Imagine my ideas for the second bitcoin white paper (http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=31645.0) turn out to be feasible (this is a big IF).

Would you want to see this kind of functionality added to bitcoin? Is it an interesting idea that should go in a different block chain? Should I just shut up?

Vote now!

I WOULD say the same thing, except, looking at the poll results, 17% of people are willing to steal and ripoff a company just because they can.  Looks like the OP pegged the people here for exactly who they are.  Liars, thieves, and the scum of the earth.  Only on 4chan would you find a higher percentage of people with reckless abandon for other peoples' well-being.

It'd be insanely easy to get evidence against someone "Hmm... right here in your browsers history I see MtGox, a bitcoin trading website, bitcoin.org, the website for the bitcoin client and a forum for bitcoin users, mtgox live, a monitoring site for the mtgox trading website, and BTCGuild, a ... ok I have no idea how to explain mining in generic terms

But when the contracts are redeemed automatically (before becoming "insolvent") and when is decided who was right in his bet and how much has to get from the other's party escrow is when the external spot price matters. If it didn't matter, we didn't had to input information from the markets.

I mean the spot price at the moment of redemption.

. . . I have been involved with Bitcoin since 2009.

As an account executive and analyst in VC world of Silicon Valley it is my job to find  potential new investments and more so in vetting them out.

Are people looking at TradeHill, of course they are. It has potential.

All I am doing is trying to help Jered from flushing himself out of the system. The method he is employing is unprofessional at best in dealing with Dwolla. TradeHill has damaged it's image. Sure they look great to you guys, but none of you guys are going to drop a couple of million in seed either.

Once again Jered, consider what I said previous about going quiet and furthermore, if I were you I would definitely make statement strongly discouraging any coordinated attacks on Dwolla in your behalf.

But when you send the sell order you don't know which miner is going to solve the next block nor what spot price he's going to report.

I was being sarcastic.  Although i dont see how putting a step by step on how to do it, is very helpful.  I would never do something like that.

http://unconfirmedsources.com/?itemid=6155

Unconfirmed sources are reporting that shares of Wall Street giant Goldman Sachs are rallying after a late announcement that they are launching a Bitcoin trading unit.

Imagine you're a user that wants a stable value.
You hold some of the bitcoin from your sales (or wage or whatever) and invest some of them in a "1971 dollar vs bitcoin" contract.
The more bitbulls the more you will be able to gain if bitcoin falls. If bitcoin rises, you lose from the contract but gain from the bitcoins you hold, so with the right proportion you stay the same.

The result of the contract (who gains, who loses and how much) depends on the voting, on the real price of the commodities.
The price you mean may differ is the price specified in the contract as a "draw" where neither party gains or loses.

Just keep in mind those voting yes... pretty sure doing this would be considered fraud.  If Tradehill and/or Dwolla and/or your bank can prove that you were intentionally defrauding them, you could go to jail, have felony(s) on your record, have large fines levied against you, etc.

If you're not an ethical person, fine.  But don't be surprised when the law comes back to bite you.

I wasn't but now that you showed me how easy it is, why not.

Thanks

No matter the denomination, the contracts will be automatically redeemed before some of the parties is insolvent.
The problem with this is that the contracts can expire before the contracted date, but the funds in escrow for the other part are the maximum you should expect to win. If you're losing, you can always add more funds to avoid that the contract gets redeemed.
In fact you don't even have to liquidate the contracts when they are become "insolvent", both parties know the funds that are in escrow from the other party, they shouldn't expect to gain more than that.

I'm just noting that the contracts could be denominated in a stable currency. The currency doesn't have to even exist, it can be defined as a basket of commodities or the dollar plus the increase in CPI from shadowstats. It doesn't have to be a currency. The contract could have rice vs gold or mac vs google.

I still think that the hardest part is to define what information must the miners include in the block and how is it going to be calculated that a block is valid or not.

I like your idea for a distributed option market, but it requires many changes and some of them (the voting for the input of information from markets) are very risky. You need to move coins from an address to other with the only authorization from the original address of the contract, and the result of the contract depends on voting.

That is the part that I simply do not understand.  The "protocol" is not an entity that can take actions.  The protocol is a set of rules that all peers use to evaluate the bitcoin messages they receive and build up a shared, agreed-upon concept of what the "global balance sheet" of bitcoin is (in the form of transaction chains stored in the block chain).  The protocol dictates rules about transaction validity that individual peers are free to ignore but since other peers have no incentive to ignore the rules, and incentives to obey them, a disobeying peer will get nowhere fast.  At every point in the complex dance of bitcoin peers, the protocol rules are constructed to cause natural agreement between everyone with minimal effort.  It's a thing of beauty.

You talk about the protocol as if it's something running somewhere in real time making decisions and effecting outcomes.  It's not that at all.  The protocol is a set of rules, and those rules must be set out ahead of time to effect the actions you want from the bitcoin peer network.  Not only that, the rules don't specify what any peer has to do, only what is valid for any peer to have done.  The protocol rules do not compel any action on the part of any peer, they establish criteria for deciding when what a peer has done is illegal, and because following these rules is to everyone's benefit due to the clever construction of the protocol, everyone naturally obeys them and everyone agrees when someone has done something against the protocol rules and ignores them identically.

So you have to formulate rules that can be described ahead of time and which, for any peer who doesn't know anything about the history of transactions in your system, can be used to ingest all of the block chain blocks and then decide on its own, independently of any other peer, what the state of the "global balance sheet" is after every block; and each peer must be able to do this identically.  The identically part is what, in my opinion, rules out appealing to external entities for values to use in protocol equations for determining validity of transactions, because nobody ought to, or ought to be expected to, rely on an external authority whom they have to trust gives out accurate information to everybody and who is always available to every bitcoin peer and always presents a true, factual, and consistent set of values when queried.

Furthermore, the requirement that the protocol establish rules that peers can use to verify transactions themselves using only the data available in the block chain (or other data that is publicly shared via the peer network and is cryptographically secure using hashes and forced work functions) means that the data sets and rules involved in verifying a given transaction must be minimal; otherwise, the work required to verify a transaction chain becomes prohibitive and gets even worse as the network scales.

This last part is why I keep asking for a concrete description of the rules that peers will have to follow to validate transactions.  If a client has to a) keep an entire history of every transaction in order to be able to evaluate the validity of a transaction chain (bitcoin peers don't due to the merkle trees), and/or b) appeal to external authorities which may or may not be accessible or trustworthy, and/or c) require the evaluation of complex relationships between transactions or escrow accounts or whatever, and/or d) require every peer to retain huge amounts of data on disk in order to be able to validate any transaction, and/or e) any number of other ways to make the work of peers to establish faith in the validity of a transaction that I haven't thought of yet, then it is an unworkable system.

It is my supposition that your proposal suffers from more than one of these problems; and I've been trying to fish out more detail (admittedly I don't understand every aspect of your proposal so I'm trying to get you to consider my concerns and apply them to your system rather than doing it myself).  I don't think you should write to Satoshi or publish a white papeer take any other premature step before addressing these concerns.