Ah !

The penny is finally starting to drop with me thanks to your more-informative-than-any-other-documentation post   So the peg's going to be enforced by creating a synthetic market where supply to market is restricted and demand is driven up by redeploying some of the IPO Bitcoin that's in reserve ? (A bit like an IBM shares buyback where - because they've no viable business profits - they buy their own shares without issuing any new ones to drive up the price and justify their bonuses).

It would be good if all of this stuff could be documented in one place rather than having to pick it up piecemeal. I got the "eBay" smart contracts stuff from the thread header, the coin supply restriction bit from a couple of darkened room videos that somebody randomly posted and the boosted demand bit from you.

Ok, you've given me something to think about now. I appreciate you making that post and supplying a missing piece of the jigsaw. I had seen other posts about IPO money being kept for "walls" but they were all out of context. I didn't get that it had an actual strategic function within the peg mechanism as opposed to simply supporting the price for the sake of it.

(P.S. Don't mind my dig about IBM - we have to retain a sense of humour in all of this if we are to take such ambitious plans seriously at the same time ).

Why don't you just make some valid points instead of cowardly ignoring their challenges ?

I also noticed the large number of "newbie" accounts posting in here. The thread is positively littered with them and sparsely populated with any accounts that have a significant history behind them.

The other valid challenge being which warrants attention is this: The proposition of Bitbay is to take an asset that's currently trading at 9 hundredths of 1 cent and somehow "Peg" it to the dollar. in other words achieve a greater than 100,000 % gain (that's a one-hundred-thousand-percent gain in case anyone mistakes a comma for a decimal point).

If you feel so confident about the mechanism behind this alchemistic phenomenon that you can put sceptics on "ignore" in a second (albeit that they express their scepticism somewhat cynically) then I'd suggest you enlighten people instead of dismissing them since it might benefit the rest of us as at the same time.

I think that, as time goes on, evidence is beginning to demonstrate that the reverse is actually true.

The 2-tier masternode approach is succeeding in all the areas it was intended to - not just technically but commercially as well. In particular it has allowed for an immense amount of realworld experience to inform ongoing design priorities without disrupting the front end blockchain interface, nor the 'backend' commercial interface.

At the same time, successive revisions to the revenue regime for the masternode network have ensured that its population keeps growing. Darkcoin now has a worldwide network of over 1200 masternodes and growing. This 2-tier approach is going to be hugely powerful going forward because it allows the network to decouple and articulate advanced, consolidated actions not suited to being run on an ad-hoc basis by end-user nodes.

For example, it's this approach that enabled the huge leap to be made from realtime to pre-emptive anonymisation. What this means in practice is that no matter what crazy fantastic algo's any other coin comes up with, the Darkcoin network will always provide a level of service that is multiple orders of magnitude more secure due to the massive redundancy it now implements. You don't even have to be making a transaction anymore for your funds to be anonymised because the entire online money supply is in a continual state of mixing.

The so called "flaws" alluded to in this post are now turning out to be strengths. They are in fact revealing the true flaws in the competition, namely:

 - anon is done in realtime, saved funds are static until transacted
 - they are mostly non Bitcoin-compliant commercial interfaces which need to be handled as exceptions by exchanges and commercial adopters
 - given Bitcoin's trading resilience against the altcoin competition over the last 18 months, the 'stock value' of anon coins which take an integrated approach (e.g. cryptonote ones) has plummeted. Bitcoin has prevailed and therefore Bitcoin compliant technologies are more amenable to adoption

How is it any less transparent that you sitting with your off-order-book purchase waiting for sufficient liquidity to mount so that you can buy without driving the price up ?

Why should you be allowed to keep your hand hidden while sellers state their price in good faith ?

The hidden wall is just automating that process. In a fast market, most supply and demand is off order book anyway.

I don't think you've thought this through when you say "it is a horrible idea". I think if you did you'd quite quickly see the hypocrisy.

If you really want to take ethical trading to its extreme then ALL orders should be hidden, not shown. That way people would buy and sell for what it was worth to them, not for what they thought they could extract from the market.

Please revisit your thinking on this so that your sense of trading ethics is better informed by these various complexities 

Aren't you confusing a pooled mining effort with an individual mining effort ?

I wouldn't regard "pooled" mining as the same as centralised mining because you don't have control over the mining effort. It goes up and down outwith your control.

How does it ?

I don't care about 52%, ergo --> I baffle you. But I can assure you, I'm not the "baffling" type  

This 52% stuff has got out of hand. It's as if the **moment** anyone gets 51% mining power it's assumed that a coin's in immediate danger. But for that to happen, the 51% 'ers would have to actually DO something malicious with their share other than just sitting and making money on it.

It's a bit like suggesting that because Bill Gates owns 51% of Microsoft he's going to destroy Microsoft.

Anyway. The 51% is'nt even as bad as that because it's made up of uncommitted individual miners who are completely at liberty to leave the pool anytime they want when they see the price going down due to their behaviour.

I don't even care if there's a 70% mining monopoly - as soon as it starts affecting the valuation people will just leave the coin anyway and go and mine somewhere else.

What we must NOT DO, under ANY CIRCUMSTANCES is get Evan to "do something about it". He's the last person that should have anything to do with mitigating mining monopolies other than implementing the proof of work algorithm faithfully.

Leave nature to do its work.

camosoul's posted a comment on there. Wasn't he listed as missing from the thread ? Maybe it's not the same one.

I never thought I'd say this but I now think that this coin could go to parity with bitcoin (on price that is, not on marketcap) at some point. I'm not saying it will, I'm just saying I can see reasons why it could.

I realise thats a bit of a bold statement and back in May when everyone was saying it I was rubbishing them, but the thing is several critical factors have changed since then. 4 things in particular:

[1] - it survived. This is probably the single biggest factor in a coin's fortunes I think - to survive the exit from the gate, a pump & dump phase and an awful lot of FUD attack

[2] - the competition didn't survive (and there was a lot of it). That just shows you what a big technical challenge this type of project is

[3] - it occupies prime space in the market. It has a genuinely original offering that is known to be desirable and furthermore that is mutually exclusive with Bitcoin

[4] - it's a 1st generation proof of work coin that supports Bitcoin's commercial interface. The competition in this field is now dwindling because we're into Bitcoin 2.0 type technologies that are more about shares and stuff. So Darkcoin can be considered now to have fully captured the 1st generation, Bitcoin compatible anonymous POW market for the foreseeable future unless it screws up which looks increasingly unlikely as time goes on

Juast sayin - it's an observation, but if you look at the ask liquidity in the markets it's thin as hell. It doesn't look to me like there's many people wanting out of this coin. If it gets another rise like the May one it's going to be big.

Hurry up. Bagholders waiting...

Should be along in a few minutes. Here's some dolly mixtures while you wait.

All coins tend to loose value in between news days. If there's nothing happening then much of the capital just disappears somewhere else while it's waiting for the next milestone.

I'd say Bay is not doing bad to keep itself at or just below the IPO price for now. If it can consolidate at that price it will have a reasonable base to attract investment when the next wave of development appears.

********** Amber Alert - Fiat Currency Control Potentially Slipping ************

Lets looks at current FAF - facts in our face:

[1] - JPY now being churned out at the rate of 80 Trillion Yen per year. Japanese exporters are getting huge tailwind at the expense of competing economies

[2] - They jacked up their money printing the same day / next day that the US fed stopped QE. So Japan clearly being deployed as a proxy QE source via the plumbing that connects international economies known as the 'carry trade' (Borrow billions in a low-interest economy, lend in a higher interest economy)

[3] - Faced with both US and Japan mutually colluding to support their economies with worthless, highly levered guvpaper, the Chinese are surely under pressure to devalue as they're facing various bubble bursts (e.g. real estate) and need the exports

[4] - That leaves the ECB as the last man standing who's printer isn't at full throttle which will open up existing fissures between hard money fans (Germany) and the rest. Germany will not want to touch an Abenomics style operation with an extended bargepole (not least because all their non-existent gold is stuck on the wrong side of the Atlantic since the Bretton Woods conference and they're not even allowed to visit at birthdays)

[5] - Possible scenarios at that point: (That I see)

a) - the BRICS economies start dumping their US treasuries using all the gold they've been hoovering up the last 5 years to offset their losses

b) - bagholders of all the naked paper gold shorts that the fed have been dumping over the last few years to keep the gold price from expoding (and thereby revealing the true value of the dollar against gold) start asking for delivery and forcing one of the bullion banks into delivery default

c) - Germany decouples from the Euro and joins the "sound money clan" of Russia-China axis leaving the ECB and Bank of England free to start their printing presses in a desperate bid to save the Eurozone from further deflation. That then places all 3 Western central banks - Japan, ECB and Fed on full throttle printing and a full blown currency war race to the bottom resulting in the destruction of fiat currencies

d) - stocks go into full reverse trend due to traders anticipating a currency crisis and an exodus into commodities and other 'save haven' assets precipitating a snap back to 'real' values as opposed to QE pump values. Massive recession ensues not seen since the early 20th century

e) - none of the above. Everything works out nice. Japan stops printing and goes back to growth. Europe goes back to growth and US goes back to growth. All the central banks hit their 2% inflation targets without any extra money printing

In the absence of (e), to me cryptos seem supremely placed to catch escaping wealth running from the train wreck. The great thing about it is that you don't need a ship or a van to deliver it. Gold has a slight problem with that.

Hold your DRK.

Looks like I've finally opened the tap of some useful contributions.

Thanks for the responses.

Indeed.

I'm obviously too thick to see it. Comforting to know I've invested in something who's viability is so blindingly obvious - wake me up when we're a dollar 

I had to surgically extract this short little phrase out of your commentary being that for me it represents the elephant in the room right there.

I can see how the supply can be managed ok. It's the "as demand rises..." bit that seems to trip off everybody's a bit too easily. Where is that demand going to come from ? eBay has an operating income of over $3 billion dollars. Taking market share off them will be like pulling teeth because the nature of auction markets is such that the bigger the audience for your auction, the higher the price you can sell your stuff at.

Where's the "demand" half of the price equation going to come from for Bitbay markets ? How will people be encouraged to adopt ? I can only see 2 answers but I'm absolutely open to other suggestions if I've missed them:

[1] - create new markets which exclusively use Bitbay

[2] - get existing ones (like eBay & Alibaba) to adopt your coin as a currency and sell the idea that they can extend their platform feature set based on the coin's bockchain

In either case the offering must swing on features that users can't get elsewhere. What would those features be and what prevents a counterparty with huge infrastructure like eBay from implementing them ?

The basic appeal of a cryptocurrency is twofold:

 - you ditch the counterparty (banks)
 - you get your hands on unlevered base money (which you don't do with fiat money)

I can see one area where that appeal translates to bitbay - in attracting users who don't have access to bank accounts and therefore can't get registered on eBay. That's one clear, well delineated group of potential adopters. What are the others ?

How can making a coin "unsellable" attract investors ?

You mean knowing that everyone else is locked in as well makes it more attractive for me to be 'locked in' ?

If demand isn't there the price will plummet anyway, regardless of what the supply is. There is some precedent for this model though. Right now the US fed has trillions of dollars locked up on their balance sheet which they've kept "off market" by offering a higher rate of interest on excess reserves to banks than they'd get on the open market.

So that has supported the value of the dollar despite a near 5-fold increase in its supply. The difference here is that the dollar 'engineers' already have a significant amount of pre-existing demand t work with, so they can use supply as a lever. If you don't have the demand in the first place then controlling supply alone is about as effective as playing tug of war with an ant.

Yea. I saw that.

What he's proposing to do is control the price by limiting the supply to market at any given moment.

The problem is, there are two components to the price equation and supply is only one of them. You don't create demand by limiting the supply - they are independent of each other. A peg needs to work from both sides of the price equation - much like the Bitshares model where a long and a short position are engaged in order to bring the currency into existence around a fixed reference rate to another currency.

All the same, this is the exact type of thing I'm interested in fleshing out. It's as vague as mud right now and could do with quite a bit of illumination.

How is that different from eBay are proposing to do with Bitcoin ?  <-- genuine technical question not FUD

I realise that Bitcion isn't pegged to a fiat reference but as far as an adoption proposition goes the criteria for buyers and vendors are exposure to huge markets rather than the technical subtelties of the currency they're using surely. Clearing houses like Bitpay just deal with the volatility for them.

Here's 35 for you   http://web.archive.org/web/20131120104851/http://coinmarketcap.com/

ok, I accept your general point though - the market is still young. Today's top 20 possibly have more longevity than the ones in that list.

But as the market gets ever more crowded it becomes increasingly important to understand the exact nature of what you're buying into. Lots of coins have things in common but one thing that is a consistent pattern is that genuine originals do prevail. Look at the top 10 market cap - they're all originals in some respect or another and have held their positions for quite some time. (Despite even that fact, they've all gone through the x10 pump and back down to 20% all-time-high rights of passage phase).

I invested in Bitbay because it had hints of that uniqueness. But its originality is still quite opaque. Technologically it has some new features, a few of which it nicked from Nubits, others planned that are appear to be specific implementations of the smart contracts paradigm aimed at a particular market sector - online auctioning. As a pure technology though I don't really see what stands out but as a package delivered with ready made markets I do see how it could be compelling. Unfortunately it's the "ready made markets" bit which are the most opaque aspect of the package which is why I've been probing in that direction.