Only if the code is changed to actually check the checkpoints during re-organisations.

Normally it is only checked when people grab the blockchain initially from scratch.

So if they do re-write, we have to hope someone has a backup that matches the checkpoints.

-MarkM-

It is not yet decentralised.

The planned "decentralisation" involves bitcoin blockchain transactions that need many signatures, so you can do things like "it takes any 30 of these 50 servers to sign in order for these bitcoins to be moved".

At that point many Open Transactions servers can all as a group secure bitcoins into the bitcoin blockchain in such a way that a majority of them have to agree where those coins are to go in order for them to go anywhere.

That "federation of Open Transactions servers" stuff is not yet in place.

I am currently testing Open Transactions, see https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=53329.0

-MarkM- ("knotwork"; Digitalis Data Services.)

I want to make stock exchanges players build in freeciv cities to be able to be actually functional, even to the extent that research and development of new technologies, including actual functionality for features of games, clients to play them with and so on, can be integrated into games.

Is it illegal to have corporations in EVE Online? Are EVE corporations unable to work with shares and stocks and bonds and so on?

Are game currencies going to have to be constantly spawned and abandoned as each currency starts to be perceived as having value?

Didn't some Chinese online game start to find its currency being perceived as a threat to the local fiat?

How long can fiat continue to be perceived as valuable if the only way it can hold its own against game currencies is by banning games or banning the representation of currencies in representations of nations, cultures, adventurers, whatever - simulations?

Just because fiat itself seems to turn out to be a ponzi scheme and has to abandoned periodically as being so, must all representations of exchange of value follow in its footsteps by similiarly being periodically abandoned, and for, it seems essentially the same reason: governments intruding and messing things up, destroying value?

This is so silly. If freeciv nation's national currencies are some kind of threat to real nations then maybe one should recall the famous moral of C.S. Lewis' "The Silver Chair": if a few children can imagine a better world than the one you come from, maybe the one you come from could do with being re-thought...

-MarkM-

The contract specifies Freenode's channel named #galacticmilieu for redeeming such tokens but does say other means can probably be negotiated. And actually #galacticmilieu-otc is maybe even more appropriate.

Basically via IRC on any relevant channel I am on at the time. (Like for namecoins, #namecoin might be reasonable.)

Automation is in the roadmap though, not just directly in/out to blockchain currencies but also ultimately multi-signature stuff on blockchains so multiple servers all have to agree, N out of M of them, to release bailed-in coins.

-MarkM-

Bailing in of coins on my server has begun, someone is bailing in 50 NMC right now.

It doesn't seem practical unfortunately to wait until a hard coded checkpoint before issuing dNMC tokens for them so I am going with the ten confirmation blocks Unthinkingbit listed as standard for secure exchanges.

-MarkM-

What is wrong with the .PRO ?

Are you maybe missing boost or curl or some such dependency?

-MarkM-

Well listing is easy, as is trading.

I am not sure about paying dividends automatically though, for one thing just trying to find out which nyms own shares might be too much of a breach of privacy to be possible to any normal script, then if the dividend is to be payed in some currency other than the shares themselves trying to figure out whether the smae nym that owns a share also owns an account denominated in the type of currency the dividends are to be payed in might be even more of a breach of privacy.

To do it without invading privacy might be possible though by issuing a new "first dividend payed" type of share though maybe in a basket currency which one could buy using "no dividends payed yet" shares or something like that, the basket would contain the new issue of share plus whatever the dividend is to be.

I guess I need to explore what exactly a script is allowed to do. Somehow I don't think querying other people's nyms as to whether they own certain types of accounts seems a very legit kind of ability for script in general to have. But maybe for this share dividends purpose it is going to be necessary.

EDIT: Chatting with FellowTraveler in IRC, apparently he plans to make routines specifically for this in Open Transactions. So although the capability is not there yet, it is on the roadmap/plan. SO we can go ahead and start issuing shares knowing someday the code for doing the dividends will come along.


-MarkM-

I don't particularly like the idea of getting entangled in some anonymous person's reputation by letting them issue their possibly dubious offerings on my server.

It is easy for an Open Transactions client to have a number of servers it connects to, so why not have people who want to issue things issue them on servers of their own? No separate worry about can you trust the server operator plus can you trust the issuer, they will be the same person.

And no worrying will some asshat do an issue on my server that will give my server a bad rep for being involved with such an issue.

I don't see much/any upside to allowing people to issue stuff of their own on my server.

-MarkM-

Delisting could be problematic with Open Transactions. It cannot delete stuff that is part of its evidence trail.

What does delisting actually consist of? What has to be done to constitute a delisting?

What happens to people's existing holdings? If it involves suspending trading, how do they get cashed out / get their money back type thing?

-MarkM-

Three entities in Galactic Milieu so far were using the term shares: General Mining Corp aka Galactic Mining Corp; General Retirement Funds aka Galactic Retirement Funds; and United Nations Shares aka United Nations Scrip.

In the United Nations case, the idea was that it would be their currency, backed by holdings of other currencies as well as by other holdings such as real estate, trade concessions, whatever they could sell.

Originally they had figured on using blockchains, based closely on Bitcoin thus being limited to never issuing more than 21 million shares/coins/scrip.

They still might go to blockchains eventually, but it now looks safer to simply trade in Open Transactions, using tokens that would be redeemed using blockchain based coins if ever they do end up moving to a blockchain. (Which would not be until after they are sure they could secure the chain adequately by merged mining.)

These instruments kind of blur any distinction between currency, shares and bonds, since for example GMC and GRF are still discussing whether to bother charging people 1%/day on loans as the borrowers assumed would be the case or simply increase by 1%/day the price of their scrip, thus effectively charging 1%/day on their debts simply by the borrowers ending up having to pay more per unit for the scrip with which to pay back the loan.

The core problem seems to be the actual valuation of the coin/scrip/shares. The blockchain idea provided a built in limit to the total number. If that idea is discarded in favour of only using Open Transactions without any concept of an eventual blockchain implementation then there maybe is no implicit limit to the number they could ultimately issue.

-MarkM-

Open Transactions similarly allows trading anything for anything, thus trading one stock for another would be quite possible.

All the talk I see of stocks/shares on this forum always seems to assume common shares, with votes. Yet in the real world "preferred shares" are also often traded, maybe more so even than common shares since they are purely financial instruments not loaded with all the politics of actual control of the company.

Maybe bonds might serve as well, I guess I should try to look up what difference there is between bonds and preferred shares and exactly how preferred shares actually work...

Someone can issue shares, bonds, currencies, whatever on an Open Transactions server simply by creating and issuing a contract describing what they are offering. But actually doing voting through the software is not yet in place in the Open Transaction code. I am also not sure what would be involved in cases where an issuer has issued varying numbers of their offering on various separate Open Transactions servers. Presumably even if the software itself tallied votes on one server, the issuer would still have to collect the results from all the servers they issued on and correlate them.

I would have thought that in most cases someone wanting to raise capital would not be wanting to give away control of their idea/company in the process, so I would have thought non-voting shares would be the norm unless most people are only looking for less capital than they themselves already have available thus that they would only be selling less than half the shares?

-MarkM-

Unfortunately it doesn't seem to be possible to actually write to the wiki, I have been trying for a few days now to get verified but so far the confirmation emails have kept failing to arrive. So it looks like something is wrong with the sendmail system at the site.

-MarkM-

It seems that an Open Source FPGA miner is available: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=40058.msg642825#msg642825

An interesting Devcoin project to support open source came to mind: a Devcoin mining co-op/shares thing whereby people invest devcoins, we buy FPGAs and use them initially to just mine devcoins to pay out but once merged mining is implemented we use them to merged mine, using the coins other than devcoins to buy devcoins to pay out.

That way we support open source by buying open sourece FPGA boards, and once merged mining is implemented we help support the value of devcoin by using the other coins in the merge to buy devcoins with.

This would also make a nice project to set up in my Open Transactions server to pioneer the use of Open Transactions for such things.

-MarkM-

There should be an odd number of places to find the files, so that one won't end up with the same number saying the right thing as the number saying some fake thing some number of admins conspire to put there.

The nodes go looking for the files based on the URLs provided in the previous files.

We could do with more separate people hosting the files...

-MarkM-

Until recently Open Transactions was not ready to test.

Now it is working, and I am running a test, see https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=53329.0

It does not have voting yet, nor dividend distribution. So it is not ready to handle voting shares yet.

-MarkM-

An OT server can publish all its receipts, so everyone knows the balances.

If a server goes away, the issuer of a token can re-issue on another server.

-MarkM-

I suppose. I was thinking of simply re-issuing them later possibly.

I kind of like the idea of buying them back at higher price than I issued them at instead of dividends, because if you have to actually part with shares to realise income/profit the percentage of total shares you own would change if, and as, you cash out. So someone with 51% would have good reason to stay invested instead of cashing out if they want to retain a "controlling interest".

Truthfully though I am not really enamoured of the idea of issuing "common stock", that is, voting shares. I actually thought most share issues nowadays are "preferred shares", used just to raise capital not to dilute control of the company by handing out votes.

Doesn't namecoin have any way of dropping names? Surely one could simply not pay to renew them when they expire if one no longer needs them?

-MarkM-

I was thinking pretty simplistic, something like d/knotwork to register my knotwork.bit domain then use subdomain-like strings maybe like d/share001.knotwork, d/share002.knotwork etc.

I expect that is not ideal, but since domains can be transferred to new owners presumably shares structured like domains would also be transferable.

Using the actual domain namespace would allow each share to have its own website as a side-effect I guess.

But maybe other namespaces in the chain can also be transferred from owner to owner?

-MarkM-

Some of this sounds like what I would like to do with my Open Transactions server. It is currently just in alpha testing, see https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=53329.0

However, I would prefer not to deal with fiat.

But that is where the existing exchanges come in. They deal with fiat currencies.

They also deal with all the tiny little "I want to buy 0.01 BTC" kind of stuff, which I would also prefer not to bother with.

I have set up my currency contracts so far to treat coins as whole numbers, and I hope that I will not have to allow decimals since for example if you want to sell some coin or other for 2.99 of some other coin you could offer 100 of the first coin for 299 of the second coin on the units-of-100-coins market of the first coin. I am hoping that using whole numbers might help cut down on the number of frivolously tiny trades.

Open Transactions uses quite secure communications, but that makes it not all that handy for web-based use, as the kind of people who insist on using a website tend to also insist on using pathetically easy to guess passwords and stuff like that. So basically this would not be targeting the casual user who deals in such trivial amounts that they basically do not bother with much security. Such people are just going to give the service a bad name anyway by constantly managing to get ripped off, hacked, trojan'd etc etc anyway. So we'd hopefully be targetting serious people who want the good security.

Probably instead of even having MtGox USD at all, I'd only have MtGox BTC, and let people do the conversion to fiat over at the fiat-to-coins exchange. I'd try to focus on *coins and on stocks, shares, bonds type of things.

By not dealing in fiat I would presumably be able to have much better liquidity across the various exchanges that do handle fiat.

Also, maybe I could have tokens that represent BTC actually held at third party exchanges, so one could trade that without having to actually move the BTC from exchange to exchange. The added risk though compared to tokens representing BTC I actually have in my own secure wallet might make the tokens representing coins held at third party exchanges trade at a different price than those representing coins I have direct control of?

-MarkM-

About how many DeVCoins per month does 1/5 of a share usually add up to?

I am thinking I might be able to convince my landlord to open the incoming port for DeVCoind depending on how much revenue that would add up to per month by the time it is converted into local fiat money.

Apparently he is looking at a fibre-optic link deal some provider is now offering too, so if I have something concrete to show him in the way of actual money I could put toward upgrading our connection I might be able to get us onto fibre...

-MarkM-