Quote: "do not question the limited supply"

Oh yeah good point. Once "the man" owns all the bitcoins, except maybe for some trivial token number of them all the billions of peons will have to make do with, maybe the virtues of altcoins will start to occur to people. Hey "the man", wanna buy up all those too? Bargain prices!

-MarkM-

"Your deposit guarantees that LargeCoin will ship you a C200 IMU by July 31, 2012,"

So did no-one deposit, or what?

-MarkM-

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In light of discussion in one of the bitcoinica threads, I would like to make clear that because my Open Transactions server represents actual assets such as bitcoins, devcoins, namecoins, or whatever by means of tokens tradeable on the server, it is important to realise that this means any theft, loss, etcetera of any of the "actual" assets those tokens represent is in effect simply the changing of the specific token type into a fractional reserve token, inasmuch as it is no longer fully backed by the asset it had hitherto represented.

Specifically and potentially importantly, this means if bitcoins get stolen but devcoins do not, then bitcoin tokens are, by that theft, rendered fractional reserve whilst devcoin tokens remain fully backed.

To be very clear here: each asset is distinct and separate. To the extent permitted by law and potentially even to the extent permitted by civil disobedience, the intent is that losses of one asset are totally distinct from all other assets. There is to be no dilution or lessening of asset X holdings due to losses of asset Y.

Specifically, upon liquidation or receivership or both of the server, there is to be no compensating of holders of one asset by means of depriving holders of some other asset of that other asset. If dollars are stolen, too bad for dollar holders, cryptocoin holders should not be affected. And vice versa.

- -MarkM-

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It occurs to me that with the way Open Transactions works, what is happening when actual fiat or coins used to "back" a token ("asset") in the server vanish is simply that that specific asset type has become a "fractional reserve" asset. So if bitcoins get stolen, oh dear the bitcoin tokens are now fractional reserve bitcoin tokens no longer fully backed bitcoin tokens. If the devcoins, however, are still secure, then the devcoin tokens are still fully backed...

-MarkM-

Wow. I am leaning back toward thinking the safest way to handle cryptocoins might be to have a deadman switch that sends them all out to their actual owners automatically if only I can merely delay the vultures from decrypting the key-storage long enough for that deadman switch to kick in...

-MarkM-

Bottom line is, if I have a shitload of client fiat funds in the Royal Bank of Canada that I am holding in trust for those clients, and a shitload of bitcoins in bitcoin wallets I am holding in trust for possibly completely distinct separate clients, and a bunch of devcoins similarly, and a bunch of namecoins similarly, etcetera etcetera etcetera, how should I set things up if I want to ensure that if/when the FDIC and Royal Bank and government of Canada screw us out of the (value of the?) fiat it is only those clients who were foolish enough to have fiat in trust instead of cryptocoins in trust that suffer the loss?

-MarkM-

But, fiat banks nonetheless do have things referred to as "trust accounts", and so do lawyers etc who actually put the fiat of those accounts into banks.

So if banks actually mixing up which coin or bill belongs to who does not render their so called "trust accounts" a null concept / invalid concept why should the details of how wallets work in bitcoin invalidate the same concept when it it merely exhibits the same gaping holes/loopholes?

-MarkM-

Ahhh, I see. I did not know that. I guess I was imagining a certain amount of "coin control" was implied that isn't actually in there. Thanks.

-MarkM-

Hmm, I did know that fees get suspiciously "stolen", not necessarily coming from the "account" whose transaction the fee is "for", but all the stuff about associating addresses with "accounts" is bogus too???

Re "secured" assets:

I am a bit fuzzy on what "secured" might be intended to mean, too. For example my Open Transactions server provides tokens "secured" by coins in wallets, but it is far from clear that this means they are "secured" assets or even that the actual coins in the wallets are "secured"...

-MarkM-

Oh wonderful. So basically they don't actually work the way the rpc commands make them seem to work / imply they work?

-MarkM-

Thank you, repentence.

Part of my interest in this is forward-looking.

It already occurred to me that if I would like accounts to be considered as being held in trust I should make sure my heirs and assigns, or whoever steps in to run things if I get run over by a bus, knows exactly which accounts are considered held in trust and which are considered to be part of the operation's own operating capital/assets...

-MarkM-

By providing examples and lessons that might have helped pirate get it right, they might have helped pirate achieve at least somewhat whatever pirate's project does for bitcoin that is good.

-MarkM-

You don't understand what I mean by satoshi client style accounts within wallets, it seems.

Read up on the accounts commands provided by the satoshi bitcoind.

The GUI might even also mention them.

In brief, accounts are distinct collections of addresses within a wallet, their balances being thus the sum of the balances of the addresses associated with that specific account.

So you could label each account with a username for example... within a single wallet.

BUT, AGAIN: fiat is totally separate. Even if all customer-owned fiat is in one fiat trust account and all customer-owned bitcoins in one bitcoin trust account, those are two totally distinct trust accounts.

-MarkM-

Oops I was a moment late with my

EDIT: Nearly tricked me there! Fiat was in a separate wallet, presumably?

-MarkM-

Wallets vs accounts are like banks into accounts.

If everything went into a single bank, into distinct trust accounts within that bank, and thieves stole certain trust accounts, the whole point, again, of trust accounts is that they are distinct. You know which ones the robbers took.

Even if they took the entire bank.

-MarkM-

EDIT: Nearly tricked me there! Fiat was in a separate wallet, presumably?

[ Items/assets held in trust] / [ trust accounts ] are not assets. If anything, they are liabilities. The company does not own them.

Isn't that in fact the entire point of labelling certain accounts as trust accounts? To distinguish them as NOT belonging to the entity holding them in trust and thus for them NOT to be used to pay that entity's bills/liabilities?

Stuff stolen from trust accounts is surely totally separate and distinct from a company's own assets, and none of the company's creditors should be able to touch it, only the people who actually have assets in a particular trust account should get anything from that particular trust account, surely? Isn't that also why lawyers often hold many separate trust accounts, with different people's assets in each, so those people's assets cannot be confused with each other or used to pay off each other's debts etc?

-MarkM-

EDIT: Maybe this could even be an argument in favour of the satoshi client style wallet accounts, since if bitcoins are stolen it is possible to determine precisely which accounts were stolen, so the theft of one such trust account need not have any effect on any other such trust account?

Not true. I am not a lawyer but I seriously doubt that just because you CAN pay a debt in fiat you MUST convert items held in trust into fiat in preference to returning the actual items to their rightful owners. An item held in trust is not a debt. The items stolen might be debts, but the items not stolen remain property of their owners, presumably?

Also, even though you cannot tell the difference between one "print" and another, you CAN tell the difference between the values / prices of some of the prints, since some owners had put different price tickets on their prints than other owners had. I admit though that at this point you have turned my argument around from looking like people might get actual bitcoins or current fiat value of bitcoins into them getting the price they had labelled their particular bitcoins to be sold for when the theft occurred... So well done.

-MarkM-

Sure, but you can also tell the difference between fiat and bitcoin.

Also, for art you can assume non-numbered limited edition prints instead of non-identical paintings if you like it still should apply, though as it could not be determined whose prints were burned versus whose prints survived, I could see doing some kind of auction among print owners to determine who gets to keep a print and who instead gets compensated in currency by the other print owners for accepting fiat instead of a print.

(e.g. if 70% of the prints survived, each print owner is owed 70% of a print, aka has a 70% chance of getting his or an indistinguishable print back, somehow among themselves they need to resolve which of them will settle for some kind of compensation versus which will actually get a print.)

-MarkM-

Whoa, you cannot sell off items held in trust on behalf of one client in order to settle a debt you owe to another client, surely???

If 100 collectors each had a painting on deposit at a gallery, and the paintings were stolen, and some of them were burned, destroyed, by the time the stolen property was captured back from the thieves by lawful authorities, and the gallery is bankrupt, does the liquidator have to sell the paintings belonging to other collectors in order to obtain funds with which to recompense the collectors whose paintings were lost??? And maybe also to recompense buyers who had fiat money stored at the gallery ready to buy paintings, which fiat also had been stolen along with the paintings but not recovered or only partially recovered?

-MarkM-

Not for API calls really, no. I expect the GUI java client would be the tool normal folk would use. There are movies and such though, even for some script based stuff. I haven't gotten as far myself as how to look up recent trades from a script, since until I first learned how to get scripts to post offers I didn't expect there to be many trades for other scripts to go looking for.

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

Open Transactions TV: http://open-transactions-tv.github.com/

Open Transactions walkthrough on vimeo: http://vimeo.com/28141679

-MarkM-