Topic: Open Transactions Server: Asset/Bond/Commodity/Cryptocoin/Deed/Share/Stock Exch. - page 7. (Read 42605 times)

I am not currently inclined to allow others to mint (to issue tokens) on my server, as my reputation would be besmirched should some minter turn out to be a scammer or somesuch. The server allows that feature to be disabled for all "nyms" other than a special over-ride nym (basically the "server-owner nym") to whom none of the configurable restrictions apply. Thus I keep issuing turned off until I need to create an issuer account then plug in for a moment the nym that is to do the issuing, create the issue account, then put back the server-owner nym. This leaves no window during which arbitrary nyms could create an issuing account.

I figure it would make more sense to use "market makers" that to allow others to be "issuers". For example if you wanted me to run a digital gold token for you, I would want you to deposit with me the gold to back them with then go about your business of selling, buying and trading the tokens, hopefully seldom or never to need the actual gold to get bailed back out of whatever vault service I end up storing it in.

-MarkM-

Watching.

There is no country where there is no limits imposed on payments in cash!

There is no way to keep minters anonymous. Minters have to issue digital assets and sign contracts where those digital assets are backed by physical assets. Reputation and anonymity are two words that don't go well together. Nobody will trust anonymous minter.

It might not only be about the minter.

Some jurisdictions might hold the server / server-operator responsible even if all they do is provide accounting of balances for abstract tokens they have no knowledge of the value or lack of value of in whatever markets people might seek value in such tokens at.

You can go on to suggest the server also be cloaked behind some "anonymity network" but in all seriousness I am not very confident that "MI-5/MI-6" and/or FBI/CIA could not track down such a server if they actually were given a mandate/order to do so.

(This is actually part of why the Martians are implicated; the take-away concept of that is that this is a military intelligence matter not some stupid civil law crap. Martian as in Martial. MI5ius as in MI-5.)

-MarkM- (A Brit, residing in Canada.)

I don't see the point of this. If you want to be able to sue the minter, yes it has to be in a country where this is legal.
If it's not legal, you don't have to camouflage it under games: just keep the minter anonymous (pseudonymous) and rely on reputation.

Okay, please give me a day or two to write down some text. I shall PM fellowtraveler my suggestion and if he decides we can publish it. Yes, I have been considering the "marble" option for quite some time and it'll be something along those lines. 

Yes, please.

Mark Twain's generation had marbles, some other generation had baseball cards, another had pokemon and "Magic, the Gathering" cards, now we have blockchains. Seems pretty simple, every generation has its plaything that later might become a valuable antique or collectable... Its actually pretty much a tradition, a part of {|western} culture...

-MarkM-

Mark, you have to obey the laws and financial regulations or you have to be ready to prove in the court of law that what you're offering is not a financial service. It is simple as that.

I'm ready to discuss how to change OT so that it does not resemble financial service but a game.

I hope you warn children in your area to avoid playing Monopoly, and in particular if they cannot avoid playing it to at least not get stuck with the position of banker. How long would they get in juvie for doing something like that in your jurisdiction?

Seriously its hard to plan a good game these days, ouch I found a magic sword, someone sold one like that on e-bay, how much tax am I liable for just for having had this one fall into my possession?

Okay maybe I need some "market makers" who will take people's monopoly, totopoly, mine-a-million or any other kind of money in return for my server's tokens, and of "redeeming" my tokens with whatever kind of monopoly totopoly, mine-a-million or any other kind of money when people want to take their remaining not-lost-to-other-players virtual collectable trading cards / tokens and go home.

Isn't the whole point of those collectable trading cards people use to play magic gatherings and pokemon and so on that they are someday valuables like some other generation's baseball cards but meanwhile used in games in which winners keep the cards of losers? How do such games get around all this crap? Or does the small print actually prohibit trading such trading cards?

Maybe I need smallprint saying "do not engage in trading any of our tokens that represent collectable blockchain transactions that happen to be legally classified as 'real money' in your jurisdiction"?

Heck what about marbles? Like collectable trading cards they too are designed to be won from other players and yet someday maybe not even by later generations be regarded as valuables? Is playing marbles also not allowed?

Is World of Warcraft a financial service? Dungeons and Dragons Online? Second Life? EVE online? Etc?

Are the big game companies now ganging up like the banks to try to create a monopoly on their lucrative business model by having it regulated?

This is really pathetic, maybe kids should be warned that games are serious business, not for minors to contemplate participating in, too dangerous to get involved in, they should just say no to playtime...

-MarkM-

It doesn't matter how OT server is designed to work. All that matters is how it will have to work in the real world as a financial services provider.

As user you can run and hide but as an issuer/custodian/legal guardian of the backing/physical asset you can not for you're "anchored" to the world you've just described. You have to obey the laws whatever they are in the country your company is residing and there is no much room for discussion here.

My point is not to discourage you, on the contrary. I'm actively working to setup a service based on OT. Simply can't afford to bury my head in the sand...

Our currencies are working nicely now, so I am starting to work on companies.

There are a couple of technical details I need to check, but here is the sample stock/share contract I have so far:


By the way, does anyone here have i2p running? I do, so it would be nice to find someone who can test the theory that the server can be connected to via i2p. TO do that you would use your hosts file to make your machine think ot.knotwork.com is localhost, and put a tunnel at the server port number that tunnels over i2p to my server's i2p key/hash/address. (Which I can provide in Private Message if someone actually has i2p and wants to try this.)

-MarkM-

Huh? Doesn't work like that. Begin reading here ... https://github.com/FellowTraveler/Open-Transactions/wiki

Look at the pictures here

http://billstclair.com/ot/ot-diagram.jpg

and here

http://billstclair.com/ot/OT-Anon-CashOnly.jpg

It is specifically designed to work around overzealous financial regulations of repressive regimes that are currently strangling the global economy ...  or maybe stick to the facebook credits koolaid if that is all a little too edgy for you?

AML/KYC 'laws' are a grasping, rear-guard action from a failed, dying economic model, centralised digital money system and the corrupted political system built upon it.

Actually I think it is a good analogy. My question is more about which fields of the transaction are hidden inside the envelop and which are visible.


Being the communication outside of the protocol, the server can just use, for example, Tor and dodge all regulations. Not so great for the users who want to be able to sue the minter (provided he's certificated somehow), but useful for other users.
Potential regulations can always hurt, but that's not a reason for not developing or using a technology that's not regulated yet.

This is not clear to me. In the original Chaum's paper the analogy to voting through carbon paper envelops is counter intuitive. What if the trustee is signing on empty envelop? Nick Szabo compares blind signature with signing blank checks but this is even worse for it leads to even greater confusion...

I guess the closest real life comparison can be made with travelers checks. You have the issuer, serial number, face value and the signature of the bearer but you can't know how many hands the check changed since the time it was issued.

There remains the question with AML regulations. Nothing prevents financial authorities in the respective country to ask you change the OT server code so that all transaction, say above $500 be declined if done through server 'cash mode'?!

If the server only acts as timestamper, the server only sees:

transaction 1 at dateTime1
transaction 2 at dateTime2
transaction 3 at dateTime3

The clams minter is the one watching the actual transfers, but this happens with both systems.

Let's assume a couple of users:  Alice, Bob, Carla, and Deborah

If Alice transfers 10 clams to Bob,  and Bob transfers 5 clams to Carla, and Carla transfers 1 clam to Deborah, the server sees:

Alice->Transfer 10 clams to Bob.
Bob->Transfer 5 clams to Carla.
Carla->Transfer 1 clam to Deborah.

-----------------------------------------------------

BUT IF THEY USE CASH, then the server would see this instead:

Bob->Has just verified 10 clams in cash (source unknown.)
Carla->Has just verified 5 clams in cash (source unknown.)
Deborah->Has just verified 1 clam in cash (source unknown.)


Of course "Bob" and "Carla" are really just public keys, as far as the server is concerned.

As you can see, the server can NOT trace the path of any money from Alice to Bob to Carla, etc. The server can only see when someone has received cash, but the server has no idea where that cash came from (because it's untraceable.)

Yes, this is an advantage over public keys. But the mint still knows which funds are which funds and could trace them from secret to secret, he just can't know who created each secret.
Since there's no way to relate public keys with persons neither, I don't think it is a big problem. When you send some funds to another address, the mint doesn't know if you're giving them to other person or moving them to other address you own. The server is only needed to provide atomicity (preventing DoS attacks by enabling an expiry field), timestamping transactions without actually knowing what they contain.
Anyway, the augmented capabilities of the assets (could be traded atomically between them and/or for bitcoins) may compensate that "disadvantage".

Maybe I'm still missing something.

Public keys are not intrinsically "blinded". The "blinding" allows you to be given finds by the server that it will not recognise as being the funds it gave to you when someone else redeems them. All it will know is whether the funds have already been redeemed. You could keep taking out and putting back the same unit/denomination of funds over and over again and it would not know whether it is the same funds over and over or completely different fund each time.

Meanwhile, I am putting together a list of companies that are looking to be traded on the Open Transactions server, giving highest priority to those that use DeVCoins as their unit of account.

There is a real likelihood that most companies traded will already have buyers lined up for all their shares, unless we can convince them that raising their asking price high enough to prevent their already-lined-up buyers from being able to buy all the shares will be worth their while. It is possible that not all of them are prepared to make use of more capital than they initially contemplated but hopefully some of them will be adaptable enough to be able to accommodate however much capital our users turn out to be wanting to put in.

By the way, it seems it might be possible that this should be operated as a private operation, open only to members equipped with suitable client software, rather than being some kind of "offering to the general public" as might be construed to be the case if it were operated by means of a public website. The Galactic Milieu mostly believes the planet known as Earth to be mythical and thus its laws and customs to be irrelevant, however people who believe in such a planet, and especially people who claim to actually live there, might not all agree...

-MarkM-

I've been reading the wiki and this pdf linked from it and I think I finally get how blind signatures are used for cash.
But what is actually blinded? Only the random secret that proves the ownership?
If so, why not just use public keys or hashes of public keys like bitcoin?
That would allow atomic trades of digital cash.
Maybe you're interested on my last thoughts about cryptographic assets:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/a-generic-protocol-for-cryptographic-assets-60591

Any criticism is welcomed.

Open Transactions has been changed radically inside to make it much more robust than it used to be, and most of the large-volume placerse of market orders have recovered from the bottlenecks of messages their large volumes of messages had caused them in earlier versions of the software.

There are probably things that can still be done to streamline the communictions between client and server and make it even more robust, but basically it works now so people are preparing to trade in earnest. A high level scripting interface is being prepared that will make scripting it much easier for casual scripters, and we are starting to look at various proposed companies looking to be traded on the exchange to figure out which ones to set up in the system and what exactly their asset contracts should say and suchlike.

I guess we are maybe preparing to transition from alpha to beta. Throughout all the hacking and testing and debugging we have not lost any of the assets, although the account display in the client still sometimes shows zero balance on accounts that do in fact have a balance. That is basically cosmetic, so it is time to get people who create pretty clients to create some pretty version of the client.

ALso sicne trading is becoming active, a more sphisticated look at the markets would be useful, such as filtering to show only assets you actually have account for, or picking specific assets to show the markets of and stuff like that.

-MarkM-