Author Topic: Overstock to CryptoStock - Proof Read & Feedback  (Read 15565 times)

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Offline Fox

A well written piece addressing the broad concepts at hand.  I feel a key component of the solution is glossed over and requires further definition prior to publication to enlighten the reader and close the knowledge gap:

Quote
Minimizing Counter Party Risk
The solution is really quite simple, an Identity Authority simply needs to sign the BitShares account...
...
Conclusion
Only BitShares X with the addition of certified accounts...

I am interested to read more about the solutions Bitshares X implements at this time to accommodate "certified accounts" from an "Identity Authority." 

Respectfully,
Fox
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Offline luckybit

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Overstock to CryptoStock

The crytpo-currency industry has been in a tizzy since wired published an article about Overstock’s Radical Plan to Reinvent the Stock Market With Bitcoin.    CEO, Patrick Bryne, has seen first hand how Wall Street has been corrupted to the core and is eager to do something to fix it.   He has identified two primary sources of corruption, centralized clearing (exchanges) and fractional reserve banking.    These systems allow corrupt insiders to sell shares in his company that don’t exist and manipulate the price.

The primary question that has been asked is “How to issue a crypto security” and a major wiki-war among the dozen or so potential solutions on the market.   The primary contenders are NXT and BitShares because each allows their users to issue their own assets (though the SEC may call them securities depending upon whether the user makes any promises) and both provide a built-in exchange that is entirely decentralized.

The question is do any of the existing technologies offer a ready-to-go solution for Overstock to dual-list their shares?    In my opinion I think that none of the existing systems are able to meet all of the regulatory and business requirements and that Overstock will have to work with someone to customize their block chain to meet the needs.

What is the primary issue?  Issuing shares in a publicly traded company that are effectively Bearer Shares which are essentially illegal in most jurisdictions around the world. 

Bearer shares are a type of freely transferable securities, which only by ownership demonstrate participation in a company. In registered or conventional shares, the name of the owner is included and will also be entered in the shareholder’s register of the company. If a change in ownership is to be made, the share endorsement and change in the registry will be required.

By contrast, as no name is included in the bearer shares, any person who has them in their possession is recognized as the owner. If you wish to transfer these shares to a third party, it will suffice to just hand over the certificates. There will be no need for any paperwork or changes to the registry of the company (except for anti money laundering control in certain jurisdictions) because only the amount of bearer shares that were issued to create the company and their numeration are shown, without making any reference to their owners. It is similar to the operation of a cashier’s check, whereby any person presenting it can collect the amount contained therein.

The measures against money laundering and tax fraud that many countries and organizations are adopting have significantly stigmatized and challenged bearer shares. The pressure on the governments of tax havens has forced many offshore jurisdictions to limit their use. Normally, these constraints involve the immobilization of securities. That is, the bearer shares must be in deposit and custody of a bank, a trust firm or the registered agent of the company who also usually must maintain a record of the owners. The objective of this measure is to register any change in ownership of the company and to be able to determine at all times who holds the legal ownership. With such limitations, not only the whole essence and flexibility of the bearer shares is lost, but their transmission becomes more complicated, because of not being directly in the hands of their rightful owner. These types of limitations have already been imposed in most tax havens.


How to Legally Issue a Crypto Security

The solution to Bryne’s problem is in finding a crypto-system that supports the issuance of registered or conventional shares where the name of the owner is included and tracked in the shareholder’s register of the company.   The shareholder’s register is effectively all a block chain is.

While some systems like BitShares with TITAN allow users to transfer shares to an account by name rather than account number.  No systems currently support restricting share ownership to certified identities, but BitShares aims to be the first to market with a practical, easy-to-use solution to this critical problem.

The solution is really quite simple, an Identity Authority simply needs to sign the BitShares account with a certification that the owner has provided the necessary Know Your Customer documentation and then the BitShares account needs to digitally sign the shareholders agreement and release their identity information to Overstock. 

After these signatures are in place, then and only then, should a block chain allow a particular account to buy, sell, or send or receive these securities.   This may not be ideal from a crypto-anarchy point of view, but from the perspective of Overstock it will allow them to achieve their primary goal:  an honest and transparent securities market provably free of fractional reserves, naked shorting, and high-frequency trading.
   
Better Market Algorithms

Quote
“Byrne says that one of the things he’s trying to eliminate is high-speed trading that serves no real purpose”
In the world of Wall Street the markets move at the speed of light with trades executed in milliseconds.  This type of speed is not possible on a decentralized system because even at the speed of light it takes 200 ms for information to travel around the world on the internet.  This is no problem for Bryne because it helps enforce his goal of eliminating high-frequency trading.

But the speed of trading is not the real issue at play, but instead an artifact of a fundamental flaw in the order-matching algorithm used in traditional markets.   If you stop to think about what a price really is (an estimate of the value of a company) you will see that this estimate should only change when new information becomes available and can be processed by the shareholders themselves.    Human judgement cannot possibly operate at 200 ms and is even challenged to operate on the 10 second intervals supported by BitShares or the 1 to 2 minute intervals of Nxt.

High speed trading is the result of Wall Street insiders attempting to “front-run” orders placed by people who have access to real information.  When someone learns some news that causes them to buy the insiders can see the buy order in advance and place automated trades to buy up any asks lower than your bid and then sell to you with almost no risk. 

What this means is that traditional order matching algorithms where you get the best price for your bid are an illusion because anyone closer to the exchange than you are can steal that advantage and give you what you asked for and little more.

BitShares recognizes this process and thus implements a system that effectively eliminates front running by insiders.   All executed orders always receive the price they asked for and nothing more or nothing less.   There is no opportunity to squeeze risk-free profit out of market participants by executing orders that take up any overlap between the bid and ask.   

To be fair the block chain becomes the ultimate insider. What this algorithm really does is take all of the money that could have been earned by front running (over lap between bid and ask) and collect it as fees for the network.  If forces market participants to place orders at prices they are willing to pay based upon their opinion of fair value.    By removing the profit potential from front-running, BitShares is the only system that will not see attacks by high-frequency traders attempting to squeeze profit out bid/ask overlap.

Another side effect of this market matching algorithm is that those that attempt to walk-the-book in a single trade in an attempt to manipulate the market will pay a much higher price than someone who walks the book at a slower pace.   Once again the trading algorithm punishes “fast traders” and rewards “value traders”.   

Minimizing Counter Party Risk

There is one other aspect that companies looking to list their shares on a decentralized exchange must consider:  what are the shares going to be trading against?   In the case of everyone but BitShares X, the only thing you can trade against are shares in the system (ie: Nxt) or shares in other assets listed on the system.

So if Overstock wants to trade against USD then someone must issue bearer bonds denominated in USD.   These bearer bonds would be a promise to pay $1 on demand and  would be a 2nd highly regulated security.   

Overstock would likely have to issue their own Overstock USD bond to trade on the system against their own shares.    This once again opens up a huge regulatory challenge centered around Know Your Customer laws.   If not Overstock USD then the USD issued by some exchange that is subject to potential fractional reserve issuance. 

Because fractional reserve issuance is one of the primary issues  Patrick Bryne has identified that needs to be solved, it seems counter-productive to rely on an crypto-IOUs for your users to trade your stock.  Using a block chain for order matching is moot if you are still relying on a 3rd party to manage the IOU. 

At the same time, absent crypto-dollar IOUs the only assets left for Crypto-Overstock shares to trade against are other crypto-assets which all have market caps of less than 10% that of Overstock.

This is where BitShares X with BitUSD collateralized by shares in BtShares X provides a unique advantage over all other systems.   BitUSD is not an IOU issued by a central party, but a crypto-asset that has no counter-party, is not a security, and confers no legal obligation on any party.  It is created by free market forces and is backed by 1.5 to 2 dollars worth of BTSX.

Only with BitShares X can companies like Overstock allow their shares to trade against trust-free assets pegged to the dollar, gold, silver, or other national currencies. 

Conclusion

Only BitShares X with the addition of certified accounts is able to meet the regulatory, philosophical, and business objects Patrick has laid out.  It resolves fractional reserves, naked shorting, and high-frequency trading manipulation.    But more important than all of those factors, the leaders of the BitShares ecosystem is not hiding behind anonymous internet identities and are available to customize their solutions to the needs of Overstock and similar companies.

As nice as it would be to see Overstock issue a crypto-stock for their company in the next few months, I think it would do far more harm than good.   Without taking the time to make sure the plan is air-tight from a regulatory perspective Patrick could make Overstock the target of regulators and scare away everyone else from the amazing potential of tracking their shares on a crypto-ledger. 



I would appreciate it if someone could take some time to clean this up prior to posting it on bitshares.org and then linking it to the Wiki at overstock.

It looks good. We might need some clarification on what you mean by BitUSD backed by $1.5-2. Did you mean collateralized?

Additional reference material for this subject: http://cointelegraph.com/news/112034/mitigating-the-legal-risks-of-issuing-securities-on-a-cryptoledger

I think at this point people are so terrified of the SEC that it's starting to hurt innovation. What are the legal consequences? How do we quantify the risks if we don't know?

Is it a fine? is it prison time? how much? Satoshi Dice was a success. They did pay a small fine but compared to the amount of money they made the fine was nothing. It may be a strategy for each DAC or organization making DACs to come up with a legal defense fund specifically to protect itself and the industry from the SEC.
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Offline amatoB

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PM me or Bytemaster for a link to the Google Doc if you want to edit or review it.

Now that it's being edited I didn't want this to turn into a wiki-war.  Anyone with the link can edit it.  Those that are editing it now feel free to PM anyone the link that you think should be editing it as well.


Did a good amount of editing on it earlier today. However, before it's distributed widely, others here (especially Dan) should probably give it a through read-through to make sure that all of the text remains true to the original intent...


Offline Riverhead

PM me or Bytemaster for a link to the Google Doc if you want to edit or review it.

Now that it's being edited I didn't want this to turn into a wiki-war.  Anyone with the link can edit it.  Those that are editing it now feel free to PM anyone the link that you think should be editing it as well.


Offline santaclause102

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actually .. from an outside point of view the realworld financal instruments seem to be the mess .. in crypto it all becomes quite 'easy' :)


//edit: let me emphasize that i am an outsider :)

I think most insiders would agree with you that the real world financial instruments are a mess (hence Overstock wanting to switch).
The issue with financial markets today as I see it is: fractual reserve banking + highly complex liability relations between banks to a degree where it is impossible to assess which bank would be solvent if another one goes down (banks often even don't know themselves where and how high their own risks are exactly ) + a quasi bailout guarantee + complex and non transparent financial products that are not understood my many who buy them (banks have good sales men; banks profit form the non-transparency)
« Last Edit: August 09, 2014, 09:01:43 pm by delulo »

Offline santaclause102

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I made a few comments (red). I have made "comments" for longer comments to not break the reading flow too much.

With any comment (own or someone else) you can click on "clarify" (might be named something else with you) and the comment incl. sub comments is gone. I deleted one of Dans and one of my own comments this way by accident :( Maybe this can be tweaked?


Offline toast

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This is very good, needs to go on LTB and as many other crypto news sites as possible
Do not use this post as information for making any important decisions. The only agreements I ever make are informal and non-binding. Take the same precautions as when dealing with a compromised account, scammer, sockpuppet, etc.

Offline Riverhead

They've created so many ways to skin the cat that no one notices there is no cat anymore. Buying securities now, for me anyway, is a lot like buying fine art. My only reason for owning it is the belief I can sell it to someone else for more later.  The fact that it's actually backed by partial ownership of a real company is a bit abstract and meaningless at the small volumes I hold.
« Last Edit: August 09, 2014, 07:42:31 pm by Riverhead »

Offline bytemaster

actually .. from an outside point of view the realworld financal instruments seem to be the mess .. in crypto it all becomes quite 'easy' :)


//edit: let me emphasize that i am an outsider :)

I think most insiders would agree with you that the real world financial instruments are a mess (hence Overstock wanting to switch).
For the latest updates checkout my blog: http://bytemaster.bitshares.org
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Offline xeroc

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actually .. from an outside point of view the realworld financal instruments seem to be the mess .. in crypto it all becomes quite 'easy' :)


//edit: let me emphasize that i am an outsider :)

Offline bytemaster

How to rapid traders do it?  Certainly when they are executing thousands of trades per second they aren't updating the who-owns-the-shares documentation as well.  Or is it good enough that they hold one share in each of the securities they trade in and then just add/subtract from their positions?

Normally it is all adding/subtracting from positions and what are traded aren't the actual shares, just IOUs for the shares issued by the exchanges.
For the latest updates checkout my blog: http://bytemaster.bitshares.org
Anything said on these forums does not constitute an intent to create a legal obligation or contract between myself and anyone else.   These are merely my opinions and I reserve the right to change them at any time.

Offline Riverhead

How to rapid traders do it?  Certainly when they are executing thousands of trades per second they aren't updating the who-owns-the-shares documentation as well.  Or is it good enough that they hold one share in each of the securities they trade in and then just add/subtract from their positions?

Offline bytemaster

I would like to add some insights I had in the shower...

A downfall to restricting owners of a stock to a certified set is the loss of privacy.   Fortunately, we can use Ring Signatures + TITAN to allow someone to prove they are a member of the SET of authorized users without revealing which member they are.   

Now we can have privacy + public accounting + regulatory compliance.

Ring signatures would end up obscuring the balance of individuals and because that balance could go to 0 the only thing that could be stated is that Overstock knows all potential shareholders and that all potential shareholders have signed the shareholder agreement.   Unfortunately, that is probably not sufficient from a regulatory perspective.
For the latest updates checkout my blog: http://bytemaster.bitshares.org
Anything said on these forums does not constitute an intent to create a legal obligation or contract between myself and anyone else.   These are merely my opinions and I reserve the right to change them at any time.

Offline bytemaster

When you guys have been trying to reach out to Overstock, has their been any reciprocity? (If you can say)

Yes
For the latest updates checkout my blog: http://bytemaster.bitshares.org
Anything said on these forums does not constitute an intent to create a legal obligation or contract between myself and anyone else.   These are merely my opinions and I reserve the right to change them at any time.