This is probably obvious, but when we export a BTSX wallet to a .json file, the exported keys are encrypted by our wallet password, right?

Hi cob (and anybody else who might know the answer),

I'm curious how "selling shares in songs" will work from a legal standpoint. My understanding is that it's illegal in the US to anonymously own shares in a company, but would it be legal to anonymously own shares in intellectual property? What would the SEC have to say about that?

I'm interested in hearing how you guys are going to deal with this kind of issue, and I'm also mulling a similar project of my own.

Hello, MMC community!

I was out running today and I had a bit of a brainstorm. I imagine that you guys are always on the lookout for interesting marketing opportunities, and MMC was the first coin that really caught my attention when I first started getting into altcoins, so I thought I'd ask if you'd be interested in this before I went around to anybody else.

I'm training for a 50-mile (80 km) running race that takes place in August: https://www.joingecko.org/info.asp?uid=310. I've had some setbacks due to an injury I sustained back in September, but I've been in therapy and in the past month I've been able to get back into a strong training routine. Due to the setback, I might actually run the 50-km race instead of the 50-mile. In either case, I'm confident that I'll be there on race day and that I'll run one of the ultra-marathon distances.

I was out running today, and it occurred to me that some coin (MemoryCoin was my first thought) might benefit from sponsoring my run. I have a few small expenses from the run: shoes (I need a new pair every couple months, they cost ~$110/pair), extra food (I don't know; maybe $20/week?) and race registration ($100). I'd love to offer my body as a moving billboard for MemoryCoin in exchange for MMC paying some of my expenses!

What's in it for MMC: I live in the Boulder, CO, USA area, and so far I've done almost all my running in town. Boulder is a community that spans all socio-economic strata of American life: we have everybody from hippies playing guitar on the street corner to silicon-valley software startup types. By the peak of my training in July, I expect to be running in and around Boulder approximately 8 hours per week. My idea is that I'd commit to wearing an MMC-branded T-shirt for all of my training, as well as on race day. This would provide exposure of the MMC logo to hundreds of people. In addition, MMC would be able to promote themselves as a community that sponsors high-endurance athletes like myself.

I wear a GPS watch for all my training that tracks my routes and distances, so I could run a blog where I'd keep my supporters updated on my training progress and maybe I'd show maps of where I've been running. Really, I'd provide whatever information MMC wants in order to justify your sponsorship - I'm not trying to just grab a bunch of money if it's not worth it for my sponsor.

What's in it for me: I love long distance running, I'm infatuated with crypto-equities, and this looks like a cool opportunity to promote both while offsetting some of my personal costs.

Well, what do you all think? If my calculations are right, it looks like it would take about 2 days-worth of all combined officer salaries to buy me a pair of shoes or pay my race registration fee. Does the MMC community think that money would be well-spent?

I'm going from the explanation of the auction mechanism that's given in the video; correct me if something has changed or I've missed some details.

For people unfamiliar with the proposed auction, it goes something like this: money from the opening bid is burned as dividends. Then the next bid is split into 3 parts:
1) The amount of the previous bid is returned to the previous high bidder.
2) 50% of the remaining amount is also returned to the previous high bidder.
3) The rest is burned as dividends.
I assume that the point of this is that it attracts people who like a good gamble, and that gamblers will create bidding frenzies that raise the price way up. Unfortunately, this auction mechanism has a lot of problems.

I'd like to write this up more formally, but alas, I'm not going to have time to do that for the next couple weeks. So here are a couple casual observations:
1. The only rational opening bid is 0 (or the minimum initial bid). If I bid minimum, then I maximize my potential revenue from the next bidder. As a result, the maximum profit for shareholders is only 50% of the total auction revenue.
2. There is no explicit incentive to place high bids, because at every stage, the lower I bid, either the less I pay for the domain name (because I am the winner) or the more profit I make from the next bidder. The only situation where it makes sense to bid higher than the minimum is when it's a high-profile auction with a low price and I'm afraid that if I only bid minimum, 100 other people also will, so I try to outbid them at this stage. This will make low-profile or end-stage auctions crawl along at a snail's pace.
3. Bidders have an explicit incentive to lie about how much they value the name. There are two kinds of bidders: a) the kind who wants to win, and b) the kind who doesn't care about the name, but just wants to make a quick buck bidding.
4. This mechanism creates all kinds of opportunities to game the system, and this can cost shareholders a lot of money. Example: I value "biophil.p2p" at 1000 DNS, but I'd obviously love to get away with paying less. So I start the auction at 0, and then the very next block, I enter a bid of 1500 DNS from another address. Notice that now, I've only paid 750 (because my first address got half the bid increase), but anybody who wants in now has to pay at least 1500. How is this good for shareholders? I would have been willing to pay 1000, but because the mechanism is so easy to game, I've essentially stolen 250 from the shareholders by a tiny bit of cleverness.

Some of these problems go away if you move to an ebay-style sequential 2nd-price auction, because then everybody's best move (dominant strategy) is to report their value truthfully. 2nd-price auctions have their faults also; if you really want to keep this system of paying bidders back for their bids, would you please consider decreasing the 50% part? You could change this to 10%; then shareholders get 90% of the total revenue, and the gaming-attack I talked about in 4 is much less profitable for the attacker. The attack is still possible, but it doesn't hurt anybody very much. Even 10% is an incentive for speculators and gamblers to come try to create bidding frenzies.

Another idea: condition each bidder's payout by how much larger his bid was than the previous bidder. Example: The bid is at 10. If I bid 11, and then the next guy bids 12, I get 0.5 profit. You could change this to one where if I only bid 11 (which corresponds to a 10% increase), then the most profit I can make is 5% of the next bid increment. But say I bid 15 (a 50% increase): now I'll get 25% of the next bid increment. My numbers don't work (the payout function has to be sublinear), but you get the idea. Now, I'm explicitly incentivized to bid more than the minimum bid at each stage. If you think this is interesting, I'll put a little more thought into it and design a bidder-payout-function that works.

That was a mouthful.

TL;DR: 50% bidder-payout is ripping the shareholders off.

We've had a lot of discussions about XTS price, and someone made a poll that gave us the "ask" side of an order book. Here's the "bid" side.

Note that I'm asking for the highest price you'd pay. You should answer "yes" to this question: If I came up to you and offered you a bitshare at the price you entered plus one dollar, would you refuse it?

Here's a question I've been wondering about:

When the Bitshares XT market first launches, there won't really be a market price for XTS since there won't have been any market transactions. So what will determine the collateral needed to short USD (and create BitUSD)? Will there be some hard-coded "starter-price" that disappears after the first XTS-BitUSD transaction?

I'm a newcomer to the MMC community, and I'm excited by the possibilities of this coin. One of the things that has frustrated me, however, is that the voting process seems unnecessarily opaque. Is there a simple way to see election rankings other than manually searching through every vote in the results and adding up address coin totals?