Our currencies are working nicely now, so I am starting to work on companies. There are a couple of technical details I need to check, but here is the sample stock/share contract I have so far: <?xml version="1.0"?>
<digitalAssetContract version="1.0">
<entity shortname="GFCstock"
longname="General Financial Corp stock"
email="markmetson@sourceforge.net"/>
<issue company="General Financial Corp"
email="GFCstock@MI5ius.M5"
contractUrl="http://contracts.MI5ius.M5/GFCstock.contract"
type="share"/>
<currency name="GFCstock" tla="sGFC" symbol="sGFC"
type="decimal" factor="1" decimal_power="0" fraction=""/>
<!-- CONDITIONS -->
<condition name="backing">
General Financial Corp stock is backed by the assets,
activities, bylaws, goodwill etcetera of the actual
Corp, which is registered as a limited liability
company by the administration of and under the laws
of the Martians of the planet known as M5. Its offices
on that planet are located in the city known as MI5ius.
The company also operates under the name Galactic
Financial Corp.
</condition>
<condition name="audit">
General Financial Corp stock is primarily secured by
the assets of the Corp and, where the Corp operates
legally under local laws of various civilisations,
of course by such provisions as local civilisations
might have regarding ownership of property, defense
of property and so on. Where what passes for or
pretends to be local civilisation fails to provide
such protections, General Financial Corp takes such
measures itself as it deems prudent under the
prevailing conditions and circumstances.
</condition>
<condition name="purchase">
In order to obtain General Financial Corp stock you
must utilise an Open Transactions server supporting
the use of said asset.
</condition>
<condition name="redemption">
Redemption implies failure of the Corp, inasmuch as
stock is not normally considered a redeemable asset
but, rather, a tradeable asset. Redemption in the
event of the failure of the Corp would presumably be
administrated by the bankruptcy departments of the
regions in which the company still has any assets
at the time of the failure / bankruptcy.
</condition>
<condition name="rate">
It is not yet contemplated that this will be
dividend-paying stock, thus no rate of payment,
calculation or release of dividends applies.
</condition>
<condition name="buyback">
The Issuer reserves the right to buy back all
outstanding stock, thereby terminating the use of
this instrument.
</condition>
<condition name="liability">
The Corp is not liable for any damages use of
this contract with your software or on your
computing equiment might cause, nor for any
loss or inconvenience you might experience due
to the performance of stock markets, trading
platforms, brokers, or acts of man woman child
god or natural force(s) or events. In any event
liability is limited to the terms and conditions
specified in this contract.
</condition>
<condition name="mint">
Float - the total quantity of General Financial
Corp stock outstanding - is created by a Mint
account, specially set by the Operator.
Disbursements from the Mint account are to be made
on receipt of duly signed and public authorization
from MI5ius. All disbursements from the Mint
account are to be made to the single Currency
Comptroller account identified by the authorization.
From time to time, the Currency Comptroller may
direct the Currency Manager to return General
Financial Corp stock to the Mint for the express
purpose of reducing the float. Such directions
should be ignored; stock, once issued, remains
in existence until and unless the entire issue
is disolved, which itself is also not contemplated.
This issue of stock consists of 100,000 (One
Hundred Thousand) individual integer units of
stock, no more and no less. Any not in the
possession of an entity other than the Corp
are implicitly and explicitly in the possession
of the Corp.
</condition>
<condition name="privacy">
The purchase and trading of General Financial Corp
stock normally are done on the basis of strong
privacy. By purchasing or trading this stock you
agree that your purchase, trading, use, ownership,
possession and material interest in this stock are
governed by the laws and customs of the city of
MI5ius on the planet known as M5 and that such laws
and customs overrule any local laws or customs any
civilisation, purported civilisation, government,
barbarian horde, gang of thieves, outlaws, bandits,
lawyers, politicians, pirates, thugs, muggers,
cutthroats, militia, military, police, babysitter,
parent, nanny or other entity might pretend,
claim, or promulgate.
</condition>
<!-- KEYS -->
<key name="contract">
- -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
***CERTIFICATE OF ISSUING NYM WILL GO HERE***
- -----END CERTIFICATE-----
</key>
</digitalAssetContract>
By the way, does anyone here have i2p running? I do, so it would be nice to find someone who can test the theory that the server can be connected to via i2p. TO do that you would use your hosts file to make your machine think ot.knotwork.com is localhost, and put a tunnel at the server port number that tunnels over i2p to my server's i2p key/hash/address. (Which I can provide in Private Message if someone actually has i2p and wants to try this.) -MarkM- |
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Public keys are not intrinsically "blinded". The "blinding" allows you to be given finds by the server that it will not recognise as being the funds it gave to you when someone else redeems them. All it will know is whether the funds have already been redeemed. You could keep taking out and putting back the same unit/denomination of funds over and over again and it would not know whether it is the same funds over and over or completely different fund each time.
Meanwhile, I am putting together a list of companies that are looking to be traded on the Open Transactions server, giving highest priority to those that use DeVCoins as their unit of account.
There is a real likelihood that most companies traded will already have buyers lined up for all their shares, unless we can convince them that raising their asking price high enough to prevent their already-lined-up buyers from being able to buy all the shares will be worth their while. It is possible that not all of them are prepared to make use of more capital than they initially contemplated but hopefully some of them will be adaptable enough to be able to accommodate however much capital our users turn out to be wanting to put in.
By the way, it seems it might be possible that this should be operated as a private operation, open only to members equipped with suitable client software, rather than being some kind of "offering to the general public" as might be construed to be the case if it were operated by means of a public website. The Galactic Milieu mostly believes the planet known as Earth to be mythical and thus its laws and customs to be irrelevant, however people who believe in such a planet, and especially people who claim to actually live there, might not all agree...
-MarkM-
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I figured this was coming when Gox first started hinting at some kind of ID stuff, and got out while I still could.
Even huge ponzi schemes like Brian Marsden's ended up doing all this paperwork crap so it was pretty obvious Gox was going to have to eventually.
It didn't help the ponzis but maybe it will help bitcoin exchanges.
-MarkM-
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What *exactly* is it in "common law" that makes vexels incomprehensible, or in "statutory law" that causes them to become comprehensible?
Can you perhaps invent a statute that, if it here made law, would redenr vexels comprensible?
I fidn it hard to even imagine a law making something comprehensible, I thought most people's experience is that even the most comprehensible of things often become incomprehensible when described in "legal language".
I don't like RIpple as it was when last I studied it, as it just seemed like something I'd be crazy to actually use, as if it were designed from the ground up as a fishing-hole for people who create an identity, join the network, exhaust andy and all credit they can get and all their neighbor's credits too, and change identity to do it again.
-MarkM-
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Okay, I have drawn up an initial stab at a "standard boilerplate stock-type-asset contract": <?xml version="1.0"?>
<digitalAssetContract version="1.0">
<entity shortname="GFCstock"
longname="General Financial Corp stock"
email="markmetson@sourceforge.net"/>
<issue company="General Financial Corp"
email="GFCstock@MI5ius.M5"
contractUrl="http://contracts.MI5ius.M5/GFCstock.contract"
type="share"/>
<currency name="GFCstock" tla="sGFC" symbol="sGFC"
type="decimal" factor="1" decimal_power="0" fraction=""/>
<!-- CONDITIONS -->
<condition name="backing">
General Financial Corp stock is backed by the assets,
activities, bylaws, goodwill etcetera of the actual
Corp, which is registered as a limited liability
company by the administration of and under the laws
of the Martians of the planet known as M5. Its offices
on that planet are located in the city known as MI5ius.
The company also operates under the name Galactic
Financial Corp.
</condition>
<condition name="audit">
General Financial Corp stock is primarily secured by
the assets of the Corp and, where the Corp operates
legally under local laws of various civilisations,
of course by such provisions as local civilisations
might have regarding ownership of property, defense
of property and so on. Where what passes for or
pretends to be local civilisation fails to provide
such protections, General Financial Corp takes such
measures itself as it deems prudent under the
prevailing conditions and circumstances.
</condition>
<condition name="purchase">
In order to obtain General Financial Corp stock you
must utilise an Open Transactions server supporting
the use of said asset.
</condition>
<condition name="redemption">
Redemption implies failure of the Corp, inasmuch as
stock is not normally considered a redeemable asset
but, rather, a tradeable asset. Redemption in the
event of the failure of the Corp would presumably be
administrated by the bankruptcy departments of the
regions in which the company still has any assets
at the time of the failure / bankruptcy.
</condition>
<condition name="rate">
It is not yet contemplated that this will be
dividend-paying stock, thus no rate of payment,
calculation or release of dividends applies.
</condition>
<condition name="buyback">
The Issuer reserves the right to buy back all
outstanding stock, thereby terminating the use of
this instrument.
</condition>
<condition name="liability">
The Corp is not liable for any damages use of
this contract with your software or on your
computing equiment might cause, nor for any
loss or inconvenience you might experience due
to the performance of stock markets, trading
platforms, brokers, or acts of man woman child
god or natural force(s) or events. In any event
liability is limited to the terms and conditions
specified in this contract.
</condition>
<condition name="mint">
Float - the total quantity of General Financial
Corp stock outstanding - is created by a Mint
account, specially set by the Operator.
Disbursements from the Mint account are to be made
on receipt of duly signed and public authorization
from MI5ius. All disbursements from the Mint
account are to be made to the single Currency
Comptroller account identified by the authorization.
From time to time, the Currency Comptroller may
direct the Currency Manager to return General
Financial Corp stock to the Mint for the express
purpose of reducing the float. Such directions
should be ignored; stock, once issued, remains
in existence until and unless the entire issue
is disolved, which itself is also not contemplated.
This issue of stock consists of 100,000 (One
Hundred Thousand) individual integer units of
stock, no more and no less. Any not in the
possession of an entity other than the Corp
are implicitly and explicitly in the possession
of the Corp.
</condition>
<condition name="privacy">
The purchase and trading of General Financial Corp
stock normally are done on the basis of strong
privacy. By purchasing or trading this stock you
agree that your purchase, trading, use, ownership,
possession and material interest in this stock are
governed by the laws and customs of the city of
MI5ius on the planet known as M5 and that such laws
and customs overrule any local laws or customs any
civilisation, purported civilisation, government,
barbarian horde, gang of thieves, outlaws, bandits,
lawyers, politicians, pirates, thugs, muggers,
cutthroats, militia, military, police, babysitter,
parent, nanny or other entity might pretend,
claim, or promulgate.
</condition>
<!-- KEYS -->
<key name="contract">
- -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
***CERTIFICATE OF ISSUING NYM WILL GO HERE***
- -----END CERTIFICATE-----
</key>
</digitalAssetContract>
This example / sample contract is contemplating being used by/for General Financial Corp. -MarkM- |
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Are these data blocks blinded cash, liike Open Transactions's Chaumian-blinded cash, so even the central server does cannot recognise cash people bring back to it as being any particular bit of cash issued earlier to any particular person?
-MarkM-
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Open Transactions has been changed radically inside to make it much more robust than it used to be, and most of the large-volume placerse of market orders have recovered from the bottlenecks of messages their large volumes of messages had caused them in earlier versions of the software. There are probably things that can still be done to streamline the communictions between client and server and make it even more robust, but basically it works now so people are preparing to trade in earnest. A high level scripting interface is being prepared that will make scripting it much easier for casual scripters, and we are starting to look at various proposed companies looking to be traded on the exchange to figure out which ones to set up in the system and what exactly their asset contracts should say and suchlike. I guess we are maybe preparing to transition from alpha to beta. Throughout all the hacking and testing and debugging we have not lost any of the assets, although the account display in the client still sometimes shows zero balance on accounts that do in fact have a balance. That is basically cosmetic, so it is time to get people who create pretty clients to create some pretty version of the client.  ALso sicne trading is becoming active, a more sphisticated look at the markets would be useful, such as filtering to show only assets you actually have account for, or picking specific assets to show the markets of and stuff like that. -MarkM- |
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DVC has hardly even launched yet, they seem a little hasty there. DVC's own stock-commodity-and-currency exchange is still only in late-alpha testing stage, and asset contracts have not yet even be created for the various devcoin-based companies that will be traded on the exchange.
I can understand the problem though, I might not have included IXC and I0C in my exchange if I had waited a few more days before doing so, since it seemed that by the time I had told my bots about them and so on they were already dead or dying.
I have held back on all the others, including litecoin, since it is still hard to tell which are really in it for the long haul and which are just pump and dump crap that was never intended for any purpose other than being dumped as fast as possible.
-MarkM-
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You drive down the value of your currency if all you actually use it for is to dump it for fiat or for some other currency.
All these play-currencies are actually very useful for testing financial applications if at least some people think they might someday have at least some value. Trying to do a real test with real users or even real players-of-games does not work well using "testnet coins" because even game players don't consider it worth their while to pursue coins that are just going to be thrown away instead of actually remaining an ongoing part of the game, a hoard they can look forward to playing with for years to come.
Possibly this particular play-currency might not be worth playing with, but maybe that is largely the fault of the people who keep trying to sell all the game-pieces instead of actually playing with them...
-MarkM-
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Digitalis Open Transactions Server is basically working now, so we are starting to work out implementation details for some DeVCoin-based "corporations" aka "companies" to trade stocks/shares of. I am making scripts for doing conservative valuations of such companies, basically by adding up the liquidation value of all their assets, but that gets complicated if you try to express the value in terms of just one type of asset since the value of assets relative to each other can change. For example I can say company X is worth Y devcoins plus Z bitcoins plus A groupcoins plus B united kingdom britcoins plus C martian botcoins plus D general mining corp plus E general retirement fund but unless all the components of its value have relatively stable trading prices how much can that really tell you? Especially in the case of companies who hold much of their value in stocks/shares of other companies. That starts to look somewhat circular, like hmm, what is the value of companies A, B and C if A's portfolio is 10 each of B and C shares, B's portfolio is 10 each of A and C's shares, and C's portfolio is 10 each of A and B's shares? Hmmm. So far in looking at scenarios with a bunch of investors saying they would put in this that or the other if a company to be formed was going to buy and/or do this that or the other it looks like "companies that are not merely holding companies but actually do something or invest in something other than simply shares of other companies or piles of various currencies" will tend to have a "conservative valuation" less than their IPO release price. This happens because the "conservative evaluation" looks basically at what it could get right now if it liquidated the company. Thus it takes no account of goodwill, future earnings, privileged positions such as first move or first to market, basically it just adds up all the cash and stocks and bonds and shares and easily-sellable assets. So for example if a company wants to invest in mining rigs, there is an instant appearance of loss of value if they buy new since even new computer gear tends not to have a resale value equal to the bought-new price one paid for it. Similarly if employees are hired they do not always brining in enough money by paycheque time to cover their paycheque, and if the company wants things like post office boxes, hosting, bandwidth, desks, filing cabinets or whatever, just general operating stuff, that too tends to make the initial liquidation value look lower than the IPO initial release price. Maybe this is not really a problem? Or maybe it is caused by figuring the total capital raised by the IPO will be the total capital of the company? Maybe we are looking at this wrong, and the companies should be figured as first having some amount of capital before IPO time, so that the IPO is only increasing the capital not constituting the whole of it? Even then though, basically unless the capital brought in is spent only on cash-type things, like actual cash or very-liquid assets that resell for the same price you buy them for, it seems inevitable that an IPO is going to create a company that is not going to be able to be liquidated immediately for the full amount of capital that was put into it. Maybe the thing to do is simply not shout the actual liquidation value around in marketing the thing?  -MarkM-
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As I do have a litecoin client running and it hasn't crashed or caused problems in all this time I will probably create an asset type for digiLiTeCoins for my Digitalis Open Transactions Server soon, we are just doing final fixes now on problems the server had with massive trading where people were doing many hundreds of automated trades but we hope to have that fixed shortly and for normal folk not doing huge volumes of trades it seems to work fine.
This will let litecoins trade against all the other asset types the server knows about, and at various scales (like ones, tens, hundreds, thousands of coins at a time each as separate markets).
-MarkM-
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GRouPcoin is in same sourceforge downloads directory as DeVCoin ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/galacticmilieu/files/ ), it was what we used to experiment with before settling on how to implement DeVCoin. It is a perma-flation coin, 50 coins per block forever, with adapative difficulty, timetravel fix (I think anyway; same fixes for adaptive difficulty as DeVCoin and I think those included fix for timetravel) but maybe too low fees depending on what value it ends up trading at. So might need anti-dustspam fixes similar to what was added to DeVCoin to force multi-output transactions to always have a fee and more fee the more outputs. It is MM capable with next ID after DeVCoin, so I think that is 0x0005 as I think DVC was 0x0004. I only see connections with it occassionally so I think whoever out there is mining it is only doing so from time to time when they happen to think of it. The others were only ever used with private friend to friend connections, then they moved all their accounting to manual accounting pending merged mining, then with perceived problems even for merged mining startups they have been moving to Open Transactions pending figuring solutions to how to make using blockchain approach affordable and secure. (Mutually exclusive goals maybe hmmm...) So recent plan has been to get transaction volumes built up first before trying blockchain deployment again since without enough actual transactions there won't be much pay for mining them. -MarkM- |
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What is happening with pool.devcoin.org? I thought it was supposedly merged mining BTC and NMC as well as DVC, but I still only see DVC in my balance waiting to withdraw. I didn't withdraw yet as I was expecting to see figures for the BTC and NMC portions also show up at some point but I see no sign of them yet? It might be useful if hacking at the code to plan that there could be umpteen more chains to merged mine too, since bitparking hasn't shown any sign yet of adding to its repertoire. (It already merges more than pool.devcoin.org does though which is why I pointed my hashing power there for now, but I hope to see pools competing on number of alt chains they merge... Would be nice to see GRouPcoin (GRP) included somewhere for example, plus of course Martian BotCoins (MBC), United Kingdom Britcoins (UKB), Canadian DIgital Notes (CDN), CZech Bitcash (CZB), General Mining Corp aka Galactic Mining Corp (GMC), General Retirement Funds aka Galactic Retirement Funds (GRF), [Galactic] United Nations Scrip (UNS), bitNicKeLs (NKL) and so on and so on are still waiting in the wings (and meanwhile being traded on the Digitalis Open Transactions Server)... -MarkM- |
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In fairness it should also be pointed out that actually Unthinkingbit did a whole bunch of the coding for DeVCoin himself, too, he didn't just pay others to do it all for him. Plus the direct rewards for actual coding were just part of the package, there were also bitcoins to be made for many other parts of the project. So it was both much more expensive than just 100 bitcoins and much more work than just sitting back letting paid minions do all the work.
-MarkM-
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DeVCoin offered only 100 bitcoins for initial coding, but had a bunch of details about how it was to work.
Since you provide no clues a coder could use to guestimate how many hundreds of hours it might take to create your proposed features, or even if they are in fact feasible at all rather than some kind of crazy pipedream based on total failure to grok computers or code or blockchains or something, there really isn't much to go on in trying to give you any kind of estimate.
RealCoin supposedly cost $10,000 and is still working on figuring out exactly what features it is actually going to have, so maybe that is a better case study to take your estimate from since you too have not detailed your exact feature-set yet...
-MarkM-
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Not to worry, trading in this coin will continue at my Open Transactions server. A huge amount of work has been done on the Open Transactions engine but the results are mostly in so it is looking like it will be up and running robustly any time now. This extended testing revealed a lot of fixes to make but the bulk of them are now done and we should be mostly just shaking out any bugs put in during the latest set of changes today. -MarkM- |
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I would prefer a coin with a large pre-mine (preferably all the coins) that are sold on an exchange.
Unfortunately Open Transactions turned out to need massive and deep re-writing otherwise my exchange would be open by now, but the re-write is almost complete to soon you will be able to use secure Open Transactions client<->sevrver technology to trade in a number of "fully pre-mined" coins. The catch however is that such coins cannot afford "miners" until their transaction volume, thus transaction fees, become large enough to "pay" miners. So initially they will be Open Transaactions based only, with only those that actually take off enough to justify the expense of usign a blockchain actually moving to an (open*) blockchain. (* They maybe however go back to the friend to friend blockchain method they used with their early testnets, or look again at "licensed miners" concepts.) -MarkM- |
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I stopped caring right after reading that initial coins must be bought LMAO this is more wacked than any other concept.
Not if the coins are basically an I.O.U. from the issuer, a token representing the value you paid to them in return for the coin. Unfortunately that does not seem to be the case here, since they apparently plan to give away for miners and subscribers/members coins that they do not actually have "reserves" to "back". You are basically spoiled by the get rich quick pyramid-coin world, used to getting money free just by jumping on each new alt-coin while its difficulty is ridiculously low. (It continues to amaze me that Groupcoin has managed to avoid that fate for so very long.) These people are catering to that mentality, plus apparently hoping to reach a wider audience of suckers who are not familiar with cryptocurrencies yet. (Since they evidently deem it impossible to bring bitcoin itself to such people it does not seem all that likely they will be able to actually do so with a stepchild of bitcoin either...) That mentality is why most of the people who had been having me research and test the blockchain based structure for them decided to go with Open Transactions first: miners are a pointless/needless expense, a huge leech that probably cannot be afforded until transaction volumes, and thus transaction fees, are large enough to satisfy their demands. -MarkM- |
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Yeah but that is the nerfed down pretend-scrypt used by litecoin, right? Deliberately toned down so botnets can use it. Because using a proper version of scrypt would make people whose machine have been infected by botnets notice something is being processed.
So basically there still aren't any alt-coins using a proper full scrypt, they are all just fakes set up for botnets to deploy.
-MarkM-
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