Isnt monero just another alt coin?

But seriously now:

Completely new code base from Bitcoin.  Not a copy coin like LTC, Doge, etc.

Devs have added over 275000 lines of code from the original codebase Monero was forked from.  Active, large dev team, 100% community funded.

https://getmonero.org/2016/02/10/monero-missive-2015-year-in-review.html

Based on cryptonote.  Completely different algorithm from bitcoin, so it serves as a good alternative in case of a catastrophic failure in bitcoin.  Well tested cryptography with lots of academic research, cryptonote has been around for a couple decades now.   

Imo:

DASH is just mixing.  Its not really any more private than a bitcoin mixer.

Monero ring signatures offer far more fungibility/privacy than DASH, especially once the ring confidential transactions feature is finished later this year.

Also DASH had an instamine and is heavily owned by one entity.  The distribution of Monero was very fair, in fact, its probably the fairest distribution of any proof of work altcoin in the top 20 of CMC. 


Also there is this:
https://twitter.com/petertoddbtc/status/622022840330682368


Quite a number of prominant bitcoin names have said good things about the cryptography in Monero and bad things about Dash.


For these reasons I think Monero has a lot more potential than Dash. 
Further, when I see Dash at 2-3x the price of Monero, and I see that the trading volume of Monero is much greater than that of Dash, I believe there is a severe market inefficiency.  Monero should probably be 3x the price of Dash, not the other way around. 



One interesting thing about DASH is that the masternode system is actually pretty similar to Bitshares DPoS.  This polarizes people into two camps: the people who only think PoW is secure, and those who like systems such as Dash masternodes, Bitshares, PoS variants, etc.

I figure that by holding Bitshares I have the proof of stake variant part of my portfolio covered, and for the sake of diversification I had better hold a solid proof of work coin, in case the peopel who say proof of work is the only way and every PoS variant is flawed are actually correct.  So for that reason also I prefer Monero over Dash, because it is much more different from Bitshares and thus helps me to better diversify.

It would be the most bitshares thing ever if it got added to azure and the fell in price...

That would be very bitshares.

Still not too late to buy.

But of course, now its risky in the short term.

Finally.

In Polo, it seems that if you have at least the maintenance collateral amount you're safe unless the price moves against you, in this model it seems you can be margin called based on orders moving around/being removed from the book. Is it the same on polo, if not could this put of borrowers off or not really in your opinion?

Imo we should replicate the polo system as much as possible, as it is proven to work.  (In a year, there has not been a black swan big enough to cause a failure, even with some wild swings in prices). 

In the polo system, lets say that you go long BTS, to the maximum allowed 40% margin requirement.  (2.5x
long).  Polo doesnt actually check against the last price that the coin was traded at to see if your margin is okay, it checks against the buy orders that are on the books.  So if the last price of a trade was 900 sats, but there is no buy orders down until 850 sats, it actually looks at the 850 sats to calculate your margin.  And if that 850 sat buy order is not big enough to cover your position (your long is more BTS), then it will look down the order book further until it gets to the point where it sees how you can cover all of your position. 

The amount of BTC you could get by market selling your position onto the books is how much poloniex actually considers your position to be worth.

From what I understand of bytemasters proposed system, it works the same.



Lets say that the person with the buy wall at 850 sats in our example cancelled his order.  Now, polo recalculates how much you could sell your BTS for. Lets say that the 850 wall was a big wall and you were relying on its existence.  Without it, poloniex sees that you would have to dump all the way down to 400 sats in a liquidation!   It recalculates your margin and determines that you are below the 20% liquidation level and are no longer safe. Therefore it autoliquidates your position, and crashes the price to 400 sats.


So the removal of an order from the books on polo can trigger forced liquidations.  Bitshares would need to do the same thing.  Its necessary in order to protect lenders.


I might suggest that for robustness sake, that if this scenario occurs that what Bitshares should do is to not allow the order to be cancelled but instead to liquidate the position into it, when the person tried to cancel the order.  Essentially, when the buy wall owner submits the order to cancel to the blockchain, the blockchain responds 'oh no, if you pull that order then it will cause forced liquidations.  Therefore you cannot pull the order, and the forced liquidations are happening now instead'. 


What will happen as a result of this is that people are going to put in big buywalls, and others are goign to take margin positions in front of them, and then the buywall placers are going to pull their walls in order to get cheap (whatever theyre buying).  This happens on polo.  Its what happened when Bitshares crashed after the 2.0 release, the price would start to drop, a whale would remove a buy order, and it would trigger liquidations.

But there isnt any way to avoid this if we want to protect lenders, and imo we NEED to protect lenders.  Lending needs to be safe.  The margin traders take all the risk.  After all, everyone knows margin trading is risky.

Calling this a bond market is misleading...  It doesn't have any of the charactertics of a bond.

There's no call date and no coupon.  Also the collateralization of this doesn't fit the description of a traditional bond market.

To properly do a bond market, there needs to be some sort of reputation system in place so that investors can evaluate risk.  Lending to an anonymous person you no nothing about is a non-starter.

Its the margin trading lending market.   And its what Bitshares needs in place in order to be able to both allow margin trading inside bitshares, and award yield to savers.