Democracy. Atleast make collective choices the right way. Democracy in the sense of everybody voting but not in the UK government sense where you elect a leader. Here we have no leader, everybody decides on everything.
What if everybody decides to imprison old ladies who don't turn over their money ? As long as everybody voted to do it first, does that make it okay? What about if 10 guys walking down the street decide to beat up a nerd and steal his backpack? Is that okay, as long as those ten guys took a vote first? |
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The freedom vs democracy question wording confused me
It's just worth pointing out that they are two separate things. |
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each citizen able to log into a secure P2P voting system to vote on important decisions If you had to choose between democracy and freedom, so that only one of those was primary, and the other was secondary, which should override the other? |
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It is beyond belief that governments would slit their own monetary throats by making gold once again money
I don't think it was governments who "made" gold into money. Rather, gold was selected as money by the invisible hand of the market. Since then government force has attempted to control it, to "standardize" it, to dilute it, to confiscate it, to replace it, to suppress it, etc to varying degrees of success. But absent such forces, gold would resolve back to its historical role purely based on market forces. In fact Bitcoin and gold are very similar in this respect. Bitcoin also has become a form of money purely due to natural market forces, and governments / central banks would love to suppress it just as they have suppressed gold, though BTC has properties that make this difficult for them to do. |
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Is this project going to support colored coins and multi-sig ?
Both are important to my own project.
Yes it should be capable of handling multi-sig transactions and other types of complex transactions like bitcoin, but probably not all the types of transactions that bitcoin supports. And I'm not exactly sure how colored coins are supposed to work, but it seems like something which is layered on top of bitcoin and I see no reason it couldn't be layered on top of the mini-blockchain scheme in a similar way. Of course we could include something in the protocol which makes it easier to "color" coins. I'd need to look into the colored coin idea more before giving you a proper answer. Colored coins allow you to use the blockchain for issuing real-world assets. Like issuing "gold ounce" units that are tracked on the blockchain. In OT, this is useful for divorcing the issuer from the transaction server. (It works in combination with multi-sig.) |
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FYI, Open-Transactions supports smart contracts, and there is a sample "Escrow" smart contract that comes with OT.
(So you can use OT for escrow.)
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Is this project going to support colored coins and multi-sig ?
Both are important to my own project.
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This isn't a complete answer, but FYI I believe 20 is the max (not 50.)
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Please supply your apt sources file.
FYI I'm using a clean install of Ubuntu. (In fact, it even boots up clean every time, from a CD.) So I will get it booted up and paste the sources, but FYI they will be the same as whatever you would normally find in a clean install. Maybe activate some of the extra repositories that come off by default, like Universe(?). Maybe add that to the instructions? Seems the instructions do not work "out of the box" without that missing step? |
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Please supply your apt sources file.
FYI I'm using a clean install of Ubuntu. (In fact, it even boots up clean every time, from a CD.) So I will get it booted up and paste the sources, but FYI they will be the same as whatever you would normally find in a clean install. |
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Well I was using clean installs of Knoppix and Ubuntu 13.04
What am I missing?
If you want to provide step-by-step instructions, I'd be happy to install from scratch (again) and then give you the output wherever it diverges from your instructions.
Anyway, if it's happening to me, it will happen to others. Perhaps the instructions should be updated to just download Electrum.tgz and use the existing binary, which is what I ended up having to do. That way no one else will run into this problem.
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I tried it with Knoppix and Ubuntu 13.04
apt-get install python-pip <=== not found.
Then I searched for easy_install per the instructions using Ubuntu package manager. Result? No results found.
I did apt-get update etc.
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Is the bank black list site down? Can't connect...
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There is more gold bullion above ground right now, than silver bullion.
There is? Do you have a source for this? Also any figures about how much is in the ground of both (preferably with measures how hard it is to acquire). I don't hold any silver of gold because I have no secure way of holding it and think the paper variant kind of defeats the purpose. May be I should find a good way to hide some silver in my house  It's been a while, but Google turns this up: http://www.goldsilverbullion.com/SilverBullMarket.htm |
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That silver is still around. It just isn't in bullion bars.
A lot of silver is subject to inelastic demand. For example, let's say that each iPhone ($700) contains 20 cents worth of silver. Next, let's say that the price of silver goes up by 10 times. (After which, each iPhone contains 2 dollars worth of silver.) Will Apple stop purchasing silver? No. They will keep purchasing the same amount of silver even if the price goes up 10 times. After all, what is $2 to them, when the iPhone sells for $700? Much of the industry that consumes silver is subject to this sort of inelastic demand. And once the silver is consumed into devices like this, it's not economical to ever recycle it. It might as well just be gone forever. Another example is certain medical cloth, which contain tiny amounts of silver due to its antibacterial properties. Mirrors, etc. 90% of the silver that has ever been mined, that has been sitting in vaults for the past 5000 years, has been consumed in the last 100 years. There is more gold bullion above ground right now, than silver bullion. |
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FT,
The difference between Mt.Gox USD and Bearer bonds is that Mt. Gox is a middle man in all transactions and can enforce KYC. Mt. Gox does not issue bearer bonds. If an OT server practiced full KYC regulations for all accounts and the issuer 'knows the server' then clearly OT will work and be entirely legal. In fact, it probably offers better privacy than Bitcoin because only 3 parties know about any given transaction and only 2 parties know all of your transactions. With Bitcoin & Bitshares once your identity is tied to an address or the address of someone you have done business with your privacy is heavily compromised.
The problem with most traditional approaches to USD vs X trading is the expectation that the USD must be an IOU. On Gox you are trading Gox Owes Me USD vs Gox Owes Me BTC and not actually trading USD vs BTC. The paradigm is then adopted by OT with issuers. What only savvy economists recognize is that Gox USD != Bank of America USD != Treasuries != Paper USD and that all of these IOU's actually trade against one another based upon the time-value-cost of moving value between these different instruments. That said, most people recognize that the value of an IOU USD from most public / trusted entities is about the same (unless Gox blocks USD withdraws)
In all of the cases above there is a counter-party who can default either intentionally, accidentally, or through government coercion. All that customers really care about is that the purchasing power of Gox USD is relatively stable (+/- transaction fees) with the purchasing power of BOA USD. So if you can create a crypto-currency that achieves this relative stability against USD then it is a suitable proxy for trading actual USD. If this crypto-currency is not an IOU backed by a 'trusted' issuer, then you have a unique and useful alternative to OT issuers.
BitShares is a crypto-'currency' that allows users to take collateralized short positions in USD. The collateral is measured in BitShares and the cost of going short equal to the cost of the USD you are short. While you are short your funds are tied up along with the proceeds you received by selling the BitUSD. This will force users to cover their short position in the future. The loss of dividends enforces a carrying cost on the short position and a profit on the long position.
The last ingredient is having the block-chain automatically cover the short position (via placing a bid in the market) any time the margin starts to fall. This protects the long position (BitUSD) from losses.
With enough participants in the market the price of BitUSD will be just as stable as GoxUSD vs BOA USD and yet there are no issuers per-say. In theory you could claim that the shorts are the issuers, but they are anonymous and there is no need to trust them. They cannot run with the money nor fail to redeem it.
Lastly, simply depositing USD into an OT server does not earn me interest where as simply owning BitUSD will pay you dividends (from all trx fees in the market). This makes it far more compelling to own BitUSD over OT USD.
I guess I would need to know more to be sure, but so far it seems intriguing. If it works (if this allows you to issue USD digitally without needing any USD issuer) then it would be great. I'm sure OT could take advantage of it. All of that said, I would love to know how we can work together to automate voting pools because I would like to have a trust-free way of transacting with BitUSD on a OT server. This would provide a lot of privacy enhancements and help scale the transaction volume.
I assume it's blockchain-based. I think as long as the blockchain you are using supports multi-sig, then we could put "BitUSD" into a voting pool just as easily as putting BTC or colored coins. I'd definitely be interested in doing so, if you've managed to eliminate the issuer. Let's say I actually have $100 cash USD -- how do I get it into the system? Let's say I have $100 in BitUSD -- how do I get it back out into cash again? As I said, intriguing idea so far. |
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OT fails almost all of the criteria.
...
All of that said, I still believe that there is a place for OT servers as high-frequency trading hubs and *trusted* banks for digital cash. OT needs to be marketed at current exchanges as a far more secure, audit-able, and accountable system. If Mt. Gox or BitStamp implemented an OT api for managing your account it would be a major selling point.
Some more replies / comments... 1) It is based upon trust in issuers In the case of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, it will be based on trust in voting pools, with the risk distributed across pools on the client side. In the case of gold, dollars, euros, etc you are correct that you have to trust the issuer who is holding your gold. But how else could you trade gold digitally, if there were not an issuer holding the gold? The same goes with dollars. I'm curious how you would have dollar trades without issuers. OT has a user-centric philosophy. We cannot entirely eliminate the risk of issuers, but the idea is to distribute the risk across multiple issuers, for example, using basket currencies. I don't know how you would eliminate issuers entirely, and still be able to trade fiat and asset-based currencies digitally, but I'm curious how you plan to do so. 4) Issuers are creating bearer bonds (illegal) I suppose this depends on the jurisdiction. But I should point out that the issuer would be fully KYC/AML compliant. MtGox, for example, allows users to trade "dollar units" and "BTC units" that are issued by MtGox -- and MtGox allows users to withdraw those units, through a KYC/AML compliant process. (And MtGox is still operating...) 3) Operating an OT server is like operating a mini centralized exchange. The big difference being that OT servers are unable to forge receipts -- and with voting pools, an OT server will also be unable to steal your coins. 5) No dividends / financial incentive for *everyone* to use the system. I'm not sure if I'm interpreting this correctly, but FYI, OT does allow you to issue stocks, and to pay dividends on those to shareholders. What prevents false-bids from being published from other OT servers? Currently OT allows you to create bids even when there isn't enough money in your account to cover them. (But the bid will be removed from the market automatically if it ever fails to complete a trade.) It would be possible, though, to alter OT so that it "stashes" the funds inside the bid itself, similarly to escrow, if that is preferable. In either case, a trade could not complete unless there were funds to back it up. I fully recognize that within a single server the price mechanism is valid, just not sure the purpose of BitMessage aside from finding arbitrage opportunities and that would imply some kind of trading bot and the ability to rapidly move funds between to OT servers. I think the actual discovery process would be very rare. Most of the time your client will already have the list of servers it's using. And if its configured to perform arbitrage between any given two servers, presumably it's already created accounts on both sides. We haven't added server-to-server wiring of funds yet, but it could be done (with or without Bitmessage) relatively easily. We'll have a technical preview available in the coming months and I'm wondering if you can find the time to come see what we've built and give us some feedback. I really value your contributions to this community with OT and respect your skills. It would be great to get some of your feedback and suggestions. Thank you. As you know, we are in our second round of funding and so we are extremely busy on this end, but if I get time to check it out I'd be happy to let you know my thoughts. Good luck again. |
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2) The model of broadcasting price information via BitMessage is not a valid means of establishing a market price.
This is not entirely accurate... See this post on the subject: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=220603.msg2758330#msg2758330Basically a client's "order book" is an amalgamation of the order books on the various OT servers he's using. Most trades will happen instantly on those servers, since no Bitmessage "discovery" process is necessary in such cases. Arbitrage should normalize prices across them all. Using Bitmessage for discovery is only necessary for finding a new server, after which point any trades there will also happen instantly. Also, any delays introduced by Bitmessage are a result of BM's p2p nature, but other (faster) discovery layers are also possible. Just wanted to clarify that. P.S. good luck on the project, looks cool. |
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Haha, good one  How's the Ripple-style multi-hop transaction routing functionality coming along in Open-Transactions? Let me know if I can help at all. Ripple is great, but I think it would be nice to also have a multi-hop system where transactions aren't published to the whole world. I'm sure they can be made to interoperate at some point down the line too... It will be similar but not the same. In Ripple, IMO the critical concept is the P2P issuance of credit lines. Based on this, it becomes possible to route payments across those credit lines, converting from one currency to the next at each "hop." Whereas in Open-Transactions, each server has its own market. If a user is connected to 12 different servers, for example, then his "order book" exists on the client side, and is an amalgamation of the orders on those 12 servers. Software clients will be able to provide arbitrage between those servers, which should normalize prices. Trades should happen instantly.But what if there are other offers, on other servers, which might offer a better price? This is where we intend to use Bitmessage as a discovery layer, to allow users to discover other users and other servers for trading on. There is a bigger delay here (introduced by Bitmessage) but it's only at the point of discovery, and not for all trades. (And of course faster discovery layers are possible, though Bitmessage will be the first implementation.) From there, it's actually preferable not to convert into 4 or 5 currencies along the way, since that is more expensive than converting directly from one currency to the other. (I expect that arbitrage and market makers will make this easy and accessible to people.) Even Ripple, presumably, is designed to save money by "finding the shortest path."In the odd case where it's actually necessary to convert into several currencies along the way, this can be handled by the client, versus building it into the network itself. This does not guarantee atomicity, but I don't think that's a very big concern. The OT client will only operate within price limits defined by the user, and such rare trades will be performed only when all "hops" are available for trade. In the end, the functionality will be the same, but it will not involve credit lines and rarely will require more currencies other than the basic 1 or 2 preferred by the 2 parties. (In one case, a party simply sends funds to another party, who then converts those funds on any market if he wishes to do so. In the other case, a party will place a market offer in one currency, which will be purchased by the other party with the second currency.) |
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