I'm now running a server as well to hopefully provide some redundancy for users.

I personally think that pirate and his customers may have contributed quite a bit to the climb of BTC value from $2 to $6.

Esteemed PPPPT bond-holders:

I'll be travelling for the next week and a half. Coupons will still be paid out, of course, but will probably not be as quick as it has been in the past. I still expect to pay them within the promised 24-hour time-frame. In other words, "DON'T PANIC" (in large friendly letters). Buy-backs can still be processed (cut-off time for this is in less than 12 hours). Bond sales might be sporadic depending on availability.

I can confirm that SELECT max(id) works for me on a MySQL server.

Agreed. So both situations actually affect p2pool negatively. Assuming that the average p2pool node has lower bandwidth and lower connectivity than a big pool, it will generally receive blocks and send out new blocks slower, resulting in more orphans overall.

If I understand this right, you're talking about stale shares, not orphans. If I find a block on p2pool, but my bitcoind is only connected to 8 peers, it might take a while for the block I found to propagate through the network. Meanwhile Deepbit finds a block and sends it to 1000 different nodes all at once, orphaning my block.

I don't know the workings of p2pool fully. Do they send newly found blocks to each other as well, to aid in propagating it?

Just wanted to add: this mmap() issue is a problem on my 32-bit Linux system as well, with a block file size of 1.8GB. I'll try changing the bitcoind file size limit and then try again. (Or maybe I should just dump the ancient 32-bit machine... )

He clearly made an IMPACT on people.

I did verify that the account CSV file shows who sent me how many assets and exactly when they were sent. Relying on user notifications isn't particularly secure anyway. Also, I like streamlining my operations as much as possible.

I'm more inclined to setting this back to 7%, because the face value of each bond is still 1 BTC, regardless of the premium paid for each share. At least that's how Goat (and maybe brendio) advertise their bonds. This document from brendio has some useful information.

Thanks, that's perfect! I always thought "recall security" was when you wanted to buy back all securities from the market.

Bond buyback procedure:

Transfer your bonds at any time to the asset account on GLBSE (account name = bitfoo:FOO.PPPPT). You do not need to notify me when transferring them. The cutoff time for this is Monday 02:00 AM GLBSETime (EDT). After the Monday dividend payment, I will e-mail pirate for a withdrawal of all accumulated buyback requests. Once the funds are returned from BS&T, each bond will be paid the face value of 1 BTC + 1 week's interest. A fixed fee of 1 BTC will be deducted per buy-back transaction. If you send me bonds more than once in the same week, it still counts as just one transaction.

I cannot let the account balance fall too low, so I reserve the right to suspend the buy-back option at any time. Please check the OP before sending me any bonds. If more buy-backs are requested in a particular week than I can honor, requests will be processed on a first-come, first-served basis, and the remaining bonds will be returned.

I have updated the OP with this info. Let me know if you have any questions or concerns.

Of course, I would withdraw the amount. But I can't destroy bonds on GLBSE, so the "number of bonds issued" still stays the same. Extreme example: say I have 5000 bonds issued but only 2000 left in BS&T due to buybacks. Then BS&T changes the interest rate tiers to 4000 BTC for 7%, 5.6% for everything below. Due to the wording of my contract, I'm still liable to pay an interest rate of 7%. Obviously I'd like to avoid having to get into a situation where I'm forced to violate the contract.

I'd need to change the contract to read "number of bonds outstanding" instead of "number of bonds issued" - that would fix this problem.

Dividends went out a while ago: 3928 outstanding bonds / 274.96 BTC = 0.07.

About buybacks: I'd be willing to do this once a week, but the problem I see is this (from the contract):

"The value of the weekly coupon will be exactly x% of 1 BTC, where x is the interest rate that the total value of bonds issued receives from the underlying investment."

If I start buying back bonds, the number of bonds issued is no longer equal to the amount of BTC I have in BS&T. If interest rate tiers change, I might end up being liable to pay out more interest than I receive. It probably should have been worded as "number of bonds outstanding". Any suggestions?

I would assume that when this becomes common-place, pools will simply start asking for higher difficulty shares.

From another thread:

When shares or BTC are received from another user, it would be useful to see who sent them in the "Transfers in" section of the portfolio. I know this information is already available in the CSV, but it would be cool to have it on the web interface.

It's pretty easy to write your own "dark-pool" order bot though, and I wouldn't be surprised if large buyers/sellers were doing that.

That's exactly the point. The market price for mining bonds was high, so more and more bonds hit the market. If gigavps didn't issue them, someone else would (and did). On the other extreme, if the market price for bonds was lower than the cost of buying the equivalent hardware, there would be no incentive to issue any more bonds, and supply would naturally be cut off.

We could argue endlessly about the semantics of calling this issue a bond, so let's ignore that for a while.

The face value of this issue was never 1.0 BTC or 1.5 BTC - it represented processing power of 5 Mh/s. Old bonds and newly issued bonds are all still the same 5 Mh/s, and are thus fungible. Gigavps hasn't violated any contract or done anything wrong here. As has been stated many times in this thread - considering Moore's law, new ASIC hashing developments and so on, it's somewhat ridiculous to expect 5 Mh/s to go up in value, or even retain the same value, whatever currency you value it in.

Nice thread and analysis. Just wanted to clarify some minor points regarding FOO.PPPPPPPPPPPT:


Bond Recall: I have a clause which states that I can recall at any time, at a rate of 1.0 BTC + one week's interest.
Pirate Rate Change policy: The contract says that the interest is tied to the interest rate that the entire fund gets from BS&T.