Percentage based fees do seem to be "traditional" it seems. However the Open Transactions software does not even have a mechanism for taking such percentages, so you might find Open Transactions a useful platform, depending upon the scale of trades. Open Transactions charges "usage tokens" for making API calls, so enquiring whether any offers even exist costs about the same as making an offer or taking someone up on an offer, and the actual value of what is offered simply does not enter into the fee calculation at all.

-MarkM-

Being the issuer and the exchange was my original plan.

This "underwriter" concept is part of an attempt to convince me to actually allow entities other than me aka my own Corp (Digitalis Data Services) to issue assets on my server (aka exchange).

Even in the game context it is not the issuer and the exchange that would approach being one entity but, rather, the exchange and the underwriter.

That is, since the underwriting can be proposed as a for-profit business in itself, the exchange could have an underwriting department attached as an additional profit-centre if it chose. Or, possibly more commonly, the exchange and the underwriter would be long term associates, a symbiotic relationship, profiting together in the business of helping Corps to "go public".

It also interestingly creates a moat or barrier in that an ordinary commercial loan would be a cheaper way of raising capital; I admit I am still puzzling out why a Corp would go public via an underwritten IPO instead of simply borrowing money without involving the public. I suppose though that the lure is the possibility of raising far far more capital than the nominal "IPO market cap". That and, of course, the prospect of in effect having a "currency" of your very own to play with.

-MarkM-

I have been watching the securities and loans sections of the forum for quite a while now and am wondering if any of the measures I have been developing for my Open Transactions server would be applicable/useful.

I initially liked the underwriter suggestion, however that has not elicited a lot of enthusiasm, and the last post to its thread even claims it is impossible or maybe they mean inappropriate.

For actual saleable stuff, objects and such that can be liquidated, the concept of "assessors who mean it" seems to have merit. Basically this involves not mere handwaving assessors who look over a Corp's tools machinery furniture retail locations brand awareness in its market and so on and come up with a guess as to how much they could liquidate it for but, rather, actual bids, in effect; firm offers "I will buy that stuff outright for this much if you want to liquidate it".

By having such an assessment of a Corp, I can be fairly confident in the "misc assets" number I plug in along with all the electronic assets on my exchange (server) that the Corp owns to arrive at the "current actual value per share" figures I post at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html

-MarkM-

On the other hand, just the simple existence of a multitude of currencies, some of which are P2P blockchain based and some of which were once blockchains and hope someday to again be blockchains if they can come up with enough mining power, is already a huge boon to the world of metagaming (weaving together multiple games).

Just the fact that any games are free to interface with any of the P2P currencies permits a whole lot of fun economics and finance play to cross boundaries between games, and in the process opens up a whole field of finance games and speculation games so that players can "invest" and "wager" and "hedge" and so on across multiple games without even having to burden themselves with vulnerable avatars wandering around inside the various games being stalked by thieves and assassins or laid siege to by armies or nuked from orbit or whatever the dangers player-avatars might face in the various games.

This also means that characters inside games investing in infrastructure in the game can merge or slippery-slope all the way through to players investing in the deployment of games the hosting of games the development of games and so on.

As an example, consider the Galaxies Online "galaxies not so very very far away" game, which currently is implemented using XNova Redesigned software. It turned out that software totally lacks combat, so perforce those galaxies, conceived as inner defences that will ultimately hopefully defend the Freeciv-based civilised worlds from hostiles from galaxies far far away, are currently limited to peaceful development/exploitation.

However, if someone were to throw some cryptocurrency at the problem of the broken combat system, or, alternatively, at making a data migration routine that can migrate the data over to the 2moons software's database schema, combat could become possible in those galaxies some day or some month or some year or some decade; players from farther-away galaxies who want to bring war-fleets toward the civilised worlds might throw coins at the problem at any time, which in turn creates motivation for the civilised worlds to try to develop a way to send fleets from their no-combat nearby galaxies out to galaxies farther away to take a "good offense" approach to defense...

-MarkM-

How do you prevent a super-machine (ASIC, whatever, something extra-powerful) from presenting itself to the network as a whole bunch of normal consumer grade machines in appearance?

Seems like one could get a bunch of IP addresses and share your hashing power out over them to appear to be many individual users, maybe even an entire mining-group of forty users for example?

-MarkM-

People have suggested in the past that "atomic transactions" can be implemented once the send coins to script functionality is active/working.

This apparently can work between chains too.

So possibly one could do things like lets use bitcoins as actual combat effectiveness, i0coins as what is needed to build infantry (metal, maybe, or something like that, in effect), and ixcoins as what is needed to build naval units (wood, maybe, or something like that, in effect).

Then set up atomic transactions in which I send my navy, represented by a number of ixcoins, to battle your army, represented by a number of i0coins; or maybe we imagine this same sending of coins as representing me sending a bunch of wood to try to seize some of your metal, since the effect of you winning would be you get my wood (ixcoins) and the effect of me winning would be I get your metal (i0coins).

Maybe the transaction can be set up in such a way that depending on which of us sends more bitcoins, representing the force we are backing our move with, somewhere, possibly also modified by the numbers of wood and metal we send (I say possibly since this could also be done integer, one woodcoin versus one metalcoin at a time, or whatever).

The basic idea here, the mechanics, is that transactions can be built, even using more than one chain supposedly, which either complete or do not complete; either the battle happens or it does not, kind of thing.

Even this though I am not sure can be done practically since maybe the way the various signings of the transaction have to happen will always leave one of us in the position of being able to abort the entire battle if we perceive we are about to be the loser...

-MarkM-

The kind of complexity you are probably imagining seems kind of unlikely, but I have thought of trying something relatively simple such as one of those map-less types of games in which anyone can attack anyone without any actual geography getting in the way by making you have to go through some people in order to reach other people.

In such a game each player's "forces" could be represented by coins at addresses, with the coins acting as the powerfulness of the forces represented by the address and possibly with the address itself being able to differentiate "types" of unit so different "types" could have different attack and defense factors against other "types".

Players could specify their "forces" by signing something with the signatures of the addresses, and manifest them by sending coins to the addresses.

But, there isn't any mechanism for removing other people's coins from other people's addresses, so if you think of the coins in an address as akin to hit points and try to deal damage in the form of reduced number of coins being at an address after the attack, the problem of how to actually cause that to happen makes it clear this would not be an overlay on a currency chain, it would be a game chain, whose clients/servers/daemons would be enforcing some rules by which players can cause other players to change the balances at addresses...

-MarkM-

Depends... how many percent a day can you offer them?

Another option might be to use tokens.

Instead of proving you have their bitcoins, maybe an equivalent number of bitcoins could be proven to be in a vault somewhere and you proven to hold that many digi-bitcoin tokens representing them?

Basically don't deal directly with bitcoin, instead tell people to go buy digi-bitcoin tokens and send the tokens to you instead of the bitcoins?

As I operate an Open Transactions server I am in a boat not totally unlike yours.

My server deals with tokens, and I would prefer not to have to keep bailing actual coins out of cold storage all day.

One approach I thought of is posted at https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=102316.0 but response has been underwhelming.

Ideally some number of bitcoins would be in a cold wallet so cold it would be a massive undertaking to get them out, and instead of taking any out people would sell tokens to market-makers, or as some call them, "exchangers". Similarly, people wanting the tokens would buy them from those third parties. I would merely operate the server and have in my "last will and testament" a method by which the cold wallet could be put back together from the various safe deposit boxes its parts reside in and decrypted with keys whose various parts are buried in various backyards, with of course umpteen redundant backup systems extremely convoluted and secure...

-MarkM-

The old "darknet" approach, eh? Yeah quite a lot of players have been picking them up while they're cheap...

-MarkM-

Well maybe it would be worthwhile to dig deeper into how a completely anonymous service can be trusted?

Could one pretend to have given up on doing it oneself, claim to have therefore sold the business model to some silky roady type corporation that operates only over Tor and i2p and Freenet, and recommend that people go see them for that service since you yourself lack the security bastions and armed guards and locational obscurity that they are able to deploy?

Someone claimed to pretend not to be doing the business he actually does, maybe he can throw some light on ways and means.

-MarkM-

Coins that most people regard as "worthless" are actually really good candidates for game-currencies.

If these things can be picked up free or almost free players will likely find use for them; if they are so cheap that one faction of players can buy up most of the coins, they might well even skyrocket in value due to having an actual "backer", a clear faction that regards the coin as its own currency to be upheld over all the currencies all the other factions of players espouse/back...

Take a look at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html for some very interesting numbers...

-MarkM-

The idea of using games as a way of distributing cryptocurrency to end-users has been brought up many times already, but most of the time the plan was  to harness the computing power of the computers players use to connect to the games; most such plans seem to have faded away as far as I am aware.

I have been watching various experiments though in which the players are not doing the network number-crunching themselves, they are simply using the currencies. Some of the currencies have been so low in value (and in difficulty) that handing them out to players has been very affordable, and even profitable.

Some interesting things have been observed; for example currencies clearly associated with specific factions, and not open to "just anyone" to mint, have skyrocketed in value compared to currencies anyone/everyone is able to mint themselves.

( See http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html )

As mentioned in the previous post, the CoffeeMUD platform has been added to the repertoire of games being used in these experiments; for some time it was accessible only via i2p as mudgaard.i2p but recently it has been made reachable (far less securely) at http://mudgaard.knotwork.com:27744

So far it looks like two types of currencies work well with games: one is very very low value coins, so cheap that they are pretty much useless for anything other than serving as game-currencies; another is currencies minted by specific factions of players so that it is clear to players exactly which faction's currency it is so they know who they should be expecting to "back" it and, from the relative strength of that faction, how strong it might be expected to be or become compared to currencies issued by other factions.

-MarkM-

I believe I was understanding. I was suggesting you are not too paranoid, that rather it might merely be that you had avoided being a target so far due to not yet holding enough coins to make yourself a target; that once you hold enough coins you well might be a target thus you are not being paranoid you are wisely thinking ahead.

Joel, his problem is he insists on revealing how much he holds.

Presumably he has to actually prove it, so even if he proves it only to individuals and only to the extent of how much of that individual's money he holds, anyone capturing such an individual would be able to see for sure that he holds at least the amount he has proven to that individual he holds...

-MarkM-

Depends... has it already been public knowledge for quite a while that you hold as many bitcoins as this business you are planning will hold?

Will you still hold that many of your own when you start also holding those of the business?

Maybe it merely has not yet seemed worthwhile to target you yet due to your not being known yet to hold enough to make it seem worthwhile to try?

-MarkM-

There is no rounding if all the variables are integers. There is nothing to round as there are no decimals in the first place.

In fact it is the processor hardware that does this I think, only some language that does not distinguish integers from reals could even get around it maybe. In C you'd have to cast to real somewhere in there or something like that.

Maybe you are imagining that the eight decimals you see displayed imply decimals exist in the code? The code uses integers, the display routines stick a decimal in before the last eight digits of the actual integer value used internally.

-MarkM-

All the I0coin tokens in the Digitalis Open Transactions server represent I0coins that date back on the blockchain at least one hard-coded checkpoint.

That is not a whole lot of I0coins, but if more I0coins are bailed into the system the number of tokens available can be increased after at least one more checkpoint is out there in the majority of active clients. Detecting that might involve having to change the version number when a checkpoint is added.

This approach allows low hashing power chains to continue to be used via proxy as it were, using tokens, until such time as the Massively Merged Mining project and anyone else interested in protecting altchains by throwing hashing power at them manages to get a decent amount of hashing going on them again.

-MarkM-

I do not think that is the real problem.

The real problem seems to me to be your desire/need to brag about how many coins you hold.

If the amount was not bragged about / published / known then you could have magic words/commands that retrieve 15,000 keys but retrieve decoy keys instead of real keys given the wrong magic words/commands.

But bragging about how many coins you hold makes it necessary for any decoy to hold as many coins as the real target, which kind of spoils the usefulness of the decoy.

Fort Knox brags about having lots of wealth on the premises, maybe the service you have in mind would be more suitable for them to offer than for you to offer...

Gosh, bragging has a downside? Who'd'a thunk?

-MarkM-

EDIT: Hey waitasec, did I just basically imply there is some security to be found in obscurity?

Most compilers?

That associativity is part of the language itself isn't it? So that a compiler that does not do it that way would be a different language's compiler.

So again, back to it being a problem compiler rather than problem code.

Could run into the problem though maybe if someone who does not bother to pay close attention to the associativity of the language they are porting from tries to port it though I suppose.

-MarkM-

Since the variables are all presumably integers of a known number of bits, how is integer arithmetic compiler-dependent? That sounds like a really bad compiler design more than a code problem?

tl;dr integers do not round, they truncate...

-MarkM-

A few "crazy" ideas come to mind.

One that is kind of blown by mentioning it here at all would be a "pretend secure coldwallet service" which holds signed documents from you they can use to prove you and they both agree you do not actually have anything of value in their care, so that if for any reason at all anyone including you does try to claim they have something of yours they are off the hook. It would function by simply being a very public pretense that your emergency coldwallet is safe in their care. The purpose of this would be so that if someone raids you can claim the coins are in someone else's care and point at who; you would not actually place anything in their care, their purpose is simply to be a decoy, you and they both maintain a public sham that they have your emergency coldwallet.

Another idea is put your emergency coldwallet into police evidence locker, as evidence of your being blackmailed or under duress or murdered or rendered incommunicado by violence or whatever. It will only be needed in the event of such a scenario, so anyone coming for it is evidence of such an event having occurred. Arrange that all your coins get sent to that wallet automatically if you hit a panic button or take your hand off a deadman switch. Then in the event someone comes to your house you can show them the button or switch and explain that the coins are all in the evidence locker as evidence that they are at your house.

You could even use both methods; when someone comes to your house you tell them about the pretend secure wallet service people; when someone comes to their house they tell them about the evidence locker...

NOTE: Any number of online services could be monitoring your evidence-locker wallet address, ready to send in SWAT or call fire brigade or whatever in response to cries for help sent out by means of pre-agreed amounts being sent to it from pre-agreed dire-straights wallets etc...

-MarkM-