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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

#31

Post by pyoung »

wyager wrote: post #21
chc wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 additi…

I would imagine most of the laws and regulations are anti-fraud in nature. Outside of that, limiting the risk exposure of banks that carry FDIC insurance, or some other government backing, is in the interest in of all taxpayers. From my laymen's understanding, if you want to start a hedge fund, take some rich people's money, and gamble it all away, nothing is really stopping you. In fact people do it all the time.

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

#32

Post by karl_gluck »

wyager wrote: post #21
chc wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 additi…

The argument is actually fairly simple: behaviors that have been known to cause fraudulent or deceptive activity in the past are placed under more scrutiny or outright banned.

For example, it becomes quite easy to hide fraud when a single entity is both an investment bank and a mortgage lender.

In my layman's opinion, a lot of the problem comes from the fact that accounting is not an exact science. For a large company with many revenue, expenditure and investment streams spread over the course of a year, accountants have a lot of leeway to massage the numbers as they see fit. Until the house of cards comes crashing down ala 2008 it can be very hard to pick apart what is actually going on from the outside.

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

#33

Post by ThomPete »

ne0n wrote: post #30
deweller wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 de…

Just thinking loosly here.

It my understanding that the decentralized part refers to the networked validation.

I.e couldn't you imagine a setup where the network collectively invalidates a set of shares and re-issue them back to the original owner. A kind of distributed jury system.

Now the problem of course is that the jury could be wrong and I have no idea about the actual implementation but it seems to me like a potential solution in the future.

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

#34

Post by Kalium »

ThomPete wrote: post #33
ne0n wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 de…

Just thinking loosly here. It my understanding that the decentralized part refers to the networked validation. I.e couldn't you imagine a setup where the network collectively invalidates a set of shares and re-issue them back to the original owner. A kind of distributed jury system. Now the problem of course is that the jury could be wrong and I have no idea about the actual implementation but it seems to me like a p…

Even if that's the case, how do you convince the network that the shares need to be invalidated? How do you do that in a way that can't be faked?

That sounds a lot like another set of private keys to me. We already know those are vulnerable to being stolen.

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

#35

Post by Kalium »

NhanH wrote: post #18

Can anyone knowledgeable (especially those that do not like bitcoin) weigh in as to why this would be a bad idea ? I'm asking this sincerely, and not being sarcasm, as I don't know enough about either Bitcoin or stock market to make a judgement. And this seems ... different enough that I'm not sure my reaction should be "damn the future is here", or "what a bunch of craps".

There are a lot of ways to abuse information asymmetry in stock markets. Decentralizing and removing oversight makes things more readily abused by creating more forms of information asymmetry.

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

#36

Post by eric_bullington »

pyoung wrote: post #31
wyager wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 additi…

I would imagine most of the laws and regulations are anti-fraud in nature. Outside of that, limiting the risk exposure of banks that carry FDIC insurance, or some other government backing, is in the interest in of all taxpayers. From my laymen's understanding, if you want to start a hedge fund, take some rich people's money, and gamble it all away, nothing is really stopping you. In fact people do it all the time.

>take some rich people's money

And there lies the rub. So the wealthy man can take advantage of start-up investing, but the government in its infinite wisdom, forbids the middle-class man from doing the same under penalty of imprisonment for the person offering the security.

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

#37

Post by eric_bullington »

guiomie wrote: post #27

With the current low price of bitcoins, wouldn't it be a good time to burn bitcoins into XCP ?

That opportunity was only available at the start of the Counterparty project. The burn-in period ended a good 6 months ago, I believe.

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

#38

Post by ThomPete »

Kalium wrote: post #34
ThomPete wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just thinking loosly here. It my understanding that the decentralized part refers to the networked validation. I.e couldn't you imagine a setup where the network collectively invalidates a set of shares and re-issue them back to the original owner. A kind of distributed jury system. Now the problem of course is that the jury could be wrong and I have no idea about the actual implementation but it seems to me like a p…

Even if that's the case, how do you convince the network that the shares need to be invalidated? How do you do that in a way that can't be faked? That sounds a lot like another set of private keys to me. We already know those are vulnerable to being stolen.

Because the protocol is transparent so you can trace what happened?

Ebay and Paypal solve 60million disputes a year using software.

http://techcircle.vccircle.com/2011/02/08/ebay-paypal-solve-...

I am not saying I know how to do this just saying that I don't think it's going to be as hard as some might thing. But sure I could be wrong.

And keep in mind. No system is perfect. Neither is the crypto-protocol. But it doesn't need to be. It just have to be good enough.

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

#39

Post by kasey_junk »

iheartmemcache wrote: post #11
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…

It's already been trading on CMFX (one of the most reputable Forex markets around, on par with BATS or CME) against the USD for a while now. This is nothing new.

This is the sort of thing that is exceedingly hard to have a measure for, but CMFX is in no way on the same level as BATS or CME.

Also, Bitcoin being traded on a forex exchange has nothing to do with the article.

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