Topic: Done with GLBSE - page 2. (Read 7511 times)

I think the answer is simple. 

1) Goat gets a short time to liquidate operations. 
2) Goat sends Nefario BTC for all the outstanding assets. 
3) Nefario distributes the BTC as a dividend to shareholders.
4) 
5) Profit.

Nefario and Goat need to use judge.me. Submit to arbitration and be done with it. They even accept Bitcoin.

How I see it:
Nefario is being stubborn and singing "la la la" with hands over his ears while Goat tells him about the double-spend problem and general fraud problem with the idiotic "code" system.

Goat is being stubborn and singing "la la la" with hands over his ears while refusing to agree to anything.

Nefario should come up with a better system than the damn codes, and Goat should help him come up with this system.

But I'm not a paid arbitrator.

Yeah we have a bounty out for someone to make an Open Transactions client "that grandma can use" but not much action on that yet.

The current GUI is a "test GUI" that includes pretty much all the things Open Transactions can do, as example code showing coders how to do all those various things. It is accordingly only for the cleverest grannies.

But we gotta get people using it, else really there won't be much incentive for anyone to bother making it more useable, and in fact the geeks might even hardly notice anything unusable about it to improve.

(WTF, a GUI? Who uses a GUI? Everything it can do better be right here in the command line commands or else... )

-MarkM-

FellowTraveler's github repositories for both Moneychanger (the GUI client) and Open Transactions itself have screenshots etc and also each has a wiki too, see

https://github.com/FellowTraveler

There is also Open Transactions TV at http://open-transactions-tv.github.com/ for those who like video.

For Windows users, da2ce7 just today made a new release, see https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.1221651

-MarkM-

Well do yourself a favour then and set up an Open Transactions client!

-MarkM-

I suspect the big problem will be "know your customer" type laws, since apparently in a lot of places a fully legitimate company has to know the identities of its shareholders. So maybe anyonymity for buying shares of really legitimate companies will involve setting up offshore holding companies in jurisdictions that do not require revealing their own owners. That way your offshore company can own shares on your behalf without revealing who you are.

I invite you to look over the contracts I use though, they are in the file digitalis-assets.tgz on my sourceforge file-download site

http://sourceforge.net/projects/galacticmilieu/files/

Basically what it comes down to is I don't think there are any "know the players who control the characters who own the shares" rules for online roleplaying games...

-MarkM-

I dedicate 5,000 DVB shares sold at whatever they are worth at the time to it if you go for it.

Markm, get to work! This looks like a new project idea for you and dvc can be used to fund it

So, again, coloured bitcoins.

-MarkM-

Coloured bitcoins.

-MarkM-

Venturing a few names, stockcoin, bondcoin, securitycoin, sharecoin?

People who want to be anonymous can connect through Tor or an anonymity proxy or whatever.

All the seller needs is a bitcoin address or an Open Transactions nym or a PGP/GPG public key type of thing by which to know each customer. Probably preferably all three, maybe with the customer specifying a sequence of priority of their use, like which one to accept for normal operations, which one to require for any change of that first one, and which one to require for any change of that second one.

So anonymity does not require a blockchain.

Also if the issuer's system is online 24/7, then the shares could even be issued as Chaumian blinded cash tokens. When you give me such a token I turn it in untraceably at the site for a new one. The site must be online at the time of the trade for this to work, and it is more untraceable than a transaction permanently recorded on a blockchain for all to see.

Obviously most people use third parties for hosting their public-facing servers, so your objection about third party hell might as well apply to anyone who does not host their website on their own machine on their own premises. If they have their website off-premises they will probably also have their shares-trading site also off-premises, though not necessarily at the same datacentre as their website since possibly their webhosting provider specialises in providing web hosting and their transaction server provider specialises in providing transaction servers.

Open Transactions is intended for this kind of use, that is why it is designed not to require that the issuer trust the operator of the transaction server.

The issuer has to be trusted though else what they issue is pretty much worthless.

-MarkM-

"Necessity is the mother of ingenuity."

I've been hearing a lot about "Open Transactions" the last few days. I don't know too many details about the project but would that be a system similar to what we're talking about?

By the way I'm glad you all managed to turn this thread into an interesting discussion.

~pyrkne

The problem with having the company/issuer manage the shares is that its not something most of them are going to be competent at. I imagine the vast majority of them would just outsource that, so we'd all end up in third party hell again.

Using a blockchain/bitcoin-like system would mean it should be extremely simple to manage, for both the issuers and the shareholders. There's no need for the issuer to know who the shareholders are - the only communications needed between them are dividends and votes, as far as I can figure. If anyone wants to get fancy with shorting or margin trading, they could work through one of the agent sites (like I'd expect GLBSE to become).

There's also the anonymity aspect. Having the issuer manage it means the data on who owns shares needs to be maintained, and if it is maintained it will be recorded and capable of being stolen or seized. I don't want any government ever knowing anything about any of my economic data. None. At all. Ever. Period. End of story. So if there's any way they can get that info I'm less likely to use the system, and won't put as much into it as I would with a system that respects my control over my data.

A blockchain seems like overkill since shares only have value if the issuer acknowledges them / honours them. Thus in the absence of the issuer they are worthless or at best represent speculation that at some future date/time the issuer might show up again.

Thus it seems to me to make a lot of sense to have the issuer do the accounting / exchanging. If you try to sell me a share of Company X and their site is down, aren't I wiser to wait until they are online again before buying, in case they have in fact already "flown by night"?

Since I want to check they are actually still in business anyway, I might as well conduct the exchange through them directly while I am at it...

-MarkM-

I really don't like the idea of replacing GLBSE with another "site" or brokers.

What we need, IMHO, is an alt-chain for shares. The smart property proposal being discussed on some threads here is a good start. Sites like GLBSE could then be middlemen that can help people manage their shares, help with buying and selling as well as research. But you should be able to move from one such site to another by merely exporting a hash (or whatever) and importing it into the new site. Those who want to manage things themselves can have their own wallet for their shares.

The smart property idea can be used for shares of stocks and bonds, car titles (using VIN numbers for part of the data), and land titles (maybe starting with title insurance). You could also use it for anything with a serial number - use an alt-chain for keeping track of your valuables.

Maybe then all you need is a free open source bitcoin-exchange with your shares plugged into it instead of fiat, so all the normal stuff would be there that a site for buying and selling bitcoin for fiat would have but no fiat, instead it'd be for buying and selling your shares.

Basically search and replace "USD" with your shares code and disable the scripts that deal with the fiat banks...

-MarkM-

Maybe brokers is the way to go, and regard GLBSE not as an exchange but, rather, as a broker.

Issue your shares to brokers, let them worry about all the individuals on whose behalf they hold your shares.

Seems like GLBSE pretty much serves in that role, but maybe other brokers need not limit themselves to only offering your shares for you on GLBSE but also place them in other places where people are open to trade.

-MarkM-

I think the distinction here is on whether you really propose to only run your own assets or actually propose to become in effect yourself an exchange, offering various third parties' assets on your server instead of them being off on their own servers just like you are on your own server.

That is, why have the actual offers and bids matching for many different entity's assets all on one system, especially on yet another entity's system?

Might it not suffice for traffic gathering to simply have some community bulletin boards where people interested in assets can search out the kinds they are interested in then visit the sites of the issuers themselves to actually make a bid, offer, purchase or sale or visit the sites of various critics advisers statisticians and so on to gain some perspective on which issues and issuers are widely regarded as worth taking a look at?

-MarkM-