Awesome, so the site mediating this has no skin in the game, it can just charge its standard per-API-call usage tokens fee for use of its functionality and not care how much value Bob and Alice are wagering and exchanging.

Unfortunately I don't see how to call this thing an asset and put it on a market in my server though.

Unlike the basket currency concept it does not seem amenable to being a token that people can buy and sell.

-MarkM-

Well presumably the price they name must at least be on the correct side of the strike?

So long person must name at least strike, and short person must name at most strike?

Maybe you can run through your example again but this time with it being the case that the prices they can get out in the world are below their strike price not above it?

-MarkM-

Quick, send me all your I0coins before they rot and infect your machine with gangrenous siloconitis.

-MarkM-

The new Windows build that someone suggested might be why it tripled in price isn't GUI?

Wow I thought you could hardly even claim something is for Windows at all if it isn't GUI.

I wonder what if anything is new about it then, surely they already had a namecoind since whoever was a whatever.

But okay, fine, maybe DeVCoin will have to do then.

-MarkM-

Hmm, okay, so the long person has to accept a coin at their choice of long price to exercies the contract.

Presumably meanwhile the short person has to provide a coin at their coince of short price in order to exercise the contract?

So if Bob, who took the short side, claims his oracle's price is $1, while Alice, who took long, claims her oracle's price is $10... What then?

If Bob is correct that short is the way it went, he has to send Alice a bitcoin for $1.

If Alice is correct that long is the way it went, she has to pay Bob $10 for a bitcoin.

So what is the net effect? Are they both right, so Bob sends a bitcoin and Alice sends him $9 change?

Or are they both right, so Bob sends one bitcoin for $1 and a second bitcoin for $10 and receives $11 from Alice for the pair of them?

Oh wait, the $5 comes into it somewhere too presumably...

EDIT: By the way, for my purposes fees to the platform/exchange are irrelevant, so only worry about whether Bob or Alice require a fee one from the other. Both are paying per API call for each and every thing they have the platform do for them, including telling them about each other's offers.

-MarkM-

Namecoin is one of the most heavily hashed altcoins, thus possibly less easy to attack than some of the other choices.

In order for bitcoin to function usefully as a store of value for use as collateral against which to borrow buying power, it needs to be used in conjunction with something that can serve as a medium of transmission of borrowed buying-power. Altcoins seem pretty good candidates for performing that medium-of-transmission function...

If it is necessary for someone borrowing to buy a car to be sent millions upon millions of namecoins, enough to clear the order book, plus millions upon millions of the next best altcoin, enough to clear its order book too maybe and so on, just to keep their bitcoins safe and sound as collateral still growing in value, then I suspect the altcoins used for that might not be as cheap when the folk who bought them put them back on the market so that someone else can be transmitted the buying power to buy a car, or the first car buyer wants to buy a house...

-MarkM-

"Actual physical bitcoins" might make a good accompaniment for them, so at the end of the evening whoever won the most could be awarded an actual good-anywhere coin as a trophy. Which they could always bring back next week to give others a chance to win back from them etc.

-MarkM-

Maybe I am not understanding correctly, because I get the impression that buying put options ought to help prop up the price of the underlying.

Maybe it comes down to the privacy/secrecy of the options? Maybe if their existence is secret and not provable your idea might work?

But if they are known to exist, my reasoning is that if someone exists who knows they can sell the underlying for price X, people considering selling will try to sell to that person for as close to X as they can convince them to pay, if other potential buyers (who lack the ability to resell them for X) are offering substantially less than X.

Basically I figured that if a CEO could announce that Entity Y knows where/how to sell for X, folk would thank wow wherever/whoever Entity Y is selling it to must know something we don't, or even if the mysterious buyer(s) or market Entity X is selling to is an idiot surely Entity X will be willing to buy if we offer a price far enough below X for Entity Y to make a profit buying from us and reselling at price X.

I see this effect the Galactic Milieu in fact, where various group's access to places ways and means of selling various things at prices other groups do not know how or where to get, or are not equipped to get, imbues value into things even in the eyes/hands of the groups who do not themselves have their own routes to liquidity of those things.

Basically the fact that there does exist someone who can sell something creates some liquidity in that thing because it provides them with the potential to turn a profit on it any time they are able to pick some up cheaper than the price they know they can get for it in their own special boutique or shop or market or via their own marketing channels or whatever it is that gives them the ability to get better prices for it than others can get.

(In the case in point here, that mechanism being the holding of a put.)

So, wouldn't the use of puts cause the puppy to be upholding, at least to some extent, the prices of the very things it was founded to short?

EDIT: Oops I was thinking of the puppybear, which is in a different thread. Maybe others have other motivations to short things.

-MarkM-

Those three reasons are part of why General Credit Corp exists.

However, GLBSE assets you'll be shorting seem likely to be such mindbogglingly worthless shares that even GCC might prefer not to actually have any on hand to loan. They might maybe though be interested in picking them up afterward if they can pick up >50% of the shares for less than the price of registering an asset, if owning a majority of the shares confers effective ownership/control of the asset. (Which I am not sure it does; I get the impression assets tend to dissolve instead of being picked up as cheap ready-to-run-with corps...?)

I guess the thinking that led to GCC figuring on owning lots of "worthless" altcoins maybe doesn't carry over to its also being potentially useful to own lots of "worthless" shares...

-MarkM-

Yes, excellent example, thank you!

Also one might hope that more and more and more bitcoin gets tied up as collateral, leaving less bitcoin for sale, thus reducing "ready supply" of bitcoins, while demand hopefully does not fall, which if it all manages to happen might even help maintain and possibly even increase the market price of bitcoins...

(A self-fulfilling "this stuff is good collateral" prophecy?)

Mind you, maybe on occassion it could work the other way too. If someone had had lots of namecoins in their collateral/leverage account recently maybe it would have made sense to borrow bitcoins to sell for namecoins to increase the collateral account as namecoins multiplied in value (they tripled in price, someone wrote?) then sell enough to pay back the bitcoin-loan and voila, profit!


-MarkM-

Not if it might miff "His Nibs"...

-MarkM-

Is GLBSE really a platform you want to issue your asset on?

Sure it is a great place to short stuff, but need you base your own shares there?

A corp that specialises in shorting things sounds like a great potential customer for General Credit Corp; shorting is something I have been exploring for a while.

-MarkM-

What is "Accepted publickey for cdecker from 178.140.220.181 port 28384 ssh2" about? Does that mean he had the private key corresponding to your public key so was able to respond to some kind of asymmetric crypto challenge to auto-login through sshd?

-MarkM-

Asset issuers on MPEx get copies of all purchases of their securities, with contact info on the buyer?

(I am trying to imagine how issuers just go right on doing their thing on waking up one day to find MPEx has vanished...)

-MarkM-

Ah so likely they logged your keystrokes to get any passwords you typed, or maybe even were able to access decrypted keys in RAM depending on what kind of "secure RAM" system might be used for keys.

Quite likely you are rootkitted too, so that pretty much anything and everything on your system is suspect, unless they weren't keylogging last time you logged in as a user who can write to the executable files areas and do not have a root exploit that can work from whatever user the logged in as.

-MarkM-

An old backup you stored somewhere?

What does that actually mean?

You gave the staff of some remote file storage site a free unencrypted copy of your wallet yet are surprised they took the coins?

Or what?

-MarkM-

Do all the issuers who someone kicked off the platform owned shares of get given these codes, so they can track for themselves those of their shareholders who are unable to use GLBSE anymore?

For example if I had an offering on GLBSE of which Goat bought some, would I too have been put in this position of being offered codes, and have to hope Goat got in touch with me with his code to "redeem" his shares I issued that suddenly are not handled by GLBSE?

-MarkM-

Maybe focus on shorting "altcoins" is too limited, since really what this is about is shorting assets, where assets might represent bitcoins, altcoins, bonds, shares, gold, silver, or whatever.

I guess why I thought of altcoins was I thought shorting was kind of a way to put your money where your mouth is, thus that all the people who mouth of about this that or the other altcoin being doomed could short it.

But one could just as well short bitcoins, they too are just another asset.

I think the crucial thing needed regardless of what someone wants to short is a system for collateral, so that whatever other assets they have that they are willing to put up as collateral can be evaluated as to how much of what they want to short the loaner is willing to loan them based on the assets offered as collateral.

-MarkM-

In a way, I guess so, just like companies that issue mortgages and car loans and so on are pawn shops and credit card companies are companies to whom you pawn your life away / pawn your future income.

-MarkM-

A Corp that uses various virtual currencies to conduct its business, including many of the various blockchain-based currencies discussed in this section of these forums.

In particular, a Corp whose operation depends upon the existence of multiple asset types, so that if only one type (such as only bitcoins, for example) existed that would not suffice for its needs.

Thus it serves as an illustration and example of why there is in fact a practical need for multiple virtual currencies, preferably with more than one (and hopefully more than two) of them being blockchain-based cryptocurrencies.

-MarkM-