Topic: [BTC-TC] Virtual Community Exchange [CLOSED] - page 133. (Read 316534 times)

Also, we should probably continue are discussions in private and not in the public threads.
No one else has joined the conversation or shown any interest, and it has now leaked across two threads.

http://polimedia.us/dtng/c/res/17830.html
(I think we are both being made fun of now. )

Just the difference between claiming to operate a site using a crypto currency, and how WoW and SecondLife operate their 'virtual currencies'.
As you recently stated in another thread, a fundamental difference is that you allow withdraws, where the games do not.


No, BitFunder is not a registered business entity at this time. I had stated in the previous thread that you carried this conversation over from that I am working towards finding a way to establish a legal legitimacy for the site. At this time I have chosen not to take the same route as BTC-TC and just claim its all play money and hope for the best.

Not sure what you mean about the (C), unless you are referencing a copyright mark?

Hosting: The site is load balanced across servers all around the world. Multiple database and front end servers share the handling of data all over.
People who know me, know I have 10+ years in the hosting business, and have equipment all around.
I also host a great mining pool http://Ozco.in which is managed by Graet, for the last year or so.

Operations: Are you referencing a business operations? There are none. Website operations? I am the web developer in the US.

Forming a corporation in another country once the legal concerns have been taken into account is not too difficult with proper consulting.
I would highly recommend anyone use a real lawyer/cpa to properly incorporate in another country. There are many laws to consider.
I have corporations in the US, Canada, and Australia currently, and working towards a financial license in another.

I gotcha.  So what you're saying is that the fundamental difference lies in the original intent of the programmers that created the virtual goods?  Is that accurate?


I wouldn't say I find anything about this comfortable in court.  For the reasons described earlier.  You never know what a judge is going to do.  What is your take with BitFunder?  Is BitFunder registered with your state's corporate division?  (I see you have (C) BitFunder on the site, inferring BitFunder is a registered entity?)  And it's hosted and operated in the US?

I really appreciate your input, it's good to discuss this stuff.

Cheers.

Actually, at least with WoW, the company specifies that their 'virtual currenecy' is to have no real world cash value. Attempting to do so is breaking their ToS.
People reported and caught doing so, have the accounts they have invested time and money into taken away.
http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company/legal/wow_tou.html
"
Ownership/Selling of the Account or Virtual Items.
Blizzard does not recognize the transfer of World of Warcraft Accounts or BNET Accounts (each an “Account”). You may not purchase, sell, gift or trade any Account, or offer to purchase, sell, gift or trade any Account, and any such attempt shall be null and void. Blizzard owns, has licensed, or otherwise has rights to all of the content that appears in the Game. You agree that you have no right or title in or to any such content, including without limitation the virtual goods or currency appearing or originating in the Game, or any other attributes associated with any Account. Blizzard does not recognize any purported transfers of virtual property executed outside of the Game, or the purported sale, gift or trade in the “real world” of anything that appears or originates in the Game. Accordingly, you may not sell in-game items or currency for “real” money, or exchange those items or currency for value outside of the Game.
"

SecondLife issues Linden Dollars that are "representing contractual permission from Linden Lab to access features of the Service." and is a limited license
that they maintain full control of. This is very different than using bitcoins on an asset exchange, as you are using a third party "virtual currency" that is
most commonly used in trading for fiat.
http://secondlife.com/corporate/tos.php
"
5. "LINDEN DOLLARS" ARE VIRTUAL TOKENS THAT WE LICENSE
5.1 Each Linden dollar is a virtual token representing contractual permission from Linden Lab to access features of the Service. Linden dollars are available for Purchase or distribution at Linden Lab's discretion, and are not redeemable for monetary value from Linden Lab.

The Service includes a component of virtual tokens ("Linden dollars" or "L$"), each of which constitutes a limited license permission to use features of our Service as set forth below. Linden Lab may or may not charge fees to acquire or use Linden dollars, and these fees may change at any time.

When you acquire a Linden dollar, Linden Lab hereby grants you a limited license ("Linden Dollar License") to use the Linden dollar as a virtual token to be held, bartered, traded and/or transferred in Second Life with other users (and/or Linden Lab), in exchange for permission to access and use Content, applications, services, and various user-created features, in accordance with these Terms of Service. The Linden Dollar License is transferable by the holder to any other user, provided that both users comply with these Terms of Service, maintain their Accounts in good standing, and are not delinquent on any Account payment requirements. Except as expressly permitted by this Agreement or otherwise expressly permitted by Linden Lab, the Linden Dollar License may not be sublicensed, encumbered, conveyed or made subject to any right of survivorship or other disposition by operation of law or otherwise, and you agree that any attempted disposition in violation of these Terms of Service is null and void. Linden Lab may revoke the Linden Dollar License at any time without notice, refund or compensation in the event that: (i) the Linden dollar program is suspended or discontinued; (ii) Linden Lab determines that fraud or other illegal conduct is associated with the holder's Account; (iii) Linden Lab imposes an expiration date on usage of Linden dollars in compliance with applicable laws and regulations; (iv) the holder's Account is terminated for violation of these Terms of Service; or (v) the holder becomes delinquent on any of that user's Account payment requirements, ceases to maintain an active Account or terminates this Agreement."

Also, VERY importantly.. they state they can, at any time, take your Lindens away, which you simply can not do with bitcoins outside of the site. They also state that 'Linden dollars are not real currency or any type of financial instrument and are not redeemable for any sum of money from Linden Lab at any time.'
"
You acknowledge that Linden dollars are not real currency or any type of financial instrument and are not redeemable for any sum of money from Linden Lab at any time. You agree that Linden Lab has the right to manage, regulate, control, and/or modify the license rights underlying such Linden dollars as it sees fit and that Linden Lab will have no liability to you based on its exercise of this right. Linden Lab makes no guarantee as to the nature, quality or value of the features of the Service that will be accessible through the use of Linden dollars, or the availability or supply of Linden dollars.
"

Both sites do definitely claim, or assert that their 'virtual currencies' have no monetary value.
I have even considered doing a similar thing for bitfunder, except that no one wants to be told that the moment they "convert" their BTC in, that it has 0 value until they transfer it out. Especially with the GLBSE nightmare. People want to be able to have recourse.
Neither site, WoW, or even SecondLife will directly let you exchange their 'virtual currency' to something else to be withdrawn.
Even SecondLife, LindenLabs directly will not convert your Linden Dollars to a fiat at any rate and give it to you as a withdraw.
(This would violate their own ToS stating their 'virtual currency' is not redeemable for any sum of money from Linden Lab at any time'.)

Having experience personal experience as a business owner for 12+ years, and having to see many Judges over the last decade to enforce contracts, I can share at least one thing I have definitely learned, is that you can 'play it' however you want with a judge. In the end, they look at it in a very factual, and straight forward manner, and they tend to look for people who play 'games' to avoid illegality, and will compare end results, not the means.

Object A
1. A shareholder of a publicly traded company spends their money to buy into shares of a company.
2. A shareholder of a publicly traded company get's to vote on company events.
3. A shareholder of a publicly traded company may earn dividends based on profits the company has hearned.

Object B
1. A user may have to spend money to but bitcoins to bbuy litecoinglobal's 'virtual shares'
2. 'Virtual shareholders' vote on actual events of of Litecoin Global.
3. 'Virtual shareholders' will receive actual profits from Litecoin Global via a 'real shareholder'.
4. 'Virtual shareholders' may at any time, in bulk, and without charge, convert 'virtual shares' into real ones.
5. 'Virtual shareholders' are being provided detailed company accounting data.
6. 'Virtual shareholders' 'actually' own a share of "the domain liteocinglobal.com, the website code, the customer list, and anythiing left in the site wallet.' and may receive these very real items in whole or part should litecoinglobal.com operate at a loss for more than 30 days. as stated in the LTC-ASSET 'stockholder agreement'.
6. 'Virtual shareholders' are liable for the 'Estimated startup costs' including up to $1,780 worth in company formation fees in the form of a clawback which would be paid by 'Virtual Shareholders' in the form of a debt, lowering the total profit paid out as dividends, should the corporation become successful.

These 'Virtual Shareholders' sure do have a lot of 'real world' responsibilities and promises for being a completely 'fake' system for 'entertainment' purposes only.

My lawyers have always agreed on one thing. Judge's will go by 'the sniff test'. If it smells funky, it probably is.
This my friend, would _not_ pass the sniff test.

There is a possibility that the other side would call in shareholders, asking how they came to own the 'virtual shares',
including buying the bitcoins, the bitcoins held value worth selling on an open market for, how much they "paid"
for the shares, if they fully expected to get actual profits distributed to them from litecoinglobal regardless of if they
are labeled as 'virtual' and who actually gives them the payments, and if they felt that these payments based on the
profits were a "promise" of value to be paid.


This contradicts the websites own terms, where it states 'No assets on the site are to be considered real.'. In this case,
as you have clearly stated, the shares of the litecoinglobal asset are true shares being proxied by a nominee shareholder,
and may be traded evenly for actual held shares of the registered corporation in bulk.

The end result is, which the Judge's care about the most, is that the 'virtual shareholders' of litecoinglobal have the
same promises, and rights as a real shareholder, and is being traded in a public open market outside of any regulation,
having the option to (without any cost) evenly trade these 'virtual' shares for real ones, leaving the only difference
being that someone tagged the word 'virtual' onto them. This does not make them 'not real shares'.

Simply telling the judge that there is a "fake" service that manages the 'virtual shares' that act in good faith as actual
shares... well. I will stop beating a horse, dead or not. For the rest of the site, that is fine, but for your own real corporation,
it just sounds bad. (to me. of course I may be wrong, but it is my opinion.)

I have known many lawyers, and have never had one say "Yeah, it can look questionable, but we can fight it."
(Well.. there was one... there always is.. man, he made a LOT of money off that odeal. Was the first time I learned the
hard way about this stuff.)
Generally the response is "Well, if it looks like a dog, walks like a dog, and barks like a dog, I would't want to go to jail for try to sell it as a cat."


Oh.. they trust them.. Until something goes terribly wrong. Then it all goes down hill from there. Does not mater if the issuer is doing what they think is right, or not.

Pulling this out of the BitFunder thread, it probably makes more sense to have it here. 


That prospectus was written up when LTC-GLOBAL was first created.  You probably also noticed lots of other things out of date, eg:


I think the line is "Hobbyists use their high performance gaming video cards to create it."  Part of the fun is constantly tweaking it to maximize performance.  Like back in the day when people used to constantly reboot their 386's, editing their DOS boot files to get maximum memory to play a game.    You're right that it's in a questionable space legally, but anything that can be said about WoW/SecondLife can be said about cryptocoin.  Some people do it for fun, some for profit. 


I think we covered this in one of the threads a while back.  The shares represented on LTC-GLOBAL are proxied shares held by a nominee shareholder.  I have offered up a trade for anyone holding a large amount of shares of their LTC-GLOBAL proxied shares to actual shares held and registered with the corporate secretary.  You just have to go through usual AML type requirements.  Photo id's, passport, proof of address, etc.

I do not claim that they have no value.  That would be like saying that WoW gold or Lindens have no value.  It doesn't hold water.  I do however hold that they have zero real cash value until you trade them for cash with someone.  Fact of the matter is that with all the cryptocurrencies, the value can be wiped out at any time by the developer, or even by a hacker.  (51% attack, or a vulnerability in the underlying crypto layer.)  So I don't think any of us realize a profit or income until such time that we actually have cash in hand.


If you can't trust your issuer, then the asset holds no value anyway.


Thanks!

Hi I have the .yml file for my exGLBSE asset RSM - https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/796com-redstarminingcom-the-oldest-public-mining-security-150ths-63257 - how long until you can get it listed?  It is free for exGLBSE assets yes?

Yep, spam folder. (gmail user)

BAKEWELL import complete.

If you held BAKEWELL and went through the GLBSE claims process, you should now have an email in your inbox.  Please check your spam folder before reporting missing emails.

BAKEWELL support thread here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=104489.300

Thank you all for using BTC-TC!

Big CSS facelift this evening.  You may have to purge your cache or CTRL-SHFT-R to see it.

Thank you for using BTC Trading Co, https://btct.co/

SYNERGY import complete.

If you held SYNERGY and went through the GLBSE claims process, you should now have an email in your inbox.  Please check your spam folder before reporting missing emails.

Synergy thread here: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.1386953

Thank you all for using BTC-TC!

If there's enough liquidity in the market to value that way, then yes - it ceases to be an issue, though you still end up booking a realised loss on the sold security if you work our purchase price based on last X rather than re-averaging permanently after each purchase.  My example was primarily showing how using the current built-in system (average cost to buy) to value fails.

Problem with using Bid is that quite often the high bid is just for a single unit - and often significantly above next highest.  Those are generally placed by sellers hoping someone will outbid that they can sell into - a cheap way to make the going rate look higher than it really is.  And the opposite also applies - that after someone sells off in a rush it can take a while before realistic new bids get placed.

With any luck volume will pick up - which coupled with the ability to leverage funds in account across multiple assets should lead to more respectable liquidity and the ability to more reasonably value from market.

Again, there's no problem doing that in RL. Again, I see that the spread and volume are our (hopefully) temporary problem. I would opt for BID as basis, but maybe the options could be selected by the user?

No, the new valuation would depend on the bid or average price or whatever you choose for the remaining 3 + the 8 in cash.

It's not implemented.  And it would be hard to do anyway - as how do you value current holdings when most assets have a wide spread and low traded volume.  There can easily be 25% difference between valuing at highest Bid and valuing at 7-day average (much more in some cases).

Once you get to the stage of having to manually enter values for each asset you hold then you may just as well do it in a spreadsheet in the first place.

Note also that the way in which purchase cost is calculated (if you have X of share then it's average price you bought last X of them at) can lead to some behaviour which could confuse those who don't fully understand it.  Here's an example.

For a given asset you buy 4 units in this order:

1 at 9.0
3 at 7.0

So you now hold 4 - which will show as having a total purchase cost of 30 and an average cost of 7.5.
Assuming you have no cash left your portfolio is now valued at 30.

Now you sell one unit at 8.0 - making a profit right?

Well not accoridng to your asset lists:)

You now hold 3 that were bought at 7.0 - total value 21.  And have 8 cash.  So your portfolio now has a value of 29.  Selling at above average purchase cost made you a loss of 1.  WTF?

That sort of thing can catch people out - and is why any profit/loss tracking implementation needs to be very clear on how it functions, when prices are averaged etc.

To get a more consistent valuation what you should do is every time you buy shares, use the self-transfer thing to reset all of them to their average value - then you'd end up holding 3 units worth 7.5 + 8.0 cash for a total valuation of 30.5 after the trade in the example above.

Another dumb thing I see people (some fund managers especially) do is buy stuff via a bid, value it at mid-range or 7 day average and claim they just made a profit by buying it.  Well no - you haven't made a profit until you can find someone to buy it for more than you just paid.  Sometimes you WILL make a profit from it - other times the reason your bid got filled is because the price is about to collapse once whoever just sold to you has sold all theirs (or all bar enough to take the price back down) and removed their fake bid that you overbid (and all the ones below it making it look like demand), leaving a bottom-less chasm below the point you just bought at.

Personally I only value what I hold for my fund two ways:

1.  What I paid for it (if above highest bid and below lowest Ask),
2.  Highest non-trivial quantity bid (i.e. ignoring 1 unit bids put there to try to get over-bidders to sell to).

In illiquid markets valuing any more optimistically has more to do with wishful thinking than with calculating profit.  Profit is what you can actually realise - not what you'd like to hope you'll be able to make at some point in the future.

All of which is to say that it just isn't easy to calculate profit on current holdings - and anything other than a very thorough approach to it is likely to do more harm than good.  This is because people have a tendency to give too muc credibilitydue to official-looking numbers and treat them as some sort of hard fact - when in fact any such 'profit' figure would be a horribly crude estimate which made no sense without a proper understanding of all the assumption which went into its calculation.  You'd learn far more - and have a much better understanding of where your portfolio really stood - if you did it a spreadsheet or whatever yourself and then had to define the actual assumptions/aproximations yourself, ensuring you were aware of them and the massive extent to which they effected the actual final number calculated.

The system doesn't care if you have multiple accounts under the same email address.  You should be able to log out of your current account, verify your new account using the verify link, then log into the new account using the details in the email.

If the login info still doesn't work, please PM me your email address and I'll take a look.

Cheers.

If I have an existing btct account with the same email as an imported asset how do I claim the shares ? I received an email abiout cognitive but the login doesnt work because I am already using the email for an existing asset.

Yup, definitely not all there yet. 

I started working on it a couple of weeks ago and realized that I need to change the dividend tracking in the db first.  That's a pretty big job, so it's been held up a bit.  It's on the plate though.

Cheers.

Works for me. Thank you.

However this now brings me back to: Where I can see profit/loss? Is it not implemented yet?

Example:

I was considering setting up an edit where you could change your purchase price, but that's a pretty edge case and only really useful for these imports so instead I put in some code that will allow you to plug in a share value when you transfer.

Which opens up a semi-hack, If you want to reset all your 0 BTC transfers to the current bid price you can transfer all your shares to yourself and set the price to whatever you want when you do it.  

Just keep in mind that if you have any legit purchases, the analysis rotates out what you're holding in your portfolio based on when the acquisition was made.  IE, old purchases could get replaced out.

Cheers.