Topic: [Announce] Project Quixote - BitShares, BitNames and 'BitMessage' - page 3. (Read 48297 times)

They simply believe they can provide decentralized tracking of external value, and that everyone can share a tax on the activity. It is "public wave" collectivism mindset, but I don't detect that they expect to lure everyone in and run away with the capital leaving the majority holding nothing of value.

Maybe your ethics detector is broken. Check out their marketing website:

http://tradebitshares.com/savers/

If your ponzi detector doesn't go 'ding-ding-ding', I don't know what to tell you.

This is what I had said to Charles in private too yesterday and what I said upthread. I am not saying it won't possibly work, but I have very strong doubts, because without threat of delivery there is no reason it must track the underlying unit.

I wish we could have decentralized tracking of alternative monetary units and equities. I just don't think it will work technically. I am happy if I am wrong.


I hope you are not insinuating that the principals knowingly wish to create a ponzi scheme, because I don't detect that lack of ethics. I just think bytemaster leans towards collectivism as marketing strategy, i.e. we will all own this and be paid dividends (e.g. the name registration decentralized corporation concept). I don't doubt his serious programming abilities. Whereas, I lean minanarchist (a subset of libertarians), and I think they are the market that will be moving their capital into a coin as the G20 starts the bail-ins and retirement nationalizations (confiscations) circa 2016 to 2020. I am most focused on fixing the anonymity, block chain, and network resilience of the coin. P.S. I am not advertising any altcoin effort of mine by saying this; there is none as of the moment.

Imagine what happens when localbitcoins is shut down. Then how do you obtain coins without passing through id checks and thus G20 capital controls. The USA is preparing its strategy against Bitcoin:

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/10/04/bitcoin-seized-its-days-are-numbered/

Bitcoin has an insurmountable lead, and I believe (Moldbug's theory that) there will be only one blockchain that wins. The only way Bitcoin loses, is if there is some key feature that is missing. I think I just stated above by implication what I think that feature is.

Everyone was ridiculing me since 2007 when I've been saying in public forums that the government was going to do these evil things, and now Snowden has helped to show that I was probably correct. Yet still many people (e.g. gmaxwell) apparently think the threat is not proven and it is best to take the middle ground (status quo with slow adaption) approach. Instead I think a technical war is ahead between the (minanarchist freedom fighting) people and the dying socialism.

And I believe the USA as a nation-state will be on the evil side of the war this time, unlike in Patrick Henry's call to action:

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/09/25/there-is-no-going-back-nsa-is-here-to-endure/

And the NSA may not be the most powerful entity we need to fear:

http://www.nestmann.com/the-nsa-has-nothing-on-these-guys

From past discussion, it appears that bytemaster believes we as a society must work this out and the solution lies in convincing society to do the right thing. I understand that throughout history this only happens AFTER the socialism has destroyed everything into a pile of debris. First there is the war. This time the war will be in the network.

I had published the official government site links for bail-ins plans in place for every G7 member nation. Now I see this today:

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/10/14/european-banking-crisis-seizing-10-of-everyones-accounts-hello-cyprus/


More on obfuscating retirement confiscation by another name:

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/10/10/secure-annuities-for-employee-safe-retirement-act-of-2013/

The shift from "public wave" to "private wave" confidence (why bytemaster's marketing is out-of-sync):

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/10/10/deflation-inflation-stagflation/
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/09/27/scenarios/
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/09/26/the-irs-destroying-global-economy/
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/09/23/us-sowed-the-seeds-of-destruction-of-the-world-economy-brain-dead/
http://www.nestmann.com/and-the-money-trail-leads-to

Cooperation is necessary, but during the "private wave" it will be private cooperation, not wide-scale cooperation that necessarily requires SEC regulation:

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/09/29/the-man-who-may-have-saved-the-world-survival-of-the-fittest-v-civilization/

We have both a sovereign debt and a pension crisis:

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/09/30/debt-pension-crisis-fuel-behind-a-stock-rally/
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/09/27/so-what-does-the-future-hold/

(also we have a student loan crisis as youth chose to fund themselves with debt instead of being unemployed)

I think it is important to consider Armstrong's theory that the Democrats want to shutdown the government to blame it on the Tea Party Republicans, so that they can win a majority of the Congress in the 2014 elections (the polls show they are winning the public opinion race on this issue), and thus they can turn the USA hard to the left with massive tax increases and anti-business laws as France is doing now. Socialism always eats itself. France now won't let a company shutdown, they must go bankrupt first. Spain taxes sunlight.

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/10/04/france-makes-it-illegal-to-close-your-company/

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/09/26/one-day-after-german-elections-truth-comes-out/

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/09/25/an-australian-senator-comments-on-socialism/

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/10/01/what-socialism-destroyed-govt-shutdown/

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/10/14/democrats-are-believing-their-own-nonsense/
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/10/13/elections-2014-2016/
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/10/13/a-giant-waste-of-time/
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/10/14/france-fighting-against-the-internet/
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/10/12/will-the-republican-party-divide-in-two/
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/10/12/democrats-continue-to-try-to-destroy-republican-party/
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/10/10/g20-meeting-to-raise-taxes/
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/10/15/imf-wants-to-strip-the-rich-of-wealth-brilliant-marxist-organization/
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/10/10/obamacare-another-nsa-spying-on-citizens/
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/10/07/how-empires-nations-city-states-die-we-seem-to-be-right-on-schedule/
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/10/06/russia-nationalizing-pensions/
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/10/06/washingtons-political-dysfunction/
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/10/04/death-of-the-euro/
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/09/29/bureaucrats-destroying-the-world-the-expat-experience/
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/09/29/the-republicans-are-now-terrorists/

Taleb's black swans (we don't have Anti-Fragility) are coming...thus the notion that society could fix itself with cooperation (before collapsing into a pile of debris) is utter nonsense...

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/09/25/deja-vu-austria-all-over-again/
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/09/30/understanding-contagion-something-politicians-remain-clueless-about/

Okay then, thanks for laying out the scam in such clear terms.

Suppose I am a risk neutral investor. I decide to invest in the bitshare system seeking to maximize my bitshare-denominated returns. I have to choose whether to invest in bitBTC or bitshares.

As long as the current resale value of 1 bitBTC = expected future resale value of 1 bitBTC, I will invest only in bitBTC and never willingly hold bitsharses.

Why?

Say the rate of return on bit shares is r. As a linear approximation, the expected rate of return on bitBTC is
2r+(expected future resale value of bitBTC/current resale value of bitBTC-1)
But we assumed that the expected future resale value = current resale value, so this is simply equal to 2r.
Which rate of return do you prefer? 2r with bitBTC or r with bitshares? Yes, 2r is better.

But this is impossible. Someone has to agree to hold bitshares voluntarily. As long as returns on bitshares are dominates by returns on bitBTC, no one is going to do this. To get people to hold both bitBTC and bitshares volintarily we need
r = 2r + (expected future resale value/current resale value-1)
Under this condition, both assets yield the same expected return. This is how country's maintain fixed exchange rates under free markets, by pegging their interest rate to the US FED's interest rate.
The equilbrium condition implies
Expected future resale value = (1-r)×current resale value

bitBTC have to depreciate steadily against bitshares. Otherwise, no one will willingly hold any bitshares at all. What about the value of bitBTC vs. BTC? To maintain parity against BTC, you need bitshares to steadily appreciate against BTC at a rate of r. This perpetual appreciation is clearly impossible. But wait, it becomes even more absurd.


For bitUSD and bitGOLD to maintain parity,  bitshares must also appreciate against GOLD and USD at a rate of r. For all of this to happen simultaneously, you will need the USD price of BTC and gold to remain constant over time.

Let's review the requirements of the system for parity to be maintained:
1) Relative prices of all real world assets excluding bitshares remain constant over time.
2) Bitshares perpetually appreciates against all other real world assests

Sound plausible? Well, of course it doesn't, this is a ponzi scheme.

The legal requirement of SETTLEMENT on a specific date...
Whether by Delivery or Cash Settlement is what enforces futures markets.
It's not clear to anyone whether you have a proper mechanism in place.

As for bid-ask spreads... there is no such thing as "you now have".

Bid-ask spreads are a function:

(a)  market liquidity

(b)  market volatility

(c)  market manipulation

You are gonna start with very liitle (a)... and a large amount of (b) and (c).
Including rules like your 5% short closure Tax that will create massive (c).

In general, overly complex systems are designed...
To make it easy for Insiders/Experts to fleece the ordinary Lambs...
So complexity in and of itself... is a reason for skepticism.

Silence in this case probably indicates seriously accomplished programmers (such as myself and bytemaster) are busy implementing. Bullshit walks, running code talks. Pissing me off is the best motivation I can receive (probably derives from being a college American football star).

Some very serious programmers are now involved.

I don't think you will see nonsense altcoins, but rather serious contenders which are much more formidable than Litecoin.

However, all my prior criticisms and input to bytemaster remain true in my mind. I don't think they have the sweet spot focus. I wish we were working together, but we don't agree on the sweet spot that needs to be attacked first as a priority. I am wishing them all the best luck, yet I am rarely wrong about marketing strategy. However, I don't want to rain on their parade. I want them to succeed.

i'm ready!!!! WHER'E'S THE DOWNLOAD LINK ALREADY??

Will be following this with interest

I know you are were upset when your coin thread got moved from the development forum where gmaxwell is the moderator to the Alt Coin forum. I've just experienced his manipulation.


And he just deleted the above from my thread too.

Nice motivation for me. Thanks gmaxwell. It helps at my age to get motivated.

When we discussed this in the past, bytemaster made the point that this type of multi-threaded P2P software required the performance of C (or C++).

Is that really true? It seems to me that any non-lossy (e.g. not gaming using UDP) P2P application is going to be fairly tolerant of network delays, and thus using a higher-level semantic language that 2 - 3 times slower isn't going to make any difference in the performance (most especially reliability, resilience, and robustness) of the system.

Whereas a HLL gains so much in productivity. BitMessage was written in Python.

P.S. see my revelation today on the potential insecurity of Bitcoin's current blockchain design:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.3328064

Definitely agree with the spirit of this, but want to elaborate on missing elements of the scam.

1) In order to convince people to put money in this, it will have to appear to work. Initially, the bitshares team will manipulate the price of bitBT to keep it roughly at parity. They will need to spend some money to do this.
2) As long as the parity is maintaned, the system will offer essentially risk-free interest on BTC. Idiots will buy bitBTC in droves.
3) Since you need to use bitshares to make bitBTC. The cash inflows will drive up the price of bitshares.
4) As soon as net cash inflows slow down, the bitshares team will liquidate their holdings and stop supporting the price of bitBTC.
5) Without artificial manipulation from team ponzi, the price of bitBTC will drop to zero. Holders of bitBTC will take a 100% loss on their investment.

The whole scheme is no different from pirate payimg interest out of cash flows from new investors. It is just more elaborate. The really clever part of it is that the profiteers can remain anonymous. The bitshares team will (plausibly?) claim to be entirely ignorant of flaws in their design and hide their BTC profits.

Perhaps but if the price is out of line with the 'expected consensus' based upon the name, then the gamblers will come on out and start betting against the billionaire.   They would eventually bankrupt the billionaire because the only way to maintain the manipulation is to throw more and more money betting against the masses.

Now you are free to speculate any way you like, but the only reason not to bet with the tracking is if you are attempting to play the momentum game and hope to exit before it corrects.   A billionaire could certainly manipulate the market but that already happens every day in the gold/silver markets.   The difference is that with BitShares the billionaire would have to tie up his money in collateral with carrying costs to bet against the market consensus and could only profit if he was able to convince others to make a bigger and increasingly risky bets further away from parity.

In this particular instance the rich would go broke playing the game you suggest and I would bet good money you would go broke too if you decided to bet with the rich man with no other supporting reasons.

Keep in mind that unless there is a market consensus there is no point in betting, it would be like gambling on a random number... some might go for it, but most would not.

Given this theory, I will submit that we should run an experiment on the test network and create BitX which is tied to nothing.  Has no label or idea.   My conjecture is that BitX would always trade at near parity with BitShares because there is no market information to bias it in any particular direction.   If someone started pushing BitX in one direction which way would you bet?  That it would continue moving in that direction or that it would return back to parity?  THe test network will prove the theory and until there it is pointless to argue about which way it will go.

Actually, it isn't absurd to suppose that it will track simply because of the name.   To demonstrate why, let me introduce the following principles:

0) BitShares have non-0 value
1) USD has non-0 value
2) There exists a ratio between the value of BitShares and USD known to the market.
3) All trades are voluntary
4) All new issuance is based upon a short and a long taking opposite sides
5) Both the short and long have financial incentive to ensure they enter the position at the current exchange rate.

As a result all short positions are by definition at a price that reflects the proper ratio or the trade would not have occurred.

Once the trade has occurred the market participants must agree on all subsequent trades.  

When the owner of BitUSD wishes to sell, he must find a buyer.  He of course wants to sell it for as high a price as possible while everyone else wants to buy for as low a price (in BitShares) as possible.  No one would dare pay more than the USD / BitShare exchange ratio and no one would sell for less than the exchange ratio.

The short position has constant pressure to cover because of the carrying cost, while the long position is receiving twice the dividends per unit value and thus there is an ample market to buy his BitUSD because excluding exchange rate risk, BitUSD pays twice the return as BitShares.

So BitUSD is a prediction market on what the future resale value of BitUSD in terms of BitShares will be.

Sure, the promise of delivery is one aspect of futures contracts, but if you look closely, 99% of future contracts are never delivered and in fact the total outstanding futures contracts often exceed the available supply of a given commodity.   The future market would be just as valuable if all trades were settled for USD rather than delivery because, in theory, the USD received would allow the commodity to be bought for immediately delivery.

Try a thought experiment,  assuming you had 1000 BitShares today, at what ratio would you short BitUSD and at what ratio would you buy BitUSD.... you now have your bid-ask spread.  
 

Usually in prediction markets there is a feedback mechanism, at some point the real world is checked to see what the real fact is and the prediction is compared to that, so people who predict well get rewarded.

If there is no feedback from the actual price of dollars in bitcoins or bitcoins in dollars or whatever then what you name your tickers is irrelevant and people are surely going to realise that. So in fact the way to make moeny would probably turn out to be to bet away from the actual value of dollars, so lots of people who are fooled by the label will think you are crazy but since ultimately whatever number gets the most bet on it wins a millionaire or billionaire or cartel or whatever can just have fun betting more than everyone else all put together on some insane value that people who think the labels mean something will think cannot possibly be right, but because it has the most bet on it thus is the consensus it wins anyway. Eventually even the most stupid of suckers is bound to realise the label means nothing, it is all about who has the most money. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, its business as usual, the labels are just more smoke and mirrors to fool the suckers.

-MarkM-

In prediction markets, derivative markets, or 'side-bets' work in practice, actors will benefit when their forecast  meet what really happen, otherwise they will lose.

In the IEM project that are designed to predict election, actors who correctly predict the election result will benefit. This is the base to generate a meaningful prediction result.

The price of future contracts is always highly correlated with the price of spot goods, because at the mature date the long side will be delivered the spot goods!

How about BitUSD? your logic is that “The only logical way to bet is to assume everyone else will eventually bet with consensus toward USD.” But why? Can BitUSD exchange with USD at a fixed rate? or who make BitUSD tie to USD will be rewarded? No. Actually there is no link between BitUSD and USD except the name, the only way to win is to forsee the price trend of BitUSD correctly, no matter how the BitUSD/USD rate will change. Isn’t it absurd to suppose that the market will make one thing tie to USD only because you name it *USD?

However things like market making can make this tie happen, and then can lead BitUSD to act like USD in payment and deposits, then Bitshare system will be more meaningful then Bitcoin…

Charles, thanks for giving so many explanation.

actually I have read out some great idea from BitUSD design, you know, Bitcoin is decentralized, but only for issuing, the issuing quantity is still determined centrally. However according to the designed creation process, it seems BitUSD can be regarded as a currency that are decentralized not only for issuing, but also for determination of issuing quantity, do you agree? 

Lol, ok you tell me what I'm building.  Some people are truly unique.

The core concept is issuing interest-bearing BTC-denominated debt. There is no cap on accumulation of debt in the system.
This only ends one way, and it is not with your debt notes trading at parity with BTC.

Cunicula, Prediction markets are the core of the entire concept of BitShares. How can we ignore it? You've been arguing for weeks in both English and apparently Chinese about the fine details of an unimplemented system and when we discuss the actual purpose of the system you tell people to ignore it? Come on man. Just give it a rest already.

Ugh. Don't let him sidetrack you with this prediction market crap. It is a red herring.