Dividend chart might be a bit confusing.

For example, this one:
http://www.havelockstats.com/dividends/PETA/6m

Suggests that dividends for PETA fell on July, whereas what happened was that they simply began paying them much more often.

Or this one, seems to suggest that dividends increased:
http://www.havelockstats.com/dividends/CBTC/1y

But they skipped two months of payouts, so they haven't really.

Perhaps some kind of a rolling average, or a sum would be better?

Hi,
The problem with current futures/CFD/option trading services is that they all have to rely on a single company for contract fulfillment.
While this might be good for smaller speculators, for bigger ones, and for companies that want to launch services on top of such contracts, this is a no-go.

But what if the contracts were mediated by M of N oracles? If you wanted to buy/sell a put/call option, you'd lock your funds on a multisig address maintained by a set of ~10-15 trusted people and companies. Even if one or two, or five of those people/companies would disappear before contract expiration date, you'd be safe.

There are some obvious problems with this - like choosing the respectable oracles to run the system, and having a good data feed for arbitration... But those problems aside, what do you guys think?

I'm wondering if there's anyone interested in such a solution.

I think of launching a service that offers put/call options mediated by a set of distributed oracles. ( https://github.com/orisi/wiki/wiki/Orisi-White-Paper ).

Right now I'm doing a market research to understand what's up in this field. Can you guys help me a bit?

- Any forums for people who are interested in this?
- Any services offering such a thing now (I know of plus500.com, and I remember there was a site where people with high WOT ranking could post their offers)?

Relevant:
https://blockchain.info/charts/n-orphaned-blocks

I don't know though if it's daily orphaned blocks or hourly or what.

I don't know about a javascript implementation, but for python you can check out ours:

https://github.com/orisi/wiki/wiki/Installing-the-oracle-node

And then run ./runclient.sh main

Here's a code that does it:
https://github.com/orisi/orisi/blob/master/src/client/main.py
(function main)

Here's a brief khan-academy style video explaination:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boPW1FwNu4c

It's a part of this tutorial:
https://github.com/orisi/wiki/wiki/Mastering-Distributed-Oracles

In short: you create a multisig address that locks the money in, and will be unlocked using one or more impartial arbiters/oracles.

The current Orisi examples assume that oracles are the only ones who sign the tx, but you could add sender/receiver's signatures to the mix to be sure that oracles won't run away with money. (it's described within the whitepaper: https://github.com/orisi/wiki/wiki/Orisi-White-Paper )

"A rising tide lifts all boats"

I think that's more or less what SatoshiDice did. They made an IPO with shares sold in various denominations/steps.

Here's the commit:
https://github.com/gavinandresen/bitcoin-git/commit/7f3b4e95695d50a4970e6eb91faa956ab276f161

As for distributed oracles - there's now Orisi.org of course

I'll think of it.


Hm. "Just the bittip" ?

Screw sci-fi...

Just a bit-tip.

A bitcoin early adopter wanted to tip a waiter a 1000 bits using a paper wallet. But due to a bug in the new Blockchain.info iOS app he tipped her 1000 bitcoins! Once he discovers his mistake he devises a plan to seduce her and steal the wallet. He figures out her Bitmessage address and starts flirting with her over the net.

His intrigue falls apart when he discovers that she runs a squat for anarchists in her spare time. Because of that he falls madly in love with her. He's torn between stealing the money back, and letting her figure out what's up and using money to buy back the squat from the rightful owners. Heart wins over wallet, and he decides to propose a marriage over blockchain. A bit too late unfortunately, because she finds out his original intentions by seeing a discussion on #bitcoin irc channel.

She gives the money to anarchists, protected by an M of N signature wallet, and they purchase the land and modify the deed into smart property managed via blockchain contracts. The girl's heart is broken and she erases her Bitmessage private keys. She still works at the coffee place, but there's simply no way to contact her. She's gone.

Epilogue: the same coffee place. The girl brings coffee to an older gentleman. You could say he looks a bit like Morgan Freeman... As she puts the coffee on the table, he grabs her hand, and looks into her eyes. "Give him another chance." She walks away. Later on, when cleaning the table she finds another bitcoin tip with a note attached: "Here's a small bribe. Those are mint condition by the way."

Right now distributed oracles seem the only possibility:

https://github.com/orisi/wiki/wiki/Orisi-White-Paper - a paper describing m of n oracles + a few words on how it can be used for sidechains
https://github.com/orisi/wiki/wiki/Mastering-Distributed-Oracles - a tutorial through the Orisi oracles
http://gavintech.blogspot.com/2014/06/bit-thereum.html - Gavin Andersen explaining why M of N oracles might probably be the best solution for sidechains

Distributed oracle sidechains have an obvious problem that you have to trust a selected number of entities to support the network. On the other hand they have two big benefits:

- they require no changes in bitcoin protocol
- it's possible to create a non-blockchain sidechain e.g. you could create a ripple-based bitcoin sidechain, or you could create a sidechain that keeps it's data within a tomp2p database

As for miners accepting the transaction - right now it's basically Eligius. As for the oracles - check out our whitepaper: https://github.com/orisi/wiki/wiki/Orisi-White-Paper and our repo: https://github.com/orisi/orisi . We have a framework for delivering external inputs to the transactions, and an example timelock transaction ready + working on new contract kinds.

Also, Gavin pushed a commit recently that will make virtually all scripts standard within a couple of months.

Hi guys,
I totally missed this discussion  What's the status of this idea, are you working on it still?

We're looking for someone to handle our ( Orisi.org ) social media & PR efforts.

The workload is around 20-30h / week, there is a small monthly payment of around 400 USD/mo (paid in Bitcoin, with an option to go up to 1.5kUSD with time & experience), and there's an opportunity to learn a lot in terms of both how Bitcoin works, and internet marketing works from people who have experience in both.

Requirements:
- time
- intelligence
- sensible writing skills
- some knowledge of how bitcoin operates
- willingness to learn about the technology with little handholding

Would be nice:
- if you were close to the central-european timezone
- karma on bitcoin forum, reddit, hacker news, and followers on Twitter

Did you read about a concept of distributed oracles?

https://github.com/orisi/wiki/wiki/Orisi-White-Paper

and the source code repo:

http://github.com/orisi/orisi

While it's quite different from what you're proposing, distributed oracles also allow for handling banking/trading offchain, using multisig accounts. It would definitely be worth for you to see what's being done in this area

Hi,
We just launched a new messaging protocol - FastCast:

"FastCast is a simple broadcast messaging protocol we had to develop for Orisi. Right now it supports a single-server hub, but it should be possible to extend it into a distributed architecture ( https://github.com/orisi/fastcast/issues/1 ), and to include a proof-of-work or proof-of-burn spam prevention.

FastCast is built as a simple web REST server based on Django Rest Framework. Here you can read how it compares to BitMessage: https://github.com/orisi/fastcast/wiki/How-FastCast-compares-to-BitMessage ."

The main repo is here:
https://github.com/orisi/fastcast

I think it may get handy in a few Bitcoin projects, hence a post here

You might want to check out this thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=685048

Once there are features worth implementing, Bitcoin will probably implement them. The problem is that right now there are none. Most alt-coin features are useless publicity stunts (built-in exchanges, messaging, etc.); are already implemented (scripting); or might be implemented one day if such need arises (proof of stake?).

You might also want to read up on the subject of side chains. Those allow new features to be implemented on top of bitcoin without protocol modification, and about distributed oracles ( https://github.com/orisi/wiki/wiki/Orisi-White-Paper ) which allow for some other cool stuff which none of the alt-currencies allow or ever will.

Just published a khan-academy style explaination of how we handle a timelock transaction:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boPW1FwNu4c

And here's a tutorial for whoever wants to set up a transaction by himself/herself:

https://github.com/orisi/wiki/wiki/Performing-a-Timelock-transaction