I am pleased to announce the start of another bitcoin stock Exchange, PicoStocks, http://picostocks.com.

The exchange is based on a different model than GLBSE or MPEx. The main concept of the new model is that PicoStocks is the legal owner of all assets. Users trading the assets can benefit from profits or buy and sell the assets to other users. PicoStocks is a legal person established under the jurisdiction of Marshall Islands. When floating assets on the platform PicoStocks will enter into share purchase agreement with the issuer or owner. In other words PicoStocks will share responsibility for the authenticity and validity of the offered shares. Of course the users are responsible for the evaluation of the assets.

We hope that the different legal model will help in floating “real world” startups on the platform, not necessarily related to the bitcoin economy. Having such assets on a bitcoin based exchange platform should be beneficial for the bitcoin community and for the issuers who, due to their small size, can not enter other regulated exchanges.

We have started the platform with the IPO* (Initial PicoStocks Offering) of 20% of all shares of PicoStocks. The business plan is available on the platform. We plan to float in few weeks a high tech SME dealing with the application of bacteriophages in agriculture. We will also float an ASIC mining project. Floating is intentionally relative expensive (50BTC), because want to focus on more mature operations. Floating can be done online, but the purchase agreement that contains the number of listed shares and the reward in BTC must be signed between the owner (seller) and PicoStocks before the trading of the shares starts on the platform. Both parameters (number of shares and raised capital) will be determined during the IPO* process.

There is one more important innovation. All transactions and all user accounts are public. It is possible to monitor the action of "best" traders and review their market position.
Several forex trading companies offer something like this as a paid service but here transparency is an important aspect of our mission. We believe more transparency will help the investors (private or public) and entrepreneurs.

The main objective for the beginning is to attract as many as possible interesting small high-tech startups. It is enough to list small fractions of their shares (even less than 1%) to promote the startups and the bitcoin community. We would like to encourage anybody ho has some shares of small high tech companies to float a part of the shares he/she owns on PicoStocks.

BTW: the business plan of PicoStocks is here: http://picostocks.com/businessplan/15 ... sorry for ignoring MPEx there. We will try to describe the differences between the two exchanges on some page in the near future.

The minimum price is 0.05 BTC. I think this will be also the final price tag. This would be a valuation at 50k BTC (~500k EUR) at current exchange rates.
You are probably right, we should start with a smaller valuation at the beginning, but we actually don't need any funds for the exchange and I still believe that even at this valuation the asset will generate reasonable return on investment in 12 months. I hope we will be able to report much better results than predicted after 12 months.

1. create an account for You bitcoin account on http://picostocks.com
2. wait few seconds for the system to create a dedicated PicoStocks bitcoin account
3. send 1BTC to the newly created account and wait 1h [5 confirmations]
4. login there again, select [pico] from the list of IPO* assets and press the buy button [right top]
5. put in the price: 0.05 and the number of shares You want to buy: 20 and press the "Buy shares" button

After this You will probably have to wait few days. I think I will close the IPO* next week.
After that the trading can start.

-bank does not always mean the entity deals with money , see for example bio-bank (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biobank) or data-bank. BioInfoBank Institute has mainly the bio and info component. The financial component is located mainly in the venture fund BIB Seed Capital SA (seed.bioinfo.pl, Polish  ). In fact the fund invested in an asset that I wanted to float on PicoStocks next: proteonpharma.com (the phage company).

But, to answer Your question, we have no banking license :-) A banking license could be useful for BTC/forex exchange but I don't think we will consider this for the stock exchange. In fact using a banking license would place us in a European jurisdiction and tax area ... we don't want to deal with this right now.

Please give us 2 days. We will launch another serious asset on Friday the latest. The asset is a bitcoin mine but I hope it will be large enough to attract interest. After this we will start floating "real world" companies. I have to admit this is a challenge because investments have to compete with the BTC deflation and the expected dividend threshold is much higher here than anywhere else. It is pointless to try to float a not convincing venture here but it can be still interesting from the tax point of view.

I guess in crisis You would run for the most liquid asset. This would be the fiat money itself. Also the forex (btc exchange) markets will always remain the most liquid bitcoin based markets facilitating fast departure from BTC.
Nevertheless a large number of listed fiat assets will add stability to the BTC exchange rates. ... until their valuation exceeds the number of bitcoins in circulation and then a default of a large listed fiat asset would provide turbulence for btc exchange rates :-) this is of course all theory.

Here it is ... a large mine: http://picostocks.com/stocks/view/17 ... probably the largest mine in few months, but not any more the largest few months later :-)

Why don't You ask Tom about it :-)

Oh my.  Someone didn't do their due diligence.