.PPPPPPPPPPT = 100 shares of BABYPIRATE", "1 share of BIB.PIRATE = 80 shares of BABYPIRATE" or whatever other conversion rate you like) to get around expansion + buying bonds issues.

As soon as the dividend API is finalized, I'm probably launching an asset on my own on GLBSE again... something like the asset you suggest could very well be part of it too.

A secure longer term solution could be simply paying out only of cold storage a few times per day.
The insecure alternative would be only operating a hot wallet.

Is it really that necessary to have bitcoins confirmed in your wallet in ~1 hour? Within 24h would be fine for me as well, if it is more secure and it would still be faster than bank transfers.

Also P2SH might be interesting to evaluate, though I still haven't seen some real implementations of that... considering Gavin was acting as if it has to be done asap and better yesterday than today, it seems a little bit weird in hindsight.

I think I read a similar thread quite some time ago (like ~1 year ago) with the same characteristics - someone wanted to offer a house or so as security for huge loans, "everyone" starting from the government, the wife, big corporations and whatnot were out to get him and there was a strong emotional appeal to raise money from libertarians.

Also again, with so many other investments on GLBSE:
This investment is denominated in fiat currency and sold in BTC - a bad investment for anyone believing BTC <--> fiat exchange rates will grow faster than the return rates of your investment fund (which is backed by a house).

I agree with mollison: If you want to have a loan on your house, present it like this and also pay dividends/interest accordingly. How you make back this money is completely irrelevant to me as your lender in most cases, if you want to earn it on GLBSE that's fine for me (and probably a lot of others too).

Goat for example suggested a scheme where he pays 1% of interest + 1% of capital back each week, which amounts to a fully paid back loan + 100% interest after 100 weeks. Yes, it sounds like a lot, but with current earning potential on GLBSE you might still have quite a few gains (if you invest smartly that is). The biggest problem is that your collateral is denominated in USD, so either you price everything in USD (and BTC bullish investors risk gaining fewer BTC back than they initially bought in for) or you price it in BTC (paying back 2 BTC for 1 BTC over 100 weeks), risking that your house drops from 60000 BTC @ 5 USD to something far lower, not covering your debt any more.

My advice would be (from an investor's perspective):
Don't raise more than you need, your emotional appeal etc. already caused me to not trust you at all for 300k USD but put up the whole house as collateral. If you need 20k USD, raise 20k USD in BTC at current value, offer some nice returns and earn them back in whatever way you want. This would also make sure even if BTC rises to 10 USD or more, that you still could fully cover the debt in BTC if you sold the house.

Alternatively:
Make sure to make clear your debt is USD denominated and for example issue 20k shares for 20k USD debt. Then integrate a bot that always keeps the ask price up-to-date with MtGox and make clear rules for dividends and which USD <--> BTC rate will be used there. This means BTC bullish people might be driven away, but they still might at least appreciate the straightforwardness and still invest a bit, unlike the recent mining bond crash that cought quite a few people by surprise.

Well, if you _really_ trust Goat, option 1 is of course the best. This might be best handled by opening (or reusing) a different asset and accepting shares from Tygrr.bot to be traded for these.

If you don't trust him, a loss of 10% or even less is not that tragic (depending on when you bought the bot bonds), so it would make sense to have option 1 opened for the people who trust Goat and the rest gets paid (let's say in the beginning of August) 0.9 or more (depending on Bitcoinica) BTC as dividend. Should Bitcoinica still be something that oyu might recover, he can keep the bonds outstanding to share holders, then when the bitcoinica money comes issue a final dividend, buy back for 1 Satoshi and close it down for good.

There are a few more bitcoin denominated "stock" exchanges out there, also some with referrals. I wonder why you don't recommend these (e.g. https://mybitcointrade.com) to your pals.

Also you could simply act as a broker for them and take some profit there.

So you wanted to trade 100% secure arbitrages only (like when there's an offer for 1 BTC @ 5 USD on A and someone sells 1 BTC for 4.90 USD on B) but still were "outbotted" by others and/or only traded close to the exchange's fee margins? From the logs you posted it seems like the bot would snipe any trade possibility above 0.5% (which would likely be the MtGox fee), so a lot of fees are to be expected.

To be honest, this should have been communicated earlier - you claimed to:
Trade more currencies than only USD trades (EUR<-->BTC<-->EUR for example still has some nice arbitrage opportunities from time to time) - which was one of the reasons why I liked the idea (more liquidity in shallow markets)
Have 0 or highly reduced fees on some exchanges

In the end of may you said:
So by that time you probably already knew about the issues, as this was probably this big investor choosing the 1% + 1% route.

What I'd like to hear:
Volume of trades so far in USD and BTC
Exchanges the bot is/was active on
Fees you'd currently have to pay on these exchanges, if you re-enabled this bot right now
Amount of USD + BTC on each of these exchanges' accounts
Why did you do USD --> BTC --> USD and not the other way round, so you end up with more BTC with all trades?

And 2^32 is a number very close to 65535/2^48, so it is often used in calculations that don't need to be 100% exact or where a few Satoshis more or less don't matter.

Yes, but by then it'd be obvious.

The real test will still be when (if?!) he decides to lower interest and some big accounts might drop out + withdraw. This will happen this year or latest next year - after that there won't be enough BTC mined to pay for his interest and it would be obvious that he pays it from deposits. So for coin_toss: in ~2 years we'll see who was right, if there is a "bank run" after lowered interest rates.

"Trade on the NYSE and earn 0.001% commission on the trades of your referred peers!" - It just doesn't sound right... also why should they need a referral program? There rather needs to be some better documentation and/or some "demo" page for people to test how to buy shares and trade (maybe make a monthly reset and award something to the person with the best test trade portfolio?), not another bunch of people who loose money on rookie mistakes.

Still to my knowledge nobody has (publicly) tried to combine pirate's addresses and check out what he might actually do with that money. Does it end up at MtGox after 2-3 hops? At silkroad? Is it transferred in huge batches or only in 0.1 BTC transactions? ALL the information is already out there, in the block chain + in the clients of pirate's customers (who know which addresses are his). We even know quite on time when he pays the interest on Monday, so even without any account holder cooperating we could still get out quite a bit of information there.

Something like http://toolongdidntread.com/category/bitcoin/ developed a bit further could really come in handy...

Operating for 8 months means nothing as long as there are 7% or more per week flowing in (he gives an estimate of ~10% in total per week here in this thread). So far, with all the "pass through" operations, people seem eager so far to throw money at him, so probably he still grows exponentially.

Wenn da Sachen außer BTC-mining berechnet werden sollen, dann müsste ich ja beliebigen Code auf meiner Hardware ausführen...

Ist jetzt nicht gerade was, was ich gerne mache, um's mal vorsichtig zu formulieren!

Somehow I get the picture of bulanula just being that kind of kid that stands behind/next to more popular others and shouts "Way to go, pal!", "You're the best, I always knew!" and "OMG, you're so awesome!" weirding everyone out. Including the people being praised, as they don't know/care who that guy is.

Edit:
"Ponzi schemes" are usually called like this because they pay out interest from deposits. Gigamining currently does (partially) do this.

Anybody daring to make an asset on GLBSE about this? I'm not 100% sure if Nefario would be ok with it though... on the other hand quite a few assets there could secretly (direct or via proxy) already be involved in MMM.

Why not a clause like "either twice the price of the previous 120 hour average market price or 0.103 BTC, whatever is higher"? Otherwise you have a strong motivation to dump share prices after some time, keep it down for 120 hours and then buy back cheaply. Also if you say 3% interest, you mean 3% of 0.1 BTC which is the value of each share. It would only make sense that you can buy them back for that price too (at a small premium maybe) and neither overpriced (twice the price) nor under the face value.

Also please include a clause how you'd handle expansions of that bond (let's say you want to issue 10000 more bonds) - at which price will they get into the market and will you pre-announce this?

Also the usual:
Current pirate exposure? Any planned future pirate exposure?

You can probably fit some digitized guarantees for more bank notes than the current BTC market cap on a microSD card...

Because density = weight / volume

Biggest issue is still delivery imho.

Either the exchange holds items/gold in escrow --> easy to ban from Blizzard side.

Right from the beginning of the EULA:
After you've been banned, you'd have to go to court - good luck with that!

Otherwise, delivery would have to be done by the people advertising --> scams, scams everywhere! It might be possible to have someone from the exchange as a 3rd person in the game (A sells item X to B --> A gives item X to escrower, escrower releases BTC to A and hands item X to B ingame) but then it doesn't scale or requires bots, which is something that Blizzard might be even more allergic to than selling gold/items outside of the game.

You could offer a service to fund anyone's BattleNet balance with your PayPal account paid with BTC though, which would be something similar to an exchange operation.


Something else that might work would be to use the official (gold) Auction House to transfer gold. There are high fees, but in the end ingame all you do is trading. It might still be bannable, but harder to detect maybe. It'd work like this (if you want to have gold):
* Get a unique item (blue or higher, random cheap one from running Act 1 on Normal difficulty for 2 minutes)
* Put it up in the auction house for a buyout of the amount of gold you want to have
* Post the exact values of this auction + item to the web site
* As soon as the auction is verified as being truly unique (no other auction with an item that has the exact same item values and buyout), it is bought by the counter party who sold the gold

The 15% fees are happening there again though...

Also you shut out any internationals that don't understand mathematical terms in english.

The idea itself is quite interesting, as pre-schoolers who haven't even seen an integral equation will be dumbstruck (but a large part of the population above 18 too...!) - it might not be the right thing to determine someone is above or below 18 years old. Also depending on the question domain, it will be hard to have a fairly unique question for everyone. Duplicates would then probably quickly be spotted + solved, depending on how attractive the site is this "captcha" protects.