I don't know. Both look really sketch and shady.
And I assume the options contracts are priced by supply and demand.
Theres so many problems with that lol. Anyways, gonna leave this here for discussion next few days and see where it goes.
For the record, I use neither of them... Just noting the reason why we need competition!  |
|
|
|
Bitcoin gives mankind an alternative to government fiat currency, which is a major breakthrough. On the other hand, the only kind of business that a decentralized exchange facilitates is scams. They are really nothing the same, even if they could both be described as questionable to a lot of people.
Plain and simple, a security is a contract, and you cannot have a contract worth anything more than the paper it's printed on without a means to enforce it. This is sort of like one of those immutable laws that cannot be ignored nor explained away with examples where someone had an unenforceable contract but still got something out of it.
It is difficult to follow your logic here, and this is vague conflation of different concepts. 1) A decentralized exchange for smart property mirrors the real world today. If you can buy a car for cash today, a decentralized exchange protocol would enable person-to-person property transfers. 2) A decentralized exchange is nothing but a secure ownership transfer and registry mechanism. It doesn't automatically attach legal meaning, and is not a contract of any sort. Legal meaning is attached from the real world to a smart property token, just like legal meaning today is attached to stock certificates which are managed by stock transfer agents in an owner-neutral, automated, electronic manner. 3) Functionally speaking, this sort of system would provide (a) pseudonymous ownership exchange and (b) issuer->holder payment tracking. This is a subscriber list, in essence. Where payments to subscribers may be publicly inspected and audited. None of that automatically suggests scams. In fact, the opposite: it is very elegant to swap a bitcoin car payment for a digital ownership token that unlocks a car. Or for the familiar mining bonds, it makes it easy to send publicly audited payments to holders. Condemning decentralized exchanges whole cloth is nothing less than condemning all digital property. A future world where the authorities control all exchange of digital property would be a depressing world. |
|
|
|
Cascascius speaks the truth. Companies who have a physical prescence are still limited by what their local government allows. And they arent allowed to issue equity to the general public.
Not true in the United States, with the JOBS Act. |
|
|
|
|
ICBit also supports futures.
|
|
|
|
|
Options contracts have long been discussed, and a few sites do offer them.
It would be great to introduce some standardization and competition to the market.
MPOE-PR runs a market, but also trolls heavily all over this forum, so his answers are highly biased.
|
|
|
|
Miners cannot mine without users using their bitcoins. Do you mean after the end of the block subsidy, and that they won't mine? Otherwise, I disagree. Blocks can be created without any transactions... You are micro-parsing. The post was discussing economic incentives. Without users, an empty block has zero value to a miner, regardless of initial block reward. |
|
|
|
Satoshi spent a long time designing the economic incentives surrounding bitcoin. For example, he worked hard to make block header hashing a static affair, not directly related to transaction or block byte count. Increasing the "work" as block size increased would encourage miners to make their blocks as small as possible, he realized. Satoshi also made it so that only 21 million of coins will be issued, and it isn't a matter of incentive but a matter of consensus. It is entirely a matter of incentives. Satoshi designed the system so that users would have the economic incentive to maintain the 21M limit -- thereby maintaining the value of the bitcoins in their pockets. They have incentives to maintain a distributed consensus. Economic incentives drive consensus making. Even if all miners will refuse to cut block awards client software simply won't accept their blocks. So expansion of Bitcoin emission is only possible with approval of considerable number of users, not miners. Does it remind you anything?
Yes -- economic incentives. Miners cannot mine without users using their bitcoins. Users cannot use bitcoins without miners mining. Otherwise there is a loss of value. |
|
|
|
Approaches 1 and 2 are problematic because issuer can suddenly release a large quantity of shares, thus diluting existing shareholders/bondholders. It can make shareholder identification rather problematic.
So I'm more for approaches where user needs to consent to new issue. It is more democratic, i.e. people kind of vote for whether they authorize new issue (it is different from a normal shareholder vote because it is implicit). Also they have control: if something weird will happen, people will have a warning before they accept diluted shares.
Everybody hits this conceptual problem eventually: new, dilutive issues. The thing is, they are unavoidable. It is a variant of the Sybil attack. An issuer may create new shares at any time, simply by representing themselves under a new identity. An issuer may also issue more shares/bonds than there are assets to back their bond (i.e. a mining company selling 1TH worth of bonds, when they only have 500GH). Without rating and third party auditing and real-world identity checking (of the issuer), voting to authorize a new issue might simply provide an illusion of safety behind which dishonest folks hide. The question to ask oneself is: what would a rational (if amoral) economic actor do? What are the economic incentives that drive the issuer, and the holders? And what can software do to change or enhance those incentives? For example, software could make it easy to track payments as well as smart property. This makes issuer -> holder payments transparent, and audit-able by any third party reading the block chain. Third parties could verify that an issuer pays everyone on the publicly known (somehow) terms. This software change creates a familiar, positive economic incentives -- good ratings, transparent, provable operations -- for issuers. Satoshi spent a long time designing the economic incentives surrounding bitcoin. For example, he worked hard to make block header hashing a static affair, not directly related to transaction or block byte count. Increasing the "work" as block size increased would encourage miners to make their blocks as small as possible, he realized. |
|
|
|
I still think we are just scratching the surface of the problem. Coloured coins will only provide a "shareholders registry" service. It will not substitute for "stock exchange".
100% correct The distributed bond thread describes a separate P2P network and DHT which would be used as a network where traders advertise assets for sale, and make offers. |
|
|
|
Why not use torrent/magnet link - or am i missing some vulnerability there?
A trusted user posts the torrent file at some location and we all seed.
The point of using PGP signatures is that a "trusted user" can be impersonated. Speaking of seeding, though, there is an experimental bitcoin blockchain torrent. |
|
|
|
It'd be good if the coloured coins could be held in one blockchain.info wallet and dividends paid to any of the coins owners choosing. Also what keep's the proof of the coloured coins? If it's just your 'short python script' on my machine then I need a way to back proof up online and to be able to distribute it to each coloured coin owner. Sorry if that sounds stupid and/or I've missed the point, still trying to figure this all out.
Given current bitcoin software, it is strongly advisable to keep separate wallets for smartcoins (colored coins) and regular bitcoins. Mix the two at your peril; it is too easy to "spend away" an asset as regular bitcoins, with a single wallet. |
|
|
|
Also, what's the problem with bots?
Bots play all sorts of games with flashing various bids and asks, then cancelling them. Trying to trigger other bots or traders to make a trade, or change the bid/ask spread etc. On mainline exchanges (NASDAQ, etc.) bots have been reported to intentionally flood the channel to lock out other players. In bitcoin-land, DDoS is a sadly familiar tactic. Lastly, you need to make sure a bunch of bots doing HFT don't suddenly dump gigabytes of data into the blockchain. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with bots. Well behaved bots that are moderate-to-low traffic are just fine. |
|
|
|
|
PS. Thank you for using 'sendmany' It helps keep blockchain bloat to a minimum.
|
|
|
|
Something like “whoever makes a block with this transaction will be a judge” does not work, because you need some qualifications to be a judge. For instance, judge should not be 12 year old. Please keep in mind that there is no restriction on age of miners.
In the proposed smart property / smartcoin / colored coin designs, the blockchain merely tracks ownership of an abstract digital object. Nothing more. It is up to software and -- as you point out -- the real world to attach meaning to the digital object. |
|
|
|
Should all contributors to the software be paid employees or just the lead? What is the typical "open source foundation" way of doing it?
For any open source project with a foundation, only a small subset of developers contributing to the software wind up getting paid. Usually there are only a tiny few full time positions for lead developers like Linus Torvalds (who is paid by the Linux Foundation), or Gavin in this case. The remaining contributors tend to fall into one of two categories - Developers paid by a vendor in the ecosystem, who has a direct economic interest. Example: My day job is working on the Linux kernel, and Red Hat (not the Linux Foundation) pays for me to work on that open source project.
- Unpaid volunteers
And there are plenty of reasons why one remains a volunteer dev. As an unpaid volunteer developer, I am free to disappear whenever I want, ignoring all bitcoin related emails for 6 months when the day job gets uber busy, or while I backpack on the Appalachian Trail. In open source projects, the long tail tells you that you will always have 100x more casual contributors, than steady contributors you can depend on for a timely response to a critical security bug. Bitcoin is a very small ecosystem right now, as open source projects go. (Warning: my own predictions... I've no BF insider info at all here) As it grows, Bitcoin Foundation will probably hire another dev or two, another sysadmin, pay for some infrastructure. Once the bitcoin ecosystem is large enough, you will start to see devs appear who are working for third parties. For example, (again, prediction, no insider info) MtGox hires their own developer, who contributes work based on MtGox's interests. Similarly, chipmakers Intel and AMD hire their own Linux kernel developers to represent their interests, and submit Intel/AMD-specific code to the open source Linux kernel. But that is a ways off. An open source project is a rich blend of paid devs and unpaid volunteers, everybody working together on one common piece of software, to make it better for everyone. As the saying goes, you work on an open source project to "scratch your own itch." That is the engineering equivalent of pursuing one's own economic self-interest, the essence of the free market. |
|
|
|
Torrent added to PirateBay! I hope you here or my friend - I used his abandoned account - will be OK with this move. Once PB picks some torrent, it usualy got spread to numerous other torrent sites in matter of few days, so expect (or not?) some more down/uploaders and/or participants here. In general, spreading the torrent far and wide is fine. But for trackers or accounts of friends, it is nice to ask [the tracker site / friend] first I haven't added any trackers to torrent. I just uploaded .torrent you linked at starting post, from my HDD, and copy/pasted some info. Yeah, post the .torrent file far and wide. |
|
|
|
If someone else appeared on the scene (let's say Luke) and asked to be lead dev would you be capable of resigning your position without a vote of the membership of TBF? Let's say you went snowboarding and were laid up after a nasty accident for a year, could a person be made lead dev after you left without the consideration of TBF? If the answer to these questions is no then one elected body has too much control of a decentralized system.
RE lead dev:Lead dev is not an elected position governed by rules and procedures. Satoshi chose Gavin, and the community consents to agree by their use of software. He has been a good steward of Satoshi's vision. It might also be fair to say that lead dev is just someone who failed to say "not it!!" fast enough Lead dev means not only wrangling releases, but also being a big fat target for any bitcoin criticism or paranoid fear. The whole point of open source and git is to make it easy to fork the project, and go your own way. The second any developer does something disliked by users, the software will be forked. Thus, open source makes it easy to "fire" any dev. If you make it easy for leaders to come and go, make it easy to change leadership, then that creates a powerful incentive not to piss off your userbase! Leaders are simply chosen by the free market (of ideas and engineering output, in this case). RE absence:If Gavin gets "hit by a bus" -- the popular jargon for losing an open source project leader -- commits and releases will happen as someone steps up and the community accepts them. I think most of us would run away screaming, if Luke-Jr were lead dev ;p |
|
|
|
Torrent added to PirateBay! I hope you here or my friend - I used his abandoned account - will be OK with this move. Once PB picks some torrent, it usualy got spread to numerous other torrent sites in matter of few days, so expect (or not?) some more down/uploaders and/or participants here. In general, spreading the torrent far and wide is fine. But for trackers or accounts of friends, it is nice to ask [the tracker site / friend] first |
|
|
|
RE: do I have gazillions of bitcoins:
I've said before that I have "thousands of bitcoins, not tens or hundreds of thousands of bitcoins." I have mined a grand total of 250 bitcoins-- electricity here is not particularly cheap, and I'm a software kind of guy, not a hardware hacker. So it always made more sense for me to buy bitcoins rather than mining them.
I would definitely be wealthier right now if I had been working as the CTO for a company for the last two years and had never heard of Bitcoin.
Indeed. For the record, I do not have any mining operation nor even have thousands of bitcoins. Not that there is anything wrong mining securing the bitcoin network. In fact, I'm the one who gave away over 15,000 bitcoins attempting to jumpstart the bitcoin economy, and incentivize developers to join bitcoin. |
|
|
|
|
Show Posts
