I might as well come clean then myself... Archive.org's record of "Adult Knotwork"

(For those who prefer to make money, see also Makemoney Knotwork.)

-MarkM-

If you don't think Open Transactions is serious, maybe you can help make it so?

I have been working pretty much full time on it for a year and a half or more, FellowTraveler has been working on it for much longer. So your dismissing it as not serious is a little... unexpected. Possibly a far more detailed critique would be helpful to the developers?

-MarkM-

Deprived, have you looked at Open Transactions at all?

Maybe your insights would be useful to its developers.

Currently it allows you to place as many offers as you like that don't individually exceed your available funds, but it also does not spend time / processor-power running around checking all your offers every time one of them gets picked up on by someone; instead if someone clicks on an offer in the GUI (I am not sure offhand what the equivalent act would be in the script language) it checks whether the nym making the offer has at that instant enough funds for it. At that point it adjusts it, but I also don't know offhand if it just deletes the whole thing or adjusts it down to what they do have funds enough to cover.

This seems a bit of a compromise but there seem to be good arguments on both sides of the issue.

I you are a Windows user thus have not been able to try Open Transactions yet due to the difficulty of compiling or even installing on that platform maybe you will find it easier now as apparently the latest ready-made binary for Windows is very easy to download and run: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=53329.msg1216747#msg1216747

-MarkM-

How do you propose the selection of whose shares to seize this way is to be done?

-MarkM-

Yeah well maybe this is part of why each issuer should run their own trading platform where people trade their stuff; since any general market is likely to think of its people as its own customers / its own crowd, which issuers of assets are leeching off of by bringing their assets there to sell...

I wonder if there would be a market for a "don't want to host your own trading platform, let us host it for you" service that specialises in hosting instances of some trading platform or other for people?

I am of course thinking of Open Transactions for this since it is specifically designed to be suitable for cases where the server operator is a third party so it is set up so issuers do not have to trust the server-operator.

-MarkM-

Most of them are not taking away mining but, rather, adding more side-rewards for miners, since they can be merged-mined right alongside bitcoin. So they are extra little perks like when you happen upon a bunch of other minerals or metals while mining a mineral or metal.

-MarkM-

Sounds resonable. Maybe the bitcoin client should also include encrypt/decrypt then otherwise everyone along the route you send your messages can see what you are up to, except I guess maybe in the special case of using an https connection though actually I hear that is itself pretty much a built in man in the middle in the person of the certificate issuer plus maybe also people can fake the certificates too.

-MarkM-

Seems unlikely. MPEx has you sign with PGP or GPG instead of bitcoin but that is just as "inconvenient", requiring doing a copy and paste then the signing then copy and paste the result. Copy nad paste is way too complicated for "normal" folk apparently.

You need the signing app to pop up automatically like your email client does for mailto: URLs, and automatically submit the result back into the form or something like that and still people aren't going to like it, thus the browser plugin. Then they'll complain they don't want to install the plugin.

-MarkM-

Seems like its pretty much a CDO, just not implemented/explained as simply and clearly.

-MarkM-

Ah, maybe you are a MPEx user?

Apparently "normal" people don't find that "useable", or even, maybe, understandable...

-MarkM-

Uh, but, isn't the whole point of this that you make bleach with this thing?

-MarkM-

Maybe he means the page does not include enough citations and he lacks edit rights there so cannot correct it himself?

-MarkM-

That is a form of decentralisation; each asset is handled by its issuer, who you already have to trust anyway.

To do it as a web thing though you still need some kind of browser plugin that will talk to your bitcoin daemon to sign messages and to validate messages it receives from the server.

If you look at the tabs in the Open Transactions GUI, you will see that it has a tab for bitcoin, in which it does talk to your bitcoind daemon.

If people really insist on using bitcoin address signing instead of their 'nym maybe that functionality can be added into Open Transactions too.

-MarkM-

Have you tried Open Transactions at all? Most people seem more interested in having a GUI, but folks who actually use command-line would be great to find out if the commands provided so far are sufficient or more are needed...

-MarkM-

I do wonder exactly what smart contracts you are thinking of specifically.

Once you have Open Transactions working at your end maybe you can look through the sample smart-contracts and be more explicit as to the exact contract it is that you are looking for?

-MarkM-

Open Transactions has smart contracts, but web browsers do not natively handle their users' private keys or certificates, they only seem to care about identifying the website, not proving to the website that the user is who the user claims to be.

This is why a bounty is being offered for making an Open Transactions client "that grandma can use".

Right now the only GUI client is the "test client" which was originally developed as reference code showing how each function can be done. It needs a lot of polishing up to make it something that "grandma can use".

If you want to make a web interface, you will need to create a way for the user's browser to do all the decrypting of messages from the server and encrypting of messages to the server, or you will have to just be another "mybitcoin" by having everyone just trust you with their private keys, making you, not them, the owner of their accounts.

If you use Windows, try out the new Windows build of the GUI. Supposedly it "just works" now:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=53329.msg1216747#msg1216747

Browsers are ridiculously over-featured for this kind of thing. But nonetheless the plan is to make the user's main Open Transactions install be a system service or system tray icon type of thing that is always running then have plugins for browsers, skype, IM clients etc etc etc none of which need the guts of OT in them as they will all call that resident daemon to do the hard parts.

Try out that Windows GUI, see how it all works, then think about how you could get people using web browsers to interface to it via a website. I figured most likely anyone who "needs" a website method for it would be better served by a real live broker they can videochat with via skype who will insulate them from the nitty gritty of it all - a "full service" broker.

-MarkM-

The gasoline brands analogy is interesting. Why indeed should I care which of the many cryptocurrencies a shop is willing to accept for a nice pair of alpaca socks as long as it happens to be one that I have enough of in my wallet?

If it happens to be an Ixcoin-only shop and I have no Ixcoins hopefully I can easily trade some other coin for Ixcoin, maybe even the payment provider will handle that for the merchant, taking whatever I like to pay with and giving the merchant his Ixcoins. Why should I care as long as something I have some of will buy those socks?

-MarkM-

Just as well, since they hadn't gotten a return going along with them in their non-returning venture didn't seem a great idea anyway.

-MarkM-

For a while the Brits and Canucks tried to peg their United Kingdom Britcoins (UKB) and Canadian Digital Notes (CDN) respectively to GBP and CAD, respectively. It maybe would have worked if they had not copied the bitcoin model for their blockchains, specifically the limiting of the number of coins to only 21 million coins. With the total number of coins limited it turned out that trying to prevent the value rising well above that of GBP and CAD was not feasible; in the end they gave up trying to push them down in value and just learned to live with the constant increase in value of their coins.

-MarkM-

The Digitalis Open Transactions server has markets for I0coin, it can be taded against any of the other supported assets, which include not just cryptocoins but an growing panoply of other assets. ( Some of them are featured in the tables at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html

Just now a Windows GUI that supposedly "just works" has been made available, see https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=53329.msg1216747#msg1216747

-MarkM-