Topic: Done with GLBSE (Read 7511 times)

Not happy, but glad I paid attention.

I had one investment left with MMM, and he doesn't seem to be communicating with anyone here, or maybe I missed the posting.

So, I lost some, but not nearly what it COULD have been.

I am done trading stocks, bonds, etc with Bitcoin.

It has been an interesting run, but this is the last straw.

I ordered a Jalapeno from BFL, but I might just sell it when it arrives, and sell off all of my BTC.

We will see. I have a few months to decide.

I had most of my assets up for sale at the time of the closure but there was just no volume 

In light of recent news... Good call You must be happy!

So many warning signs, just like with bitcoinica and pirate, still people send their bitcoins to the most retarded people to manage it for them.

Maybe one day this community will actually learn from these incidents. Until then, bring on the next scam. We still got lots of suckers here!

When I saw Goat's assets delisted, I decided it was the last straw, and bailed everything I could.

Only BTC0.05 and a few shares of SS were left trading. SS should be fine. Imma kick some ass over the bitcents.

As long as I get my Tygrr and defaulted pirate debt back, I'll be happy
(I want it for trophies!)

Shame nefario took the most pussy way out - just close up & run. 

Let's add prophetic, shall we?

So, OP was wise...     Damn you Nefario

So far all I have is a quick batch of HTML tables generated by shell scripts: http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html

However those are produced from include-files that basically just record values in shell variables, like

BTCrate=12.40000000
DVCrate=0.00001825

etc

which would not be hard to suck in to any kind of pretty-chart-making shellscripts or scripts that output formats for various spreadsheets or stock analysis programs etc I would imagine.

-MarkM-

Yes. OTcharts 

I shouldnt have to operate an  client or use a command line just to browse the internet 

A bitcoincharts type of site maybe? That is kind of what I meant in an earlier post by critics and statisticians and such; sites that help you figure out what assets interest you, which have been performing well and so on so you can hone in on which ones might warrant an importing of their server-contract into your client so you can interrogate their server about actual current offers and prices and such, and place offers/bids yourself, or deposit that cash voucher your granny sent you in your birthday card.

-MarkM-

That sounds about right, and just use OT as a backend system.

Perhaps what he means is a site that is similar to an OT search engine so you can see who has what offerings.

If everyone has their own separate server how do you find them ?

It needs a way to index them. They dont need to list on this index only notify it that it exists and maybe provide a way to display prices/dividends/ etc.

People can then have their own server instance and their own assets but it allows people to find them The site doesnt need to know who the shareholders are or can actually do anything about the assets themselves apart from index them.

Its the same reason you can find torrents on google but the government cant sue google about it.

Open Transactions' server is an exchange, and already is free open source software.

What we need is prettier / more GUI-user-friendly clients people can use to communicate with the servers.

There is a bounty offered: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/bounty-185-btc-open-transactions-client-for-grandmas-105506

-MarkM-

Perhaps start a new thread, setup bounty for open sourced exchange to be used with open transactions ?

Ah gee gosh golly darn it, that darn Open Transactions gets in my way on that part, only way your balances can be changed is if your private key signs off on the change, and those darn keys only live on your machine not on mine. Pout.



-MarkM-

Hmm. I am the issuer of the digiBiTCoins, digiDeVCoins etc on my server, and custodian of the wallets the actual coins backing them are in (I would not want to issue tokens representing assets not located in my own vaults), does that present similar "issues"?

-MarkM-

Ah, forced buyback, interesting concept.

Involves someone's balance changing without their privkey signing off on the change. Oops, sorry, problem there.

I guess he won't be wanting to use Open Transactions if he wants to mess with people's balances unilaterally...

-MarkM-

You could have dealt with this whole thing privately instead of dragging it into the public domain. It would have been better to use arbitration before this happened.

Yes, it makes sense to us rational people. However I think the only way they will agree on anything is if they pay for an arbitrator.

This seems like a decent solution.

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-

I am not talking about their servers but my servers. The software is already free to all, they can run it on their own servers as and when they please.

-MarkM-

The one thing that I am hesitant about in offering Open Transactions services to people is maybe solvable simply with a terms of service clause, which would be they must not issue anyone else's assets, only their own assets.

Basically I like the idea of setting up a server specifically for one issuer, but not as a way of creating a competing service. Does that make sense? If someone else also wants to issue assets Open Transactions style I want to deal with them separately, not have them squeezed onto a server I already run for an existing customer; I also do not want customers hosting scams for third parties; any scams on the server I set up for their assets to run on should have only their scams on it, no-one else's.

Well, except maybe for mine? What would they be doing about coinage? Would they want to set up their own tokens for each type of cryptocurrency and so on or would they find it convenient for me to issue my standard tokens so there are common currencies across the servers? Details...

-MarkM-

It looks that is going to vary according to exact goals/requirements.

It might work out better in many cases for issuers to be each on their own separate/distinct server/platform that only offers assets issued by that one issuer. That would keep all the liability issues much clearer by making it very clear exactly who the one entity is that is fully liable for all assets offered on that server...

-MarkM-

Does anyone have a reliable alternative for GLBSE?

exactly there for him terminating is a breach. First of all he cant even delist items

GLBSE 1 was a BETA end of story!

"The Exchange reserves the right to suspend transfers of any asset, or suspend access to an asset creator's account, for failure of an asset creator to provide requested information, or in the event of suspected fraud. "
Acording to there terms of service they can not delist an asset. Im no lawyer but they broke there TOS by doing such.The only thing they can do is suspend trading which doesnt mean to stop
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/suspend for those of you who need to know what suspend means

So....when is everyone going to stop acting like children and start working together?

Oh right...i've got more popcorn to eat, that's why it isn't over.

And, Nefario, you've been given the details you need to continue operating GLBSE with some customers. You're unfortunately ignoring that, much like you say Goat is ignoring your details.

I continue to liquidate the final assets (minus of course the PPT bonds that Nefario has fucked me on) and withdraw any remaining BTC after the sales. I will not purchase any more securities on GLBSE until nefario is replaced, and GLBSE becomes a public company, with shareholders electing a board. It's clearly incapable of directing itself in a professional manner with nefario at the helm.

Yes. Done.

I don't care if Goat wants to bury his head in the sand, because I can write off the small amount of BTC I had in his issue,

but I do care that Nefario is ruining his reputation and trading floor, because I had a lot of BTC invested there.

If Nefario has decided to punish his customers because of a dispute with Goat over something else, he will reap the reward of a useless and untrusted trading floor.

Already sold off 90% of my holdings and took out the BTC.

Waiting for the remainder to sell, and will never be back.

TERRIBLE WAY TO RUN A BUSINESS

It's not about you agreeing. You're off GLBSE - deal with it and give nefario a BTC address. Trying to claim that he's keeping your BTC hostage when you're actively refusing to give him the details he needs to give it back is just shady.

...Unless you use the codes given to you by GLBSE

If you are dealing with them on GLBSE there is no 100% security either, if their account is compromised you cannot ensure it 100%. As far as i understood every shareholder got an identifier. The longer it takes for you to setup a system where they could register, the bigger is the chance of theft of codes. So act quick to reduce your shareholders potential damage.

As far as i understood : Nefario is forced to delete the asset, because he wants to make GLBSE a legitimate company. These were fake shares. He made a mistake in claiming that he would honor them, but was not in the position to decide this. So he is offering you a compensation out of his own pockets with twice the value of the share at "IPO". This is more than generous. He just could delist the asset of the fake GLBSE and that was it then. He is not even the owner of this IPO. Neither is he the solemn owner of GLBSE. Goat, you fucked up big time. Get your head out of your ass and set it straight.

Nefario clearly made mistakes but not giving you a higher price for your shares or even actual GLBSE shares was not one of them.

+5

I also think that would be a good idea. Relist goat's assets for a week or a two with huge warnings, to give the asset holders  the time to get out  and strike a deal with goat. I can understand nefario's position all to well, but I dont think shareholders should get in the cross fire like this. Plus its also giving goat a convenient excuse.

Maybe he means the page does not include enough citations and he lacks edit rights there so cannot correct it himself?

-MarkM-

Because it's a good explanation of what fiduciary duty is, whats your point?

Why do you link to wikipedia?  You should know the original sources if you hope to continue in your current business.

Next, you'll be citing episodes of Matlock.

It's so sad watching everyone in this forum butting heads.

I could resolve to only do business with people who don't blow up at each other over the internet...

But then it looks like I'd be doing business alone.

~pyotr

Are we sure this is what we want fellas? S.E.C is already looking and this is just horrible, Not taking either side don't care but some sort of private agreement.  Like a 1 week time frame for goat to get his affairs in order then pull the plug?

Okay, so you do not want to secure the BTC of your Investors because you feel like you do not want to "comply".
Guys we have a winner. There is probably little chance that you get the possibiliy to make this mess clean without you working something out for your shareholders.

Investments with you are NOT safe.

Nefarios action maybe hotheaded , but you are doing little to help the people that trusted you. If I were you i would have a solution for my investors that trusted me ready right now and would look after nefario later.



Goat resisted his forced sale because he felt like his fake shares are undervalued (he sold them for 10 BTC to someone, nefario wanted to pay him the double the initial ipo price alas 0.2 BTC), and wanted to give nefario a scammer tag. Nefario then cut ties with Goat and delisted his assets without prior notice. He gave Goat everything he needed to identify who is holding his shares.

Then you're asset holders should push to have you prosecuted for fraud.

You have a fiduciary duty to your asset holders http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiduciary_duty

And you have been given all the information needed to carry that duty out.

Can you inform the rest of us what the dispute is about?

You've been given all the details you need to continue operating without GLBSE.

I've also asked you for a BTC address to send the remaining balance in your accounts to you.

Yet you continue to perpetuate this one... ironical much?

People already know whats happening they dont need 5000 new threads about it.

No I am not, I am choosing to warn my fellow Bitcoiners as to what is happening.

And how is your post helpful at all, or are you simply a smart-ass that wants to inject himself into every situation?

You are saying there are people who leave BTC on GLBSE lying around instead of investing or saving according to their contracts?  For other reasons than investing,paying dividends or buybacks there is no need to hold BTC there. Goat , does Nefario hold some of your Assets BTC ? Is he clearly (mind you) intending to not give them back?

Way to jump in front of a parade. Are you a politician ?

You know that your BTC are held by the asset issuer if you bought shares , right?

This has gone too far.

I am selling everything I have there, moving out all of my BTC, and never trading there again.


The owner of the platform acts vindictively and hot-headed, freezes accounts/issues of anyone he doesn't agree with, and has basically placed hundreds if not thousands of his customer's BTC in limbo.

Death-knell. I predict crickets over there.