Quote from: merivercap on April 28, 2015, 12:50:09 am

Can someone tell me what the current price feed is or price feeds are? 

Is it the average of the USD->BTC->BTS chain at various exchanges?

Just looking for a link..thx.

This is currently the most popular tool set that includes a python feed script: https://github.com/bitsuperlab/operation_tools

Thanks Riverhead. I'm not a coder, but digging in it seems BTC38, BTER, Yunbi are the exchanges and the script pulls USD->CNY info from Yahoo?  I assume the price feed is then: USD->CNY->BTS using the following exchanges: BTC38/BTER/Yunbi for CNY->BTS

Thx.

So I always liked TITAN for the simple names, but I heard something about moving away from it because of the anonymity features?  Is that correct?  What are the future plans for TITAN?  Not clear on the history of Keyhotee.   I'm just interested in easy-to-use naming addresses for mainstream adoption.  Anonymity is great, but secondary.   

How does TITAN compare with the Netki solution?

Netki uses Namecoin & DNSSEC
http://digitalmoneytimes.com/crypto-news/netki-introduces-name-wallet-service-to-push-bitcoin-adoption/
https://www.netki.com/

Also there has been recent discussion of a Bitshares DNS and that may help....

Can anyone elaborate on the future of TITAN?

Unfortunately I think Title IV Reg A+ won't be great for most startups.  I think new companies that want to raise a lot of money to make a public splash will do it and that makes sense, but the regulatory burdens are significant enough to deter most companies from doing it.  You'll probably have to spend $75-150k+ on average to file and it's almost like an IPO-lite. 

1) Title IV Reg A Tier 1 (up to $20m) - people will have to register with each state under Blue Sky laws. This is a non-starter.

2) Title IV Reg A+ Tier 2 (up to $50m) - more fees, need to file a form S1-lite, legal fees of $75k - 150k.  This may make sense for companies that want to spend money for publicity.  This will be more like a mini-IPO.  Recurring filing fees may also be a drag. 

3) This Reg A law is not really good for the average non-accredited investor or startup from a fiscal standpoint.  It's mostly hype.  But who knows.  Getting the hype is probably worth it for some startups, especially those with viral videos and mass appeal.  The business model may make no sense, but if a company is fancy, shiny, viral or exciting a lot of people will invest anyways.  Companies will also generally get better valuations from the public. 

4) If the legal fees for Reg A+ can go down to $50k and recurring filing fees are not too bad many more companies may consider doing this. 

5) You can already crowdfund or market directly to accredited investors under Reg D without the fees since late 2013 so most companies that don't have mass consumer appeal and are fiscally responsible will be wiser to use this option.

Great job KenCode!

I'm confused, from memory (crap connection atm, can't really YouTube) one of the bitshares.tv videos mentioned that if BTS lost ~60% value in a few hours, then the system would collapse -- they even contrasted it with Bitcoin, being as volatile as it is, never having experienced such an event.

BTS would be priced exponentially higher in hyperinflation, as would physical gold & silver and bitGold & bitSilver.   The US dollar and bitUSD would be worth much less or essentially worthless.  The system should work fine, but the demand for bitUSD would shrink immensely.  If there are bouts of rapid dollar deflation in between that may potentially cause some black swan events,  but again with the first bout of hyperinflation the bitUSD market would probably shrink to be a negligible amount relative to all the other bitAssets and any bouts of rapid deflation would be less consequential.   

Note: I have a friend who lived through hyperinflation in Vietnam and he said that ultimately even after hyperinflation when gold became extremely valuable, his mother would cut small pieces of gold to trade for goods that were still priced in Dong (Vietnamese currency).. hence even in hyperinflations people may still use US dollars as the unit of account.. it would just be valued exponentially less.   

If the problem is the settlement price for the CFD, why not use the mid-market rate between bid & asks based on volume in the order book?

It is a common social convention to split the difference whenever there is a disagreement on price.

I was going to add also if you use the mid-market rate between bid & asks for settlement it would be hard to manipulate the order book because you would have to place orders on the book to sway pricing one way or the other and you would effectively bring more liquidity to the market.   You will be 'making' the market and providing liquidity if you tried to manipulate the market and that helps with price discovery even more. 

Also rather than having an expiration date, why not just mark-to-market daily?  Hence both short & long have liquidity and everyone will effectively have the CFD contracts rolled over daily automatically and have fungibility.   The problem may be if there will be enough stable supply of bitAssets to meet demand.  If you have enough BTS you can short bitAssets into existence so if your business relies on having a fixed supply of bitAssets you can make sure you have enough BTS to cover any supply shortfalls in bitAssets. 

Finally the available bitAsset supply should ultimately be tied to the fundamental value of the collateral:  BTS, the organization/DAC that receives BTS via transaction fees as 'revenue' and whose 'income' is revenue minus 'expenses' (ie. delegate fees) that results in 'profit' to members or 'stakeholders'.   Because income for a growth company is not necessarily desired and investors would usually want 'profits' poured back into grow the company you can use price to sales (ie. revenue) P/S as a better rough proxy for estimating the value of the DAC rather than P/E. (You can also use a discounted cash flow (DCF) model for valuation if you wanted.)  The maximum P/S ratio of Facebook & Twitter in the trailing twelve month (TTM) is about 25 so that might be the max P/S you would use to estimate the max value of BTS (The US stock market is overvalued btw.  On the other hand Facebook/Twitter is already past the mid-point of it's S-curve growth so they may be somewhat conservative comparisons)

Hence it would be good to have higher collateral when the bitAsset supply is too great relative to the value of the collateral based on P/S to prevent bubbles and lower collateral requirements when the value of the collateral is much higher relative to the bitAsset supply.

If the problem is the settlement price for the CFD, why not use the mid-market rate between bid & asks based on volume in the order book?

It is a common social convention to split the difference whenever there is a disagreement on price.