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Ray Dillinger: If I'd Known What We Were Starting

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Re: Ray Dillinger: If I'd Known What We Were Starting

#61

Post by nhaehnle »

CJefferson wrote: post #9
a_d wrote: post #2

"What else ticks me off about this, is that there is absolutely nothing wrong with issuing stock in your company as tokens on a block chain instead of through brokers on a standard exchange. Just do it legally, for Pete's sake! Go to the SEC, or whoever the appropriate regulatory authority in your jurisdiction is, and get authorization to issue stock! Hire somebody to implement shareholder voting as block chain trans…

I can't imagine blockchains ever satisfying all legal requirements. At some point I expect some court to say "X shares were illegally transferred from person A, give them back". If we don't know where they went, it's impossible on block-chain to give them back, unless we assume the existence of someone who has the rights to make arbitrary changes, at which point there is no point having a blockchain.

It's easy to add a special party to a block-chain which does have the power to make arbitrary transactions.

Can that be abused? Yes. But all such abuse will be evident in the public record, and then the usual legal system can easily get involved -- which it already did anyway, if you're doing a proper IPO just with stocks tracked on a "block chain".

Re: Ray Dillinger: If I'd Known What We Were Starting

#62

Post by matt4077 »

chrisco255 wrote: post #27
Theodores wrote: post #7

On a more day to day level, a few years ago a lot of e-commerce pay-by-bitcoin options existed. You would not put this on the checkout next to PayPal because nobody was doing bitcoin then. What I don't understand is why this never took off. People know bitcoin through the news, it is not new. In this time Apple Pay has come along nicely but not bitcoin. Bitcoin has gone off on a tulips tangent. This seems at odds wit…

I'll take a stab at guessing. I think in order for merchants to be paid in BTC or other crypto, it needs to be instantly converted to cash. Why? Because the value of BTC can swing wildly and retailers can't afford that risk when their margins are low. Also, BTC transactions can take 20 minutes to an hour to confirm sometimes, so that matters too at some level. I think something like Tether, which pegs its value to th…

I'm using it in a B2C shop with low-value transactions ($20 to $200) and I really don't care about the sort of volatility that BC has shown.

But, yes, the time to confirm is annoying: 1 in 24h/transaction_time orders miss that day's shipping deadline and are delayed by a day. More importantly, any delay > 1m requires the UI to accommodate for transactions that aren't instant.

But, as a retailer, these are rather small issues. What matters more is simply the lack of demand. We've offered BC as a payment method and its use has always been a rounding error in our statistics.

Re: Ray Dillinger: If I'd Known What We Were Starting

#63

Post by nhaehnle »

nesyt wrote: post #60
mattnewton wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's arbitrarily divisible, up to the limit of a float though right? So nominal prices can keep "decreasing" in bitcoin for a long time. Maybe that's just too much work to keep the prices reasonable? Edit: they can't actually be using a float for money though, right? So what is the actual limit of divisibiity?

It's divisible to the 'satoshi'[0], but could be changed in the future. [0]: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/114/what-is-a-sa...

Yes, people could increase the subdivisibility -- and break a lot of JavaScript implementations in the process.

It's clear that Satoshi either had some affinity to JavaScript or was otherwise familiar with people who are crazy enough to do financial calculations using double-precision floating point numbers, from the fact that the upper limit of existing satoshis is so close to what fits into a double-precision mantissa.

Re: Ray Dillinger: If I'd Known What We Were Starting

#64

Post by dwaltrip »

wmf wrote: post #39
zodiac wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you propose making bitcoin "have stable value"?

https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/11/11/search-stable-cryptocur...

This is highly theoretical research. It's not surprising Bitcoin didn't include something like that, on top of everything else.

Re: Ray Dillinger: If I'd Known What We Were Starting

#65

Post by carlisle_ »

wyldfire wrote: post #44
carlisle_ wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And what if they refuse [despite consequences]? I feel like this is a problem that is pretty commonly exercised in our legal system and incarceration is usually a strong last resort motivator.

That's why I added "despite consequences". Ok, now they're in jail and they still refuse. Now what? Ugh, lets go convince the peers contributing to consensus that we need to fork the chain and delete this transaction (like Ethereal). This is just the tip of the iceberg BTW. What if they die or have a brain injury? Their password securing the wallet is now lost to the world. Now there's no way to reverse this transact…

>That's why I added "despite consequences". Ok, now they're in jail and they still refuse. Now what?

This already happens without block chains.

Re: Ray Dillinger: If I'd Known What We Were Starting

#66

Post by wmf »

zodiac wrote: post #58
wmf wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/11/11/search-stable-cryptocur...

I'm really interested in the stablecoin space but I don't think it's realistic to expect bitcoin to have started out as such. Firstly bitcoin was already testing some unknown assumptions (mainly "is our PoW scheme secure and scalable?") and it would be too confounding to also test "is our chosen stability mechanism effective?". Secondly none of the solutions Vitalik mentioned are easy at all; you need decentralized m…

It seems like some variant of a bounded estimator would have dramatically reduced volatility without the complexity of two currencies.

Re: Ray Dillinger: If I'd Known What We Were Starting

#68

Post by vkou »

neilwilson wrote: post #37
chrisco255 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll take a stab at guessing. I think in order for merchants to be paid in BTC or other crypto, it needs to be instantly converted to cash. Why? Because the value of BTC can swing wildly and retailers can't afford that risk when their margins are low. Also, BTC transactions can take 20 minutes to an hour to confirm sometimes, so that matters too at some level. I think something like Tether, which pegs its value to th…

USD fluctuates wildly from my position in the GBP currency zone. But you don't get out of it - for the same reason you don't feel the 18.5 miles per second you're travelling through space. BTC isn't taken as a currency because you can't live in its zone. Everybody swaps it into the currency of the zone they are living in - unless they are speculating. You use the currency of the zone you are living in because everyth…

I agree with your other argument. My landlord doesn't accept BTC, and neither does the IRS.

Re: Ray Dillinger: If I'd Known What We Were Starting

#69

Post by nerpderp83 »

a_d wrote: post #2

"What else ticks me off about this, is that there is absolutely nothing wrong with issuing stock in your company as tokens on a block chain instead of through brokers on a standard exchange. Just do it legally, for Pete's sake! Go to the SEC, or whoever the appropriate regulatory authority in your jurisdiction is, and get authorization to issue stock! Hire somebody to implement shareholder voting as block chain trans…

I just announced notary chain.

Re: Ray Dillinger: If I'd Known What We Were Starting

#70

Post by chi18 »

koolba wrote: post #24

> Let's think about that for a minute. Would you buy stock in a business whose business plan was a giant marketing campaign to promote the value of the stock? This is a beautiful summary of the ICO ecosphere.

When I read it I was thinking, "Yes, along with many others, because that is basically the story of many, many public companies."
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