Borrow it from Bobcorp and sell it, maybe?

Bobcorp should be eager to earn more Litecoin by loaning it at interest?

Maybe at some arms length if Bobcorp prefers to think itself to be investing in litecoin based corps rather than to be helping Alicecorp short Litecoins.

But heck Bobcorp likely doesn't hold all the litecoins, right? So maybe borrow from someone else.

Actually General Credit Corp is kind of hoping to be able to fill the role of loaner of a wide variety of assets...

-MarkM-

How about Bob and Alice each incorporate and do IPOs, Alice running her Litecoin Shorting Corp and Bob running his Litecoin Longness Corp, and sell shares? People betting litecoin will go long will buy Bobcorp, people betting it will go short will buy Alicecorp, and part of the fiduciary responsibility that Alice and Bob take on is minimising loss / maximising profit for their shareholders?

Shares can trade on any markets, and Bobcorp and Alicecorp can even work out any kinds of leverage either between them or with various other corps, or issue bonds to obtain leverage, or whatever they in their fiduciary capacities and vast wisdom and experience determine to be the most effective means of profiting from the fall of litecoin in the one case or the rise of litecoin in the other?

-MarkM-

Bitcoins on paper do not need to be monolithic, surely?

Couldn't you print a whole bunch of addresses with different amounts in them, either already chopped up into separate pieces of paper, or go in with scissors to cut out just enough for your current withdrawl needs when you need to withdraw?

Basically print hundreds or thousands of encrypted one-bitcoin bills, for example, and bring only as many out of your vault as you actually want to spend?

-MarkM-

Maybe Tormail with Tor would work as a cutout if sentient cutouts are, as they could well be, untrustworthy?

-MarkM-

Lets try to avoid individualised smart contracts if we can. For example, litecalls tokens could cost one litecoin each, bought from the house. She still gets five tokens for five litecoins, but there is no need for an entire smartcontract per token with an internal variable storing a litecoin.

The weakness here would be either a proliferation of hundreds or thousands of different types of token, one per strike price alice might propose, OR it being entirely up to alice how much she chooses to tell bob she is willing to honour the proposal at.

Yuck. I still think this cannot really be done as simple permanent tokens people can obtain from the house and eventually sell back to the house.

Instead we are faced with an entire smart-contract per each individual call, whether in this case that will be one call good for five litecoins or five calls good for one litecoin each.


All that automatic sending of stuff back and forth and vanishing of tokens is basically smart contract stuff not tokens.

Each "exercise" would be the causing of a script built into a contract to be run, with the money to be transfered to or from whoever possibly having to be stored in the contract all along. Or it would be multiple scripts, such as bob "buying" the contract being bob storing assets into it as collateral ready to be sent on to alice if he exercises the contract.

It might well make sense to create some kind of special-purpose platform in which abstractions tailored specifically to this type of thing exist than to go through all the overhead of a smart-contract per coin, which could get really heavy load if someone decided to exercise many thousands at once,

To be able to put such things on the markets, meaning, to be able to offer to sell them for any asset, their price cannot be built into them it must be something the market decides. Having to have a market for each possible strike price proliferates the number of markets massively, since any asset can be paired with any asset to form a market at any power of ten scale.

So you'd end up with markets like "strike price 0.003 litecoin calls offered for sale for 0.002 Ixcoin calls in lots of one",  "strike price 0.003 litecoin calls offered for sale for 0.002 Ixcoin calls in lots of ten", "strike price 0.003 litecoin calls offered for sale for 0.002 Ixcoin calls in lots of a hundred" and so on for all possible pairs of assets, which would include all possible strike prices of all altcoins' calls and all shares' calls and so on and so on.

Take a look at the number of markets we already have just in having ten or twenty coin and share assets each of which can be traded at any integer scale of ten against each of the others...

By contrast, sure if any alice and any bob can get together somewhere and negotiate some specific deal they can figure out how to code into a smart contract they can do so. It is just kind of awkward to expect any specific deal they come up with to be a mass-sellable item tons of other people will be interested in bidding on (since at the very least they might well prefer a tiny difference in the strike price, which makes the entire thing a totally different product...)

-MarkM-

I hadn't planned to implement the long and short coins as baskets themselves but simply to buy back pairs aka completed baskets for the value of the backdrop, since the actual long and short parts cancel each other.

Maybe though people holding shortcoins might have an incentive to simply not offer them for sale until some mythical pie in the sky time when they will be worth the full amount of the backdrop, the stuff it is short on having vanished away to zero value.

So I can see how having a time limit by which they have to be redeemed in order for the entire shortcoin to not become worthless could be useful.

But if having to tie up capital in the form of backdrop is as big a problem as you seemed to have earlier thought maybe tying it up indefinitely in the hope the thing you shorted will become worthless, or even just in the hope it will some year or decade become worth less than it was when you bought the basket or the shortcoin, is unlikely?

I wonder how much of a problem it would actually be to have a few scrooges who keep hoarding shortcoins, more and more and more shortcoins, and "never" selling them?

Since the longcoin can never go down in value to less than the value of its backdrop, the house/platform presumably should always be able to buy the longcoins back for that amount if no one else is willing to offer more.


Yes but options maybe require some special programming, if only in the form of smart contracts that take any needed collateral into the custody of the contract itself (which Open Transactions smart contracts can do); they might not be amenable to being implemented simply as tokens people can trade on the markets like any other tokens?

(This idea of trading like any other token is also part of why I prefer not to have to resort to having expiry dates on tokens.)

-MarkM-

Maybe the platform could afford to do that on an alternating-type basis.

That is, it accepts them one at a time, and each time only of the type it didn't accept the previous time.

This could be smoothed out somewhat by having users offer the coins for sale, the marketbot then being able to look at both markets to check it can make a pair, and if doing so is within what it thinks (oops, maybe needing an oracle to do its thinking for it) is a worthwhile price it buys a pair.

Thus its buying activity basically broadcasts to the markets what its oracle is telling it is worth buying, which again brings us back to oracles.

It seems possible that if the interest on leverage loans is high enough, and such loans are popular enough, a brokerage doing the collateral/leverage accounts could build up enough collateral of its own that it might be able to provide larger leverage ratios to smaller borrowers, maybe even eventually to the point that small enough loans requested by frequent enough customers could even reach 1:1

For example if a specific customer has borrowed 100 of something at 1% per such loan 100 times, then the brokerage has already received 100 from them in fees, thus might be willing to risk some of that by offering an increase in leverage on loans that small or smaller.

Futurecoins maybe could be done as baskets the way assassination markets and such work. Basically someone interested in betting on a true/false proposition buys a basket of two coins, an itwasfalsecoin and an itwastruecoin. They then sell either of those to someone wanting the one they themselves do not want. When history reveals whether "it" was true or false, the house buys back either the true or the false but not both, the other becoming worthless.

Presumably the coins would then be retired while new but similar baskets are issued offering much the same bet but covering a new span of time.

Unfortunately this again needs an oracle, and oracles introduce liability as to whether the oracle might from time to time, ever, or always lie.

(LIARbility, hee hee.)

-MarkM-

It could be useful to do this with a blockchain which is merged-mine-able but does not mint new coins.

That would throw out the entire confounding pricing/cost factor caused by miners minting coins, so we can look directly at how much it costs to have miners merged-mine a chain.

There are already several chains in which miners do not mint coins.

Each is individually looking at having to pay whatever "the going rate" turns out to be for having a chain merged-mined.

Maybe all such chains can gang up, between them paying to have one multicoloured chain merged-mined.

Maybe also everyone who is interested in colouring coins could provide an estimate / ballpark of how much buying-power their colour expects / plans / intends / will commit to spending on securing a chain.

-MarkM-

He will likely claim that it is the privacy laws that prevent him telling Goat himself everyone's contact information.

He wants to leave it to them to choose to reveal it to Goat or not or maybe even whether to employ a cut-out to represent them who will like GLBSE not reveal their contact info to Goat.

-MarkM-

In people's minds one half should be worth more than the other, but getting them to agree that their half is worth less than the other guy's half could be a problem.

Leverage is not something we can do without securely escrowed or held collateral unless we have soldiers and/or police and/or lawyers in place on the planet where the collateral is located that can and will go get us that collateral in the event of a default.

In the game we can in fact have units of army and navy, and even nuclear missiles and so on, so in game contexts we can maybe allow collateral to be something we do not have in our vault. But in "real life" if it ain't in our vault we should assume Tom WIlliams and/or Pirateat40 has it.

All this really means is leverage is for the relatively rich.

The leverage I am thinking might be realistic to provide is the collateral/leverage account setup, whereby your broker maintains for you a nym that holds stuff of yours that the broker is willing to accept as collateral and the broker loans you stuff up to a value of some fraction (maybe half) of the value they think your collateral they have custody of is worth.

So compared to that, the basket long+short coins didn't look that bad really.

This matter of how to actually cause markets to value the longcoins and shortcoins appropriately is interesting though, Hmm...

-MarkM-

Actually DeVCoin does have stuff about appealing decisions, maybe even removing officers and such.

If it needs more clauses and such quite possibly there is reward in DeVCoins to be had for helping develop such things.

-MarkM-

DeVCoin allocates 90% of mined coins in accordance with what might be regarded as kind of articles of operation, or bylaws, or somesuch, with the guidance of executives / officers / whatever.

So in some ways it might be giving a glimpse toward some of the intent of this proposal?

It is unfortunate that GMC and GRF, both being corporation created currency, had to retreat away from using the blockchain format due to merged mining not turning out afterall to create a safe environment encouraging the deployment of altcoins. Maybe they will yet achieve sufficient transaction volume someday though to move back to the blockchain format as they were originally intended.

-MarkM-

1) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sor9GzivGbk

-MarkM-

Well then just assume that no-one is.

There are not a whole lot of people running Open Transactions clients yet so for financial trading purposes there really isn't a whole lot there yet for people who do not have characters in any of the individual character level views into the game nor have a nation in the nations level of the game nor run an intergalactic mining operation nor even a primitive village in either of those scales of view into parts of the game.

For non-players just looking to trade in the game's stock exchanges Open Transactions is going to be the interface, and so far not even actually implementing each individual stock exchange as a separate Open Transactions server since right now we are still working on getting the very first Open Transactions server set up and running with decent clients available and so on before worrying about splitting each nation's assets into its own national stock exchange then on to each city's stock exchange to its own server and so on.

So it is still "early adopter" time in other words.

EDIT: Thanks for pointing out that the link in my .sig to a web-launchable client for Crossfire RPG is not provided on the wiki page, I will add that now.

-MarkM-

Yes there is. For a top level overview see http://devtome.org/wiki/index.php?title=Galactic_Milieu

Basically there are the in-game economies, the out-of-game economy involved in financing the game, its hosting, bandwidth, development and so on, and the fact that it is an "alternate reality" game in other words this "planet known as Earth" is itself within the game thus these currencies that people can take home with them instead of relying on a third party server to centrally administrate help implement the inclusion of our world into the game and the game into our world, blurring any distinction between them.

-MarkM-

This thing would also be more useful if it actually remembered all those people I used to have set up in it.

Somehow it seems to have no recollection of anyone today.

I am already on Sone, three times in fact, once as markm, once as Knotwork, and once as Digitalis.

However the web of trust forgot my identities, and the recover option does not let you assign your nickname, so I had to pretend to create nickname from scratch but over-rode the new random keys with my old keys for my identities. It still after many days will not let me introduce any of them, still saying it takes some time to download puzzles. Sone seems to remember at least parts of the conversations I was in though.

I noticed on starting RetroSHare today that it wanted to know my location, so I told is Desktop, I don't know if that is why it decided to forget everyone. Its not as if it created a new identifty for me as me at Desktop, or if it did it deleted my existing identity as me at unspecified place while it was at it, as it only has one identity for me, now known as being at Desktop, and knows of no other people whatsoever.

EDIT: It also knows of no forums etc, evidently decided to forget which ones I was subscribed to and so on.

EDIT2: So I was forced to shazam my supertroubleshooter skills, hack the .retroshare directory and thereby resurrect myself.

-MarkM-

Yeah its a pain when even your own sockpuppets steal your ideas without crediting you isn't it?

-MarkM-

One important thing I think this needs is a context or grouping system so you can group "friends" into separate groups who cannot see whether you have any "friends" outside the group they are in; or even with access controls so you can allow certain groups to see into certain other groups.

As it was last time I ran it, you were able to see who I had as connections, which prevented various other potential connections from being willing to connect to me until such time as we could set up some kind of cutout machine in-between us to insulate them from being seen by you...

They would like, for example, to be able to post to the forum without you being able to recognise "aha, I happen to know that that guy knows markm, is connected directly to him in fact, so I'll add that fact to my report to Big Brother..."

Of course instead of them not connecting to me maybe I ought not be connecting to you. But then there goes the network...

-MarkM-

So is BItrustica going to get itself a seat on the Bitcoin Foundation board or anything like that?

-MarkM-

Well obviously the user can prove that GLBSE did give them that specific code, right? By showing that it is signed using GLBSE's private key?

But GLBSE maybe ought to have a signed by Goat list of codes Goat acknowleges having been given by GLBSE.

Each user should maybe have been given the hash of the list that was given to Goat as well as the signed by GLBSE code. Actually the message containing both would be signed in such a case presumably.

Goat is screwed though if the list he was given does not in fact hash to the hash GLBSE told the users it hashed to.

-MarkM-