One of the developers mentioned that it involves bots. If there aren't counter-parties or trading restrictions, then aside from bots, how would you keep the price stable? The increase in Peercoin's price may be partly attributable to the bot owners' need to have a large supply.

Ok, I hadn't heard that the developers actually did mention bots. Interesting.

To me, if their plan is to amass a large supply of PPC and then try to stabilize the price by playing central bank, they're just crazy. It's so blatantly obvious that it wouldn't work - unless when they say "stable price" they don't mean "constant price." Anyway, I don't think they're idiots, so I don't think they're trying to maintain a constant PPC price by playing central bank.

It seems like their plan must be to do something like launch cryptocurrency NuBits, then create some kind of price-stable derivative of NuBits (maybe with some similarities to BitUSD) whose price they control with bots via centralized exchanges. Maybe? In that case, the PPC pump is kind of a red herring; it's just people flailing around trying to figure out how to make money on NuBits before they know what it is.

rofl, the person had one job, to list one fact and blew it.

joke is on us though 

Does wsj have a "corrections" or errata section? A spot where they mention inaccuracies in previous issues? We could probably get them to publish a correction. That way bitshares gets mentioned in 2 issues.

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Not sure if this is correct, but as I understand it there are a maximum of 2 billion BTSX; so if you need some amount, say X, of BTSX held as collateral for each bitUSD created, then 2 billion BTSX divided by X will be the limiting factor. So for instance if you need 200% worth of BTSX in collateral for each bitUSD, then when you have 1 billion BTSX worth of bitUSD there would be no more BTSX left, as 2 billion BTSX would be held as collateral. But as you know there are other bitAssets as well, and they also require backing by BTSX, so it will really be 2 billion BTSX divided by X plus Y plus Z. This also means that the higher the market cap of BitShares X, the more bitUSD and other assets can be created, because less BTSX is needed to back each bitUSD etc. Did I get that right?

Yeah, that's right. I usually think of it the other way around; so instead of thinking of a max on BitUSD, I think of a min market cap on BTSX. The market cap of BTSX is always at least 1.5x the combined market cap of all bitAssets. You put an upper bound on the number of bitAssets, I put a lower bound on the value of BTSX.

I think it's particularly interesting in your example when you say "then there would be no more BTSX left." That is, if the market wanted more bitAssets to be created, the price of BTSX would have to increase. If there are essentially no shares of BTSX available, even a tiny increase in demand for them would cause an enormous increase in price. It's a good example of why demand for bitAssets drives demand for BTSX.

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About the thin markets: I have the following bots running but am going to deploy more:

1) Market Maker bot on bitUSD:BTSX to assist with peg stabilization
2) Market Speculator bot on bitUSD:BTSX to add volume
3) Market Speculator bot on bitCNY:BTSX to add volume

I plan to deploy shortly:
1) Market Maker bot on bitCNY:BTSX to assist with peg stabilization (need to get feeds for CNY working in the bot)
2) Market Speculator bot on bitUSD:bitBTC to add volume.

Any other markets need some love? BM asked us to hold off on new markets so I guess that gives me about a week to tune more bots .


The bots are pretty easy to write. It'd be nice to see more of them.

Are your bots open source? I'd love to take a crack at writing some myself, and it would be nice to look at a couple different variations to figure out what the he'll I'm doing.

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Snapshot date?

Quote from: starspirit on September 17, 2014, 12:48:48 pm

The BTSX collateral is there to protect the rights of all parties to be paid according to price movements in the bitAssets. So the rights to proper payment are backed.

However it does not back the actual value of the BitAssets in the same way that say the value of a share or loan is backed by the saleable assets of a business, or that a house loan is backed by the ability of a bank to liquidate the recuperate the value of the loan, or the way in which gold-backed currencies used to be redeemable for gold. If the market decided to value BitAssets at 10% of today's value, instead of at the peg price, the BTSX collateral does not alter that, it only ensures everyone is paid accordingly. So perhaps we need to be careful with what we mean by 'backed'?

Strictly speaking you right.  But this will happen only if the peg is not working in witch event the whole experiment is a failure. . So let rephrase it, if  the peg is not working your bitAssets could be in danger else your bitAssets are backed by real money.
 . To me the backing of BitshareX is the business behind,  and my short explanation for newbie is : BitSharesX is a virtual bank that lets users buy, sell and trade virtual assets that have the  valued of real world assets. In the process of creating those virtual assets people make money trading similar way like Forex. To me the difference is: What's backing a share in Western Union  or Google ? And for the crypto crowd my killer question is what is backing Bitcoin ?

Yeah, that question is great: "what is backing bitcoin?" To another crowd, you can ask "what is backing gold?" Though gold has the benefit that it's been highly valued for millennia...

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An objection I heard the other day is that BitAssets are not backed by anything.

With regard to the opinion (expressed by delulo above, but that I've heard elsewhere) that its OK because BitAssets are really prediction markets, not assets, I am confused. Doesn't a prediction market require a pre-determined point in time at which the result is verified, such that people's bets are estimates of the probability of the outcome? What outcome are BitAssets predicting? If there is no end-point, there is no guarantee of any outcome at all. I'm not sure how this overcomes the concern.

That's an interesting misconception. Actually, bitAssets are backed! They're backed by at least 1.5x their value in BTSX! To open a short position (akatkam create bitAssets) I have to put twice their value in escrow as backing.

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