You do not seem to address the rather important matter of consensus.

If my node thinks 60% of everyone's data has arrived and thus closes the block, what happens with all the other versions of the block who heard from a slightly different 60% than I did? Each of us when we were at 59.9999% might not have had the same nodes in our collection but even if we did, we each could hear from a different node as our last straw that broke the 60% barrier and caused us to close the block.

Also, since your objective supposedly is to be a provider of cloud computing, all of this crap about how currencies could work is irrelevant, as there are already working currencies in existence. What you need to do as a provider of distributed p2p cloud computing is solve that goal's problems, such as how to decide which nodes to pay how much currency to and why.

As a person wanting cloud computing, how do you check you got what you wanted and are not being charged for services that were not in fact provided, stuff like that. See for example the distributed storage thread about dirt cheap remote disk storage which so far it seems turns out not to be dirt cheap at all due to being a difficult problem; notice how often they end up back at the idea of a centralised service that will co-ordinate home computer nodes that want to be paid for providing storage... And to cloud-compute, you need storage out there to hold data people want computation to be done with/on so storage is just part of the problem you are facing...

-MarkM-

It has intrinsic value just like bitcoin and litecoin. They might have a little more networking-effect value aka brand-awareness or "goodwill" currently but those are not intrinsic.

You could add namecoin and devcoin to the list too though since like litecoin they both also have a distinguishing characteristic.

DeVCoin actually has an additional distinguishing characteristic so is note purely an experiment in distribution of minted coins but also an experiment in never ending constant number of coins per block, which if you want to observe it in action on its own separate from the whole thing about the miners not getting all the coins you can observer GRouPcoin to see, so maybe GRouPcoin also belongs on the list if your list basically assigns intrinsic value to being a distinct experiment that tests the affects of a different approach to some aspect of the basic concept they all have in common.

-MarkM-

Okay well in the movie lets get Anthony Hopkins (or maybe Michael Caine) to play the client and oh I dunno, maybe Johnny Depp to play Pirate.

Hopkins/Caine (Client) behind a desk piled with stacks of "decks" of unmarked twenty dollar bills. You know, the bound with a paper ribbon batches, but make them look used so its clear they are random unmarked bills not fresh from the counterfeiter's printer or sequential bills fresh from a bank.

Client: "Nice to look at, isn't it? I love the smell of small unmarked bills in the wee hours of the night. Go ahead, take a whiff. I'm afraid that is all I have for you this time, however, as your services are no longer required."

Stage Direction: Pirate makes a move toward taking some of the cash.

Client: Ahem, not so fast young man. Just smell it. The smell of it is all I have for you this time, your services are no longer required. Luigi?"

Stage Direction: The Thugs, led by Luigi, move in on Pirate, "gently" and "courteously" ejecting him from the premises...

-MarkM-

I don't suppose Oct 12th is some kind of Zeek Rewards court case date or something by chance? I'm sure the Zeek Theory advocates would love that.

-MarkM-

Read it more carefully. He claimed to have made a move to secure the USD, not to have actually succeeded in securing the USD.

Quite possibly he (in the fictional-or-not scenario he might be trying to convey or imply) tried to grab the dollars to make up for the client not giving him the coins, and didn't get the dollars or the coins thus now has to wait until a court date to find out whether a judge is going to tell the client to give him the coins or to give him the dollars.

-MarkM-

TL;DR: There are some very expensive things bundled into a full service exchange that maybe are easier to see if you think about breaking them out into distinct separate services...

When I decided that third party "market makers" would be useful to me, I also had to face the fact that it is what they do, not what the actual offer-matching engine does, the probably accounts for percentage-based fees.

If the hassles of constantly driving the armoured car to the vault to deposit real assets and driving the armoured car to the post office to ship real assets out from the vault are delegated away to a separate, distinct service, then indeed one does have to wonder what could justify charging for a data field update based on how many bits of the data field were toggled aka how many units of assets the transfer or exchange represents.

I suspect that it is because Open Transactions deals with the data about balances, rather than actually shipping the actual bars of gold or dollar bills or whatever that those balances represent, that it takes the "pay per API call" approach instead of the "take a percentage of the value of the actual numbers being moved around" approach to fees.

Then again though, such thinking has also lead me to wonder why most of the fees at exchanges aren't on the sending in and shipping out of assets instead of on the matching of offers / transfers of balance amounts between customer accounts.

Customer service department, maybe? I have to admit I like the idea of farming that out as a distinct separate service too. Keep actually using the matching engine / account balances system cheap for those who know how to use it and have links to online schools that teach how to use such systems for those who do not know how to use it or something like that maybe. Because having to read or listen to people is masively massively expensive compared even to maintaining and running software, and burdening people who know what they are doing with the massive overhead cost of handholding people who do not know what they are doing seems kind of unfair. I suspect the reason we see it so much around us is a kind of "tyranny by the majority" since the loud voices seem to be the ones claiming most people are idiots who need constant free handholding...

-MarkM-

https://github.com/FellowTraveler/Open-Transactions

https://github.com/FellowTraveler/Moneychanger

http://open-transactions-tv.github.com/

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=53329.0

Also, go on Freenode IRC network and join channel #opentransactions people are there 24/7

-MarkM-

I wonder how much dollars will be worth when silver is $310 and ounce... Postage might skyrocket too...

-MarkM-

But alternative currencies are forced upon people by their location, skills, tools, situation, the rules under which they are operating and so on.

Consider a character in a MUD that only implements "gold pieces" as currency. You either quit that MUD or make do with "gold pieces".

Consider World of Warcraft. You either quit that game or make do with "WoW gold".

Consider EVE online. You get a choice, whoopie, you can make do with the currency or the approximately as negotiable "permit to play for X amount more time" coupons.

Consider a farmer with a combine-harvester living in wheat country. He has to make do with wheat or quit being a farmer and look for some other currency to buy his government fiat / pay his taxes with.

And so on...

(Consider someone with oodles of GPUs and no ASICs...)

-MarkM-

What would be involved / what would it take to be able to do generic puts, calls, and/or futures?

An example use case for a generic put is someone who is considering building a widget factory. There is no point building the factory unless at least X number of widgets can be sold for Y somethings (such as bitcoins, for example) each at some future date, this future date obviously being a date after the factory has been built. This someone - a prospective widget-company, wishes to "put" X number of widgets at price Y at a future date.

A use case for a generic call is a prospective employee of a widget company, who has been offered a job constructing a widget factory. The job pays X number of widgets after the factory has been completed and has started actually churning out widgets. This prospective employee wishes to be able to "call" Y number of somethings (such as bitcoins, for example) at a price of X widgets at a future date.

Do those two examples get across the basic idea I am trying to get at?

-MarkM-

Hmmm not sure what that Torbutton or Tor browser are about, I run Tor per se, just plain Tor, and Torchat and my Firefox has some foxyproxy thing it uses to make it use the Tor proxy port.

I don't trust the browser not to leak some info by things like doing DNS lookups so I wouldn't trust the browser for anything I actually need to have secure anyway; Torchat seems a better approach than a browser and if making the borwser actually be secure means installing a whole new/separate browser I might as well install Torchat instead, it seems simpler enough to give me more confidence that it is not full of as yet undiscovered holes caused by some stupid resource-hogging eyecandy or earcandy or mindcandy bell or whistle that adds more vulnerability for the sake of encouraging adoption by idiots...

-MarkM-

So the British pound must bring something to the U.S. collar? As must the Yuan? And the Yen? Etc?

-MarkM-

Unfortunately you are probably correct. All games featuring goldpieces, silverpieces, or any other kind of in-game currency will be attacked by the lawyers of such games as can afford to get themselves a "license to allow the world represented within a game to include a representation of currency" so all the super mario or whatever games where the chracter collects some kind of valuable will be legal but all the free open source games like Freeciv which feature currency/gold will be illegal.

I hope though the the sheer idiocy of such a proposal will help keep that time away for a while yet.

Pretty much any MUD, for example, includes a representation of currency. How is MUD gold to be distinguished from World of Warcraft gold? Hopefully quite a conundrum for the regulators...

-MarkM-

The way to sustain a currency's price is to buy it.

Any time the price of a currency whose price you wish to sustain goes down, buy more of that currency.

Nations do that with their national currencies. The Brits, Canucks, and Martians do it with their United Kingdom Britcoins (UKB), Canadian Digital Notes (CDN) and Martian BitCoins (MBC) respectively. General Mining Corp and General Retirement Funds do it with their GMC and GRF currencies too. It is pretty much normal/standard practice.

People can launch as many currencies as they choose, but if they refuse to buy it at a good price it will tend not to have a good price.

Miners who dump the coins they mine cheap are undermining the value of the coins they mine. Seems silly but that seems to be the way miners (and human nature in general maybe) are. Thus maybe miners are not the best folk to have minting coins if the coins hope to be valuable. Take a look at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html and you will see that the coins which have already been fully minted so that miners only get transaction fees not the ability/right to mint coins seem to do pretty well in terms of price. (Their problem though is how to motivate miners to mine them...)

-MarkM-

In some situations brining something away from bitcoin is actually better.

For example consider all the rules and regulations around fiat, and how many people keep trying to get bitcoin to be widely thought of as "a real currency". Imagine the rules and regulations bitcoin could inherit from the fiat world if those people succeed.

So, having coins that are farther away from fiat, by not being bitcoin; while being easy to interact with bitcoin due to having similar lack of reversable transactions, similar PRC calls to talk to its daemons and so on, is great. When regulation hits bitcoin so that litecoin is maybe next on the firing line it will similarly be good that there is yet another something else that is not litecoin as well as being not bitcoin...

-MarkM-

Maybe that too then is another way in which trading on an Open Transactions server might be easier, though this depends on how the specific asset contracts happen to be set up at the server.

On my server, for example, all assets are integers, for many reasons. This means that all prices must be integers, which in turn means that the number of effective digits of granularity you have in prices is determined by the scale of the market you choose to trade on.

A server offering a USD asset would probably use cents, but since this is just a for example hypothetical let us assume a server that has integer dollars and integer bitcoins.

On the scale one market you could offer 9 dollars per bitcoin, ten dollars per bitcoin, eleven dollars per bitcoin etc.

On the scale ten market you could offer 101 dollars per ten bitcoins, 102 dollars per ten bitcoins, etc.

On the scale one hundred market you could offer 1001 dollars per 100 bitcoins, 1002 dollars per 100 bitcoins etc.

On the scale one thousand market you could offer 10001 dollars per 1000 bitcoins, 10002 dollars per 1000 bitcoins etc.

See how the number of effective decimals of price you get is increased by using a larger scale market?

It is my hope that this will help lead to reasonable trades instead of a proliferation of dust-spam tiny little trades...

-MarkM-

It seems to me that such bots might work better on markets that do not have a percentage based fee?

Or does it actually prefer trades so small that a fixed fee per trade (say maybe about half a cent to a nickel in USD or CAD terms) would be larger than the typical percentage-based fees are?

I have not yet actually determined exactly what the fees will be when I do turn on the usage-tokens system on the Digitalis Open Transactions server because until I do turn it on I will not know exactly how many API calls, and thus how many usage tokens, typical scripts will tend to burn through in the course of normal operation. Also it is known that the "test GUI" java client makes many more API calls than it actually technically needs to (its programmer wasn't having to pay for each API call so wasn't really thinking about minimising the number of calls it makes).

So far wild ass guesses though have been that we would probably sell somewhere in the range of 100 to 500 "usage tokens" for a bitNicKeL (NKL), and as you can see by consulting http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html bitNicKeLs have usually been about $0.50 to $0.60 or so each (though still climbing, it seems...)

-MarkM-

Oh that is very nice, yes, thank you for that.

But it is already a step toward letting the players discover prices themselves aka a step away from "the oracle". In fact there is not really "an" oracle anymore, and no reason to think there are only two places where alice and/or bob could discover yet more prices.

Thus, I still think the properly elegant solution I am looking for would be one in which no one other than maybe alice needs concern themselves about what alice uses as an oracle or even whether she uses one at all (aka uses her ass as in pulls numbers out of her ass) and same for bob; thus no oracles other than the players themselves in their oracular capacities (however limited those capacities might be).

Thus I still have not really come up with anything better yet than the thread-titular baskets, though I have been reading upon how MPEx works (and finding out their secret sauce seems to be secret).

I am wondering whether these baskets might become more palatable to people when used/viewed in conjunction with a capital-building "line of collateral-building credit" I have also been thinking about. Basically that idea involves a broker who holds (escrow basically; a margin account kind of thing) a collateral account against which you can borrow up to lets say about 50% of its assessed value. Since this type of margin account already forces you to have 50% of your collateral tied up, maybe the way that these baskets also tie up some funds will not seem so bad, or maybe even the two ideas (the collateral account you can borrow against to buy more collateral that you can borrow against to buy more collateral etc etc etc and the long+short basket currencies idea) can be brought closer together, maybe even somehow to some extent actually integrated...

-MarkM-

Fiat banks are for sure scary.

Probably it would be best to go with a secure fiat storage of your own, not deposited in any bank accounts but, rather, as physical currency in a safe or safe-deposit-box, and only trade "tokens" representing that securely stored fiat on the exchange.

That way all the risk involving fiat banks can be delegated away from the actual exchange-per-se onto third party (or nominally third party; you could run one of thse yourself in addition to running an exchange if you wished) "market makers" who sell people the tokens in return for fiat and buy the tokens back from people in return for fiat.

At first glance this might seem silly, as the first question to pop into your head might be "what for do I need the exchange if these third parties exist, surely the third party could sell me actual fiat instead of tokens representing securely stored fiat???"

However, the big important difference between actual fiat you give to or get from these third parties and the tokens representing securely stored fiat (which you also get from these same third parties) is the "securely stored" part. Bank accounts are not secure in this sense, because what you think is in them can later turn out not to be in them due to transaction reversal by the bank. The "securely stored" fiat the tokens represent, by contrast, cannot be reversed thus are eminently suitable for exchanging with other irreversible currencies.

Another difference is all the fees these third parties would tend to need to charge due to the risks they take on in dealing with banks.

The actual exchange per se being separated from that risk and thus its associated costs can be nice and economical, letting you trade currencies without having to charge a percentage on each trade. (For example it could be implemented using-or-like Open Transactions, charging flat fee per action performed regardless of how much value that action exchanges or transfers.)

Thus once you have gotten away from the fiat banks into the secure tokens you can trade back and forth between umpteen currencies over and over and over again wheeler-dealing daytrading or whatever at far far lower cost (at least as long as your trades are not as tiny as the tiny nominal per action fees per action) than you could on exchanges that incorporate the bailing in and bailing out (to/from fiat banking sytem) risk costs into the actual trading system where the wheeling and dealing is done.

-MarkM-

People have been worrying at this problem since the invention of the web.

Basically it seems to come down to either web browsers are not cut out for this or some kind of plugin or extension or a new data type that fired up an external application to "display" it is needed.

Open Transactions for example plans to have a daemon aka "systray icon" on the user's end that all kinds of applications including browsers, instant messenger clients, videochat clients etc etc etc will talk to for any financial transactions. This encapsulates the finance stuff with all its rigorous security concerns from the normal day to day apps used to surf pr0n and download wares...

At the webserver end this would presumably just involve using some new kind of URL that tells the browser to fire up whatever application the user's desktop has been configured to use to handle that new, financial transactions oriented, type of URL.

-MarkM-