Topic: [LTC-GLOBAL] The Litecoin Global Virtual Stock Exchange - Public Beta - page 6. (Read 21392 times)

wrong thread? 

This should help tho: http://ltc.kattare.com/about.php

Read the part about how PPLNS round scoring works.

Cheers.

been mining for hours and my balance still says zero

rate is 100khash

I like this idea.

New PEER APPROVAL SYSTEM for new assets.

I will no longer be doing verification 100% myself.  From now on a vote of the shareholders of LTC-GLOBAL will determine whether new assets get approved or not.

The current rules are:
- You must have 10 shares of LTC-GLOBAL to vote.
- An asset gets flagged as ACTIVE when:
    (a) There are at least 5 YES votes, AND
    (b) There are more YES votes than NO votes.
- You can vote yes or no, and can change your vote at any time.
- NO votes carry twice the weight of YES votes.  (they count double)
- When you submit your vote, you can add a comment.  The asset issuer will get a copy of your comment via email.  So try to be selective!  If something doesn't add up, or needs clarification, vote NO, and ask them to fix their Prospectus, Business Plan, Contract, etc.

Even after the asset has been approved, you can still adjust your votes.  Hopefully we can use this as a vote of confidence, and over time maybe even set a trigger point where a certain number of NO votes will trigger a review of whether the asset is good for our exchange or not.

Cheers.

You got it.  See the "Account" page when logged into your asset issuer account.  You'll find a link in there to an API output formatted in JSON like so:

{"owners":{"[email protected]":"1","[email protected]":"260","[email protected]":"80", ... },"ticker":"LTC-MINING.LTC","_comment":"cached up to 10 minutes","generated":"2012-10-06T23:32:59+01:00"}

DO NOT, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES SHARE THAT URL.  It has a very long API key, but if you let that get compromised, people will be able to see who holds your security.

This was the last piece to the "What do I do if LTC-GLOBAL ceases operation?" puzzle.  From here on out, all asset issuers can download their list of asset holders in an automated fashion at regular intervals.

I have also added the time to the top of the pages.  The time displayed takes into account your Account Timezone setting.

Cheers.

If you set your timezone in the Account page, server time is your time.    Not a bad idea to put the current time up somewhere though.

The reserved balance is a little trickier.  Since you can have overlapping bids from one security to another what is reserved essentially becomes the sum of your bids on whatever security you have the most bids on.  I'll see what I can come up with to make this more clear in the interface.

Cheers.

Update tonight, added google auth support for asset transfers, coin withdrawals, and buy/sell orders.

Turn it on/off in the Account page with the "Google Auth for Transactions" checkbox.

Cheers.

Well there's a few differences:

1.  In shorting the ultimate authority on who wins is the market.  In a binary market the asset operator can directly determine the outcome (and knows it in advance with near certainty).
2.  In shorting the benefit from shorting is restricted to a certain amount per security.  In a binary market it's based on the ratio between people on each side of the bet - which can be directly exploited by the asset operator.
3.  It's much harder for the asset operator to go long on their asset (sell shorts) without actually delivering something to satisfy the market.  In a binary market the asset operator makes most money betting ON their asset by giving the impression of doing badly whilst meeting their contractual obligations.

The real difference is that the operator can gain in the binary market irrespective of how they do - by manipulating market confidence in the OPPOSITE direction to where it should be going.  With shorts (on either side of the deal) at least that particular issue in no longer true.

Could you please add the server time to the header or footer and I think it is useful to see how many litecoins are actually available and how many are reserved for bids.
Balance: Ł10 (1000 reserved).

These are all very good points, but one way to resolve this is by only listing reputable people with real companies.  Will it be any different when we are able to short these securities and the asset operator misses a dividend or gives some bad communication while he or she is shorting the asset?

The binary betting model does raise some interesting possibilities e.g :

For a low-dividend investment you could end up being better off betting on it paying than actually investing.

You could create an asset that appeared really terrible, buy up shares yourself (so that it had an obvious need to pay dividends), do absolutely nothing with it and just bet on the pay side.  As you'd have little liabilities (hardly anyone invested but yourself) you should make a decent profit off everyone betting against it.

Scammers could bet against their own assets on sock-puppets accounts to make even more profit.

And the last two are the real problem with it - the asset owner KNOWS what the outcome of the bet will be (if it's short-term) so can flood that side of the bet on a second account (or via a partner), meaning noone legitimately betting gets any sort of decent value.

There are some things that could be set in stone.  For example, dividends will be paid every Monday, or 0.03 BTC (I don't know a realistic litecoin number) on Thursdays.

They could only be matched with very strict asset contracts.  Default is a grey area as many times in an asset contract default is not defined.  It could be all defined in the insurance contract.

I did give this a try on GLBSE but there was not a lot of demand.  I suspect it was because it was not marketed well.  Having the ability to bet right next to the asset's buy or sell page would drastically increase awareness.  There was also one problem with the contract as I did one for TYGRR-B Bond.  I stated that it would pay X bitcoins over the course of 30 days.  A floating point rounding error (I think) on GLBSE caused the total dividends to not equal X, so those kinds of issues need to be taken into account.

You can search for the assets under the Security forum by trying HEDGE.GIGAMINING.LONG

I also think these kinds of binary insurance betting should be very short term and may require the exchange to act as the counterparty.  There are some good and bad models to use for binary trading.  GLBSE had a beta binary trading platform for about a month.  It used a bad model.

Right, but who's the judge of when it is in default?  What if the contract is sufficiently generic as to have a large gray area where you could say it looks like it's in default, or you could say it has not?
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Its true there is probably not a way to automate it. You can do something like if it misses 2 dividends in a row it is in default. But then some securities dont pay dividends. Theres probably a way to crowdsource it.

Every time a security gets created   a "fail" or "succeed" asset is created on the "prediction market" people can bet on default.
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Right, but who's the judge of when it is in default?  What if the contract is sufficiently generic as to have a large gray area where you could say it looks like it's in default, or you could say it has not?

Every time a security gets created   a "fail" or "succeed" asset is created on the "prediction market" people can bet on default.

My messages get shorter the later it gets, heh, sorry, way past my bedtime here.


The assets would have to trade hands 500 times, not 1000.  The transaction fees are paid by both sides.

I thought about trying to pool the insurance... discounted it pretty quickly, it doesn't seem like a good idea.

I hear you with it hitting the day traders harder.  It would hit the bottom line for LTC-GLOBAL a little bit as well.  (reduced trades)  Without people wanting to invest long term though you wouldn't really have a platform to day trade on, so I suspect increasing confidence in the platform would ultimately benefit everyone.

I like the three tiered approach.  Makes it worth my time to do the verification process.  I liked where GLBSE was going with black, pink, and blue markets.  In part largely because people KNOW a black market is stupid high risk, a pink market is high risk, and a blue market would be medium risk.  (I don't consider any crypto-assets low risk.)


That's an interesting thought.  A little side market on every asset that pays or doesn't pay based on if the contract is met or not?  Can you detail how you would see it function?  Who determines when an asset defaults?  What if there's gray area due to contradictions in the contract?

This is why I suggested having a simple binary market for insurance.  One party would may bet that the security would not pay its contractually obligated dividends, or bet that the bond would default, or whatever.  A speculator would bet that the operator would pay a dividend, or would not default.  It would have to be integrated into the exchange/brokerage site so that it would have maximum exposure.  It would allow investors to voluntarily purchase the insurance and have speculators take on the risk and not the exchange.

Problem is that if the transaction fee is tiny - so is the insurance pay-out.

If I invest 1000 LTC in something, it fails/vanishes and I get 1 LTC back I wouldn't get a warm and fuzzy feeling that it had been insured.  It would feel more like adding insult to injury.  You can't have a tiny insurance charge that provides significant cover if every asset has its own pool (and you can't pool the insurance premiums from all assets or it just ends up with the good businesses paying off people who invested in scammers - making HYIP's the best investment).

I should in fairness point out that the proposed insurance has a downside for me that it doesn't for most others.  I mainly day trade - so I'd be paying this 0.1% every trade (or every other trade) without receiving any real benefit of it.  The (majority of the) benefit of insurance gos to those who hold securities long-term, not those whose hands it briefly passes through.  It thus acts as a disincentive to actively trade - as it automatically reduces your margin.

In most cases it wouldn't deter me from trading/investing in a security.  The exception being where someone proudly trumpeted that their IPO/security was "Insured" (unless they'd be trading for ages).  Those I'd stay a mile away from - as they were either scammers, lying or didn't realise just how irrelavnt being insured for 0.1% of your capital is.

Do also bear in mind that the actual time-scale before a 0.1% insurance fee fully covers the IPO is  immense.  to get 100% coverage every share issued has to change hands 1000 times.  i.e. nearly 3 years if every single share is traded every single day.  In practice the insurance cover would never get there - the asset issuer would die of old age first.


Not convinced a hard cap on funds for new companies is good.  Consider ASICMINER - think their IPO was 10k+ BTC.  That's going to be above any meaningful cap you'd set.  A cap actually deters the very IPOs we want to see.  The market really doesnt need more people trying to take 10-20% or so of profits from mining whilst passing the risk on to investors.  Nor does it need more "Investment Managers" whose plan is to dump cash into fairly random securities, take a cut of the dividends themselves whilst ignoring any loss to investors as the value of those investments plummets.  We need companies that will actually produce something tangible (be it hardware, software, a service or whatever).  And those companies won't be able to start with a cap on funds that is low enough to deter scammers.

Rather, I'd suggest you consider tiers of companies.  With each tier having increasingly difficult requirements (in terms of contract clarity, business plan, revenue forecasts etc) and also significantly larger fees (to cover the time you'd need to invest to check they met the requirements).

So bottom tier could  be 250 LTC fee, requirements just that they cover the basic elements in their contract (purpose of investment, type of security, rules on issuing new paper, profit-split/fees mechanism, closing-down process etc).  Maximum market cap for these maybe 20,000 LTC.

Next tier maybe 1000 LTC fee, market cap 250k LTC, requirements added of a more comprehensive contract, some form of business plan including at least a theoretical demonstration of long-term profit for investors, and a sample weekly or monthly report containing all essential figures investors would need to see).

Third tier, 10,000 LTC fee, requirements to include proof of incorporation, details of company's lawyer, proof of a place of business etc.  No market cap.

All you're asking for in reality is that if the asset issuer wants a decent amount of funds they demonstrate that they at least have the potential to make investors a long-term profit.  Any good asset issuer will already have produced that before even considering raising funds.  It'll not just reduce scammers - but get rid of all the just out of school wannabe millionaires who think that, by some magic means, if they can just raise a big chunk of cash then profits will just naturally fly in their direction.  The latter are in many worse more damaging to the community than scammers imo.

And obviously once a company's established they could move up to next tier by providing the additional information and paying the extra fee.

Just an idea on a different approach to it.  Upgrading companies market cap based on profits would obviously be the absolute worst way - as that would prevent genuine start-ups with a medium to long-term plan from incubating and allow ponzis free rein.

I had thought about that issue... that the costs would come from the shareholders.  But I guess no matter what you do the insurance would come from users directly as trades, or indirectly as a fee to the company.  There are many examples of companies that opted for insurance via CPA.  I think with this system you're better off because you know the funds are actually there. 

You're right too.  Some people would shy away from the insured companies because of the extra trade costs.  Other people would be attracted to them knowing that there's something there if they bet incorrectly.  That's 100% their call.

One of the other things you have to remember is that to a certain extent, this is to protect people from themselves.  People make "poor" investments on a regular basis.  I think it makes sense that these poor investments have a transaction tax to make you think before trading and provide a buffer when things go bad.

As for the funds sitting idle.  Not sure what to do with those.  Addressing the "many years down the road" question though, since the point of the insurance is against scamming, not business failure, then after 18 months or 24 months of proven stability a motion could be voted on to return the funds to the shareholders?  I'm not super worried about it because with cryptocoin it seems like there's more deflation than inflation.  Your coins gain value even just sitting there for the most part.  I don't think it would be a good idea to try investing them in anything. 

And my last argument for this is that the transaction fee would be very, very small.  0.1% is 0.1 LTC on a 100 LTC share.  Not nothing, but it shouldn't be enough to keep people from trading.



For the newly created companies, vulnerable to fraud immediately following the IPO, I think we would have to cap the funds you can raise on a new company.  Regardless of insurance or not and keeping in mind that this is one tool in what I hope to be a toolbox of many.  I think it could help mitigate some of the craziness because you dramatically increase the amount of trouble a scammer has to go through for a large payout.


I 100% agree that a business plan should be a requirement for verification.  I'm just not sure how to judge them pass/fail.