General Credit Corp

[markm]

General Credit Corp (GCC) is in the business of extending credit.

It likes to hold collateral in the form of stuff that tends to hold value well or even go up in value while extending credit against that collateral in the form of some other kind of stuff than that which it holds as collateral.

In order to do this with all the convenience and power of cryptocurrency, it therefore needs at least two cryptocurrencies to exist; however many such currencies it takes to reach a point where one or more tends to hold value well or even increase in value while one or more other(s) have sufficient liquidity to serve as a means of transmitting buying-power to borrowers while also, preferably, not being as prone to go up in value as the one(s) customarily used as collateral.

At time of writing, bitcoin is quite popular as collateral, while various altcoins are being watched to research which might best serve the role of transmission medium for transmitting buying-power that borrowers borrow against their collateral.

-MarkM-

[Chang Hum]

General Credit Corp (GCC) is in the business of extending credit.

It likes to hold collateral in the form of stuff that tends to hold value well or even go up in value while extending credit against that collateral in the form of some other kind of stuff than that which it holds as collateral.

In order to do this with all the convenience and power of cryptocurrency, it therefore needs at least two cryptocurrencies to exist; however many such currencies it takes to reach a point where one or more tends to hold value well or even increase in value while one or more other(s) have sufficient liquidity to serve as a means of transmitting buying-power to borrowers while also, preferably, not being as prone to go up in value as the one(s) customarily used as collateral.

At time of writing, bitcoin is quite popular as collateral, while various altcoins are being watched to research which might best serve the role of transmission medium for transmitting buying-power that borrowers borrow against their collateral.

-MarkM-

What exactly are you talking about?

[markm]

What exactly are you talking about?

A Corp that uses various virtual currencies to conduct its business, including many of the various blockchain-based currencies discussed in this section of these forums.

In particular, a Corp whose operation depends upon the existence of multiple asset types, so that if only one type (such as only bitcoins, for example) existed that would not suffice for its needs.

Thus it serves as an illustration and example of why there is in fact a practical need for multiple virtual currencies, preferably with more than one (and hopefully more than two) of them being blockchain-based cryptocurrencies.

-MarkM-

[Bitcoin Oz]

General Credit Corp (GCC) is in the business of extending credit.

It likes to hold collateral in the form of stuff that tends to hold value well or even go up in value while extending credit against that collateral in the form of some other kind of stuff than that which it holds as collateral.

In order to do this with all the convenience and power of cryptocurrency, it therefore needs at least two cryptocurrencies to exist; however many such currencies it takes to reach a point where one or more tends to hold value well or even increase in value while one or more other(s) have sufficient liquidity to serve as a means of transmitting buying-power to borrowers while also, preferably, not being as prone to go up in value as the one(s) customarily used as collateral.

At time of writing, bitcoin is quite popular as collateral, while various altcoins are being watched to research which might best serve the role of transmission medium for transmitting buying-power that borrowers borrow against their collateral.

-MarkM-

What exactly are you talking about?

Its better to spend fiat on mining rigs that produce bitcoins than it is to spend bitcoins on fiat equipment which doesnt ever make you back the bitcoins you spent.

So you hand over bitcoins as collateral and get fiat/devcoins which you use to buy mining equipment. Your collateral will keep rising in value and also it will take less and less mined coins to pay back the fiat you borrowed. When you have paid the loan off you get your collateral bitcoins back. You never want to borrow coins that constantly rise in value you want to borrow coins which stay the same value or decrease in value.

[Chang Hum]

What exactly are you talking about?

A Corp that uses various virtual currencies to conduct its business, including many of the various blockchain-based currencies discussed in this section of these forums.

In particular, a Corp whose operation depends upon the existence of multiple asset types, so that if only one type (such as only bitcoins, for example) existed that would not suffice for its needs.

Thus it serves as an illustration and example of why there is in fact a practical need for multiple virtual currencies, preferably with more than one (and hopefully more than one) of them being blockchain-based cryptocurrencies.

-MarkM-

A pawn shop?

[markm]

In a way, I guess so, just like companies that issue mortgages and car loans and so on are pawn shops and credit card companies are companies to whom you pawn your life away / pawn your future income.

-MarkM-

[markm]

Its better to spend fiat on mining rigs that produce bitcoins than it is to spend bitcoins on fiat equipment which doesnt ever make you back the bitcoins you spent.

So you hand over bitcoins as collateral and get fiat/devcoins which you use to buy mining equipment. Your collateral will keep rising in value and also it will take less and less mined coins to pay back the fiat you borrowed. When you have paid the loan off you get your collateral bitcoins back. You never want to borrow coins that constantly rise in value you want to borrow coins which stay the same value or decrease in value.

Yes, excellent example, thank you!

Also one might hope that more and more and more bitcoin gets tied up as collateral, leaving less bitcoin for sale, thus reducing "ready supply" of bitcoins, while demand hopefully does not fall, which if it all manages to happen might even help maintain and possibly even increase the market price of bitcoins...

(A self-fulfilling "this stuff is good collateral" prophecy?)

Mind you, maybe on occassion it could work the other way too. If someone had had lots of namecoins in their collateral/leverage account recently maybe it would have made sense to borrow bitcoins to sell for namecoins to increase the collateral account as namecoins multiplied in value (they tripled in price, someone wrote?) then sell enough to pay back the bitcoin-loan and voila, profit!


-MarkM-

[Bitcoin Oz]

Its better to spend fiat on mining rigs that produce bitcoins than it is to spend bitcoins on fiat equipment which doesnt ever make you back the bitcoins you spent.

So you hand over bitcoins as collateral and get fiat/devcoins which you use to buy mining equipment. Your collateral will keep rising in value and also it will take less and less mined coins to pay back the fiat you borrowed. When you have paid the loan off you get your collateral bitcoins back. You never want to borrow coins that constantly rise in value you want to borrow coins which stay the same value or decrease in value.

Yes, excellent example, thank you!

Also one might hope that more and more and more bitcoin gets tied up as collateral, leaving less bitcoin for sale, thus reducing "ready supply" of bitcoins, while demand hopefully does not fall, which if it all manages to happen might even help maintain and possibly even increase the market price of bitcoins...

(A self-fulfilling "this stuff is good collateral" prophecy?)

Mind you, maybe on occassion it could work the other way too. If someone had had lots of namecoins in their collateral/leverage account recently maybe it would have made sense to borrow bitcoins to sell for namecoins to increase the collateral account as namecoins multiplied in value (they tripled in price, someone wrote?) then sell enough pay back the bitcoin-loan and voila, profit!


-MarkM-

It means the coin you borrow against the collateral needs to stay stable in price or for more profit,drop in price. For example if freicoins existed they would tend to go down in price because its an inflationary coin.

Just say you borrowed 1000 ppcoin against 1 bitcoin and used the ppcoin to invest in bitcoin denominated investments. Your repayment may be 10 ppcoin per week BUT because you invested in bitcoin denominated securities you made .5 btc and to pay back the ppcoin you only need to buy .005 worth of ppcoin. Thus you made many thousand per cent profit all while your bitcoin is sitting untouched in your collateral account growing in value


Whatever coin you borrow against your bitcoin needs to be traded still to allow you to buy them to repay the loan.

[Etlase2]

A Corp that uses various virtual currencies to conduct its business, including many of the various blockchain-based currencies discussed in this section of these forums.

In particular, a Corp whose operation depends upon the existence of multiple asset types, so that if only one type (such as only bitcoins, for example) existed that would not suffice for its needs.

Thus it serves as an illustration and example of why there is in fact a practical need for multiple virtual currencies, preferably with more than one (and hopefully more than two) of them being blockchain-based cryptocurrencies.

-MarkM-

Not trying to sound like a jerk, but does anybody besides you actually follow this stuff? Is there actually some virtual economy going on here?

[markm]

Yes there is. For a top level overview see http://devtome.org/wiki/index.php?title=Galactic_Milieu

Basically there are the in-game economies, the out-of-game economy involved in financing the game, its hosting, bandwidth, development and so on, and the fact that it is an "alternate reality" game in other words this "planet known as Earth" is itself within the game thus these currencies that people can take home with them instead of relying on a third party server to centrally administrate help implement the inclusion of our world into the game and the game into our world, blurring any distinction between them.

-MarkM-

[Etlase2]

That link is far from an enlightening answer to my question. Crossfire RPG has no link, maybe freeciv is viable, Battle for Wesnoth links to a few threads on a messageboard started by you with a half dozen replies. I don't care enough to dig through all of the information that again seems written by you, looking for evidence that people are actually making use out of all this.

[markm]

Well then just assume that no-one is.

There are not a whole lot of people running Open Transactions clients yet so for financial trading purposes there really isn't a whole lot there yet for people who do not have characters in any of the individual character level views into the game nor have a nation in the nations level of the game nor run an intergalactic mining operation nor even a primitive village in either of those scales of view into parts of the game.

For non-players just looking to trade in the game's stock exchanges Open Transactions is going to be the interface, and so far not even actually implementing each individual stock exchange as a separate Open Transactions server since right now we are still working on getting the very first Open Transactions server set up and running with decent clients available and so on before worrying about splitting each nation's assets into its own national stock exchange then on to each city's stock exchange to its own server and so on.

So it is still "early adopter" time in other words.

EDIT: Thanks for pointing out that the link in my .sig to a web-launchable client for Crossfire RPG is not provided on the wiki page, I will add that now.

-MarkM-