Topic: [Announce] Project Quixote - BitShares, BitNames and 'BitMessage' - page 17. (Read 48297 times)

Surely you don't agree with paying people to do nothing.

When I deposit my savings at a bank, I expect an interest bearing rate, because I expect my bank to loan out the funds and make them productive. I don't expect to get paid for my capital sitting in the vault. We can't create capital out of nothing, it must be created from increased productivity.

When you debase BitShares and then distribute (a portion of) it proportionally to each BitShares unit, this is a facetious claim that you have given the BitShares owners something for doing nothing, because all you've done is debased the value of what they had, by (a multiple of) what you just handed them.

What do you expect to gain with such a lie? Let me try to enumerate some of what you what you may lose...

If you also distribute (a portion of) transaction fees to the BitShares owners, you are transferring wealth from the producers in the economy and paying people to do nothing. Remember M x V = nominal GDP, thus transaction volume is proportional to GDP and thus is proxy for production. Please don't tell me I can't use math to understand. I just did.

Your claim is that by buying BitShares, one is taking a proportional ownership position in a business which offers transaction services. And thus that (a portion of) transaction fees should be distributed to the owners of the business. I have several problems with this.

1. The wealthy transact a much lower percentage of their wealth than the lower class, yet they own 90% of the wealth. If BitShares is truly to become a means for decentralized stock markets as you envision with BitAssets, then you have just invented the most regressive tax ever known to mankind. Way, way, way above the Laffer limit, thus guaranteed economic implosion if BitShares became the dominant money and capital stock.

2. It is an oxymoron to conceive of a "investment" which is the entire economy (if BitShares becomes the dominant money and capital stock). Investment requires diversity, otherwise it is travesty of the concept of opportunity cost. Another way of putting this, is that when the dollar is your unit-of-account, you don't say your dollars are worth less when gold goes up in price. Thus you can't have an "investment" which is also your unit-of-account. It is nonsensical. Thus everyone who is investing (versus using for transactions) in BitShares is by definition in it for the capital gains, for as long as it is not their unit-of-account. And the aim is for it to become their unit-of-account, then the capital gains will be irrelevant (c.f. aforementioned gold example). So if you are growth mode, why do you want bleed your customers (the transactions) and starve your desperately needed PoW to secure against attack (while BitShares is still small and not a unit-of-account) who you need to grow, just to pay a silly dividend which isn't relevant to how the investment is being valued. And the dividend will be miniscule compared to the volatility in the BitShares -> USD exchange rate, so it is just noise, but yet costing you PoW resources when you need them most.

3. As you admitted, the ratio of split between the miners and the BitShare holders is not market determined. That is evidence to you that you've made an economics design error.

4. To the extent that your facetious gimick works to attract people to BitShares, these are dumb people who don't understand that the capital gains volatility made any dividends irrelevant. If you attract dumb early adopters, then you have dumber ecosystem built around it. Wrong trajectory.

5. Should I go on?

I do hope you do your dividends, because I want to see if any of my statements end up being true. Any way dividends are probably not a killer either way for your plans. My impression is a similar ideology infects also on the market maker issue (possibly also the domain name issue too). I am thinking I may be wiser to not try to too hard to change your design for I can gain knowledge by watching your results. Also I should not want to be responsible if I am wrong, since it is not my baby.

A few comments below interleaved...



You too. Thank you.


Yeah I can relate. But how confident are you about the accuracy of the tracking price of the BitAssets relative to the designated asset? I just couldn't go so rambunctiously into something with some more concrete basis.


Thanks for the willingness to have a brief exchange of thoughts. I don't think I applied exceptional effort to change your mind. I don't believe in controlling others like puppets.
    

When you have some time, you should learn to respect Martin Armstrong. I haven't found a significant market turn that he has predicted wrongly since the 1970s. His predictions are made 10 and 20 years in advance and then accurate to usually within a day or two. The recent examples he called the gold price to decline from $1600 level and said it would go to slightly below $1200 by end of June. It was exactly correct both on price and timing. He is now calling for double in the DJIA by 2015.75 and he said we would see a correct to $14250 in Sept before resuming the rise.

The reason he can do this, is he spent $100 million to collect the history of the world and put it in an A.I. computer system.

He is way more advanced in understanding than any of the people you respect, including Mises, Rockwell, etc..




If you believe that Austrian economics says that an always going higher level of savings is positive for the economy, then you are egregiously misinformed. Note your use of word "any".

I am not against hoarding, when it is driven by market forces, then it can't become higher than optimum for longer than the irrational can remain solvent.

But if you view an economy only in the capital model of savings versus consumption, then you entirely miss the importance of fitness. This is where the math of simulated annealing comes in. I explained fitness in terms of knowledge creation and finance/saving:

http://unheresy.com/Information%20Is%20Alive.html#Knowledge_Anneals
http://www.coolpage.com/commentary/economic/shelby/Demise%20of%20Finance,%20Rise%20of%20Knowledge.html#KnowledgeInvesting

You want to imagine that the simple act of delaying consumption is high-valued activity, but the fact is that the economy only functions between the diversity of knowledge is always finding matches of solutions to problems.

Fitness means that given a fractal coastline, you could select from a diversity of shapes to fit all the differently shaped indentations on it. In the real world, imagine the indentations as opportunities (or problems to be solved) and the fitting shapes to be human brains.

So saving versus consumption is really not where the economy derives. One of the proofs of this is the repeating 78 year cycle of technological unemployment that causes depressions and war, yet also brings all the prosperity we have today as compared to the Kings of countries of yore.

Armstrong understands this, because his computer identified these repeating cycles backtested to Mesopotamia.




I can support this one with a some simple math explanation. But I am tired.


Actually because the capital is invested as usury and not at risk with knowledge applied, because each person is not investing their own capital. This is part of the math I would explain, but I grow weary. Been there, explained this so many times in past.


It can't mathematically.
 


Astute. See point #3 above.


See my point #2 above.


See points #2 and #4.


I don't see how you claimed to debunk it. But in any case, I grow weary now.

https://github.com/InvictusInnovations/BitShares

Yes.   Because we are not pre-mining everyone has equal opportunity to profit from being involved.  If you have C++ or web skills and don't require a lot of management overhead then we would love to have contributors.   Lots to do.  More eyes the better.

The reason they are being integrated are as follows:

1) ease of use (eliminating the need for bitcoin-style address exchanges)
2) off-chain trading
3) names / messaging is being done first so we can harden the network/code prior to introducing a crypto-currency on top of it.

Just to be clear:  Only the BitShares ID and BitShares Mail system will be released in beta at C3.   Rushing a crypto-currency to market without ample testing and review is something we want to avoid.   That said, a large part of the BitShares blockchain has already been defined including the transaction types.   I have even generated and validated 5 blocks to prove the basic behavior as a crypto-currency with dividends.  You can view my debug block-explorer output: http://the-iland.net/static/chain.html for an example of how the numbers work.    Anyway, just showing you that we have a plan and will be systematically rolling it out as time permits. 

AnonyMint,
    You are clearly investing a lot of time into this thread and attempting to understand how things are expected to work and where we might have missed something.   Recognizing that I have been wrong before and paid people to show me where I am wrong I can appreciate your efforts.   I argued long and hard in the Master Coin thread about why their similar escrow system for creating 'GoldCoin' was fundamentally flawed and it took a long time to find the magic example / explanation that finally got him to see his flaws.   We are in a similar situation here.  

    I am betting the farm on my way of thinking and have been thinking through it for months.  So you will have a very up hill battle and will need to find the magic insight that can undo all of my previous thinking.   If you can do that it would be greatly appreciated because above all in life I seek knowledge and truth.
    
    If I am wrong then it means I hold two contradictory beliefs to be true at the same time.  Convincing me of that will depend upon arguing via reason from the truths I already accept and demonstrating the contradiction.   Ie: never argue with a Christian by quoting the Koran.  Never argue with an Atheist by quoting the Bible.   An atheist can quote the bible 'as true' when attempting to demonstrate contradictions to a Christian.    The point of this is that I can be convinced, want to be convinced, but have very high standards of reason.

    So here is the problem, your arguments are based on assumptions that I reject combined with appeals to authorities I do not respect.  You will have to adjust your strategy if you want this to be productive.  

So we can start with assumptions I reject based upon my current understanding of austrian economics:
   1) markets can be modeled by math.
   2) saving / hoarding is harmful in any situation
   3) dividends / pooling is 'socialistic' and inherently bad.
   4) fixing the dividend / mining ratio
  
Here are the tests I use to determine 'bad' socialism:
   1) is there any coercion
   2) are the risks divorced from the rewards

By your view, all forms of insurance are 'socialist' because people are pooling their money and then redistributing it disproportionally.   I am generally against insurance myself, but only because most conventional insurance is so regulated by the government that the risk/reward payoff for me doesn't line up in most instances.  
 
Based upon this perspective, my opinion on economics is guided by both Austrian theory and Non-Aggression principle and any position that would violate one or the other I default to non-aggression trumping economics and attempt to find the flaw with my economic theory.

You could say that my founding axiom from which I derive and evaluate all of my thinking is, "don't do unto others what you don't want them doing to you".   From this my entire world view flows and I attempt to resolve all conflicts.

Back to topic:

I interpret this point as being logically equivalent to price fixing.  If you 'fix prices' then you are deciding for the market and the consequences are obvious.   I fully accept and attempt to avoid price fixing when ever possible with the following design points that still bug me:

1) price fixing 5% fee for margin calls
2) fixing 1 year of history
3) fixing initial margin and maintenance margin requirements.

However, if you take a view that this system is not the 'entire market' and that it will be competing against LiteShares, FeatherShares, etc then market forces still apply and one chain is competing on price and features with all others then there is still a corrective market force / knowledge at work.   For example, the miners of a coin could agree to change the fee to 1% or reduce the margin requirements in order to compete with an alt-share.   An alt-share could also adjust the dividend / mining split based upon some other rationale.  In the end I am not deciding anything for the market, i am introducing one product that will compete with all others.  Simplicity is also a product that is highly valued (ie: Apple) so any alt-share that increases trust requirements or adds complexity to achieve an economic ideal may actually destroy value derived from simplicity.


I have stated constantly that grandma does not get a 'no-risk' positive return.   The BitUSD price will fluctuate +/- 5% and the effective dividend rate will also fluctuate with the result being that if she enters/leaves at the wrong time and doesn't hold long enough her expected ROI may be more or less than what she was expecting.   Granted the risk is minimal and within relatively safe min/max gains/losses.   The fact of the matter is her value is ultimately backed by a crypto-currency and that is a risk in and of itself.

There for 'no-risk' must be qualified as, "assuming you have 100% faith in the crypto-currency and market pegging".  

Now that I have debunked your 'no-risk', zero-knowledge, basis, I think the foundation of your argument against dividends is gone.



    

Without considering the technical factors, only a purely economic ideology basis off the top of my head, I would rather see namespace (e.g. .bit, .bts, etc) providers be a free market with many different competing models and ideas.

I have also suggested to Daniel in private message that he consider feature pruning and making things more modular + orthogonal, but I also stated that maybe I am wrong.

It occurred to me about this and my suggestion to have market makers chosen by the users in a free market (instead of the randomly awarded PoW miners), creates more interest in the coin, because more businesses can build diverse business models around the coin.

This is another example of why well-intentioned top-down hard-coded ("non-negotiable") choices usually are unoptimal. PoW is not a choice. Rather it is unarguable because nothing else will work for securing a block chain. When something is arguable, it is better to leave the choice to the users.

If you are interested in decentralised identities built on top of the Bitcoin protocol, maybe it is also interesting to note that Namecoin can already do that: https://dot-bit.org/Namespace:Identity

And please don't take me wrong, I'm very curious to see what Bitshares will really develop into and if the economics behind work out.  I'm just not sure whether it is a good idea to do everything from a decentralised exchange over identities/names and messages in a single project at the same time.

I read about this a couple of days ago and am still doing a happy dance.

Of these the most interesting piece to me is the decentralized identity management. You've mentioned the code is open source. I also have some ideas on how to build this on top of the BitCoin protocol.

Can you point me to the code base?

Are you looking for any contributors in anyway?

What did you decide on miners being market makers?

I suggested upthread that users could instead choose their market makers (free market, at-risk, optout/optin, knowledge behavior) and the miners could accept these inputs in whole, so miners don't have control over market making.

Those three principles (or axioms as you will), you will see repeated over and over in my economic understanding is this concept that the decisions must be with the individuals. If there is no optout, it is socialism (collectivism) and destroying value. This is entirely consistent with Austrian economic theory. When you try to "bribe" grandma to join a monolithic pool of BitShare dividends with a guaranteed (no-risk) positive return, or similarly for your idea for BitDomainNames, then you are deciding for the market, thus reducing degrees-of-freedom, impinging upon knowledge creation, and thus destroying value. And you've told me you never want to decide for the market or destroy value. So I am hopeful you are going to have an epipheny, and retract your "non-negotiable" stance on dividends. You think dividends will create more demand for your altcoin, but (famously well-organized) top-down planners are myopic to the unintended effects of their interference (ahem "choices") with individual choice (this is almost verbatim from Austrian economics!). I believe this is analogous to HELP.org's feedback to you about domain name squatting regulation.

Individuals can't choose which miner wins the PoW.

I provided one example of potential manipulation where if the volume of trades was much lower than the value of open shorts, miners might have an incentive to buy up all the spreads, then run the price as high as they need to and trigger margin calls.

Other manipulations are delaying trades by not adding them to the block and generally that the individual can't demand any level of service, because the individual has no choice in the selection of which miner wins the PoW.

My economic understanding is based on the way knowledge is created, since all our prosperity is due to knowledge creation (we live better than Kings of yore because of technology):

http://unheresy.com/Information%20Is%20Alive.html

We are not so far from being able to see eye-to-eye and still work together. Daniel as I PMed you before I slept, I was exhausted when I lost my patience yesterday because I had been awake for about 36 hours.

Any way, I am not expecting you to change your economics stance. So I will read your replies and then once my understanding of your plans and theories is complete, I can move on. If however, there is a way we can work together, then I am not closed-minded to it.

Hope my feedback has been constructive in some way.

charleshoskinson, I was too exhausted for meeting on Skype yesterday, besides I am high in the TROPICAL, INSECT INFESTED mountain right now and don't have enough internet connectivity bandwidth at this "rest house" location for a voice call. Also I wanted to see in public if there was some way that we could coalesce before getting to that serious point. I got a bit frustrated yesterday when from my perspective Daniel was so far off base in his guess of my economics ideology (yet now I am noting he is likely deep-in-thought programming simultaneously with posting here) and also in his single-minded focus only on one facet of capital formation (which from my perspective doesn't capture everything that Austrian economic theory is about) causing him (as far as I can see so far) to conflate issues and understanding (and actually caused him to think I was leaning Keynesian while noting to myself that the popular misinterpretation of Keynes is the antithesis of my ideology). I was simply too tired to untangle it all. Communication is complex and especially written versus verbal. Yet sometimes written it is more efficient in other ways, c.f. above hopefully it is coming more lucid now....

becoin, you don't know how many times I have reflexively tried to kill that bug on my screen in your avatar. You would think I would remember it is a gif animation. Striving to be a good socialist, I am sending you the bill as taxation for the Windex cleaning solution I needed to clean off the smudges in a certifiably government approved antiseptic standard, plus the $100 it cost to deliver it to me in the mountain by 36 weeks expedited Marxist-collective delivery service-- the collective is fairly owned by all who are guaranteed their fair share of a dividend with no downside (negative return) risk whatsoever placed on their gains. Noting that "cleaning" solution will likely be imported from China and contain harmful chemicals, I assuredly will be increasing my medical bills charged to you via taxation forever (because my children and their grandchildren are also in on this on this "fair share" ownership ideology).

I remembered Antal Fekete's point about backwardation, which is when the demand for the real asset NOW is so much greater than than the demand for the commodity in the future, that the spot or near-term, interest-rate (cost of capital) discounted prices are much higher than the futures market interest-rate discounted prices. This signals a broken futures market losing trust in future delivery and wants the real asset now. Perhaps this could cause BitGold to diverge lower from the actual price of gold in future when the "shit hits the fan" on the global sovereign debt crisis.

Okay so we've learned that the design of BitAssets is that the demand and supply have asymmetric probabilities, because the demand can be an indefinite position and there is no margin; whereas, the supply are those who borrow short and thus have a market risk to manage on their margin cost of capital. If an asset is in a bull secular trend, then I am thinking that (on average over the entire distribution of positions and strategies) the shorts are going to be using shorter-term valuations and the longs are going to be more longer-term focused, and vice versa in a bear market secular trend.

The whitepaper already acknowledged that the ratio of the valuation of the BitAsset to its designated asset would be influenced by the evaluation of relative opportunity cost (i.e. time and asset preference) by the market participants.

So if the opportunity cost probabilities are asymmetric, then wouldn't we expect mathematically that the valuation of the BitAsset would diverge from the designated asset valuation over time?

I had also written upthread that forcing synchronized shorter-term expiration on each short and long position would balance properties, but then value is lost over time relative to the designated asset due to volatility losses from rolling over the options frequently, which is observed in all tracking ETFs as far as I am aware of.

So I am doubting the theory that BitAssets can track designated asset valuations even proportionally long-term.

I am thinking maybe the best we can hope for is they track valuations reasonably well over very short periods of time (which accomplishes the whitepaper's goal of reducing liquidity risk for local face-to-face meetup exchanges). And to that goal, I would rather see a symmetric short and long position given (I assume, haven't studied the exact details) this has been proven to work for ETFs then you can just copy it, and still offer the long-term asymmetric positions separately.

Thoughts?

Are the ETF algorithms decentralized or do they require input price quotes that can't be adapted to this purpose?

P.S. I am sort of excited about BitAssets. This appears to be a very significant innovation. Kudos!

Got it. Thanks.


I suppose if there is no ask, then there can't be a margin call since these are block atomic, yet there could be more margin calls than asks in that block. So I see you just take all the collateral, so a thinly traded market is dangerous for the short.

So the Bank of Dan(iel) is always losing value, as there is no interest rate charged on these loans, yet the debasement of BitShares is greater than the dividends paid on BitShares (because some percent goes to the miners)?

Yet if the miners were the only ones receiving dividends (awards for PoW) as I proposed, then they would never be losing, as difficulty would scale to match ROI in an at-risk (i.e. high knowledge) activity (those who apply high knowledge don't lose even it means abstaining from mining while the majority are irrational). Note there is no way for an individual to opt-out of BitShares dividends, nor apply any knowledge to earning them. That is a crucial point, and I think Daniel is smart. Economics is all about advancing knowledge. The real capital is knowledge creation (the highest form of labor).

I hope soon you may have an epiphany on my economics point differentiating valueless no-risk activity of usury (which forces centralization and pooling risk due to mathematically guaranteed failure) from the value-added activity of at-risk hoarding (which rewards individual risk).

So now back to analyzing the valuation of BitAssets...in next post...

P.S. One last bit on programming languages, I am keenly watching the development of Ceylon. Ceylon has a first-class intersection (disjunction, e.g. Int | Bool | MyClass) type which Scala lacks, but doesn't do higher-kinded types. Both have union (conjunction) types. I lean to higher-kinded types as essential and intersection types as an improvement over downcasting from AnyRef (i.e. the top type in an inductive language or bottom _|_ in Haskell).

Sam keeps his BitUSD until he wants to sell it.
Bank of Dan will cover her position by buying from someone else (anyone looking to sell)

I admired the merged mining improvement, using the cross-chain transactions to decentralize multiple blockchains running same protocol, even am interested in the BitAsset although I am trying to ascertain its qualities first before I complete my analysis.

As for optimal blockchain design for scaling and other factors (features needed), there is much more study and analysis I need to do.

I admitted that C++ was probably best given the reality of the situation, notwithstanding my belief that Scala is the best language going forward for strongly statically typed s/w (while noting that Python and Haskell are excellent for their use cases). I did criticize both Go and Rust, because type theory is something I have been into lately and so I have a knowledgeable perspective there. Ken Thompson is a legend, but not in strongly typed, high-level semantics. Martin Odersky and Philip Wadler are the gurus. The IQ level in the Scala community is extremely high. Haskell probably even higher. But that doesn't apply to what you need now.

Economics is something I have been thinking (and writing extensively) about deeply since about 2005, when I realized the global sovereign debt crisis was coming (long before most people did). We can't really ascertain the relative knowledge on economics without a detailed debate, and I have agreed not to do it in this thread. I did want to point out that I am not disagreeing with Austrian economics, nor other misunderstandings that some readers have erroneously attributed to my ideology. Because it is very difficult to explain the entirety of my economics understanding in a few short snippets of text.

On the legal issue, if you don't credibly threaten the establishment, you will be okay. Otherwise, you will need to conform, change society (i.e. alter human nature), or hide. Daniel seems to think the middle case is likely. I don't (at least not in the near-term and the long-term, we will get a wave of society-wide freedom again in the middle phase as always happens on these repeating historical cycles). One thing I learned from Armstrong and Margaret Thatcher, is that timing is very important on the political cycle.

I have enough experience to know when someone isn't understanding what I am saying and recognize it has Dunning-Kruger effect. You will note for example, that I wrote that I was sufficiently ignorant of options trading that I may not be grasping BitAssets readily and downthread, you see my expectation was correct. I also noted upthread where I lack domain specific knowledge and that I could not likely catch up to Daniel in coding. This humility quality is the antithesis of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Yet you still don't explain what happens to Sam's BitUSD asset when the margin call is placed on Pam? Does Sam receive BitShares? If yes, then his position in BitUSD has expired.

P.S. My understanding of economics does not disagree with Austrian economics, it is what I understand to be (if I am correctly reading you) your interpretation of Austrian economics which I believe to be mistaken. However, we can't assume I am correct, without a debate to hash it out. Just as I pointed out with a hyperlink upthread, that most people misinterpret what Keynesian economics is. I agree debating economics seems pointless, because people never change their mind except by experiencing failure.

No, the margin call on Pam only results in Dan accepting the lowest ask in the market on her behalf.   If there is no ask in the market, then an bid is placed at the full collateral amount.

If I didn't have so much other work to be doing I would gladly debate the economics with you, unfortunately I will have to defer that to Mises and other austrian bloggers and researchers. 

So the margin call on Pam, causes the expiration on Sam too? If so, I think this is problematic.

P.S. to becoin and bytemaster, if you want to discuss economics with me, please start another thread. I will pique your interest by pointing out that hoarding is a knowledge-added risk activity which entirely fits with my economic understanding. I contrast this against usury which doesn't care how the interest is produced, only that it is guaranteed with a public backstop to be paid. Then note that if the usury rate is greater than the growth rate of the money supply, then it is mathematically impossible for the economy to remain solvent (a debt crisis is always on the horizon). I don't wish to outlaw usury (as I pointed out even sitting on capital insured is valuable to a lesser extent thus we don't debase overnight to 0), yet I don't want to build it in by default either. Inflation is absolutely necessary to bleed capital from those who aren't adding value to those that are, but not too fast, because of inertia and imperfection is necessary for knowledge creation.  Centralized inflation is bad, because a few people game it, e.g. QE we have now. Decentralized algorithmic debasement is good and necessary. We can get into that in more detail, if you are so inclined. Actually I would prefer not to waste a day or more on that, and you may concur.

Sam buys it from Pam as an even trade.

Initially the bank owns the BitUSD... it then lends it out (like bank notes) and ultimately Sam will own the BitUSD until he sells it to someone else.  Ultimately someone will use it to pay off a loan and return to the bank.

It BitUSD is an IOU from the Bank backed by the Bank's stock.

When the bank makes a margin call, it accepts the lowest Ask for BitUSD on the market... Sam is given the opportunity to sell above market value.   Of course there are many players here and all BitUSD is fungible so it may not affect Sam at all.  Some other seller of BitUSD will provide the BitUSD used to cover the margin call.

I find it beyond dubious that a random man walks into my thread and systematically attacks every design decision we have made, programming languages built by teams of brilliant designers with decades of collective experience, the economic knowledge of men like Ron Paul and Lew Rockwell and then has the audacity to cite the Dunning-Kruger effect. This almost seems like a game rather than a legitimate debate. I understand that you are thoroughly impressed with yourself so much so to label us as unskilled individuals.

But let me remind you that we are also the ones who are actually building a product and working countless hours every week. While I really do love having debates, at some point work needs to be done and I'm confident we can manage without your help. Why don't you run along and start competing with us as you stated earlier. And please keep those trade secrets with you.

Pam puts up 2X collateral, so where does Sam's payment go? Or are you saying that Pam gets 1/2 her collateral by selling to Sam?

Sam owns the BitUSD but you say the bank owns the BitUSD. 

Where did the bank get the BitUSD? If they create it out of thin air, then this is an increase in the money supply, but then it is retired later when it is redeemed? But if the Bank makes a margin call on Pam, then if the BitUSD is retired, then how is Sam affected?

Sorry I am still confused. Perhaps I am very slow to grasp it. Apologies.

I had it right at first, then 'fixed' it wrong.   

Is it a good sign that you only had a math error to point out?

Typo, I assume you mean 1 BTS == 0.67 USD, else you mean 1 BitUSD for 1.33 BTS.