Aaron, well let me first say you are extremely expressive. You have given a cogent, logical, reasonable, respectful answer. And I totally thank you for it.

Let me cut to the bottom line as I do get super busy and I did read everything. First off, I am 100% absolutely NOT in it for the fame. In fact the fame bothers me as I just had my account hacked yesterday and had my reputation propagandized. It was a good opportunity there to divorce myself from my ego by the way. I'm doing this to make the world a better place. You might totally think that is cliche and not true but it is. That is why I got interested in making unbreakable contracts and it's why I worked so hard to teach myself Python. There is like almost no guarantee my plan will favor the honest people, but that is my plan. To make a system that favors us by making "unbreakable" contracts. If my software inspires someone else to copy it and it becomes used everywhere I've succeed and could care less if the world thinks I'm the lowest of subhuman scum or they call me Hitler, whatever. Doesn't matter. It would be nice to live a happy life and accepted but that isn't material to why I did this.

Your suggestion to have orders list without putting up a deposit might work lets say if the seller essentially received only counter-offers.

Your response was so excellent that I clearly understand you, your motives and what you were trying to say and how you wanted to use the software. Yes it's okay to open the escrow window, the software is just telling you that your completion request was final and it considers the deal done but that doesn't mean you can't open the panel and send more requests or chats. And yes, I did appreciate your suggestion. Like I said maybe if they all came in as counter-offers in your case a seller would want to list multiple jewels and yet his volume shouldn't exceed what he holds in his account because his wide variety of selection. I can now see why you perceive that as a flaw. And perhaps at some point way in the future when I have free time, I can revisit that suggestion.

Lastly you said you were interested in only using BitBay. Then really you are the kind of sellers and users we are looking for. That is even better. We already have lots of investors, we could use some real power sellers.

You mentioned that the volatility effects you as a seller on BitBay. However did you know you can simply have BitBay as the DEPOSIT ONLY and then accept Bitcoin, Cash, Tether, or really anything you wish as a payment method? Basically what you are looking for is the use of my barter template.

The way to make a basic barter is to set the buyers deposit to twice the item value and you set 1x. Then when you ship, he pays in X (Bitcoin, Cash, whatever) and then you may either cancel or confirm the contract (since the net effect is the same)

Please let me know what you think of that.

And sorry also if I missed something or if I seemed defensive or anything like that. You are right, it's good advice. You are just "John Q Public" because me as a dev I'm supposed to consider all users in this way. It's not easy to be politically correct all the time either. I'm not particularly well known for having a filter haha.

I get a lot of feedback so it does get really tiring when I finish one thing and two more tasks pop up. So only for that reason do I say it's hard work and hope as a coder you can see that. Which clearly you do. In any case you can list and accept anything you want for your gems and are not required to take BitBay as payment only the insurance deposit. Also had BitBay gone up 30% in value would you have reacted the same way?

Anyways let me know what you think. 

Hey so I realize you think that you can just deduct when an order starts to fund but it doesn't work like that. Specific inputs need to be signed and then arranged peer to peer in order to broadcast and also arrange the other advanced commitments like the bomb tx. It's maybe something you could argue is a flaw in bitcoins design. However until we have things like lightning transactions it's really not realistic to over-engineer a way to not commit inputs.

The software is very strict. I very carefully do accounting on everything. This helps educate users on accounting, not to delegate funds they don't have and really helps scale things. In fact, this system was built to scale. There is no other Bitcoin software in existence that I'm aware of that does such complex change and input management.

I do know what you are saying in terms of your inventory. Like lets say you are a seller and hold 100k usd worth of gems and want to list half your inventory so the software is going to want at least 25k worth of inputs with a little padding assuming you put 50%.

However... a seller can even put 10% up if this is a concern. In your case you can in theory offer a nominal deposit. There are even guarantor contracts where you don't deposit however I would not recommend a buyer to take a guarantor with a high deposit on their end and low or non-existent on the other. So at least putting a nominal 5-10% of item value should be more than enough to get started and then when you really start selling gems and things kick off you can offer higher deposits on your inventory.

Think about where things are headed with any type of advancement in lightning networks or (maybe) some DPOS improvements we can start to see faster transactions and then be okay with being a little more lenient. However it is still not ideal to have a bunch of inventory listed that you are unable to deposit on. It would depend on your daily volume I suppose. Like if you predict it to be low enough to have the funds to deposit to somehow return to you. However please remember your X% will be locked in escrow!! And it will be locked for the entire duration of the shipment process which could be a couple weeks. You definitely do not want to backlog users nor "pause" anyone as they will turn somewhere else to buy. At the time being I cannot allow that as it would be a big design flaw and against the theory of a UTXO system to boot. There is also something else to consider and that is when we have the peg, maybe we can find a clever way to use frozen funds as collateral.

Hey so let me explain why it is a bad idea to allow listing of items without forcing the reservation of funds. The reason is of course because of double spend but also because the limited number of inputs in an account. The BitBay Halo software breaks coins into multiple denominations of inputs for exactly this purpose so users can enjoy small and large orders without tying up their entire balance. Bitcoin itself works like a cash system so it's not possible to deduct X from your account without tying up inputs greater than that.

The thing is, when you say you have something for sale and you aren't reserving those inputs, then you might not actually have those inputs when the time comes. If you have multiple orders, all competing for the same input, logistically you would not be able to handle the incoming offers anyway because the inputs are stuck broadcasting. Also the seller wouldn't potentially have the money for the deposits anyways in that case.

What you will end up finding is the coding is very clever and designed for this exact purpose. This was definitely considered in advance, to handle lots of volume. Indeed it is other market designs that will not handle the volume when we will.

Now here is another thing and this is fairly important. When you list using custom contracts, you have no ability to set quantity. However in Cash for Coins, you do. That is because the templates are designed for a much more advanced user interaction with the markets.

So if you had a large volume of gems, instead of reposting them over and over, you can have a single order with quantity and inventory. Thus all the orders that come in could be bids.

A trusted seller may also not be asked to put 50%. Even 25% is a pretty good amount because he will be the one to ship first, putting him out the item and the amount placed to prevent extortion. Since the sellers deposit is to prevent extortion and bad quality items.

Nobody would want to wait for a seller to be on hold or pause while waiting for an escrow to clear either. The reason is when you are shipping something it can take up to a week. The buyer will want to review the item make sure it is as described before even thinking to release escrow.

As a seller you might want to consider your daily volume. If a seller has high volume chances are he will quickly get the BitBay he needs for deposits.

I would say a seller starting out if buyers wanted to take the "risk" so to speak the seller could offer a 25% deposit on his end and that at least binds him in some way.

So I also would say setting a quantity in the Buy/Sell anything template essentially does what you are describing since all offers come in as counters and bids and the buyer would only be able to accept if he had enough inputs for those. Perhaps it is best to understand how Bitcoin actually works and see how inputs and outputs are structured. We have a video sort of scratching the surface to explain it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJfxHWJ576c

By the way thanks for the feedback. We will get there one step at a time.

And actually I took your order for the tourmaline. This way you can get used to the process. Also you mention lack of photos in your order I should point out that I do think the description field allows basic HTML and also you might consider a link to imgur with more photos.

Well we are on schedule. So should be testing the new build soon with core.

This is a great post. Welcome! Yes well so have you fully researched the power of double deposit escrow aka unbreakable contracts on our site? You will really love it if you saw problems with the eBay format. I really like it when people can testify for the need to eliminate middle men. And you asked a really good question. Will people make the shift and start protecting themselves in their business deals and using products like this?

I think they might, it is just that humanity is like water. They take the path of least resistance so we need to keep making the product more accessible and easy to use. I like the idea of drop shipping and reselling too.

There are only about 10 orders. There was more. However if you sell rare minerals I will buy some! Let us know if you need help walking though the client on Slack.

Although hahaha it's nice to have you post here too like cryptohunter says it's good to have activity on the forums.

Hey so just to mention the dates on the roadmap were to give me lots of padding on the time. We will try to be ahead of schedule I'm almost done with the new release.

Personally I don't see the need for SegWit as lightning network can be constructed without it. Segwit gives too much power to people who validate transactions.

BlackHalo, unbreakable contracts, decentralized markets, automated joint accounts and hundreds of other features including being linked to BitHalo

Yeah there is a good amount of volatility but making it easy to move the price down or up. But for a person trading they wouldn't mind that. It is funny because we are going to stop that and this is why BitBay would be a good example or test case(with the rolling peg). Since this would set the example for the crypto industry that indeed it can be done.

Well, bitcointalk was dominated by shill profiles and has too many political ties. Regardless it's still one of the only forums almost a monopoly. Also Slack is a pretty good way to quickly answer questions and is a bit more interactive. There is also Discord. We have multiple social media platforms our core team talk on.

Whenever important questions are asked here we are usually pretty quick to answer them.

Some pretty interesting discussions have happened on Bitcointalk to say the least.

Tiered interest doesn't work to restrict supply and you need to give economically unsustainable interest rates.  Everyone here knows that doesn't work for a currency. In fact, Coinage was removed from Blackcoin because it was a serious security threat as users didn't have to stake funds to gain interest and could connect at a later date and get better rewards. I'm not saying there isn't an iteration of it that wouldn't work but still, aggressive interest rates don't help the economic health of anything.

What you need is control of supply which is what we are doing. Hence we can freeze what is needed at the time, and thus the liquid coins have greater value when supply is lowered.

This of course means the price is dynamic and can certainly still entertain investors. But at the same time it will help stabilize things and help grow the price. My biggest hope is it gets rid of market makers and manipulators and replaces them with the tech itself.

Now as for tiered interest you know where it would work? On the frozen coins of course. Depending on the quality of the liquidity being staked you could certainly offer more attractive interest rates. So something very frozen could get better interest increasing demand for it.

With that said, that is a bit overzealous to release on the first fork. So most likely if we do something like that it would be after we see the first iteration of the peg and it's success to decide if we can add more to the complexity of it.

So one step at a time, we are almost there! The wait is almost over. And things have been really running smooth lately.

Perhaps, but we should follow the roadmap because we already have a lot of great features on the way

No you are way off base there. We will stabilize the price and the supply would be determined by the community. This system can be used to make a hard peg by also allowing interest rates to increase and base the entire thing off of a cold algorithm. However it can be used to make a "rolling peg" or more or less like a crawling peg in economics. It will get rid of the volatility during massive price crashes and let us deflate aka freeze to defend against it. Then when volume rises and price increases too high because it's being aggressively pumped we would inflate to punish the pumpers for going beyond what the market supports.

So the truth is, it gets rid of the market makers and manipulators and instead price is controlled simply by technology.

But perhaps the best proof is in the pudding. Watch and see. I'm known for delivering on my word.

By using a combination of automated algorithms and community vote we can really hone in on the price that meets the demand. If our supply was always set to be equal to the demand we would see the kind of stability you are thinking of.

But let me also paint another picture. Let's say we do aggressive rate changes and force it as a hard peg. So all our coins end up being worth $1 but to do it, it freezes like 90%. Even so, you are forgetting the fact that as demand rises it would inflate to release more coins. So just because you were only able to sell 10% of your holdings doesn't mean you won't also be able to sell the other 90% when the market matures and demand increases.

And even if we chose a fixed algo (which I'm definitely not recommending because in my opinion the dollar is weak) ... even with a fixed algorithm we can "roll" the peg upwards going from 1 dollar to 2 over the course of a year for example.

It's just trail and error, the good ol' fashioned scientific method. And in some ways also an art form to really decide what will make investors and users happy. Although we can't expect to make everyone happy but I can assure you this is what Bitcoin was supposed to be "programmable money" and we are doing just that. Programming money.

No it won't have a fixed price. It's price is determined by supply and demand.

If the supply is low and the demand is high, the price will rise. Period.

If you have 40M and 20M don't assume the price or marketcap will be the same. Because at half the supply it will be cheaper to buy up the liquid coins. The total marketcap would be the same but the price would potentially be double or more.

Example, if you have 40M coins at $1 and you go down 50% to 20M then you have less liquid coins. At the exact same level of demand price could go to $2 at 20M

Thus the marketcap of liquid coins might not change(but it could) and the price would most likely double(but it can certainly go higher). In this case it means you sell half your coins for the same value you would have sold all of your coins. The rest of your coins you hold in reserve in case demand increases etc.

So no, this is not a fixed price whatsoever.

The community simply has more control over the supply and we can use algorithms to achieve our goals as well.

Yes your impression of the peg is correct. It can be used to track a price or it can be used to increase or decrease volatility. Since users would now have control over the supply being able to freeze and unfreeze based on the collective will of holders and the algorithm. Also the ability to trade frozen coins will make a secondary market. So yeah to be honest it really depends on the strategy used by investors, how we design the automated algorithm and how much strength we give users votes.

On this forum other than our weekly updates people aren't quite seeing the action going on in private slack channels. However there are several core members on our team (as on our team page on the site) and I get 100s of messages a day. A lot is going on for PR.

The most consistent PR push will be an ongoing Facebook campaign that we will monitor our target markets for results. There is a list of other things and creative ideas are thrown around daily.

Also exciting news to the holders as posted on Slack...

Bitbays first checklocktimeverify transaction

c18a0e7f4ddd6492fa653d9feebea1fdfd64c24b54f7c691383e2ef3852f885d

That is an example of freezing coins

It was only frozen for 10 minutes

https://chainz.cryptoid.info/bay/tx.dws?c18a0e7f4ddd6492fa653d9feebea1fdfd64c24b54f7c691383e2ef3852f885d.htm

Notice the address was "bRuVYS74nhKMX62oV5HqCTfhBGrYEFAsBL"

but the keys used to sign were actually from "bTuZboysrngsaqJvRj4db4CV2Qa21Q5Jcb"
 
It was locked until this timestamp... 1505429979



So just so you guys know, I'm making steady progress with our locking functions! The next update will have a lot of fun types of payments we can send to each other!

It's just as I'm very strict on security I have to always make sure everything is smooth and we make sure parties are notified when they get these types of payments and that they check the scripts.

No the exchanges need to honor the peg. Also when the peg starts, we begin at full liquidity and can then freeze and unfreeze in either direction (inflate or deflate). It just controls liquidity. However, I really wouldn't keep my Bay on exchanges... it is always best to move it to a wallet.

Sort of... we can run electrum nodes and then ask them for data

I've thought about it but then I really don't like the pseudo-centralized aspect nor do I like political things like voting. I mean okay our peg will be driven by a vote at first but this is like voting for delegates. Also they have some sort of account driven model and a lot of differences I would have to adapt the code to.

However, I have been keeping an eye on it. There are other ideas I've had for POS and will wait and see which protocol fares the best.

Well I love IPFS and DPOS has proven itself to be the best proposal for scaling despite its heavy centralization to the 100 nodes. However if a platform like Steem can operate on it then it clearly is a practical solution. However... decentralized storage is hard and with IPFS every node involved in storing a particular site means to store the internet on everyones computer? Seems really like an engineering nightmare. Like is this info encrypted? How much is being stored on the blockchain? Hopefully ONLY the torrent link. And how is data compartmentalized? What if nodes go down and they are hosting a specific piece of the torrent? What kind of security flaws is there in doing this? Should a user download the entire site, check to make sure the sites publisher signed the hash of it and proceed? Do they download something to run on the client side?

You can see some of the obvious concerns that immediately spring to mind.

Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I think the blockchain is only for notary, hashing, finance a few simple apps, sidechains, pegs and maybe hashed apps and torrents.

However, the idea seems ambitious and the chart looks good. See what you can download and beware of any coin that doesn't have downloadable software!!