[NXT] Decentralized Asset Exchange Discussion Thread

[Anon136]

Hi everyone!
Due to the somewhat delicate matter of this post, I just registered this account.

I am a long time customer of Silk Road (SR) and its follower (Sheep Market, Silk Road 2.0). SR made over 1.2 billion in revenues. There are several voices who claim that it was SR who made Bitcoin popular. In the last months there were several major drawbacks for these kind of markets: The Bitcoins of the vendors / customers got stolen either from hackers or the platform itself. Of course after such bad experience especially the vendors do not want to trust their funds to an anonymous platform since there are huge trust issues involved. Desperately they are looking for an alternative solution. The Asset Exchange could solve this problem for the vendors.
 
What they need is (beside the obvious):
1.     The setup of their products must be easy
        a.    Description
        b.    If possible pictures
2.     Message system
3.     Easy Payment
 
To address the demands of the customers. The following criteria must be met:
1.     Easy access
2.     Ratings of the vendor
3.     Message System
4.     Easy Payment

Will the NXT AE be ready for that?
Needless to say if this is working there mustn’t be a lot of marketing and new investors / vendors / customers would naturally come into NXT. Result would be full order books and a price explosion.

please dont do this on our blockchain. the last thing i want is the feds breathing down my neck. the code is open source go fork it and make SilkRoadCoin.

but in answer to your question, technically, yes, a blockchain could be used to solve these problems. not asset exchange though. thats not what asset exchange is for. its for trading homogeneous resources not heterogeneous resources. "weed" for example is heterogeneous so weed colored tokens wouldn't work well in the asset exchange. what you want to do is outline a protocol for interpreting arbitrary messages in a way that is relevant to running a marketplace not an asset exchange.

Anon, could you explain what you mean by homogenous/ heterogeneous and explain the difference when it comes to functionality of the AE?

sure so i am talking about fungibility. should have been more specific.

Fungibility is the property of a good or a commodity whose individual units are capable of mutual substitution. For example, since one ounce of gold is equivalent to any other ounce of gold, gold is fungible.

the asset exchange lends its self to fungible assets. ounces of weed are typically not very fungible.

[Jerical13]

Hi everyone!
Due to the somewhat delicate matter of this post, I just registered this account.

I am a long time customer of Silk Road (SR) and its follower (Sheep Market, Silk Road 2.0). SR made over 1.2 billion in revenues. There are several voices who claim that it was SR who made Bitcoin popular. In the last months there were several major drawbacks for these kind of markets: The Bitcoins of the vendors / customers got stolen either from hackers or the platform itself. Of course after such bad experience especially the vendors do not want to trust their funds to an anonymous platform since there are huge trust issues involved. Desperately they are looking for an alternative solution. The Asset Exchange could solve this problem for the vendors.
 
What they need is (beside the obvious):
1.     The setup of their products must be easy
        a.    Description
        b.    If possible pictures
2.     Message system
3.     Easy Payment
 
To address the demands of the customers. The following criteria must be met:
1.     Easy access
2.     Ratings of the vendor
3.     Message System
4.     Easy Payment

Will the NXT AE be ready for that?
Needless to say if this is working there mustn’t be a lot of marketing and new investors / vendors / customers would naturally come into NXT. Result would be full order books and a price explosion.

please dont do this on our blockchain. the last thing i want is the feds breathing down my neck. the code is open source go fork it and make SilkRoadCoin.

but in answer to your question, technically, yes, a blockchain could be used to solve these problems. not asset exchange though. thats not what asset exchange is for. its for trading homogeneous resources not heterogeneous resources. "weed" for example is heterogeneous so weed colored tokens wouldn't work well in the asset exchange. what you want to do is outline a protocol for interpreting arbitrary messages in a way that is relevant to running a marketplace not an asset exchange.

Anon, could you explain what you mean by homogenous/ heterogeneous and explain the difference when it comes to functionality of the AE?

sure so i am talking about fungibility. should have been more specific.

Fungibility is the property of a good or a commodity whose individual units are capable of mutual substitution. For example, since one ounce of gold is equivalent to any other ounce of gold, gold is fungible.

the asset exchange lends its self to fungible assets. ounces of weed are typically not very fungible.

OK. Basically, what you are saying is that the AE is not set up to sell things as singular assets; You can't sell 57 Chevies, Rare Collectables, art work, ETC. Is it a characteristic of the AE programing that sets this limit, or is this usage limitation designed to reduce and control the number of assets that can be listed on the AE for the sake of organization?

[williamevanl]

Why does my api call for all assets return nothing?:

{"assetIds":[]}

[Anon136]

Hi everyone!
Due to the somewhat delicate matter of this post, I just registered this account.

I am a long time customer of Silk Road (SR) and its follower (Sheep Market, Silk Road 2.0). SR made over 1.2 billion in revenues. There are several voices who claim that it was SR who made Bitcoin popular. In the last months there were several major drawbacks for these kind of markets: The Bitcoins of the vendors / customers got stolen either from hackers or the platform itself. Of course after such bad experience especially the vendors do not want to trust their funds to an anonymous platform since there are huge trust issues involved. Desperately they are looking for an alternative solution. The Asset Exchange could solve this problem for the vendors.
 
What they need is (beside the obvious):
1.     The setup of their products must be easy
        a.    Description
        b.    If possible pictures
2.     Message system
3.     Easy Payment
 
To address the demands of the customers. The following criteria must be met:
1.     Easy access
2.     Ratings of the vendor
3.     Message System
4.     Easy Payment

Will the NXT AE be ready for that?
Needless to say if this is working there mustn’t be a lot of marketing and new investors / vendors / customers would naturally come into NXT. Result would be full order books and a price explosion.

please dont do this on our blockchain. the last thing i want is the feds breathing down my neck. the code is open source go fork it and make SilkRoadCoin.

but in answer to your question, technically, yes, a blockchain could be used to solve these problems. not asset exchange though. thats not what asset exchange is for. its for trading homogeneous resources not heterogeneous resources. "weed" for example is heterogeneous so weed colored tokens wouldn't work well in the asset exchange. what you want to do is outline a protocol for interpreting arbitrary messages in a way that is relevant to running a marketplace not an asset exchange.

Anon, could you explain what you mean by homogenous/ heterogeneous and explain the difference when it comes to functionality of the AE?

sure so i am talking about fungibility. should have been more specific.

Fungibility is the property of a good or a commodity whose individual units are capable of mutual substitution. For example, since one ounce of gold is equivalent to any other ounce of gold, gold is fungible.

the asset exchange lends its self to fungible assets. ounces of weed are typically not very fungible.

OK. Basically, what you are saying is that the AE is not set up to sell things as singular assets; You can't sell 57 Chevies, Rare Collectables, art work, ETC. Is it a characteristic of the AE programing that sets this limit, or is this usage limitation designed to reduce and control the number of assets that can be listed on the AE for the sake of organization?

well its not that you cant.

technically you could issue 1 asset for many different 57 chevies but then customers would be weary of using it since they wouldnt know exactly what they were getting for their money. meaning they would tend to only be willing to bid the value of a 57 chevie in the worst condition imaginable. meaning it would be a terrible way to sell a 57 chevie in decent condition and would tend to end up representing only the crummiest ones because there is some heterogeneity in 57 chevies that are only worth their weight in scrap.

or you could issue 1 asset for each 57 chevie but it would be a huge waste of resources.

cfb is working on a blockchain marketplace, that would be the place to sell 57 chevies.

it could be very useful for chevrolette corporation to issue 10000 units of 1 asset that represents brand new 2014 chevies though. that would make a lot of sense. it would even allow them to get a better idea of what the market clearing price is for their product in a way that they cant get with guessing and then shipping them out to dealerships with a price tag that represents that guess.

[Jerical13]

[

well its not that you cant.

technically you could issue 1 asset for many different 57 chevies but then customers would be weary of using it since they wouldnt know exactly what they were getting for their money. meaning they would tend to only be willing to bid the value of a 57 chevie in the worst condition imaginable. meaning it would be a terrible way to sell a 57 chevie in decent condition and would tend to end up representing only the crummiest ones because there is some heterogeneity in 57 chevies that are only worth their weight in scrap.

or you could issue 1 asset for each 57 chevie but it would be a huge waste of resources.

cfb is working on a blockchain marketplace, that would be the place to sell 57 chevies.

it could be very useful for chevrolette corporation to issue 10000 units of 1 asset that represents brand new 2014 chevies though. that would make a lot of sense. it would even allow them to get a better idea of what the market clearing price is for their product in a way that they cant get with guessing and then shipping them out to dealerships with a price tag that represents that guess.
[/quote]

So it is because of the limited information and data that the AE is able to transmit that would be the problem. You can't post pictures or give a long description ETC.

So then the Market place that is in the works will be functional in this way? Is it going to be similar to the AE? or linked to the AE? Or will the AE be modified to do this?

[bitcoinpaul]

afaik the marketplace uses AM to trade goods.

[Anon136]

afaik the marketplace uses AM to trade goods.

that's right.

[trisher]

this is an awesome project but i wonder if it can success

[Jerical13]

afaik the marketplace uses AM to trade goods.

that's right.

Does the AE use Arbitrary Messaging or is it facilitated by something else?

Is there a link you could provide for the arbitrary message system and how to use it? Is it functional?

[Anon136]

this is an awesome project but i wonder if it can success

a solid colored coins implementation will succeed, will it be on our blockchain though? thats far less certain.

[IveBeenBit]

I do not understand this... I paid 35 NXT for 10 shares of an asset + 1 NXT as a fee.

It is showing up in the client as spending 0 NXT + 1 fee that was sent to the genesis account.

It should show up as 35 NXT going to the asset seller + 1 NXT to the person that forged that block, right?

Is this on purpose, or a bug? If it's on purpose, why?

Note also that the # of confirmations is not updating on the dashboard, but appears to be updating in the "transactions" section.

Screenshot:

[IveBeenBit]

please dont do this on our blockchain. the last thing i want is the feds breathing down my neck. the code is open source go fork it and make SilkRoadCoin.

but in answer to your question, technically, yes, a blockchain could be used to solve these problems. not asset exchange though. thats not what asset exchange is for. its for trading homogeneous resources not heterogeneous resources. "weed" for example is heterogeneous so weed colored tokens wouldn't work well in the asset exchange. what you want to do is outline a protocol for interpreting arbitrary messages in a way that is relevant to running a marketplace not an asset exchange.

I think you are wrong here, Anon.

Suppose I'm a weed dealer called Mr. Green. Suppose I get 10 oz. of product in from my supplier. I can issue an asset called "1 oz Mr. Green's Dank Bud" and issue 10 shares of the asset.

Dealers develop reputations for quality of their product, so 1 oz. from Mr Green may be worth less than 1 oz from Mr. Purple, but as far as a buyer is concerned...an ounce from Mr. Green is fungible with any other ounce from Mr. Green.

And not for nothing, but Bitcoin would probably never have gotten out of Mom's basement if it weren't for the appearance of the Silk Road early on in Bitcoin's history.

You're probably right that there are more elegant ways to run such a marketplace, but to say it couldn't be done in the AE is being shortsighted, IMO.

I could be wrong.

[IveBeenBit]

Is there, or is there planned to be a way to make payments to everyone holding an asset?

Suppose I am an asset issuer and I want to send 1 NXT per share to the Nxt account where the asset is held (like paying a dividend or interest). Can this be done?

Or would I need an external program or some sort of script to parse the blockchain, looking for accounts that hold shares of my asset and have it pay them individually?

[bitcoinpaul]

Maybe via AT.

[CIYAM]

Maybe via AT.

Yes - we are going to have to consider a few things about how AT and AE will interact to help with the above and with other things to do with the creation of a DAC.

[Anon136]

please dont do this on our blockchain. the last thing i want is the feds breathing down my neck. the code is open source go fork it and make SilkRoadCoin.

but in answer to your question, technically, yes, a blockchain could be used to solve these problems. not asset exchange though. thats not what asset exchange is for. its for trading homogeneous resources not heterogeneous resources. "weed" for example is heterogeneous so weed colored tokens wouldn't work well in the asset exchange. what you want to do is outline a protocol for interpreting arbitrary messages in a way that is relevant to running a marketplace not an asset exchange.

I think you are wrong here, Anon.

Suppose I'm a weed dealer called Mr. Green. Suppose I get 10 oz. of product in from my supplier. I can issue an asset called "1 oz Mr. Green's Dank Bud" and issue 10 shares of the asset.

Dealers develop reputations for quality of their product, so 1 oz. from Mr Green may be worth less than 1 oz from Mr. Purple, but as far as a buyer is concerned...an ounce from Mr. Green is fungible with any other ounce from Mr. Green.

And not for nothing, but Bitcoin would probably never have gotten out of Mom's basement if it weren't for the appearance of the Silk Road early on in Bitcoin's history.

You're probably right that there are more elegant ways to run such a marketplace, but to say it couldn't be done in the AE is being shortsighted, IMO.

I could be wrong.

if they could keep there quality consistent enough than it could work. the thing is that there probably wouldnt be a huge advantage for mr green of allowing people to trade greens dank tokens amongst themselves rather than just selling to them directly. though there could potentially be the advantage of giving him some really solid price signals to help in the running of his business. i may in fact have been wrong about this. it may infact be good for mr green if he produces a steady supply of reliable constant quality, not so good for some guy who gets meth or something from different sources all of the time with varying quality. good for producers themselves who can guarantee a constant quality and constant supply, bad for resellers who just resell what ever they can get their hands on.

[wesleyh]

New version at http://nxtra.org/nxt-client/

Basically, I changed asset issuance;

See this screen below, you'll see there are a bunch of extra settings. The most important of which is the suffix.

Now that the asset exchange allows non-unique names you'll see duplicate listings. I don't like this. Now, in the future I will show as XYZ.001, XYZ.002 etc (it doesn't yet now for technical reasons), but even that is not a good solution. We need some kind of branding.

That's why I added a suffix field. This field should be set to an alias you control.

This allows you to brand your asset. For example, if you sell gold, instead of it being displayed like "gold.012" you can display as "gold.yourname".

The prefix (gold) is not unique, the suffix is (since it's an alias which is already unique).



There are a few other fields also like tags but I don't really use these now. I added this because CFB is also adding tagging capability to his digital goods store. However, he is doing it server side, I'm doing it client side. I don't like that. I would like for both api's (asset exchange and DGS) to have as much in common as possible). I'm only adding tagging here as a proof of concept at the moment.

Anyway, this is how an asset with a suffix looks like in the sidebar:



This too I would like to see integrated on the server side, as an extra field in the assets table. Why? Because right now I have to do double the requests; I have to first fetch the asset, if it has an alias assigned to it, fetch the alias and check to see if it belongs to the asset issuer (if not it is not displayed). So this is not as efficient, and since it's a field that can never change, it doesn't make sense not to integrate it in to the asset exchange table.

Of course, only if you guys (the community) like this feature.

Please let me know your feedback on this. I think it solves all the issues; we have a non-unique prefix and a brandable, unique suffix.

Thanks to pandaisftw and jl777 for the ideas.

Test this, and let me know if you find any bugs or have suggestions.

Donations appreciated at 8189784314684138350

[CIYAM]

It will have to be non-unique as JL has already agreed and made the changes that Asset naming is to be "non-unique".

Trying to "get around it" by saying it is a secondary name is allowing listings such as:

Software:Microsoft
Hardware:Microsoft

where Microsoft is a squatted alias (thus we are now allowing "multiple" scam listings rather than even just the one).

[salsacz]

If a new exchange creates Nxt assets, I buy some of them for 10.000 Nxt, what can I do with those assets then? What benefits can it bring to me?

[IveBeenBit]

If a new exchange creates Nxt assets, I buy some of them for 10.000 Nxt, what can I do with those assets then? What benefits can it bring to me?

The two most obvious uses would be as equity shares in a company, or as "bearer tokens."

A "bearer token" means that anyone that sends that token back to the issuer will receive something for it.

For instance, Anon136 had the idea of issuing tokens that would correspond to a specific type of 1 oz. silver coin.

He would sell these tokens on the asset exchange for enough money to cover his cost + shipping to the United States + some profit for himself.

So if he has 500 silver coins in his vault, he can sell 500 tokens redeemable for a 1 oz silver coin, including shipping.

Now these tokens can be traded freely on the exchange and function as a sort of currency. If one day I decide that I would rather hold the coin in my hand than just own it digitally, I can send my token back to Anon and he will mail me the silver coin.

That is one example. There are novel ways of using these assets to raise capital to start a small business, as well.