Hi Brad, have you head of BitShares?
It is a decentralized ecosystem and financial exchange that would allow you to reduce your costs, your risk and increase your profits by earning referral income for every new user you on-board to your business, and will allow you to issue tickets in a more efficient way.
Your tickets could become tradable, you have the option to retain full control to revoke tickets, and you will profit from the fees generated every time your tickets are swapped in a secondary market.

Everybody wins:
The issuer of an asset (Gametime tickets, in your case)   gets the fees from   the use of that asset      by everybody else's users.
The recruiter of a user   gets the fees from   the use of the network   for everybody else's products.

... and we all benefit from greater economic volume - which itself attracts more users and service providers.

So, bottom line:
Network members compete to win and retain customers - usually drawn from completely different demographics.
Our affiliate incentive program gives them credit for everything those customers do on the whole network - by introducing them to products and services offered by other network partners.
They gain by having their own products and services marketed to the customers of other network members.
They gain by sharing market depth and liquidity in a single global marketplace.
They gain by sharing in the "unhackable" and "transparent" set of order books that protect the consumers for the first time from exchange counterparty risk.

cool. once the big push for 2.0 is complete, it might be worth taking some time and funding effort to make the best API docs and tools on the market. sometimes simply facilitating connectivity offers higher marginal payoffs than new features.

TL;DR: There is a market niche for a global unbounded corporation organization that efficiently adapts and morphs to the needs of the market and the desires of it's shareholders.
I believe BitShares is that corporation organization.
The upper limit of this corporation is bound only by the size of the global economy. The current main use for trading tokens of value are financial derivatives purchased by large institutions and well educated individuals who reside in geographical locations favoured by financially powerful nations who have capital to risk.
A system that can drop the barriers to entry and allow everyone in the world access to the global economy will rapdily expand the total value of the economy.
BitShares will not only rapidly grow to meet the existing market, it will rapidly grow the size of the market itself.
Currently this potential is valued at around $20M.

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BitShares aims to replace all centralized exchanges into one decentralized, open ledger with a shared orderbook resulting in the combined liquidity of all participating exchanges, who reduce costs and increase profits by joining the BitShares exchange.

There are several main issues that result in numerous competing exchanges existing in today's financial market and if all of these issues were solved then only one exchange would be needed to meet the needs of the market.

Counterparty risk mitigation -  holding value on several exchanges.

A single party guaranteeing the IOUs traded on its exchange carries counterparty risk – that they may default on their obligations.
The risk is factored into the cost of doing business with this exchange.
A reduction in counterparty risk results in a reduction in cost of doing business there.
If counterparty risk is eliminated from an exchange then separate exchanges cannot compete on mitigating this risk.
A decentralised exchange where ONLY the users are able to spend their own funds (hold their private keys) and that has many parties providing price-feeds has negligible counterparty risk.

Competition of fees that each exchange charges.

If fees required to trade on an exchange are negligible <£0.0025 and much lower than the total value of the trade then separate exchanges cannot compete on fees unless they offer
significant advantages to entice customers away from the established exchange that has the
largest market depth/liquidity.
Would you rather pay 0.25p to trade on the largest, longest running exchange with the highest liquidity – or would you choose to trade on a newer exchange if it could offer fees of 0.2p? Bearing in mind that transaction fees pay to keep the network (exchange) secure against attack.

Systemic risk in the trading platform - The code might get hacked and trick users.

The risk that a fatal bug in the code exists but has not yet been exploited decreases over time and with the number of people auditing the open source code.
A separate competing exchange cannot surpass the incumbent/leading decentralised exchange without significantly simpler code (less potential bugs) and without being active for a sufficient amount of time. During which time the incumbent has attracted even more capital due to an even greater reduction in risk (due to increased uptime with no fatal flaws). The competitor would have to be much better in order to catch up.
   
Laws in different geographical regions - bureaucracy involved in global transfer.

Cryptocurrency can be transferred globally in seconds. There is no inefficiency in moving funds between jurisdictions except when 'cashing out'.
Separate 'gateways' to real world assets will still exist and they will be able to issue derivatives on the decentralised exchange that track the spot price given by the external 'gateway'. This allows arbitrage between spot prices from several gateways all within the decentralised exchange ecosystem.

Arbitrage

Currently, due to the time delays in moving funds from one centralized exchange to another (days with fiat, 10-60 minutes with bitcoin) a trader wanting to take advantage of arbitrage opportunities must hold value across several different centralized exchanges.
With the ability for a decentralised exchange to hold derivatives of the spot prices given by centralized exchanges there is no longer any need to hold value on separate centralized exchange that present counterparty risk.

Competition for market share

A decentralised exchange based on cryptocurrency allows anyone to hold shares in the exchange itself so all participants profit as the value traded on the exchange increases. There is no need to set up a competing decentralised exchange because there is more profit to be made by assimilating and bringing value to the existing market-leading exchange.


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With decreasing demand for separate exchanges comes an increase in the liquidity and market depth offered by the most successful exchange.
This leads to an increase in its market share, which in turn breeds even more liquidity making it even more attractive as THE place to trade value.

For the reasons stated above the most successful exchange will be:
A Decentralized Autonomous Corporation (DAC) with (low) fees that adequately cover the expenses of securing the network.

This DAC (likely to be Bitshares) will:

Be Decentralized
Counterparty risk (of maliciously quoted prices) decreases as the number of 'nodes' offering price feed data increases and is almost eliminated completely if the DAC/exchange holds no custodial funds.

Have very low fees
A DAC exchange built with a cryptocurrency can transfer the underlying collateralizing asset irreversibly in seconds for very little cost.


Be a Corporation with shareholder voting rights
The most successful exchange will adapt to market conditions and customer desires fastest.
Shareholders are anyone who holds the cryptocurrency, bts

Be Autonomous
Top down central planning is an inefficiency.
Shareholders vote directly for blockchain parameters and the direction BitShares takes


Cater to as large a market as possible
The current main use for trading tokens of value are financial derivatives purchased by large institutions and well educated individuals who reside in geographical locations favoured by financially powerful nations who have capital to risk.
With cryptocurrency comes the ability for the tokens of value to contain data that can only be utilised by the current holder of the token. This brings countless new use cases for these derivatives/tokens of value.

One example is Peer Tracks – a company using a DAC to issue scarce tokens that represent a share in the value of music sales made by a particular artist. It aims to be a competitor to Spotify that instead of paying artists with advertising income it encourages artists to crowd-sale shares in their future career. A user who finds talent they like can invest in their career. If they make it big the value of the tokens they hold will have increased dramatically. 'Hipsters' are now financially incentivized to invest and advertise music they think will be the next big thing.
How many more genres of music do you think there will be if a record label is no longer needed and musicians do not need to 'sell out' to appeal to a mass market large enough to be worth the investment of said record labels?

The DAC can provide banking services to internet connected users (individuals or businesses) with no questions asked as there are no compliance costs as no custodial funds are held.

Enable businesses to use the DAC ecosystem for their own needs. 'User Issued Assets' are not backed by collateral but by the assurances made by the party/business that issues them.

Provide Identity Verification services so that things like user website login and proving you are a human user and not a bot can all be controlled from within the DAC.

Provide gateways to external services

Provide Price-Feeds and Validate Transactions

Honesty is heavily rewarded and malevolence is punished swiftly.


Provide ease of use and secure account recovery for the user.


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The current state of BitShares and the risks of a competitor
Only 2.5 billion currently exist and they are highly divisible so there is no upper limit to the number of trades this total supply can support.
E.g A $1 derivative could be collateralized with 0.00001 bitshares one day in the future if bitshares were valuable enough.

The theoretical maximum supply of BitShares is 3.7 Billion. The 1.2 B yet unissued shares are kept in a reserve-pool and every day a fraction of these funds are directed where the shareholders deem most useful. There is a hard-limit on the number of reserve-pool funds available each day, and the yet-undesignated reserve-pool funds cannot be spent by anyone.
They can either be: burned and removed from the supply forever, recycled and sent back to the reserve-pool for use later, or pledged to Worker Proposals as payment to complete shareholder desired tasks.

Each BitShare is currently worth $0.0046 (21/04/15)
The current market cap of bitshares is $11.5M




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Questions
How many more people and how much more capital can benefit from exposure to a derivatives market in this new system compared to the old system?

Will there be as much competition between exchanges if the main exchange is highly trustworthy, highly secure and has negligible fees?
It is much cheaper to assimilate and provide value to the customers of the existing BitShares DAC than it is to create a competing ecosystem, which the bitshares DAC would bridge to anyway.
This is much the same as starting an internet company to benefit internet connected customers instead of trying to design a replacement for the internet itself.
Separate ventures that DO NOT compete as a derivatives market but instead

It is estimated that there are currently less than 1 million Bitcoin holders. That leaves 99.985% of the population who are yet to hear about and benefit from cryptocurrency. If they all understood what they could get out of it, how much more value would be within the crypto ecosystem?
It is my researched opinion that the systemic risk of Bitcoin or BitShares failure is far outweighed by the systemic risk of counterparty default in the traditional banking system.
Bitcoin and BitShares are just more volatile in the short to medium term. Such volatility can be solved by holding market-pegged SmartCoin assets to stable commodities of the users choice. Funds never need leave the BitShares ecosystem.

The reason that Bitcoin and Bitshares have such low valuations is PR. The global advertising campaign is yet to take place.
With the BitShares referral system, marketers are encouraged to attract new users and will be paid up to $80 to do so.

So, do you think BitShares will increase in value?

Quote from: starspirit on July 08, 2015, 08:10:10 am

Warning: this tangential discussion has nothing to do with micro-payments:

As an aside, I wondered if it might be beneficial to demand transparency of real identities from witnesses. This would allow the community to better assess the actual decentralisation in the witness pool, the trustworthiness of the witnesses, and put their real-life reputations at stake rather than just an alias that can be replaced. Could this improve network security (albeit at the expense of witness privacy)?

First, I respectfully disagree about the impact of cost on the viability of micropayments. As I stated earlier, the cost of the network must be factored into the equation for determining minimal fees and thus directly relates to whether micropayments will be economically viable and not a welfare feature.

Second, as to the last paragraph, have you considered that mandating a real world identity might make the network weaker? It provides a direct path for gov regulators to attack individual witnesses, which is yet another reason I keep saying coexistence of privacy and forceful (i.e. gov) regulation cannot coexist.

A better way to protect against bad witnesses is their track record of production and other systems of reputation. Real world identification is not necessary.

Quote from: Ander on July 07, 2015, 10:08:31 pm

Quote from: Akado on July 07, 2015, 09:42:47 pm

Maybe it's a good idea to get Bter to run on BitShares 2.0

I'm sure bter would find a way to mess it up.

Maybe if they don't, the crypto world will finally acknowledge BitShares as the safest way to run an exchange

Quote from: Ander on July 07, 2015, 05:58:50 pm

* The .0365 low that we hit was an exact 50% fib retracement of the move from .0198 to .0532.
* Volume was higher the past two days as we approached the low, but was still much less than during the may rally. 
* The price action for the past 5 weeks looks like an ABC correction. 
* Indicators are very oversold.


The only negative is the moving averages.
This could be a bottom, marking the end of this wave 2 correction and start of wave 3 up.  (It could drag on and go a bit lower, but it doesnt need to).

i've never put too much stock into technical analysis, but i'll take any positive news at this point