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Overstock.com Assembles Coders to Create a Bitcoin-Like Stock Market

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Re: Overstock.com Assembles Coders to Create a Bitcoin-Like Stock Market

#21

Post by wyager »

chc wrote: post #16
awt wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there were a law that could prevent regulatory capture then I would say go for it, more regulation.

With or without regulatory capture, I can't see how the problem we face is too much oversight on Wall Street.

Why should people on wall street be forbidden from doing whatever investments they want to, insofar as they are contractually allowed? If you don't like how someone is investing, don't invest with them. If you think certain banks are behaving riskilly, don't give them your money. What are some counter-arguments to this? I.e. why is it a) moral and b) desirable to regulate the activity of wall street traders in addition to the laws they are automatically subject to (like anti-fraud laws)?

Re: Overstock.com Assembles Coders to Create a Bitcoin-Like Stock Market

#22

Post by barisser »

It's an exciting prospect to trade financial assets on a decentralized, trustless network. Definitely the right direction.

But I'm not psyched about having to think about Counterparty's internal XCP currency, even if it isn't used for most purposes. It's an annoying barrier to have to transact in an altcoin to access certain functionality.

Other implementations use pure Bitcoin only, and are much less overwrought with complexity than Counterparty: https://coins.assembly.com

Re: Overstock.com Assembles Coders to Create a Bitcoin-Like Stock Market

#23

Post by bdcravens »

alphonse23 wrote: post #10

This is sort of the idea I've been waiting to come out of the bitcoin universe for some time now. A decentralized stock exchange seems like an obvious killer application for bitcoin. Though, the only thing I don't like about it is counterpart. Was never a fan of them, nor open transactions... Why go to the SEC? I feel like the advantage of doing something like this would be the ability to build a trading exchange wit…

Why go to the SEC?

Overstock is already a publicly traded company - anything that remotely hints at trying to circumvent the regulations they're already subject to would be a very bad idea

Re: Overstock.com Assembles Coders to Create a Bitcoin-Like Stock Market

#24

Post by [deleted] »

ne0n wrote: post #15

So what happens when somebody doesn't secure the private keys to their Overstock shares well enough? A hacker steals your Overstock shares, and now they own them? What happens if someone steals the shares from the CEO? Obviously the hacker could never make use of those shares or else they would get caught. In a system like this, it can't be truly decentralized, can it?

[deleted]

Re: Overstock.com Assembles Coders to Create a Bitcoin-Like Stock Market

#25

Post by deweller »

ne0n wrote: post #15

So what happens when somebody doesn't secure the private keys to their Overstock shares well enough? A hacker steals your Overstock shares, and now they own them? What happens if someone steals the shares from the CEO? Obviously the hacker could never make use of those shares or else they would get caught. In a system like this, it can't be truly decentralized, can it?

From a technical perspective, it can. See http://counterparty.io/ for a decentralized exchange in action.

Do you mean you don't think people can be trusted to keep their own shares safe? Securing a large value of cryptocurrency is challenging right now. But if you don't trust yourself to do it, you can hire a third party that you do trust to hold your shares for you.

Re: Overstock.com Assembles Coders to Create a Bitcoin-Like Stock Market

#29

Post by PhantomPhreak »

barisser wrote: post #22

It's an exciting prospect to trade financial assets on a decentralized, trustless network. Definitely the right direction. But I'm not psyched about having to think about Counterparty's internal XCP currency, even if it isn't used for most purposes. It's an annoying barrier to have to transact in an altcoin to access certain functionality. Other implementations use pure Bitcoin only, and are much less overwrought wit…

Quite generally, Counterparty functionality that requires the use of XCP simply can't exist on platforms without their own currency. That's why it's there.

Re: Overstock.com Assembles Coders to Create a Bitcoin-Like Stock Market

#30

Post by ne0n »

deweller wrote: post #25
ne0n wrote: post #15

So what happens when somebody doesn't secure the private keys to their Overstock shares well enough? A hacker steals your Overstock shares, and now they own them? What happens if someone steals the shares from the CEO? Obviously the hacker could never make use of those shares or else they would get caught. In a system like this, it can't be truly decentralized, can it?

From a technical perspective, it can. See http://counterparty.io/ for a decentralized exchange in action. Do you mean you don't think people can be trusted to keep their own shares safe? Securing a large value of cryptocurrency is challenging right now. But if you don't trust yourself to do it, you can hire a third party that you do trust to hold your shares for you.

"Do you mean you don't think people can be trusted to keep their own shares safe?" Well, to a degree, yeah. Most people don't know how to properly keep them safe.

The main thing I'm trying to say is that it's potentially easier to steal shares, and there is really no way of reversing it if it's decentralized. If you know some shares are stolen, can you invalidate them, or reissue shares? It's not really completely decentralized if you can. There is probably still a central authority for creating and issuing shares, but they will allow you to trade the shares in a peer-to-peer way.

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