[ANN][CLAM] CLAMs, Proof-Of-Chain, Proof-Of-Working-Stake, a.k.a. "Clamcoin"

[smooth]

The small purchases are made to cover loses incurred by the short-selling (if price goes up after a short-sale, the portfolio has lost 'value', and must purchase CLAM to cover that loss).

At least, that is my understanding of it.

Small price changes normally wouldn't cause margin calls. You have to lose enough to drop below the minimum required equity first. Of course that depends how leveraged you are. Poloniex allows something like 4:1 leverage I believe, though some of the BTC margin exchanges allow some really crazy stuff like 50:1 or maybe even 100:1

[SuperClam]

The small purchases are made to cover loses incurred by the short-selling (if price goes up after a short-sale, the portfolio has lost 'value', and must purchase CLAM to cover that loss).
At least, that is my understanding of it.

Small price changes normally wouldn't cause margin calls. You have to lose enough to drop below the minimum required equity first. Of course that depends how leveraged you are. Poloniex allows something like 4:1 leverage I believe, though some of the BTC margin exchanges allow some really crazy stuff like 50:1 or maybe even 100:1

Conceptually that is correct though, right?

[smooth]

The small purchases are made to cover loses incurred by the short-selling (if price goes up after a short-sale, the portfolio has lost 'value', and must purchase CLAM to cover that loss).
At least, that is my understanding of it.

Small price changes normally wouldn't cause margin calls. You have to lose enough to drop below the minimum required equity first. Of course that depends how leveraged you are. Poloniex allows something like 4:1 leverage I believe, though some of the BTC margin exchanges allow some really crazy stuff like 50:1 or maybe even 100:1

Conceptually that is correct though, right?

The purchases need not be small, necessarily. If the market moves a lot and the position is large (and especially if highly leveraged), then large trades may be generated by margin calls. I don't remember exactly how Poloniex does margin calls either, but my vague recollection  is they consider liquidation price which means orders coming off the book can trigger margin calls even if the current market price does not change. Don't quote me on that though.

[dooglus]

Could you please explain, if you know this, how margin trading works on poloniex? If I short sell like 10k clams and price is stagnating and I decide to close that short will that appear as a buy in market?

I think it works like this:

When you short sell 10k CLAMs, you borrow the 10k CLAMs from a lender and immediately sell them on the market.

Later when you close your position, you buy the (10k plus interest) CLAMs back on the market and repay your loan.

So your trade causes a 10k sell when you open it, and a 10k+ buy when you close it.

It won't appear as a buy order in the market. Your buy will execute as a market order, consuming existing sell orders rather than creating a new buy order.

The small purchases are made to cover loses incurred by the short-selling (if price goes up after a short-sale, the portfolio has lost 'value', and must purchase CLAM to cover that loss).
At least, that is my understanding of it.

Small price changes normally wouldn't cause margin calls. You have to lose enough to drop below the minimum required equity first. Of course that depends how leveraged you are. Poloniex allows something like 4:1 leverage I believe, though some of the BTC margin exchanges allow some really crazy stuff like 50:1 or maybe even 100:1

Conceptually that is correct though, right?

I'm not sure what you're getting at with "the small purchases". There aren't any small purchases.

If the price goes up high enough that you're getting close to being unable to afford to buy back the CLAMs you sold then you will be margin called, and the BTC you used as collateral plus the BTC you made by selling the borrowed CLAM will be used to buy the CLAM back so you can make the lender whole.

[hetecon]

Does the shorting occur from poloniex exchange?

[SebastianJu]

Crypto needs margin trading like a hole in the head.... I hate margin trading it just creates greedy wankers looking for a quick profit...it does nothing for CLAM or any other coin but increase hype and fud

Jon  

I think it leads to price stabilisation too. Since only with margin trading you can bet on a dropping price. So traders are interested in both ways to go.

[SuperClam]

The small purchases are made to cover loses incurred by the short-selling (if price goes up after a short-sale, the portfolio has lost 'value', and must purchase CLAM to cover that loss).
At least, that is my understanding of it.

Small price changes normally wouldn't cause margin calls. You have to lose enough to drop below the minimum required equity first. Of course that depends how leveraged you are. Poloniex allows something like 4:1 leverage I believe, though some of the BTC margin exchanges allow some really crazy stuff like 50:1 or maybe even 100:1

Conceptually that is correct though, right?

I'm not sure what you're getting at with "the small purchases". There aren't any small purchases.

If the price goes up high enough that you're getting close to being unable to afford to buy back the CLAMs you sold then you will be margin called, and the BTC you used as collateral plus the BTC you made by selling the borrowed CLAM will be used to buy the CLAM back so you can make the lender whole.

Direct from Poloniex staff, some time ago, I was informed that many of the tiny little orders were the margin system/users covering itself.

[smooth]

The small purchases are made to cover loses incurred by the short-selling (if price goes up after a short-sale, the portfolio has lost 'value', and must purchase CLAM to cover that loss).
At least, that is my understanding of it.

Small price changes normally wouldn't cause margin calls. You have to lose enough to drop below the minimum required equity first. Of course that depends how leveraged you are. Poloniex allows something like 4:1 leverage I believe, though some of the BTC margin exchanges allow some really crazy stuff like 50:1 or maybe even 100:1

Conceptually that is correct though, right?

I'm not sure what you're getting at with "the small purchases". There aren't any small purchases.

If the price goes up high enough that you're getting close to being unable to afford to buy back the CLAMs you sold then you will be margin called, and the BTC you used as collateral plus the BTC you made by selling the borrowed CLAM will be used to buy the CLAM back so you can make the lender whole.

Direct from Poloniex staff, some time ago, I was informed that many of the tiny little orders were the margin system/users covering itself.

If someone is close to the margin limit and the price moves a little, then yes there will be small trades generated to close part of the position, just not always.

[clf99]

margin trading and short selling are good for markets.  This is an area misunderstood in the stock, bond and fiat currency markets by many as well, but plenty of economics and financial scholars have written PHD thesis and books on these things for decades.  If you really want to understand it, it's not that complex.

Specifically, with clam, right now, I have 1000's of clams lent out at a DAILY interest rate of .3979% interest, which is a compounded rate of
(1+.3979/100)^365-1 or annually 426%!!!

So that is dramatically better than the 53% (approx) staking interest rate.

But I lent those clams out for 60 days, which means I have to believe at some level that my clams will be worth nearly the same amount or more in 2 months than when i lent them out.

Now the borrower, who is selling those borrowed clams is driving down the price, but only for now, when he sells them.

What is happening is that my viewpoint (clams will be worth more in 2 months) the borrower's viewpoint (it's dropping soon), the guy he sold them to's viewpoint (he's buying so he think they're going up either now or eventually) and poloniex's viewpoint (they're willing to participate in the market by enabling it) are all being represented here in minute by minute price action.

Without margin and shorting, you have few people getting their viewpoints represented in the market, and a less fluid information rich price.

Also there are those who are buying on margin (they're actually borrowing bitcoins, not clams, when they buy clams).

All of this information from all of these people get into the price action and i believe it is a good thing, a very good thing.

[jd1959]

Margin trading leaves one open to market manipulation ...you only have to look at Forex trading to prove this........ whenever I sell I think of it as shorting, as I then place a bid to buy back in at a lower price. I then go

long by placing a sell order at higher price. I can increase my holdings by purchasing more than i sold while still taking a profit. As I own what I sell and buy with what I own, I choose my position and am not forced by

short term market fluctuations.... I know markets a driven by fear and greed.... so If your fearless and not greedy it becomes a fun ride....enjoy the ups and downs, that's where the profit is. We all lose occasionally if

we're not greedy we don't lose much

Jon    

[AgentofCoin]

Question as to changing the Clam protocol (or whatever) to prevent future Whale Diggers.
Forgive me if this has been presented before, but there are many pages in this thread now, but:
Has anyone proposed, a new coin being created from burning your Clam coins?
What I am proposing is a secondary coin (like dogeparty), where we burn our clams now, and lock in that total clam cap,
by a certain date. Anyone who wants these non-dig-able Clams after that date, can no longer burn their clams for conversion.
These "cooked" clams would still have staking and etc, but are not diggable and forever fixed, except for the staking.
This allows current Clam Coin to not change its protocol, which is a violation of the social contact,
and would also allow current Clam holders not to lose value with potential whale diggers.
We could call them "Cooked Clams".

I speak for only myself, but I have no desire to splinter the CLAM community.

This doesn't, of course, change the fact that any party could choose to fork CLAM and create such a network.

Just to clarify, I have no desire to splinter the community either.
I would have thought this idea would have been seen as a less drastic move, then the current voting mechanism based on holdings.
If a vote is made and agreed to changing the protocol,
I assume the damage would be much greater than what "Cooked Clams" would do.

In regards to forking Clam to do this, people would only support this if it was by the Clam Team.
I was only suggestion it as an alternative to a change to the protocol.

[dooglus]

Just to clarify, I have no desire to splinter the community either.
I would have thought this idea would have been seen as a less drastic move, then the current voting mechanism based on holdings.
If a vote is made and agreed to changing the protocol,
I assume the damage would be much greater than what "Cooked Clams" would do.

In regards to forking Clam to do this, people would only support this if it was by the Clam Team.
I was only suggestion it as an alternative to a change to the protocol.

As I understand it, what you are proposing is a new currency, forked from the existing CLAM currency.

I don't see how that doesn't splinter the community.

You'll have those people who keep using the current CLAM currency, and those who burn their CLAMs to get "Cooked CLAMs". You'll have two separate blockchains, two different markets on Poloniex, two different prices.

Or did I misunderstand?

[SuperClam]

...
I would have thought this idea would have been seen as a less drastic move, then the current voting mechanism based on holdings.
If a vote is made and agreed to changing the protocol,
I assume the damage would be much greater than what "Cooked Clams" would do.
...

I disagree.

CLAMour, the 'voting' mechanism, is not 'law'.
In fact, it already exists in every network that implements a 'soft-fork'.

A 'soft-fork' in most networks is implemented when a set portion of the block-creating network has updated to the client that contains that feature.
CLAMour is very similar to this process - with one very important difference.
It occurs before the implementation of a change and doesn't affect consensus at all - on it's own.

CLAMour does not require an update to software or the consensus rules the client implements to register support.
CLAMour simplifies and makes available to every-day users the process of defining a change.
It does not require 'permission' or approval.


This is important; much more-so than any single issue.
Think of all of the 'positive' changes that have been proposed to other networks, such as BTC.
Privacy features such as Tor and blockchain obfuscation, capacity changes such as side-chains/lightning-networks/blocksize/etc., expanded Turing-complete scripting systems, and the list goes on.

One of the primary sources of resistance to these changes is the uncertainty of support.
There is no ground-truth.  
No way to force-the-hand of the development process.

It is much harder to ignore a proposal which comes with provable super-majority support - even if 'special-interests' resist that change.


CLAMour allows our users to create new proposals and ideas for CLAM.
CLAMour allows our users to express how they see the future of CLAM.
CLAMour allows our users to prove that they have support for changes to CLAM.

Without approval.
Without permission.

CLAMour is nothing more than information/data.
And yet, information brings the power of persuasion and factually based debate.

It removes power from individuals.
It gives power to stakeholders and the network.

[DrkLvr_]

My view has changed a lot since I initially proposed an idea to half the dig rewards as time went on. My major worry was that another digger would show up x months or x years from now and cause a disruption, and i was (admittedly excessively) vocal about it. What i was missing was that because of the stake rewards, the more time passes, the lesser the impact a digger would have.

CLAMS has now proven itself resilient in the face of a massive whale dig, but more importantly, it withstood the most dangerous attack of all.. an attack from within. Kudos to the devs for not over-reacting and changing things which in hindsight would have been a huge mistake.

At this point, I really hope we'll stop considering changes to CLAM digs, stakes or any other fundamental properties of the coin.

LLTGC  

[AgentofCoin]

You'll have those people who keep using the current CLAM currency, and those who burn their CLAMs to get "Cooked CLAMs". You'll have two separate blockchains, two different markets on Poloniex, two different prices.

Or did I misunderstand?

In theory, majority of people would "cook" their clams to protect their holdings.
There would be no reason for people to stay behind on the "old" Clam chain.
The "old" chain would only exist as a secondary market (silver, to gold),
for people who have not yet dug their potential clams, but those potential clams can not be "cooked" after a certain date.
It is a way for the clam holders to be protected from future digs(new clam), and for potential future diggers to still have their valid digs (old clam).

I do not think it would split the community, just create a gold and silver version of the same coin.
Just-Dice, in theory, could accept both, the rich mans clams and the poor mans clams.

...
It removes power from individuals.
It gives power to stakeholders and the network.

I agree that CLAMour is a more proper way to determine Clams future, compared to just doing whatever the Devs want.
I'm just concerned that if a protocol change is agreed upon, and implemented based on what the largest holders want,
it could ruin the reputation of clam in the eyes of all future potential investors.
Many investors shun certain altcoins if those altcoins protocol potential are seen as wishy washy. It is a credibility issue.

When it is all said and done, I am just voicing my opinion, I have no expertise in coding or economics.
I just wanted to see if anyone had proposed a burn Clam evolution coin idea.

I do not claim to be arguing for the correct position or idea.
Just throwing it out there to see what community would think.
I have not even attempted to work out all the possible benefits and/or failures of this idea.

[smooth]

Meh.

Measuring support of miners/stakers has never been hard. As you said, soft forks have generally included voting already. If miner/staking voting for mere polls was really wanted and so useful, it would be more widely implemented. No disrespect to the developers here, but it really isn't a hard feature to implement. Miners could even do it on their own by just agreeing to put suitably formatted messages in their coinbase

What makes this whole issue hard is measuring and reasoning about the support various changes would or do have from other stakeholders (using that term as an English word here) who aren't involved with block generation, including possible future participants (who may decline to become participants if some changes are or are not made).

Reducing the entire problem to "(current) block-creators decide everything" is oversimplifying to a dangerous degree.

[TooDumbForBitcoin]

I'm all out of CLAMs. I sold 50 btc at 0.00076 and about 50 btc more around 0.0008. That's it for me. The price should go up now. Great for those that got in at such a cheap price!

Good to hear, enjoy your Btc
Interesting recovery

Indeed... Polo's fees will add up quickly while you're faking market activity by buying your sell orders back.

Gullable as you may be.. your shillery makes you an accessory to this fraud/ crime.

Speaking of which..
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=210646

Any day now with the taking down of your scam promo/sig, "Creative".

What's more impressive - how wrong A Man's Tot is all the time, or how unaware of himself he is all the time?

[SuperClam]

...
Measuring support of miners/stakers has never been hard. As you said, soft forks have generally included voting already.
...
No disrespect to the developers here, but it really isn't a hard feature to implement. Miners could even do it on their own by just agreeing to put suitably formatted messages in their coinbase
...

True.
No one ever claimed it was "difficult".
At a technical level, it is nothing more than a formatting protocol to give a standard for parsing.

...
If miner/staking voting for mere polls was really wanted and so useful, it would be more widely implemented.
...

The entire intent and purpose of promoting users switch to Bitcoin XT was predicated on providing a place for users to express support for bigger blocks.
This is even more clearly the case for those users who switch to a new version immediately; as there is no chance in the short-term that the new software causes any changes to consensus at all.
The quantity of nodes reporting the version 'Bitcoin XT' was closely watched.

Suggesting that this information isn't wanted is incorrect, in my honest opinion.
The entire conversation surrounding the Bitcoin XT debate shifted after certain Chinese miners made known their opinion.

Is it more sensible and reasonable for every user who wants a change to create and maintain their own codebase?
Their own codebase which implements forks and potential disruption to the consensus process?

...
What makes this whole issue hard is measuring and reasoning about the support various changes would or do have from other stakeholders (using that term as an English word here) who aren't involved with block generation, including possible future participants (who may decline to become participants if some changes are or are not made).
Reducing the entire problem to "(current) block-creators decide everything" is oversimplifying to a dangerous degree.

I know you have concerns about the representation of minorities and specifically changes which might affect 'digs' or other essential characteristics of the network.
I think those concerns are valid and even sympathize with them.

Even assuming that it means little for a network such as BTC, it means something very different for a Proof-Of-Stake system.
A system like CLAMour, in a Proof-Of-Work system, would pool the feelings of miners.

Proof-Of-Stake has attributes which make this type of 'polling' much more valuable.

Blocks are staked by those who possess CLAM.
The same people who stand to be positively/negatively affected by poor development choices, and to the same degree.
The suggestion to keep track of and allow the holders of BTC to vote has indeed been discussed in various places.

In the end, CLAMour is nothing but data.
Data that we wouldn't have had without it.
Data that clearly, provably, and by definition, represents the wishes of those who possess and stake CLAM.

A population census simplifies the content of a population and doesn't poll the unborn.
That doesn't mean that a population census is devoid of useful data.
The utility of a data source is not defined by how well it happens to serve a specific individual's opinion.

Are you essentially arguing that having this data is a negative, or at least useless thing?

If so, I disagree.
Data is only information.

If we use that data inappropriately, then the shame lies on our own shoulders.
Not the data itself.

[P-Funk]

A cryptocurrency is its network, and with Clams being PoS, the network is the subset of clam owners acting as stakeholders who are maintaining the network by staking or pooled staking. If Clam owners want a say in this CLAMour system, there's very little barrier to having it.  Worrying about what oblivious clam owners (mostly owners of undug clams) will think about changing something about Clams, if that even happens, is a strange anxiety and not productive. Stakers are the network, and the network is the cryptocurrency.

[smooth]

Are you essentially arguing that having this data is a negative, or at least useless thing?

It's not entirely useless, or it would be useless to discuss it.

But its utility is limited, for reasons already discussed. Nor it is entirely free of potential harm. Overestimating the utility or underestimating the potential for harm are both dangerous.

@P-Funk: which stakeholders are the network? Because this set potentially changes every time there is a transaction. Polls and voting can only measure stakeholders at an instant-in-time, but both network stability and confidence in the economic value require a greater degree of stability and consensus over acceptable rules and rule changes. That is why, for example, soft forks typically require a large supermajority. There is no technical difference between a soft fork supported by 51% of the network and a 51% attack; the only difference is that an acceptable soft fork is widely supported by the larger community and a 51% attack is not. But technically, and in terms of on-chain voting, the two are identical.