Jeezy Louisey...

Suffice it to say that I've had a lot of bad luck with clonecoins of this sort. So this time, my bad luck will consist in me doing without this incredible opportunity.

Thanks. Sure explains why ETC's bouncing back up.

That's very sensible of you. When Factom went on its rocket ride in early March, it was a bad time to buy. But by June, it was a great time to buy. If Monero follows the same path, there'll be a great buying opportunity this fall.

Hmm...that might be why ETC is slumping. Remember when it used to bounce back up when it got below 0.003? Not now.

It spiked up but fell back; I remember that well. The reason for the jump is is, Peerplays is doing a sharedrop. They're picking a random time between September 1st 00:00 GMT and September 16th 00:00 GMT for a blockchain snapshot which they'll use to allocated the shares dropped. You'll get a tl;dr at the top of this post:

https://steemit.com/bitshares/@steempower/comparing-price-action-of-bts-and-nxt-sharedrops-peerplays-vs-ardor

Peerplays' full announcement is here:

https://steemit.com/peerplays/@peerplays/announcement-bts-snapshot-date

FWIW, I'm trading Bitshares and writing about my experiences here:

https://steemit.com/@nxtblg

One post per day, goes live in the evening (Eastern time.) The time varies depending how long it takes me to write & proofread it.

P.S.: Congrats again for spotting Factom! It had a really good run, altho' it looks like the pump is over. Sell-on-the-good-news effect.

The fork chain from the COPYING file - https://github.com/ionomy/ion/blob/master/COPYING


2014-2015?? Typo?

Thanks for mentioning it. Funny: the short sellers have pulled in their horns right now. After a frenzy when Factom bottoned at ~0.0035, a lot of shorts liquidated as the selling was met with a lot of buying. Some of them, I'm sure, liquidated at a small loss. "Ouch."

Now, when Factom climbs up, far fewer shorts are fighting the trend than yesterday and the day before. Other than that big fight at around 0.0035, the volume has dwindled too. It's as if both the punters and the shorters have stepped back to see what will happen. Maybe because of the Series A closing?


(Alternate explanation: the pumpers are now chasing MAID, DASH, VOX and NEM instead of FCT...but that doesn't explain the shorters' reticence.)

Wow...wotta thud after a day when the bulls & bears fought each other to a near-standstill. It wasn't short-sellers: from what I could tell, more than a few used the plummet to cover. I wonder if it's a whale (or group of impatient dolphins) who watched FCT go nowhere today and lose patience. If you bought only four days ago, you've got a >50% profit even at the post-dump price.

I know some folks here prefer more involved interpretations, but I'm still a fan of Occam's Razor.

Thanks for the link! I responded with (what I hope is) a helpful comment.

I remember that pump. There I was, looking at the chart and the implied Bitcoin values of my Factoids...and building castles in the air while shouting "MOOOOOOON!" in my head...

Make of this what you will: this current uptrend has so far been sustained, even though it looked shaky several hours ago. Also, the short sellers are back in force. My perspective on them is a weird one with respect to the usual rules of thumb, but from what I've seen they're tactically smart (shorting in force after a very-short-term leap) but not so smart with respect to the trend: they prefer fighting it. This fight-the-trend stance of theirs could result from them remembering how the previous pump collapsed, or it could just be that they're scalpers: taking micro-profits by pushing down a leap. Likely, both reasons apply.

(There are short-seller bots: one of them has the...charming habit of borrowing in a very large collection of very small amounts. Because of that bot, my "Active Loans" box is crowded as s%&!.)

Wowie, what a ride! I've been playing the Lending market for most of the day (off and on) and the daily rates have been HUGE. As I write, the low offer's 0.1298% per day...and I have lotsa loans at above that rate.

Funny how Facton's market has been unusual: in that, the short sellers - over the longer term - act a lot like dumb money. I've been not only lending my Factom but also loading up more when the rates got above ~0.4% daily. Relative to the stock market, it's pretty weird. In stock-market land, the short sellers tend to be the smart money. At Polo, not so much. From what I've seen, short sellers' dumping have just held back Facton's rise. They haven't put any long-term dent in it; they've just acted as roadblocks.

The wind is definitely a tailwind...

Well, congratulations: you got your wish.


Without the need of a lawyer, I should add...

Way to go with the Factom call! Of course, I'm saying this as someone who loaded up on it earlier.

Good question.

As I said before and will probably say again, I'm not a lawyer. So, my thinking-as-the-plaintiff's-lawyer is prolly defective in subtle ways.

To gab about the defense side, it occurred to me that there's a two-pronged slam-bang defense that any real lawyer would bring up in the initial interview:

Prong 1: The Good Samaritan defense. The white-hat hacker team had no motive other than to rescue The DAO stakeholders and worked for free during their rescue operation. It's not enough to claim that they did so because they themselves were stakeholders - not as long as they got the exact same aliquot-share reward as someone who occasionally cheered them on at Reddit but otherwise did nothing. In order to impugn this defense, the plaintiff has to prove that they got compensation over and above what they got as DAO stakeholders. To put it bluntly, the plaintiff would have to show that they were either a) paid for the work, which would render the Good-Samaritan part of the defense moot; or b) that they were bribed to do it. Either attempt requires the plaintiff to have evidence; speculation won't do.

Prong 2: "We Haven't Touched The Ethereum Classic Blockchain" defense. This one's intriguing, because a court would have to regard the Ethereum Classic blockchain as a separate entity. If the defense can demonstrate that they haven't touched the Ethereum Classic blockchain, then the plaintiff's job becomes harder. Plaintiff would have to argue that the white-hat-hacker team had an affirmative responsibility to return the Ethereum Classic to the now-Classic-DAO token holders. This could be done, using that corporate-spinoff analogy I riffed on above, but it would have to be done carefully. A judge might well decide that the people who incurred the liability were the dev team behind Ethereum Classic!

In fact, Prong 2 might well suffice on those last grounds.

So a real lawyer for the plaintiff would ask: 1) "Can you prove that the whit-hat hackers received special compensation over and above their share as DAO token holders?" 2) "Can you prove that they messed around with the Ethereum-Classic DAO on or after the time of the hardfork?" If the answer to both is "No," then said lawyer would decline the case.

Or recommend that the plaintiffs sure the devs of Ethereum Classic!

You misunderestimate lawyers' agility.

All a lawyer needs is some reasoning-by-analogy that's the kernel of a plausible theory and he's ready to go. If the legal beagle gets the idea that the Ethereum ---> forked Ethereum + Ethereum Classic is like a split of a company into two, called a "spinoff," then he has a theory he can work.

1) Show that every holder of Ethereum before the split block received equal amounts of Ethereum-Fork and Ethereum Classic;
2) Show that Ethereum Classic has a copy of The DAO which contains Ethereum Classic, and that draining this version of The Dao does not touch the Ethereum-Fork DAO's holdings in the least, thus demonstrating that the Ethereum Classic in the ETC-DAO is separate from the Ethereum-Fork held by the "real" DAO;
3) Tie (1) and (2) together by showing that token holders in The DAO pre-fork have equal amounts of The DAO tokens for each blockchain;
4) Drag in the analogy relating the one-blockchain-into-two to a corporate spinoff, for which there are lots of precedents to show that all shareholders in Company X are entitled to their aliquot shares in both company X1 and Company X2;
5) Possibly put an insta-expert on the stand to demonstrate that a) the fork reduced the value of the "real" Ethereum and b) there's a negative correlation between the value of Ethereum-fork and Ethereum Classic, which tightens up the Ethereum-as-corporate-property analogy. [This one might well be superfluous, and it is risky because the insta-expert would be subject to cross-examination.]
6) Demonstrate that The DAO is a creature of the Ethereum blockchain, has no life or value outside of it, and demonstrate that The DAO has value with the Ethereum blockchain - and that The DAO-Classic has value in Ethereum Classic.
7) Conclude by adducing standard company-split precedents that all say that a company which splits owes its shareholders aliquot stakes in both new companies - and demonstrate that this analogy is exact with respect to forked Ethereum and Ethereum Classic.

So yeah, I'd say that a lawyer would take his money.


P.S. I'm no legal beagle myself, but I found this out when two mining-exploration companies were amalgamated into one (which became a producing gold mine, by the way) a long time ago. The two companies were called Golden Giant and Golden Sceptre, and they held deposits next to each other that were amalgamated into a new company called Hemlo Gold. As part of the re-org, which started off by merging Giant and Sceptre, each shareholder in each company got stock in three companies: Hemlo Gold, New Golden Giant and New Golden Sceptre. Never mind that the last two went nowhere; each shareholder was still entitled to a piece of all three because otherwise some corporate property from the temporarily-merged Giant-Sceptre company would have been unaccounted for.

The only risk with the above theory comes with the kernel analogizing a cryptocurrency to a corporation. But a capable lawyer could adduce the IRS ruling that cryptocurrency is property, and hope that the judge carries the ball the rest of the way by deciding that the analogy to corporate property is legally sound. It's not a sure thing, but it's a good-enough theory for a lawyer to take his money and sleep soundly at night.

Binary options are bets on financial instruments. Let's say I'm a gold bull and want to bet that gold will be above US$1,350 as of 5 PM ET next Tuesday. I can buy a "binary option" which essentially is a bet on gold being >$1,350 at 5PM ET August 2nd, 2016. If gold isn't above that level, I lose my bet. But if it is, I win the bet.

The way a binary option differs from a regular bet is the payoff amount. With a regular bet, I win the fixed bet amount. But with a binary option, I'd win the difference between the real price and my bet price. Example: if gold closed at $1,352.5 at that time, I'd win $2.50.

The binary option sector is a) huge b) widely regarded as scammy. Factom's financial-data Trusted Oracle could help clean up the industry or at least take away the smell to it.

That's absolutely mind-blowing: not the smart-contract thingie, but the trusted oracle. Auditable, trustworthy financial data: just think of what that could do for binary options!

Thanks.

Glad to: I really was.