Bumping to remind people to file claims.

For reference, I've talked a bit with Nefario but haven't yet received any data, or my own coins.

Is there another way to look at it?

We already said with a proper deposit/transaction structure you can alleviate the problems, enough to make this a powerful tool in practice. But they are hardly solved when:

 - You need to trust the other party not to lose their key.
 - The seller may not have available funds to use as deposit (if the deposit is large).
 - Even if it's not in their best interest, some people will still try to blackmail, and some people will still give in to it.

I've made arguments similar to yours in the past and I agree, I just disagree with the characterization as "solved".

No, it doesn't solve the problem. Being gradual maybe solves a problem with the OP's specific implementation (avoidable with better transactions). The hard part is what happens after everyone finishes depositing. Every party can hold the other ransom - with a successful blackmail he gets both his deposit back and some of the other party's. Having a large deposit means trying to do blackmail is more expensive, but also that more can go wrong.

Even if this is possible it sounds like such a system would be very limited. It definitely wouldn't generalize to arbitrary transactions (eg buying a product at an online store). And for currency exchange you have other methods such as Ripple-based exchange.

Nice table. The main problem (as has been discussed for example here) is blackmail - instead of doing step 5, trader B can tell trader A "I'll only give you the key if you pay me 50 BTC!". Assuming the threat is credible, A will have to part with 50 BTC to rescue the other 50. Even if most people won't give in to blackmail, if B's deposit is small he can try it on N people until he succeeds. This is alleviated if B's deposit is larger, but then A can blackmail him in step 6... You can make it work (with carefully balanced deposits and more sophisticated transactions), but it's not trivial.

For an alternative mechanism, see https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Contracts#Example_2:_Escrow_and_dispute_mediation - it involves a 3rd party arbiter, but the arbiter cannot steal (or lose) the funds without colluding with one of the parties, as long as the traders agree it doesn't matter what happens to him.

I'm fine with using the word "Bitcoin" for both the resource being considered (capitalized) and a unit of measurement for that resource (not capitalized).

Absolutely not. That's more or less like saying a computer is worth what you could get by melting it and selling it as scrap metal.

The worth of a company is not the sum of the resell value of its physical assets. It is a reflection of how much profit it is expected to achieve with its combination of people, IP, customer base and physical assets. You can't take any of these away without making the company something completely different which is no longer profitable, and thus no longer valuable.

Since nobody knows how much profit a company will make, everyone has a different evaluation and a market can extract an aggregate valuation. It is still the case that for a liquid market, the most reliable indicator of value is the market price, from which each individual can adjust based on his own analysis.

The Herzliya Bitcoin Meetup October 2012 has been scheduled for October 16, 17:45, in Microsoft ILDC - Think Next Academy, Shenkar 13, Building No.6, Floor L1, Herzeliyya Pituach. See http://www.meetup.com/bitcoin-il/events/85485312/.

It seems there is now a claim form on https://glbse.com/. Please file a claim there. Since we do not yet know what will happen with the information submitted, it may be a good idea to independently send me a claim as described above (by sending email to glbse at menirosenfeld dot com with information of GLBSE username, amount of bonds held and withdrawal address, as well as any other relevant details).

Knowing the going rate of something is essential to deriving your own valuation for it, and for liquid assets the personal valuation is the going rate - plus or minus epsilon to account for friction and personal needs and beliefs.

If I meet you and offer you 1000 bitcoins in exchange for $X, how low will X need to be for you to accept (giving you some time to complete the payment)? I doubt the answer is much different from $12150 (to within ~10%), where $12.15 is the Mtgox last traded price. Because you know that even if you have no need for bitcoins, you could sell them for ~$12150 on the open market (and that if you needed bitcoins and I didn't come to offer them, you could buy them for ~$12150).

So public knowledge of exchange rates is important. And actually traded rates aren't reliable because someone can trade with himself to manipulate price. Only a committing public offer can serve as an indication of the market rate and depth.

I'm not sure we're talking about the same thing. As I explained several times, making sure nobody runs away with the money is not a problem, that's easily solvable with both transfers being in the same transaction. I'm talking about manipulating the price by broadcasting orders you have no intention to execute, backing out when a 2nd party wants to take you on your offer.

Well it's hard to discuss this when we're not sure what the cross-chain system will look like.

But at the basic level, once everything is said and done every party will need to sign the constructed transaction. If he can back away on this last step all the preceding steps aren't committing.

This can be resolved if a signature is provided beforehand with a script saying this is valid as long as anyone pays quantity X of Y to Z. Maybe it's possible but it will surely be complicated (even if it's within the same blockchain, the script will have to recognize the color of coins).

Thanks. In a few months I'll see if it makes sense to issue more bonds.

Forced donation will be a last resort if there is no way to figure out who the bondholders are.

If you manage to recover your csv and determine exactly how many bonds you hold, it will be a good start.

This is relevant to my interests. (The company, not the investment opportunity which is out of my league.)

I hope we'll finally have a solid BTC margin trading platform, as well as some other badly needed services.

The mistaken assumption is that the pool always pays out exactly 100% of the block reward.

Basically, PPLNS absorbs no variance (all block reward is paid), PPS absorbs all reward (payment is completely independent of block rewards), and DGM absorbs some variance - in lucky times less than the block reward is given, in unlucky times more than the block reward is given. On average it evens out.

To further complicate things, this description is correct only if the block reward is fixed (and "luck" only relates to how many blocks are found). But if the block reward is variable (e.g. due to transaction fees), true PPLNS also doesn't always pay out exactly the block reward. That's the only way to be completely hopping-proof and to make sure expected payout is always equal to expected contribution. The differences will usually be minor though.

More concretely, it would enable pool-hopping when tx fees become significant. Hoppers will mine at your pool when the fees are low (knowing that the low fees will not be factored into their score) and as more time passes without a block and fees increase, hop to solo or a pool that does handle fees correctly (where they are credited for the high fees).

As someone who has also been burned both financially and emotionally by some recent events, and is struggling to make sense of it all, I have the following advice:

1. Now that you're depressed about what happened is not the right time to figure out overreaching insights about life, the universe and everything. Make decisions when you're level-headed, neither euphoric nor depressed. Take some time to cool off to think about things.

2. Things are bad but they're not all that bad. For every person who scammed me I can name someone who despite all difficulties, and despite me having no real recourse, successfully struggled to uphold his sizable commitments.

A month ago, I would say that among the borrowers who pass a sniff test, the proportion of legitimate ones is around 100%. Most people said that it's essentially 0%. Turned out the proportion is closer to 50%. I think this is a very impressive achievement.

If you look at it from a Bayesian perspective you'll see how scammers are overrepresented. There are many good people (for some definition of "good") in the world and a few con artists, but it is the con artists who will approach you to take your money (and to that end appear to be nice and likeable). So it isn't that surprising when someone who wants your money turns out to be a scammer. We thought spotting these scammers would be easier; we were wrong.

It's easy to establish some rules of thumb to avoid this kind of problems (and with the power of hindsight it's also easy to get oneself to apply them). Making a trade with someone where the value of the single trade is much smaller then that person's future profits from his activity = good. Giving a short-term loan to someone reputable to help with a temporary lack of liquidity = good. Giving a long-term loan to someone anonymous, to use in an unspecified risky way, with total liabilities many times his net worth or the value of any reputation he has = bad.

I still think it's possible to do business in a nontraditional way, and to use Bitcoin to power it. We just need to figure out how.

I will possibly migrate to colored coins at some point, until then it will be static (no ability of holders to transfer ownership). For the foreseeable future paying coupons will be more lucrative for me than buying back, and running my mining operation will be more lucrative than liquidating it (and the two are mostly independent).

The offering did assume the existence of GLBSE, but the prospect of perpetuity is fundamentally future-looking, the discontinuity of the coming weeks won't harm the essence of it - again assuming bondholders can be identified.

If that's a question to me it belongs in the PureMining thread (and the answer is that I will pay coupons until an ELE-based buyback is in order).

As a general question - GLBSE isn't important, what's important is the data which I hope is recoverable (of course the situation isn't better with any other stock or bond on GLBSE).

The first step will be to compile a list of asset holders (identified by payment address) and corresponding amount of PureMining bonds. I hope Nefario cooperates in generating such a list, but just in case:

If you have any PureMining bonds, please send an email to  glbse at menirosenfeld dot com  specifying the amount of bonds you had and a payment address (and preferably, some other details). If no information comes from Nefario and the claims are consistent, I'll consider going by the claims. Otherwise we'll figure something out (donation to charity is a possibility).

The second step will be to find an appropriate technical means to distribute coupons as normal until an eventual buyback. The buyback terms will of course have to be modified since there is no longer trading on GLBSE (probably making use of the extrapolated lifetime earnings).