Workshop: DEALER NETWORKThis workshop will be held in
I Bitcoin Supernode Summit Finland 9.-12. May 2013.
MISSION STATEMENT:
We believe that setting up a decentralized, enormously liquid way of determining the USD/BTC rate, is beneficial for the continued increase of the rate. We believe that it is possible to gather together the owners of 3,000,000,000m
BTC (about 30% of all the bitcoins aboveground) to regularly post their willingness to sell a part of their stash to the rising prices. The ultimate counterparty would be a new bitcoin user who buys these coins. The intermediary would be a Bitcoin Supernode dealership. We believe that this operation can be set up in 3 months, and it will be the ultimate stabilizer of the price, even though we expect that the actual number of coins traded by this mechanism would likely not exceed the aggregate turnover of the exchanges, even after the 3 months.
TECHNICAL:
1. We set up a Bitcoin Dealers' Association, which will accept members upon very strict scrutiny. The number of members will be limited to about 200, and it is not mandatory to have more than 10 for it to work properly.
2. We set up an
order matching software, which will process the
net dealer orderbooks of the BDA members, every 8 hours. I propose this happens at 00:00UTC, 08:00UTC and 16:00UTC, continually, every day. There will
not be continuous trading at all in the first stage; it can be added later if found beneficial. I don't think it will add anything, since we already have the exchanges for play.
3. Net dealer orderbooks will be sent encrypted to the software, it will find the market clearing price, and send the details to the counterparties of the actual trades. The software cannot (ie.
it is mathematically impossible to) cheat. If all of the participants see their net position fulfilled at the fixing price, the software has worked properly.
4. It does not cost anything for a member to send their orderbook, also there is no fee for the trades matched. The fees are a fixed membership fee and a one-time registration fee. In addition, members can buy the stock of the association (stockholders decide the directors etc.) and they will have to post a significant bail, which will cover the maximum of outstanding trades by the member, and is held in a 3-out-of-5 escrow perpetually during their membership.
5. The trades are settled T+4, which means that the trade contracted will have to clear in the other end in 96 hours from the fixing. Eg. fixing on Monday at 00:00, will have to be paid
and cleared in the receiving end by Friday at 00:00.
6. If there is a delay in settlement, a penalty will be imposed + all the expenses of the counterparty will need to be covered. If this is due to negligence, a warning is issued. If there is further negligence or an outright default of the payment, the bail will be used to cover the damages and the member is expelled. If
(which can not happen unless the scamming party can also hack the blackbox software to give him a larger outstanding orders limit than his bail covers) the damages exceed the bail, all other members pay prorated, and the scammer is expelled and criminally prosecuted.
7. The software will publish the fixing price automatically and immediately to the public. The volumes and counterparties of the trades will not be published.
8. Later on, the settlement can be extended to futures contracts, and options on futures can be written.
This is an ingenious mechanism, which achieves the following objectives:
- No central point of failure; the central software cannot mathematically cheat, since if it clears the market according to the orders of each of the members, it will have been cleared it according to all of them.
- About 30% of the bitcoins of the world will be able to be part of the price finding mechanism without need to physically move them or even know the exact owners and whereabouts of them. Quite many of them will be owned by the members at that point, and some non-members will certainly know of the members who act as their brokers. Dealers do not need to divulge their local order book (amounts, personal info) to anyone, the amounts will be sent to the blackbox encrypted, the customer info stored locally.
- Any local dealer can serve any Prince Harry who wants to purchase 10 million worth of bitcoins, which is impossible in the current exchange model (prepayment) and the Web-Of-Mistrust model (nobody would trust you for more than you have been doing before, which is childish if we are talking about actual business).
- Yes, as the end-user customer, there is no need to store your cash or bitcoins anywhere in particular. Only the dealers will need to abide by the following conditions->
If the following conditions are met:
- All (= every one of) the members are professionals, to make it smooth enough to have a delayed 84 hour settlement with an assigned counterparty.
- Members post a bail to cover their total outstanding orders limit, or any lesser amount if it is considered stupid enough to scam all the other members of the network prorated.