450btc Bounty (Pledge) for Open Source Exchange project.

[britschler]

I was thinking having the entire exchange operating only in a darknet(only accessed from within i2p for example), and beyond the reach of any government. Since I am living and operating from within a totalitarian regime I must from the begining be out of government reach(and it will only be a matter of time before other governments attempt to destroy bitcoin, the easiest method to do so is shutdown bitcoin sites).

To achieve this it might worth thinking about moving the market (and probably even bitcoin itself) to freenet http://freenetproject.org/. Non-traceable identities, web of trust, and the like do exist already.

[1713575768]

1713575768

[Nefario]

I was thinking having the entire exchange operating only in a darknet(only accessed from within i2p for example), and beyond the reach of any government. Since I am living and operating from within a totalitarian regime I must from the begining be out of government reach(and it will only be a matter of time before other governments attempt to destroy bitcoin, the easiest method to do so is shutdown bitcoin sites).

To achieve this it might worth thinking about moving the market (and probably even bitcoin itself) to freenet http://freenetproject.org/. Non-traceable identities, web of trust, and the like do exist already.

Freenet is a distributed datastore, not exactly a darknet and to the best of my knowlege doesn't have eepsites or hidden services as Tor or i2p have.

[britschler]

To achieve this it might worth thinking about moving the market (and probably even bitcoin itself) to freenet http://freenetproject.org/. Non-traceable identities, web of trust, and the like do exist already.

Freenet is a distributed datastore, not exactly a darknet and to the best of my knowlege doesn't have eepsites or hidden services as Tor or i2p have.

There are indeed various hidden services that are built on this (darknet-like) datastore. There is no realtime communication though.

[Nefario]

There are indeed various hidden services that are built on this (darknet-like) datastore. There is no realtime communication though.

Thats the problem, no realtime communications, which makes running an exchange impossible.

[Anonymous]

Davout just open sourced his code for bitcoin central. I think it qualifies for this bounty or if it doesnt why not?

[Nefario]

Davout just open sourced his code for bitcoin central. I think it qualifies for this bounty or if it doesnt why not?

Great, we can get started using it as a frontend.

On a related topic,
It does seem that Open-Transactions https://github.com/FellowTraveler/Open-Transactions/wiki would be a good backend to build our market.

I've spent the day setting up a machine (Ubuntu 10.10 server, this is an old desk top that I have, I will dedicate it to this project, it has about 60G of free space after the install on an encrpted LVM volume) and have built this and played around a little with it as well as trying to understand the theory.

OT is just a backend, it contains a transaction server and client (these are built on libraries, so you could build your own client, and there are bindings for a number of popular languages).

The transactions are kept as text files(one file per transaction), and they are mostly xml formated text that has been signed by the seller, the buyer and the transaction server.

The theory behind this is ricardian contracts and triple entry accounting.
http://iang.org/papers/ricardian_contract.html
http://iang.org/papers/triple_entry.html

Seems good( am I wrong, have I missed something?)

The crypto library that is used for all the signing is OpenSSL 1.0.0b or greater (not the default one in Ubuntu 10.10).

I have not been able to investigate the market element properly so I do not know whether it is suitable. This I will do tomorrow and hopefully have the server up for others to test by the end of the day.

I think a few days of testing should be enough to know whether this is the right tool for us. If it is then we only need to build a front end for the server and some easy to use clients.

Hopefully we will be able to use the work already done by davout, and we will have our own bitcoin based market exchange.

[Nefario]

I spent all day playing around with i2p trying to get it working,eventually I did and learned a lot in the process. Things such as using i2p is not easy. i2p is really slow and very often unreliable etc.

I am sure that a lot of these problems are to do with my poor quality, slow, and heavily restricted connection but it has made me reconsider running it on i2p from the beginning.

Apart from this I have gotten no other work completed, I feel like it was such a waste. I have also decided that I will only inform the forum when I have something to show them.

[Mahkul]

Davout just open sourced his code for bitcoin central. I think it qualifies for this bounty or if it doesnt why not?

I have just sent whatever I pledged to davout since I am happy with his code. Just in case the community decides not to accept davout's bitcoin-central as the final project, could someone please delete my pledge from here? Thanks.

[jgarzik]

I sent 5678.00 BTC, so I consider my pledge already spent.

[grondilu]

Wow davout I guess you have plenty of bitcoins now.  Would you like to buy a gold coin ?

[Anonymous]

I sent 5678.00 BTC, so I consider my pledge already spent.

Thats definitely money well spent.

[Mahkul]

I sent 5678.00 BTC, so I consider my pledge already spent.

Perhaps I should have sent my pledge to you instead...

[fellowtraveler]

Davout just open sourced his code for bitcoin central. I think it qualifies for this bounty or if it doesnt why not?

Great, we can get started using it as a frontend.

On a related topic,
It does seem that Open-Transactions https://github.com/FellowTraveler/Open-Transactions/wiki would be a good backend to build our market.

I've spent the day setting up a machine (Ubuntu 10.10 server, this is an old desk top that I have, I will dedicate it to this project, it has about 60G of free space after the install on an encrpted LVM volume) and have built this and played around a little with it as well as trying to understand the theory.

OT is just a backend, it contains a transaction server and client (these are built on libraries, so you could build your own client, and there are bindings for a number of popular languages).

The transactions are kept as text files(one file per transaction), and they are mostly xml formated text that has been signed by the seller, the buyer and the transaction server.

The theory behind this is ricardian contracts and triple entry accounting.
http://iang.org/papers/ricardian_contract.html
http://iang.org/papers/triple_entry.html

Seems good( am I wrong, have I missed something?)

The crypto library that is used for all the signing is OpenSSL 1.0.0b or greater (not the default one in Ubuntu 10.10).

I have not been able to investigate the market element properly so I do not know whether it is suitable. This I will do tomorrow and hopefully have the server up for others to test by the end of the day.

I think a few days of testing should be enough to know whether this is the right tool for us. If it is then we only need to build a front end for the server and some easy to use clients.

Hopefully we will be able to use the work already done by davout, and we will have our own bitcoin based market exchange.

Hello, I have just discovered this thread.

ABOUT MARKETS ON OT:

Right now I've got the markets coded and trading. You can put an offer on a market. There may be a hundred other offers.

You'll always get the highest bidder on the market if you're selling within that price range, or the lowest asking price if you're buying within that price range.

Your offer may trade many times against multiple other offers on the market, before it has finally completed processing.

After each trade, OTCron will drop a receipt into the respective inboxes for the 4 asset accounts involved.
(A trade involves, say, a buyer and seller bitcoin acct, and a buyer and seller WoW gold account. That's 4 accounts.)

When your offer has completed its terms, OTCron then removes it from the market.

You can configure your offer as a "day order" (date range) and/or as a "stop order" (only activate onto the market
when price reaches X level) and/or as a "limit order" (only allow trades at a certain price point) and/or as a
"fill-or-kill order" (each trade against a given offer must occur in minimum increments.)

OT Markets also support market granularity, meaning that the price of wheat on the 5000 bushel market might
be cheaper, per bushel, than the price of the same wheat on the 10 bushel market. This means that traders would
be able to profit by purchasing in bulk and then breaking up the wheat to be sold in smaller chunks (on smaller granularity
markets.)

You could also use the markets for trading currency baskets (since OT supports baskets).

Since each asset type on OT is based on a currency contract, you could even issue futures contracts and other options,
and use OT for trading futures on markets, or baskets of futures, etc etc.

The only problems I see are: (1) OT is very new and has not been tested with users in the real world. The version is v0.44.
I'm very proud of it, but it is brand spanking new, so you have to take that into account.  (2), the keysize is still restricted
to 1024. Since the software is still experimental, I haven't added any other keysizes yet, but that will be necessary if you are
using it for real trades, FYI. and (3) the markets are the newest instrument, and so the API basically just lets you add an offer
to a market. There's like one function in the API for markets.

It will work, but there are still not yet API functions for market introspection and for canceling offers.  You will need those.
Those will be easy to add though (it's just so new). I'm willing to add a few market functions when you need them -- I'm very
supportive of any developers that are using the OT API.  So contact me if you end up using the software and let me know
how it goes.

-FT
P.S.
FYI, I have recently released a new version of OT, along with a new article describing the Use Cases for the OT API:
https://github.com/FellowTraveler/Open-Transactions/wiki/Use-Cases

The article shows which OT API functions to call for each use case. For more
detailed info on each API call, check out this page:
https://github.com/FellowTraveler/Open-Transactions/wiki/API

You'll find the market offer API function towards the bottom of both pages.

If you want to play with it, there's the test wallet market interface. Test wallet instructions:
https://github.com/FellowTraveler/Open-Transactions/wiki/Test-Wallet-commands