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Maybe there is a market for a Tor hidden service that will send cash in the mail for bitcoins?
Dunno how to do the reverse though... leave small unmarked bills under a park bench won't work too much chance someone stakes out that park bench.
I think the fail is on the fiat side; it simply underscores how much fiat sucks and the importance therefore of never going back to it once you manage to get to bitcoins...
-MarkM-
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Maybe a good start would be identity services that take care of all that hassle and simply countersign encrypted messages affirming they know who sent them and will provide that info upon court order.
Then all kinds of businesses can go ahead and trade with people without all this extra "barrier to entry" hassle.
(In essence "my customer is this ID place, go see them if you want to know which of their people in particular sent any particular order / instruction / message on their behalf".)
-MarkM-
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It seems evident that identification isn't worth much, it might deter some scammers but serious offenders will either not give a damn (like pirate, possibly, if he is really Trendon Shavers as he is thought to be) or will have professionally forged ID. So it seems much more important to be able to seize assets of theirs than to know or even care who they are. This is actually all part of why I like to be able to set things within a virtual universe in which the assets of the players are where I can grab them and where the players who have invested in armies and fleets and so on can grab them. Seeing how much scamming happens in EVE Online I wanted to find a way to create a game universe in which not all investments would be scams. That is I wanted to finds ways to create non-scam investments. I figure that will be a good start toward eventually being able to compete with EVE Online; obviously I also will need to make enough capital with it to be able to also deploy art assets if I ever want to attract the folk to whom eyecandy is more important than fundamentals but if the fundamentals of finance are unsound raising that capital seems unlikely thus the starting with the financial fundamentals before worrying about the eyecandy. You gotta make the potential scammers risk something, basically. Even then that will merely force them to plan their scam at a large enough scale for it to pay for that risk plus also make them a profit. For example if you require one bitcoin per share to be in escrow they will aim to pump their shares up to more than a bitcoin each in price so they can run with more than a bitcoin per leaving you holding the one bitcoin per to mollify their victims with. Maybe you should just call the pink section "scams" and if any ever make it out of there explain "ha ha that one fooled us, the scam was that it was not a scam!"  (It is already clear there are sheetloads of coins out there urgently wishing to invest in scams so this should in no way be an obstacle to their raising vast sums of coins. ) -MarkM- |
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I am starting to be glad that in Open Transactions assets are identified by the hash of their contract so that even a totally trivial and semantically null change results in a different hash thus a different asset. It means this entire argument will not have to be rehashed (hahahaha punny) when using Open Transactions platform.
-MarkM-
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TL;DR if you cannot get professional / qualified investor capital to get your operation off the ground and profitable, you ought not be offered to the public on a stock exchange. On a crowdfunding site sure, go begging there, but public offerings should be proven successful companies looking to expand, not the latest scam someone made up and is starting from nothing.
The idea evidently still needs work, but basically I was thinking along the lines of margin accounts initially.
Certain of the assets on the system would be acceptable for use as collateral, and borrowed against.
This way an entity could build up a lot of collateral since each time they buy some they can immediately borrow again half the value of what they just bought. Assuming the things they buy actually go up in value this could grow quite nicely.
Eventually some huge holders of collateral would be in a position to consider branching out into doing the underwriting thing. They would find corps they consider creditworthy, and back them. Obviously they would be able to charge half as much interest if they simply loaned capital to the candidate company, so there would have to be really good reason to "go public" in order to justify also loaning them capital to act as surety to the exchange so they can "go public".
Hopefully this will keep many corps out of public trading entirely at their initial startup; which seems to me to make sense. Think about it, when facebook did their IPO were they a startup or had they already "proven" themselves? When google did their IPO were they a startup or had they already "proven" themselves? Etcetera. It seems a good idea to make it actually cheaper and easier to simply get a commercial loan to do your startup than to additionally borrow more to do an IPO. This way hopefully companies will first get themselves profitable before doing an IPO.
For startuip entrepeneurs there is crowdfunding. A stock exchange ought to be a more sober matter, not just another crowdfunding setup.
Let people get funded and get profitable then worry about whether to go public.
-MarkM-
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I don't see a profit mechanism here. How do you make anything doing this?
-MarkM-
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Advertising a scam is not all that different from scamming. People who toasted their reputation this much often end up scamming themselves, so what's with the detour?
We already know the guy's a scammer, we're on to discussing whether the scam would actually work. Reminds me of that story about Winston Churchill in a railway carriage with a young lady. "Young lady, will you sleep with me if I pay you a million pounds?" He asked. She agreed! So "How about for five shillings then?" he offered. "What kind of a girl do you think I am!" she protested. "Ma'm, that has already been established", he replied. "Now we are merely discussing the price." -MarkM- |
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It has been tried over and over and over. I lost count of the number of consolidation funds I have seen that tried to consolidate lots of HYIPs to supposedly spread the risk.
Also it is a marketing game. How large a mailing-list do you have of people with a known proclivity for playing HYIPs who will hear about new HYIPs from your spam before they will hear about them from someone else's or see its ads on one of the forums dedicated to HYIPs?
Many tend to give a commission even if you have not put in any money yourself, so if you do have such a mailing list it would probably be best to only advertise them for the commission you'll get on other people's deposits, not actually put in any money yourself.
As already said above, its been tried to death. Do you run an HYIP forums bigger and better (more traffic more apt to pour money into such things) than anyone else's?
The only reliable way you'll come out ahead is by simply running a ponzi yourself without putting in to anyone else's.
Remember you can't actually even be sure what you put into is a ponzi, many aren't even really a ponzi, just quick scams, creating an illusion of being a ponzi just long enough to suck in some money from people who like to play "known ponzi" games...
So actually belay that run a ponzi yourself. Run a scam yourself; running a ponzi you'll just get sucked dry early on by those who know to get out their capital fast... Even giving multi level commission pyramid might not convince them to send you enough contacts from their own mailing lists to get you by, though maybe if you do it enough times over and over and over you will eventually develop enough of a mailing list to rake some profit each time around...
Are the bitcoin "openly pyramid or ponzi" games still running? How much profit have you made so far playing those and marketing them?
-MarkM-
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An approach I am thinking of using is simply to make sure you have plenty of collateral of theirs on hand to confiscate in the event they default/scam. That is, only allow people who have significant holdings on your server already to issue assets. In a way this kind of comes back to the underwriter idea since if the person who wishes to issue and asset lacks collateral themselves they can find themselves an "underwriter" who is willing to put up the collateral... -MarkM- |
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It seems we need to add handling for much larger inboxes than the original code expected people to have, as test users posting 72 or more offers at a time two or three times a day then not downloading their inboxes until all the offers had expired were running into inbox-size problems.
The plan to deal with this is to check size and if too large break the download automatically behind the scenes into parts.
In the meantime a limit of ten cron items (e.g. offers) per nym has been put in place, which might not impact you directly but might indirectly due to the fact it means all the market-makers will not be posting their automatic offers anymore to fill the markets with offers.
-MarkM-
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This seems to assume you have a phone? Yet subject/title said even without one?
Is it that if you have no phone you have to get a yubikey instead?
-MarkM-
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GRouPcoins are part of the Massively Merged Mining array of merged-mined coins, so if you used that pool you might do better than simply directly mining GRouPcoins yourself because your hashing power would get you a share of all the altcoins, expressed as (and converted into) DeVCoins, plus hey you never know it might even get you a fraction of a bitcoin eventually (as it actualyl is a p2pool, so you are mining bitcoins in distributed p2p fashion while also merged-mining the altcoins). I added a new hardcoded checkpoint to BBQcoin recently since it is so low difficulty it could easily be 51% attacked again, my new version is in the BBQcoin directory of my sourceforge file-downloads site http://sourceforge.net/projects/galacticmilieu/files/BBQcoin is like litecoin, it cannot be merged mined, even with litecoin, and aims to be CPU-friendly, which, right now, thanks to not currently being mined by folks using GPUs, it is doing a better job of in a way (that way being, hey with CPU you can still mine the stuff right now). (After people attack a coin, it seems, they tend to go rest on their laurels afterward instead of keeping up the attack forever, so often after such an attack is a good time to get in and get some coins while they pat themselves on the back for having "killed" it...) As to price, why, they are priceless!   GRouPcoin are traded on the Digitalis Open Transactions server; BBQcoins I have not set up there yet as I am waiting to see how they survive over a longer period of time before worrying about trading them. -MarkM- |
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RIght. About the only things still low enough in difficulty that a CPU will get you any are BBQcoin and, to a much less extent, GRouPcoin.
-MarkM-
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Okay. I also did a grep for 21000000 to check for any other places it might be hard-coded. Only found these two (definition of MAX_MONEY and this place we are about to fix).
The comparison we are about to fix is to a real or double or something - some kind of floating point number. Is it okay to just plug in MAX_MONEY instead of 21000000.0 or should an explicit type-casting be used? (In 'C' I believe casting is automatic but I am not really familiar with C++ enough to know if/when it violates C traditions. Plus maybe could be even a matter of style or making clear to future programmers less familiar with C what we are doing. Also, I have seen FellowTraveler type stuff on IRC implying the whole matter of casting can get really really hairy/scary in C++ since people can define new types that overlay old types and so on. I don't even know what type the calculation is really using, could be weird_bitcoin_reals for all I know not a standard type at all.)
-MarkM-
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I grepped the source code. In wallet.cpp is outputs that if the amount is less than zero. In rpc.cpp sure enough it checks for 21 million, which we didn't catch because it should have been using a defined constant there not a number hardcoded at that very spot. int64 AmountFromValue(const Value& value)
{
double dAmount = value.get_real();
if (dAmount <= 0.0 || dAmount > 21000000.0)
throw JSONRPCError(-3, "Invalid amount");
int64 nAmount = roundint64(dAmount * COIN);
if (!MoneyRange(nAmount))
throw JSONRPCError(-3, "Invalid amount");
return nAmount;
}
So, Unthinkingbit, gimme a name to name the constant and a value to assign to it. Maybe even guidance as to where such a constant ought to be defined. Maybe that function MoneyRange needs to be looked at too... main.h:inline bool MoneyRange(int64 nValue) { return (nValue >= 0 && nValue <= MAX_MONEY); } Nope it uses a constant we presumably already defined. Maybe we need to use the same constant or a multiple or division of it in AmountFromValue. (Maybe all *coin code should so each alt doesn't run into same problem if it happens to have more coins than bitcoin as its max.) -MarkM- |
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How rich? If rich enough to 51% the bitcoin network I'd have enough hashing power that a bunch of chains that currently don't have enough hashing power to come out in the open could come out in public again using Massively Merged Mining. So I'd form a few arms length corps to keep it from becoming obvious one entity has that much hash power, having several entities all invest hugely in hashing power and all happening to see the potential in merging lots of chains... If that brings enough others on board merged-mining all the chains I'd maybe even be able to spare some capital to invest in some litecoin mining farms too. But first would be securing all the chains that can be merged. -MarkM- |
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3) Merged mining still remains possible and an effective method to secure alt-chains. Transaction revenue from alt-chains is currently negligible but over a long enough timeline it is in theory possible for an alt-chain to generate more revenue than the primary chain (Bitcoin).
A lot of miners though are apparently rejecting that revenue, apparently they think that every smidgeon of value in an altchain is somehow stolen from or undermining the value of the main chain. It is a vicious circle too, if people don't mine them people won't push as much value through them so the rewards for mining them will be lower. -MarkM- |
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Why not merge it with the merged mining pool? Not as profitable?
Not merge-able. -MarkM- |
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The English version was pretty legible to me, I saw at least one place where a German word still appeared but in general the whole site was okay English when I switched to English.
-MarkM-
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I can't wait!!!!!!!!! gimme This is right up my alley ... I have been looking for something to do with my LTC
A bunch of assets have been available for litecoin for quite some time actually, take a look at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html for recent figures I started archiving a while ago, but those listings don't date back as far as the actual asset offerings themselves do. Take a look at https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=53329.0 for info about the trading platform they are on... -MarkM- |
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