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General Discussion / Re: Use Gold and Silver with BitShares to bypass Fiat Regulations [BLOGPOST]
« on: January 25, 2015, 11:31:57 pm »
Unfortunately that widely quoted price is highly manipulated. For every ounce of silver there are nearly 100 ounces of paper silver driving the supply/demand equilibrium way down. We need to decouple from that in order to be of any interest to silver bugs.
I'm aware how manipulated the price is, I expect the paper price to ultimately decouple and our delegates will have to be on top of that transition, which will probably just involve switching price feeds to Asia and places like the SGE I mentioned.
Tracking the global average price of a 1oz physical coin independently is tough. The reason I'm interested though is that there's a great marketing angle here, I'm not sure anyone else does this. I'm pretty sure we'd have to have two markets though. BitSilver & BitSilverPhyzz1oz.
Also even if the price wasn't manipulated there's stil just a natural huge deviation between the price of silver and the price of a small 1oz coin.
Purchasing a 5kg Bar of silver would work out at about $20 per ounce but buying a solitary silver eagle might cost $25 an ounce. (So trying to price in 1oz is very deceptive and is more production cost related & would result in the overpricing of gold & silver.)Why not bitGold at spot, and then have other assets like bitGoldMaple and bitGoldKruger, etc? They all have different values. It costs a lot more to mint 10 1 ounce mapleleafs than it costs to make a generic 10 oz bar.
I think this is a great idea. They could be 'SubAssets' which are based on the price feed, but trade at a percentage offset. The offset would need to be set by Delegates in order for this to work correctly.
Delegates could cooperate and include SubAssets in their price feeds, and as long as 51 delegates have SubAssets of the same name, they qualify to be included in the marketplace.
This could account for the different mints, but also may be a path to decoupling paper/physical while still serving both markets.
Yeah, maybe 1 sub-asset market that tried to maintain a generic BitGold & Silver 1oz phyzz price would be interesting.
If I were going to try it (and I just might) I would want to pick the most commonly traded and most recognizable form of silver I could find. There are about a half dozen good candidates, but to me the US Silver Eagle is as good as any.
So I like the idea of a sub-asset called BitSilverEagle.
It should be easy enough to establish the peg based on any five of the top ten dealers - selected because they have the same way of handling shipping and fees perhaps.
I would simply define the peg to be the average of a basket of coins from these dealers. This would be easy for delegates to compute and easy to audit by everyone. No need to argue about what the other dealers are doing, the Big Five are already dynamically adjusting their prices to be competitive in the global market.
Then any dealer would simply shop around to get a better price than the average of the Big Five and let that be part of the dealer's added value profit.
One thing you don't seem to be taking into account here Stan is that dealers in the existing market base their prices on the manipulated spot price. Until an alternative to that exists you could just as easily base feeds on the spot and take the dealer variable commission out of the equation.
Once trade volume in the BitSilver / BitGold gets high enough let the blockchain define the average price. It's hard to determine the real "free market" price with all the influences / manipulations going on. It may not be possible to determine the real market price for some time, but the closest we could come is observing trades on the blockchain. Maybe some sort of rolling averages.
No, I see there is some value in having a BitSilverEagle, even though dealers base their price off the manipulated silver price, in times of crisis you see a big divergence, a higher premium over spot for physical, so many people may well rather have a BitAsset that tracks dealer prices.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2013/05/28/somebody-is-messing-with-the-gold-market/