Doesn't java 6 also have vulnerabilities?

Most security sites seemed to be saying do NOT go back to older java...

-MarkM-

Aha! My previous post did give me an idea for a way to build something that could make a profit for people who buy it with bitcoins.

We make a corp that offers gains to people in some other currency. The way it makes those gains is by using that other thing to buy bitcoins. The way it is able to cause gains for people who already had bitcoins is, it does not pay out to the other currency people the full amount the bitcoins have gained in value.

Hmm, actually maybe even that seems maybe at least a little scammy. People investing their other currency in it would be better off simply buying bitcoins directly themselves... But I guess that is where our profit comes from: we get to skim some of the profit they would have made by holding bitcoins instead of this offering of ours...

-MarkM-

EDIT: For someone willing to be active rather than passive, maybe providing bitcoins to be cold stored as backing for tokens would be worthwhile if you are prepared to make money by acting as a market-maker...

The problem is that bitcoin itself is an investment, so it doesn't make much sense to borrow it to invest. It makes more sense to borrow something else to invest in bitcoins. It is very hard to come up with a non-scam reason to take a loan denominated in bitcoins, even borrowing litecoins or devcoins or ixcoins or i0coins might actually make more sense; sure they have more room to massively jump in price but have they actually been growing in value as fast as bitcoins? Best of all would be to borrow fiat or something about as stable as fiat.

So what would force a borrower to have to resort to borrowing bitcoins, of all things?

Maybe being such a horrible credit risk that they are totally unable to borrow anything else?

A great return could be offered in almost anything other than bitcoins simply by using that other thing to buy and hold bitcoins.

-MarkM-

I'm not convinced it is actually necessary to handle fiat at all in order to hedge it, long it, and short it. See https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=103699.0

-MarkM-

Okay, lets say we have an obscure newfangled currency we invented, of which we have shitloads on hand, but for some reason common Earthlings don't seem to think our wonderful newfangled currency is actually worth much, if worth anything at all.

Lets also say we don't have enough fiat on hand to offer to buy a few million of our newfangled currency at dollars apiece.

However, our newfangled currency cost us almost nothing to create. If we could get a dollar apiece for it we'd be stinking rich.

Now if we were prepared to sacrifice a few hundred thousand to pay out as "interest", we could start up a nice HYIP, denominated in our currency, so the whole already existing panoply of HYIP-marketing channels could pick up on us.

If somehow our coins are already fetching a dollar or more per, like bitcoins were last year after the crash, that would be really helpful because we would not have to spend any fiat ourselves at all in order for people to see there is a market for this "interest" we offer to give away to them.

The only "catch" to getting this "interest" from us is, you have to have some of our currency first, as we only "pay interest" on our own currency, not on, for example, fiat currency. So if you want in on these amazing "interest rates", you gotta find a way to get hold of some of our currency.

It can be easy to pay 1%/day for a long period of time under the right circumstances. One such circumstance is that of having millions sitting around that cost you almost nothing and that would in fact drive their own worth down to almost nothing if you actually tried to sell them. So you probably actually want people to re-invest rather than to go cash out right away, because even just the few hundred thousand you plan to give away in this "promotional campaign" could actually drive prices down if more people cash out than are being attracted in. This is the weak point in the plan, because of course all experienced goldgame-players aka HYIP-players know to get their seed coins out as fast as possible so as to be playing only with their earnings. Luckily plenty of people who for whatever reason fail to execute that tactic play goldgames / HYIPs...

-MarkM-

I don't think you understand what I suggested, which, if it is an investment at all, is an investment in marketing / advertising / propaganda; also, no default would be involved. People with millions of almost-worthless bitcoins hand out a few hundred thousand to people to increase interest in the coin. Before they are done, the coins are no longer almost-worthless. Yum yum.

-MarkM-

EDIT: Also, a lot of investing in business costs fiat. This plan costs bitcoins, yet could suck fiat into the system. To the extent any "ponzi" is involved, bitcoin itself in whole is the "ponzi". This plan is merely a marketing campaign.

I suspect the reference is to the latest bitcoin-killing solid coin...

-MarkM-

I still think it could make sense for a bunch of early adopters holding millions of bitcoins between them to have had Pirate run this as a way to drive up the value of bitcoins. It does seem like there is nothing like massive amounts of HYIP action to get a fledgling currency off the ground.

Of course the catch in this theory now is why this extra delay? Why not just hand him the half a million coins to pay everyone off?

Maybe buying up all the debt though, to minimise how much ends up getting paid off, might actually further help maintain the value of bitcoins?

-MarkM-

EDIT: Wow, the silence is deafening all of a sudden...

Probably not, because getting it doesn't pay. Remember the old saw about getting things the getting of wihich undermines one's paycheque?

Maybe realsolid started out this way too, the extremism only arises as more and more realities keep getting in the way of the riches being gotten quick?

-MarkM-

You already are not restricted to one exchange. You can issue on any servers that will let people issue assets. YOu can run umpteen servers yourself distributed all over the world. Shares inherently have centralisation in their issuer so there is no point using a blockchain except possibly in a case where you are timestamping documents by means of a blockchain. There are other timestamp services out there though so even for timestamps maybe a blockchain is not really important. You could put a classified ad in newspapers around the world for example with hash of change of ownership document of a share.

The only time when a blockchain makes sense for shares is in cases such as bitcoin, litecoin, devcoin and so on: cases where the "company" is itself a distributed entity and the "issuing" is also distributed, each miner being an issuer of shares. It is actualyl a miracle that such shares are worth anything considering most of those "issuers" are not actually intended to "back" the coins, merely to "dump" them for fiat...

-MarkM-

That is where brokers / brokerages come in maybe?

Afterall its hard to get a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, yet joe public still managed to get hold of shares traded there...

-MarkM-

I agree that blockchain currencies are pretty much shares, albeit highly divisible shares. This is leveraged in my system as a means of computing the worth of the coins, since it is feasible in the case of certain coins to add up the assets of the issuer and divide them by the number of coins to determine the value of the "coins aka shares". It is probably this, in fact, that accounts for the huge values such coins have achieved as compared to various coins that lack a specific "backer" / "issuer".

Voting and dividends are, again, centralised things. Votes go to the central issuer, dividends issue from the central issuer. So no problem doing those on the issuer's Open Transactions server. The dividends can even then be withdrawn as blinded cash tokens, though what those tokens would be backed by I do not know. More shares? Does it make sense to issue dividends in the form of more shares?

I am against dividends anyway myself. They let people monopolise while still getting passive income. I prefer that anyone who wants to extract money have to sell shares to do so, to help encourage liquidity instead of having all shares snapped up at IPO then never traded thereafter.

-MarkM-

There is another idea that would go part-way toward p2p trading of shares, and that is to enable the blinded cash system - the mint - for assets whose type is shares.

Right now I have only created mints for the assets that are considered a type of currency rather than being shares.

However I believe that the only thing stopping people from withdrawing untraceable blinded cash form of shares is simply the fact I have not created mints for assets of that type.

Given blinded token form for shares, people can trade them person to person all they wish. When someone eventually deposits a share, the server cannot tell which share it was. This assumes some volume of course; obviously if only one person ever withdrew a share in cash form the share being deposited cannot be any other one than that one. But if lots of people withdraw them as cash tokens, there is no tellng when one is deposited whose withdrawal that deposit corresponds to.

Since shares have in any case to be centralised as to their issuer, this seems like it should work fine. The issuer runs an Open Transactions server, issues the shares as cash tokens, and people can p2p them all they want by person to person exchanging the cash tokens.

-MarkM-

i2p or Tor is do-able using an Open Transactions server...

I'd mention some such servers were it not that people might then think I run them; on the other hand if people don't think they know who runs them would they trust them?

Well the nice thing about Open Transactions is it is really the issuer of the asset, not the operator of the server on which it is traded, that people need to trust. Maybe we can get you set up with a server you run yourself in your greenhouse?

-MarkM-

Maybe the blockchain is only really needed for proving which transfer of a given share is the most recent, and thus currently valid, one?

I could sign over a share ownership ceritificate to someone else, publish the hash of the new signed certificate, and wait for that hsh to be sufficiently deep in the blockchain. Any certificates purporting to sign over the same share to someone else would then be invalid, as the next one to be valid in the blockchain would have to be the one I just signed, signed over in turn by the person I signed it over to to someone else.

We could either have some kind of p2p protocol by which these actual certificates are published, or they could be published to a usenet group for a public record, and some backup harder to find to shut down means like maybe private/secret usenet networks, p2p filesharing networks (freenet for example) etc.

-MarkM-

The Short+Long baskets described at https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=103699.0 act, in effect, as floating rate secured loans.

I had been looking into other methods of providing secured loans, but this basket system is so simple and elegant and multi-purpose (in that it also acts as a means of shorting or going long in an asset), and makes "debt" so simple and easy to trade and to discover prices, that I am now thinking of just going with these baskets instead of worrying about the other various ideas of how to provide lines of (secured) credit...

-MarkM-

Good luck with that. No one has managed to come up with a p2p exchange yet.

It might be worthwhile to do so though as regardless of whether coloured coins ever happen there are already plenty of flavours of coin that could do with a p2p exchange to exchange between them all.

-MarkM-

Well one good thing about this method is the exchange doing it does not have to be able to handle the type of asset that is being shorted or longed at all, nor does it need to have any way of discovering any prices of them; in effect the prices of them are discovered by the prices the shorts and longs sell for. There is thus no dependence on some external ticker for a price against which to compare or to settle. People simply directly buy and sell the baskets, the shorts, and the longs.

Lets take CAD as an example. The  exchange could make BTCslCAD baskets available at a cost of 2 BTC per basket.

The basket would consist of one BTCsCAD unit worth one bitcoin minus one CAD, and one BTClCAD unit worth one bitcoin plus one CAD.

The plus one CAD and minus one CAD cancel out, so there is no need for any support for actual CAD; the exchange can persist in dealing only with non-fait currencies. These Short+Long baskets and their comprising shortcoins and longcoins are purely bitcoin-based wagering tokens. The server redeems completed baskets, for two bitcoins (plus maybe some slight profit for going to the trouble). The users choose how much, or even whether, to buy or sell the shortcoins or longcoins for. They are simply tokens that by convention represent either shorting CAD or going long CAD.

In effect you are borrowing a CAD worth of bitcoin if you buy a basket and sell the longcoin, retaining the shortcoin. The shortcoin is a bitcoin that is short by one CAD from being a full bitcoin. The longcoin is a bitcoin that is long by a CAD from being merely a single whole bitcoin.

(Whether it is by retaining the shortcoin or by retaining the longcoin that you in effect borrowed is confusing isn't it? By holding the shortcoin, you are basically out by the value of a CAD. So you can think of that as being in debt to that amount. You need the longcoin back to repay that shortage so you can turn in the completed basket for a full two bitcoins.)

-MarkM-

Well it is based on bitcoin code that compiled on windows so there is no reason it should fail to compile on windows. Maybe someone who is used to windows can help you with whatever specific compiler or linker errors you are getting...

Then too once you do get it compiled, I believe there is still a bounty avalable for anyone who provides windows binaries...

-MarkM-

What will you be using as an exchange for, say, these "twitcoins" for example?

If you use Open Transactions for your twitcoins or whatever coins, you'd also have markets too automatically...

-MarkM-