Topic: RFC -- Distributed Bitcoin Stock Exchange (DBSE) (Read 10976 times)

any update on this?

Did this die?

Yes, I agree. Furthermore, OT can implement the Ripple distributed protocol.
But I mean specifically for the trades. Then the dividends for bonds, and a lot of other things can be managed well through OT.
Does Ripple lacks something for trades of crypto-assets that make OT preferable (for that particular task)?
As said, at the moment OT is the solution that needs less trust IMO.

If glbse supports importing your assets to open transactions that would be a nice feature.

Ripple credit card ftw.

If you could have a normal chip and pin or swipe card that ties into the ripple system it could be a killer feature.

When will people understand...

It's not OT or Ripple. It's OT and Ripple.

It's not Bitcoin or gold. It's Bitcoin and gold.

It's not either/or -- the future that is coming, is a combination of all of these things.

Are you saying that someone has implemented a chain with assets that can be issued by any keypair (instead of only for miners) and the chain has been destroyed by a pool that doesn't know what it's mining for?
Do you have a link for that?
They have implemented the base of ripplecoin. Anyway, the current design of the Ripple distributed protocol is better than ripplecoin because it has instant payments.
I think OT is currently the more "trust-less" (well you always trust the minter of the substitute/IOU ("untraceable cash" in OT terms): mtggoxUSSSD, mtgoxBTC...) solution for decentralized exchange of digital assets/promises. But Ripple will be better. What will it miss that OT has (for decentralized trading of crypto-assets)?

The Open Transactions server thread fellowtraveler mentioned is at https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/open-transactions-server-assetbondcommoditycryptocoindeedsharestock-exch-53329

I know this current thread I am posting to is old, but I deliberately went searching for threads about distributed stock exchanges to make sure that what seems to have turned out to be a major problem for various steps in such directions has been mentioned.

I see that it did receive one small mention toward the end of the thread, but hopefully it can bear more thought.

The problem is that even with the implementation of merged mining to make adding more blockchains to one's mix when mining relatively cheap, the reactions encountered by various chains have taught us that even with merged mining the miners demand an impractical percentage of the entire market cap of the issued securities / coins / tokens. In short, they want to own them all, one hundred percent of all issued assets! That is totally prohibitive and makes the entire concept of using blockchains for issues belonging to anyone other than miners pretty much ruled out from the get-go.

Then too, even beyond demanding 100% of the total worth of any blockchains they touch, miners also have shown a willingness, even a desire, to conspire to attack blockchains or, failing directly contributing themselves to the attack, at least a desire to have others perform such attacks so they can gleefully sit back and laugh. And let us be clear here, this is not how they treat chains that fail to hand over to them 100% of the chain's assets, oh no, this is how they treat even chains that do hand over 100% of their assets to the miners!

At least two corps (General Mining Corp and General Retirement Corp) issued what amounted to "preferred shares" in blockchain form, but, along with several other assets that once upon a time were implemented using blockchains, they have been forced to scrap the blockchain approach for now in favour of using Open Transactions.

Coins on a blockchain amount in practice pretty much to some form of share of the total economy of that asset. So far DeVCoin is the only blockchain predicated upon not giving 100% of its assets to miners that is still running in blockchain form instead of having switched over to using Open Transactions.

Really think about this. It is comically imbecilic, it would sound like fiction, so ridiculous as not to be believable, to anyone not familiar with the history of blockchain based assets that even when 100% of the assets were to be seized by the miners at the very moment and by the very method of their issuance, miners prefer to destroy all possible value of such assets. I am not sure if that is more worthy of Kafka or Monty Python or some Dadaist or what.

SInce the initial move of several assets that had been implemented as blockchains over to Open Transactions format and to trading on the Digitalis Open Transactions server, new assets have basically given up on the blockchain concept for now and have been starting out from inception on the Open Transactions server.

-MarkM-

FYI Markm is already running a test server, though it's down today until I get a certain bug fixed. Should be back up tomorrow or the next day.
Search this forum for markm, open transactions alpha server, and you will find all the relevant info.

The easiest way to play with OT is to just download it, since the default configuration includes sample data for a "localhost" server.
You just run the server yourself on your local machine, then run the GUI on the same machine, in order to play with the functionality.
(That's what you see me doing on the OT videos.)

I wouldn't characterize OT (the library itself) as needing marketing, since it is already well-known and short on demos.
More likely, once more user-friendly applications are available, then those will need the marketing.
(The first real users of OT will encounter it not directly, but through software built with it. That's where I think marketing will come in.)

-FT

Thanks fellowtraveler for the reply.

I think I understand where you're coming from. If OT does what it's billed to then it really needs lots more users which mean some sort of marketing.

I guess I should thank you for chiming in on this thread since OT does seem to fit well with the goal stated here.

So, who wants to setup an OT server so readers of this thread can play with it?

FYI, "the OT community" can only be a reference to me, since I have slaved away on it, alone, for the past year-and-a-half. (Seeking volunteer coders.)

We're in the process now of testing our way through the first alpha server.  Discussion is at irc.freenode.net #opentransactions

My own focus has been on developing the library itself, and supporting anyone who uses it (not so much on building sites that use it or creating demos, which is your job, not mine.) In the end there will only be two types of people: those using OT, and those re-inventing the wheel, coding new systems that do the same things. There is no escaping this. (And either end is fine with me  :-)

-FT

Ok, I've watched a couple of videos on OT and visited the github wiki page. I can see now that Open Transactions has a lot going for it. If it works, it has the fundamentals of what we need.

It also solves a problem of incentives for mining a new general asset blockchain. If you have a ton of assets and nothing to give miners besides initially sparse transaction fees, a general asset blockchain might fail.

The most glaring issue with OT that I can see is the lack of a javascript client. GLBSE is as easy to use as it is because of the javascript client and seeing one for OT might enable users/issuers etc to get up and running with a minimum of fuss.

Also, I think this thread should culminate in some sort of action. Perhaps a bounty for an OT javascript client?

I'm personally a little bit annoyed at the mention again of Open Transactions. We know Bitcoin works and I've still not seen a working system using Open Transactions. I'm watching a video on it now so hopefully I'll learn that OT is ready to go but I think the OT community could do a better job of providing demo servers or examples of sites that are using it.

I'm definitely "still interested", but I still think Open Transactions+bitcoin is probably the way to go. It is as distributed as we need, and the technology is already there.
I don't think we need to create new chains for everything. The issuance of backed tokens is pretty much what OT is about.

Just something to think about:

Bitcoin enables many other P2P projects, most of which we can't imagine yet.
I think there should be some sort of P2P Bitcoin-backed database, that could serve as infrastructure to such projects.

I wrote a paragraph about it on Reddit:


I'm not saying that it makes sense to develop this database while also developing BDSE, but it's just something to keep in mind. If you could kill two birds with one stone ...

Bitcoin's beauty is the fact that the underlying database is distributed, and enforced by the 51% rule.  A global asset exchange/registry based on the same principles would be revolutionary. 

Hard ?  Yes, but that's what we do.

Is anyone still interested in this idea? I think a distributed asset exchange built on a blockchain with written linkage to traditional legal entities has merit.

Don't know, maybe. I see it complicated.

Not to the chain of course but perhaps sending requests to the p2p network of miners instead... the answers could be in the blocks. The message structure doesn't need to be precisely identical, only "compatible" so that centralized tokens could be exchanged by tokens issued on this chain, and also that issuers could migrate their tokens from a server to the chain and vice-verse.

Now I understand what you mean. I would say it is not feasible, but don't take my word for it. I don't understand OT well enough to be able to firmly tell you that it is not possible. It's just that you can't talk to a block chain like you do with a server. Request, answer, request, answer, etc. If possible, it would be definitely harder to implement than the chain proposed here.