Topic: Devcoin - page 161. (Read 412998 times)

Mark has been awarded the bounty for developing another devtome wiki, with advertising:
http://devtome.medianewsonline.com/index.php?title=Main_Page

Mark wanted the total 6 share or 60 BTC bounty in bitcoins, so I sent him 60 BTC and provisionally I will in turn get 6 extra generation shares in round 7.  If anyone wants up to 6 extra shares, I will trade them at 10 BTC/share, until block 24,500.  The round 7 receiver file will be made at around block 25,000.

If anyone else makes a devcoin wiki, they will get 2/4 of the bounty, and the last 1/4.

Every secondary devtome wiki gets 1/5 of a share for basic maintenance, plus 1/5 of a share for backing up the primary wiki or being ready to back it up until the primary wiki has a backup file.

The primary wiki will get 10% of the ad revenue to cover its costs.

At the time of this writing, the create new account function in the primary wiki is not working reliably.  When it is, that will be posted in this thread.

all the user reported problems with devtome have now been fixed , if you see any other problems let me know
thanks

I want to make stock exchanges players build in freeciv cities to be able to be actually functional, even to the extent that research and development of new technologies, including actual functionality for features of games, clients to play them with and so on, can be integrated into games.

Is it illegal to have corporations in EVE Online? Are EVE corporations unable to work with shares and stocks and bonds and so on?

Are game currencies going to have to be constantly spawned and abandoned as each currency starts to be perceived as having value?

Didn't some Chinese online game start to find its currency being perceived as a threat to the local fiat?

How long can fiat continue to be perceived as valuable if the only way it can hold its own against game currencies is by banning games or banning the representation of currencies in representations of nations, cultures, adventurers, whatever - simulations?

Just because fiat itself seems to turn out to be a ponzi scheme and has to abandoned periodically as being so, must all representations of exchange of value follow in its footsteps by similiarly being periodically abandoned, and for, it seems essentially the same reason: governments intruding and messing things up, destroying value?

This is so silly. If freeciv nation's national currencies are some kind of threat to real nations then maybe one should recall the famous moral of C.S. Lewis' "The Silver Chair": if a few children can imagine a better world than the one you come from, maybe the one you come from could do with being re-thought...

-MarkM-

I am no expert in this area but from my limited understanding on the US laws, it is illegal for Americans to participate in this type of thing. I mean c'mon there must be at the very least financial rules are regulations involving the SEC and US government that must be followed in order to even attempt to do something like this on any kind of legal level.

If anyone else is more knowledgeable on this subject I would love to hear what you have to say.

That devcoin.exe version from twobit does not work because it is from before the difficulty change.  If anyone makes a Windows exe from the Dec 9 version of devcoin or later:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/galacticmilieu/files/

they'll get 2/5 of a generation share.

Why?

What is wrong with the .PRO ?

Are you maybe missing boost or curl or some such dependency?

-MarkM-

Well listing is easy, as is trading.

I am not sure about paying dividends automatically though, for one thing just trying to find out which nyms own shares might be too much of a breach of privacy to be possible to any normal script, then if the dividend is to be payed in some currency other than the shares themselves trying to figure out whether the smae nym that owns a share also owns an account denominated in the type of currency the dividends are to be payed in might be even more of a breach of privacy.

To do it without invading privacy might be possible though by issuing a new "first dividend payed" type of share though maybe in a basket currency which one could buy using "no dividends payed yet" shares or something like that, the basket would contain the new issue of share plus whatever the dividend is to be.

I guess I need to explore what exactly a script is allowed to do. Somehow I don't think querying other people's nyms as to whether they own certain types of accounts seems a very legit kind of ability for script in general to have. But maybe for this share dividends purpose it is going to be necessary.

EDIT: Chatting with FellowTraveler in IRC, apparently he plans to make routines specifically for this in Open Transactions. So although the capability is not there yet, it is on the roadmap/plan. SO we can go ahead and start issuing shares knowing someday the code for doing the dividends will come along.


-MarkM-

Since Open Transactions can not delete stuff, in that case an Open Transactions exchange should be able to suspend trading.  So no one would be able to trade and the last price string would be 'Delisted' or something like that.



If someone else wants to make an another exchange in a more liberal jurisdiction, they could.  Until then, people in many countries may not be able to list their company.

I agree with both of you. It's such a grey area, especially for those of us that live in the USA, I have battled with this myself - I want to be an honest businessman but at the same time participating in the GLBSE could quite possibly be totally illegal.

I don't particularly like the idea of getting entangled in some anonymous person's reputation by letting them issue their possibly dubious offerings on my server.

It is easy for an Open Transactions client to have a number of servers it connects to, so why not have people who want to issue things issue them on servers of their own? No separate worry about can you trust the server operator plus can you trust the issuer, they will be the same person.

And no worrying will some asshat do an issue on my server that will give my server a bad rep for being involved with such an issue.

I don't see much/any upside to allowing people to issue stuff of their own on my server.

-MarkM-

That's hard man.  You can be as legit as you want, but unfortunately, some asshats decided that they can make you a criminal for what should be a matter of free will..  I'd love to do more with Bitcoin stocks / glbse etc.. except I fear legal issues.  I don't think that's right. 

I just want to make a suggestion, I think its important to have to prove your identity beyond just having to upload your keys, GLBSE strive to be anonymous, and because of that it is very easy for someone to scam, also the other side of it is , if you are a legit person who has a legit business , its difficult to prove who you really are, you should have to upload a scan of your ID, and accounts should be registered to real names , not to forum aliases..

thanks for listening!

Delisting could be problematic with Open Transactions. It cannot delete stuff that is part of its evidence trail.

What does delisting actually consist of? What has to be done to constitute a delisting?

What happens to people's existing holdings? If it involves suspending trading, how do they get cashed out / get their money back type thing?

-MarkM-

Thanks for all the stock bounty suggestions.

The stock exchange bounty will be 4 generation shares for the first devcoin stock exchange which meets the basic requirements:

1) Create new listing
2) Issue new stocks
3) Buy/sell stocks

The next two requirements are optional and are worth 2 generation shares each:

4) Pay dividends
5) Delist stock

An exchange which meets all the requirements would get a total of 8 shares.  The additional feature of

6) Stock splits / Reverse splits

is useful, but isn't quite necessary to have a useful exchange.  The additional feature of:

7) Options (probably very low priority as there is no Options volume on Vircurex, I assume interest is rather limited.)

is of limited interest until the underlying issue is trading at least 100,000 $/day.  So having Stock Splits or Options doesn't get more bounty.  Companies on that exchange could also trade in bitcoins or something else, the bounty is awarded for being able to trade a company in devcoins, the bounty is not lost if a company can also trade in another currency.  In general, the stocks will probably trade in devcoins and bitcoins.  The next devcoin exchange will get 6 shares, then 4, and finally 2.

Furthermore, there will be a bounty of 5 generation shares for the first open source company which trades in devcoins and makes at least a dollar of revenue.  The next company meeting the requirements will get 4, then 3, then 2 and finally 1.  Because people can set up a mining company relatively easily and make a dollar of revenue, which would drain the bounty for all other types of companies, there will be an additional bounty of 5 generation shares for the first open source non-mining company which trades in devcoins and makes at least a dollar of revenue.  The next company meeting the requirements will get 4, then 3, then 2 and finally 1.  Good accomplishment applies to the company bounties, so they will not be awarded for ponzi schemes, spam companies, etc..

Three entities in Galactic Milieu so far were using the term shares: General Mining Corp aka Galactic Mining Corp; General Retirement Funds aka Galactic Retirement Funds; and United Nations Shares aka United Nations Scrip.

In the United Nations case, the idea was that it would be their currency, backed by holdings of other currencies as well as by other holdings such as real estate, trade concessions, whatever they could sell.

Originally they had figured on using blockchains, based closely on Bitcoin thus being limited to never issuing more than 21 million shares/coins/scrip.

They still might go to blockchains eventually, but it now looks safer to simply trade in Open Transactions, using tokens that would be redeemed using blockchain based coins if ever they do end up moving to a blockchain. (Which would not be until after they are sure they could secure the chain adequately by merged mining.)

These instruments kind of blur any distinction between currency, shares and bonds, since for example GMC and GRF are still discussing whether to bother charging people 1%/day on loans as the borrowers assumed would be the case or simply increase by 1%/day the price of their scrip, thus effectively charging 1%/day on their debts simply by the borrowers ending up having to pay more per unit for the scrip with which to pay back the loan.

The core problem seems to be the actual valuation of the coin/scrip/shares. The blockchain idea provided a built in limit to the total number. If that idea is discarded in favour of only using Open Transactions without any concept of an eventual blockchain implementation then there maybe is no implicit limit to the number they could ultimately issue.

-MarkM-

I am targeting "preferred shares", hence no voting, the investors should be investing purely out of economical reasons and not because they want a controlling stake in the company.

Difference between bonds and shares, extract from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bond_(finance):

Bonds and stocks are both securities, but the major difference between the two is that (capital) stockholders have an equity stake in the company (i.e., they are owners), whereas bondholders have a creditor stake in the company (i.e., they are lenders). Another difference is that bonds usually have a defined term, or maturity, after which the bond is redeemed, whereas stocks may be outstanding indefinitely

The main point being: bonds have a defined term or maturity.

Open Transactions similarly allows trading anything for anything, thus trading one stock for another would be quite possible.

All the talk I see of stocks/shares on this forum always seems to assume common shares, with votes. Yet in the real world "preferred shares" are also often traded, maybe more so even than common shares since they are purely financial instruments not loaded with all the politics of actual control of the company.

Maybe bonds might serve as well, I guess I should try to look up what difference there is between bonds and preferred shares and exactly how preferred shares actually work...

Someone can issue shares, bonds, currencies, whatever on an Open Transactions server simply by creating and issuing a contract describing what they are offering. But actually doing voting through the software is not yet in place in the Open Transaction code. I am also not sure what would be involved in cases where an issuer has issued varying numbers of their offering on various separate Open Transactions servers. Presumably even if the software itself tallied votes on one server, the issuer would still have to collect the results from all the servers they issued on and correlate them.

I would have thought that in most cases someone wanting to raise capital would not be wanting to give away control of their idea/company in the process, so I would have thought non-voting shares would be the norm unless most people are only looking for less capital than they themselves already have available thus that they would only be selling less than half the shares?

-MarkM-

Setting up the exchange shouldnt be the problem, thanks to the dynamic design of the underlying platform of Vircurex, adding additional Currencies/Stocktickers is a matter of minutes or using the same codebase for a second exchange.  Though I would need to adjust the screen layout a bit as it currently shows all possible combinations of available currencies, it would even allow to trade stock for stocks (though the sense of that is questionnable).

Looking at the current active currency combinations on Vircurex, it probably doesnt make sense to offer all possible combinations, that would water down the volume hence the decreased liquidity will push the prices down. I would suggest it do be trading against BTC and DVC only.

The more important question would be the scope of functionality expected?
 - Create new listing
 - Issue new stocks
 - Buy/sell stocks
 - Pay dividends
 - Delist stock
 - Stock splits / Reverse splits
 - Options (probably very low priority as there is no Options volume on Vircurex, I assume interest is rather limited.)

We'ld need to offer some space for people to store their quarterly/annual reports (devtome.com?)

that is an awesome idea!

I would very much like to buy a FPGA board to mine devcoins. Maybe I will buy myself one for Christmas