Why didn't you bother to read the definition of the terms?

"Maturity time" means the time until the reward is received. If an SMPPS pool has a very negative buffer, it will take a long time for miners to get the reward for current mining.

"Hoppable" means that some times are more attractive to mine than others (considering all metrics, not just expected reward). In an SMPPS pool it is more attractive to mine when the buffer is positive due to having no maturity time in this scenario.

"Instability" includes the severity of a collapse. If a PPS pool collapses nothing happens. If an SMPPS pool collapses miners can lose a lot of money.

Some pools forward tx fees, most keep it.

Currently tx fees revolve around 0.05 BTC which is 0.1%, I don't think they're something to worry about now. They definitely will be in the future.

Of course not. But if you issue an asset, if you've verified a facebook account with Nefario the asset page will state so.

All POLY bonds have been recalled*. The Mtgox last price at the time was 10.92630 BTC; 428 POLY.10.1 bonds were bought back for 1.2*(10.92630/10) = 1.311156 BTC each for a total of 561.174768 BTC, and there were no outstanding POLY.10.-2 bonds. POLY is discontinued until further notice.

I still believe POLY is a viable model for a much-needed instrument and this was not an easy decision. Some of the contributing factors were:
1. Making POLY successful would require more work than I am currently able to allocate to it. This is exacerbated by the fact that GLBSE is lacking some of the features that could have made it easier.
2. The demand was mostly for the long bonds, which shorten my position; I had a need for this when I started, but I currently do not.
3. Due to various recent events I want to minimize my liabilities.

Thanks to investors and other supporters.


* (except for one account with 28 bonds which had a problem and Nefario says he's working on it.)

Well Nefario said he'll be more selective with new IPOs so you may want to familiarize yourself with GLBSE as a user before going there.

I don't think there's a guide but there isn't that much to it. You put bitcoins in, buy assets by placing bids or executing asks, get dividends, and as needed sell assets and/or take bitcoins out. If you have specific questions I guess you could ask here.

It's more or less the same, but instead of p=1/D you should use throughout p=d/D, where d is the difficulty of the current share submitted.

This doesn't do much. If address A can only be spent to address B then coins sent to address A are like coins sent to address B. The only difference is that if B is compromised and A is intact, the original owner can hold the coins ransom when negotiating with the thief.

Yes, you can have an address that requires signatures from two separate keys. But it's not fully supported in current software.

I doubt it will be done soon. It's a big change and its usefulness will be limited by the advent of multi-signature transactions, which can be used for much better security than the current standards.

The main reason for most hacks we hear about is either malice or negligence, not lack of technical means.

Something like this was discussed, and the bottom line is that in principle this can work, if you replace "aborted" with "redirected to a predetermined address". The predetermined address could be for example where the coins came from, or maybe something with EC math, etc. .

Let's say the safe address A is associated with a fallback address B. A transaction spending from A is only considered confirmed after 144 blocks. If there are not yet 144 blocks, and there is a transaction double-spending this with B (but no other address) as the target, it takes priority over the previous transaction.

So you could keep A in a cold wallet and B in a frozen wallet which is essentially never used. If you need to spend the coins from A you'll have to wait a day; but if someone steals your key and tries to spend the coins, you have a day to notice this and broadcast a transaction that overrides it and redirects the coin to the still secure address B.

Alberto says he will pay by Monday or Tuesday.

I can see how I may have used "depositor" to refer to the wrong person, I've edited to "borrower". Whether the term "deposit" itself is appropriate is arguable.

Not sure what you mean by "this", but http://www.paydayninja.net/ and http://shorttermloans.net/ offer short-term loans at 25%/mo (and if they still offer it, someone must be taking it), and successful startups commonly give massive returns to early investors. Before Bitcoin there was no easy way to move money around for investments and deposits, which may have been a catalyst for the current lending marketplace.

The borrowers could be wrong and the underlying investment opportunities may not actually be as profitable as they think. But as long as the borrower is honest and responsible, this is the borrower's problem, not the lender's.

Is it possible to update the translations?

Coupon payment summary for August 2012 (total 0.014924034 BTC per bond):

I agree with the general idea that people shouldn't be automatically assumed to be trustworthy, but there's something very fundamental you seem to be missing, and I'm happy for the opportunity to point it out.

If someone is taking deposits and offering high interest with low risk, it does not mean he thinks whatever he is doing with the money is low-risk. It means he is willing to absorb the risk, and commit his personal illiquid assets to pay it back if the risk doesn't pan out.

Let's take a simple example. Someone is very sure that the BTC price is going to increase and wants to buy $10K worth of bitcoins. But he doesn't have $10K and can't borrow it with traditional means. He does have a $20K car which he'd like to keep if possible (and which the bank won't accept as collateral), but he can trade it for a $10K car should the worst happen. He expects to sufficiently profit from buying to be willing to borrow at high interest; and he commits to repay by trading his car if he loses.

This whole arrangement is very risky for the borrower (whether he realizes it or not); but if the borrower is trustworthy, it is not risky for the lender.

In practice there are multiple ways to generate high ROI with various risk levels, such as currency speculation, arbitrage, mining, starting new businesses in the emerging Bitcoin economy, short-term loans, or investing with other people who are better equipped to generate ROI than you. By diversifying among various channels the overall risk can be lowered even if every single investment is risky; and by having valuable traditional illiquid assets there is a way to honor one's obligations even if the risk assessments went horribly wrong. In this case a smart investor can profit by accepting high-interest loans with no risk for the lender.

I'd like to especially point out short-term loans as one of the primary revenue streams of some of the big borrowers; many people are willing to pay high interest for such loans. I don't know why they are, but the fact of the matter is that they are. Once again it is the borrower's role to assess and absorb the (relatively high) default risk of these individual loans. This isn't new with Bitcoin, also; p2p loans with 1% daily interest have existed for a while in the traditional economy.

To summarize, I'm not saying any particular borrower is or is not a scammer. I'm saying that given the diversity of investment opportunities, there is nothing fundamentally impossible about high-interest loans with no risk for the lender. The only catch is finding a borrower who can be trusted to be both honest and responsible with his liabilities; and of course, by the time it becomes easy to find one, the supply of time-money will be high enough that his offered rates will not be as high.

No.

To conjunct with another event with probability 1/1000, that is multiply the odds against by 1000, is to add 10 bits.

To take the given event and to have it happen 1000 times, you take the odds to the 1000th power, meaning multiplying the number of bits by 1000.

Easy there. There are only 160 bits in an address. I don't know what are the probabilities for these events but let's say lightning is 20 bits, meteor 30, shark 15 and tsunami 20, and that they're all independent - you've already used up 85 bits. Having that happen 1000 times puts you at 85000 bits which is way too much.

Thanks.

Galil. (Chose the related Kalash from the list.)

Not that I understand much about rifles, but spend enough time with one and you develop loyalty.