.p2p auction parameter discussion

[toast]

Ok so let's use that analogy on the other extreme:

I pay $100 per year to list my personal webpage with a few download links to some crypto tools I built. A few days before my lease expires someone bids $200, I'm on vacation and they get it. Replace my download links with versions that steal everyone's keys.

So now what, we have to add some logic where when someone makes a bid above you there's some minimum time you get to re-bid before you actually lose the name? I guess that's not so bad, I just have to somehow notify all my users that my site is about to get compromised.

The more concerning scenario, actually almost identical to the one you said but formulated in a way that doesn't sound irrational: Big Corp sees that my site with its new brand is quickly gaining popularity, says to pay them $10k per month or else they'll buy my name for that much because it's worth it for them to not have competition grow even if it is not possible to monetize the users for that much. This also coincidentally happens near the end of my lease, because hey it takes about a year to build up a good brand.



@adam I imagine everyone will always be using $ value to judge and so I don't think initial supply or price per share matters at all. Let's just pretend we're using USD for these, all the points made by everyone else are still valid.

[Agent86]

@Agent86 I still do not see how you can't imagine someone with more money than you wanting to buy your name and doing something malicious with it. I would *never* rent a domain if I expect it to be possible for some rich guy I piss off to snipe it out from under me.

Ok, I'm trying to think of best way to explain how I see it.

Imagine you have a barber shop and you are leasing a space for your business (common practice).  You have been there 5 years and have prepaid your lease out by 5 years @ $12k/yr.  Now, your customers know your location, you have adds in yellowpages etc.  Some rich guy who wants to spite you (maybe the large hairdresser at other end of stripmall?)   He wants to raise your rent to $20k/yr.  So he goes to your landlord and puts in deposit of $20k x 5yrs = $100k.  Your landlord makes you aware of it and says you have 5 years to decide what to do.  If you make a quick decision, he has the spot next door available at your old rate, or maybe less.   So if you like you can take 6 months to tell all your customers contact the yellow pages etc. get the new shop open, move your stuff, forward the mail and then collect a little less than $40k profit for your trouble.  Sure, it could be a bit of a pain, but you get rewarded.  Lets look at the other guy:  He just spent $100k paying way above market rate for a place he has no need for just in some vain attempt to inconvenience you.  He'll then have to eat it at a complete loss or immediately put it back on the market at a big loss.  I guess he could open a hairdresser there, but everyone has been made well aware that this is new ownership and he is not fooling anyone.  It's a lot of effort and money to start a business he never intended to start and the lease price was too high for you so he's obviously overpaying.  He's kicking himself already.  Maybe you don't want to move, maybe you stay there for 4 years while this rich jerk has his $100k tied up doing nothing.  Maybe it was a good time for you to move on anyway at that point.  Then you start the moving process; he'll probably start panicking and trying to cut a deal with you because he wants his money back already and doesn't want the stupid shop for 5 years.

I mean is this a real problem that people contend with?  Is this really a way to harm someone or just a great way to shoot yourself in the foot?

Maybe he's been more sneaky and has been slowly making higher offers over time but it's always up to you if you like to extend your lease at a bit higher rate, or if you tie up the attackers money and make him start sweating.  Or if you take the money and run at a time that is most convenient for you.

[AdamBLevine]

After a talk with BM just now:


* You get back exactly what you put in, no kickbacks.
* Delegates set the number of auctions that are allowed to close in a given time to prevent domains that didn't get attention from getting sold off.
* Global, fixed renewal rate set by delegates.


@Agent86 I still do not see how you can't imagine someone with more money than you wanting to buy your name and doing something malicious with it. I would *never* rent a domain if I expect it to be possible for some rich guy I piss off to snipe it out from under me.

First thing I do when this releases (if I don't just sell my shares) is buy every halfway reasonable sounding domain I can and promise never to sell them in hopes you guys start to "get it"

Really? You're going to sink $20,000 on a few hundred domains and not sell them for a profit?

I think his point is that it's not 20k if he starts out with a bunch of domainshares since he has an investment in bitshares and the supply just went to 2 billion, so we're all going to be rich rich rich! 

and thus it's not really 20k.  It might be the opportunity cost of having spent them as 20k, but the base cost will be a fraction of a fraction of that.

Or am I missing something?

[toast]

I still think you need a minimum price.  Previously I said a decaying price function, but the point was really just that auctions have a minimum price.  There are going to be domains people fight over, then domains that are worth the minimum allowed to bid.  Those low value (but worth something) domains could clog your blockchain.  I mean, thats what i'd at least consider doing.  Although thats not necessarily wise either with renewal fees.

Yes, there's a minimum price, probably equal to the renewal fee which is reasonably priced (I'd imagine delegates set it to just below the renewal price of icann domains)

[gamey]

I still think you need a minimum price.  Previously I said a decaying price function, but the point was really just that auctions have a minimum price.  There are going to be domains people fight over, then domains that are worth the minimum allowed to bid.  Those low value (but worth something) domains could clog your blockchain.  I mean, thats what i'd at least consider doing.  Although thats not necessarily wise either with renewal fees.

[toast]

After a talk with BM just now:


* You get back exactly what you put in, no kickbacks.
* Delegates set the number of auctions that are allowed to close in a given time to prevent domains that didn't get attention from getting sold off.
* Global, fixed renewal rate set by delegates.


@Agent86 I still do not see how you can't imagine someone with more money than you wanting to buy your name and doing something malicious with it. I would *never* rent a domain if I expect it to be possible for some rich guy I piss off to snipe it out from under me.

First thing I do when this releases (if I don't just sell my shares) is buy every halfway reasonable sounding domain I can and promise never to sell them in hopes you guys start to "get it"

Really? You're going to sink $20,000 on a few hundred domains and not sell them for a profit?

[bitbro]

Agent86 is Satoshi


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Agent86]

If you guys aren't going to implement a system that lets people pay market rate for a domain, you may as well just treat them like user names at that point.  They are first come first serve and everyone pays just on the data cost of storing the names, so more names means higher cost per name.  The whole one-time auction process to reach "market rate" is silly, confusing, and does not accomplish the stated goals.

".p2p" will never be taken seriously by businesses, and will never be able to compete in a meaningful way with the ICANN system.  At least ICANN has some checks and balances against squatting.

First thing I do when this releases (if I don't just sell my shares) is buy every halfway reasonable sounding domain I can and promise never to sell them in hopes you guys start to "get it"

My proposal does not result in people having their domains "seized" against their will in any way.  Under my idea, there is no reasonable reason for anyone to ever bid above a generic market value or the value that the domain personally holds to them for very long term use.  Long term domain users who have committed to their domain are rewarded with a long term commitment from the DAC.  Under my system BestBuy can be reasonably assured of getting bestbuy.p2p at a fair market rate even if they are late to the ".p2p" game.  Under other proposals they will never get it because I'm going to squat it to prove a point.  Under my proposal, even current TLDs like ".com" could eventually move to this type of system and away from ICANN. 

[merockstar]

hey toast, maybe something like this could help you visualize it.

I tried to make you a spreadsheet, but quickly realized that I've forgotten most of what I learned in high school about spreadsheetery.

but if you or someone on the forums is good at this stuff, you could take a look at this and get an idea of what I was going for (clearly I screwed something up because I'm getting negative values)



http://www.filedropper.com/toastspreadsheet




http://i.imgur.com/ORbd0Cy.png

[bytemaster]

After putting even more thought into it...

1) because users invest a lot into making the name valuable (and we want them to do this), they need to own it.
2) there are two kinds of names, squatted names, and active/in-use names and the ratio is likely 100:1
3) our goal is to maximize the value the blockchain earns while preventing early
4) because names are a scarce resource (limited blockchain space) perhaps all that is needed is a way to scale annual costs with the number of names.  If price goes up as the number of names increases the cost of holding names for squatting purposes goes up as well. 

All of that said, I think the biggest problem we have is that price is a moving target.

So lets keep it very simple:
1) You bid on a name, if you get outbid you only get X% back so bid wisely.
2) Let the delegates set the minimum bid based upon which transactions they are willing to include.
     - if delegates earn a commission on sales then their incentive is to balance volume vs price to maximize profit.

Shareholders now vote on delegates which set the price.  Each delegate is only able to to include a certain number of transactions in their block so if one delegate wanted to give names away "for free" then they could  but would be limited to 1% and only if they had shareholder approval.     

[gamey]

My thoughts - 

This system is very complicated.  A lot of people will want to understand the auction rules before they start.  I believe this will hinder early adoption/bidders to some extent.  Although it will be self-explanatory once implemented in a GUI, people are just going to be a bit slack-jawed at the start.

I agree with Agent86 and everyone else about trying to prevent squatting.  I think the reasonable partial solution may be to have a decaying start price.  So it starts at 1k USD and has some decay function for unbid auctions and stops short of $0.  $20 ?  Seems like a reasonable price discovery mechanism.

I need to look at renewal fees. (?)

I think E-bay with 0 start price works just as well as setting higher initial prices.  There is definitely some psychology involved and I am pretty sure it involves the interactivity of bids that is tied into competitiveness.  People get caught up in the moment. 15 second times blocktimes are boss in that regard.  So trying to guess R.. I would set it really low.  The downside though is that we can't have "hidden" bids so the interactivity/bidding war isn't there even with the 15 second block times.

As far as D …  you're going to have to have a sophisticated bidder to start taking such a thing into account.  With that in mind, choosing D is beyond me.

A sim makes more sense when actually addressing the OP. 

[Agent86]

Frankly, it just adds a big unknown into the equation that would keep me from using p2p if I was looking at the p2p features.  People are coming to p2p so they don't have to worry about their domain being removed by some process out of their control. AFAIK thats the main reason.

It allows you to buy a lease that no government or anyone can take from you for the time that you have paid for it.  It allows you to establish long term ownership of a domain over time that becomes very hard to ever take from you.

The whole point of p2p to me is to be uncensored.  You've just removed the largest selling point for me.  Anyway.. I agree about disagreeing.  I do think with the current system there will be a lot of squatting.  Although squatting has lost a lot of value with the proliferation of top level domains.. so.. lots of things to consider.

The system I propose is not "censored".  It is governed by very clear rules that are predictable and not up to anyone's discretion.  I don't think it treats people unfairly.

Squatting kills the value proposition out the door.   It could be worse than in our current system because no one looks at trademarks etc.  I think no one takes it serious when all the major domains are being squatted.

I would want this to be a system that could be used by everyone including large companies, not just a system for early adopter crypto nerds.

I think we could look at details but I think preventing squatting is more important for adoption of the DAC than protecting a person's "right" to forever monopolize domains that they got for cheap.

[toast]

Can we pretend like the auction system is finalized and actually discuss the parameters in the OP?

[gamey]

The sharp guys wise to the exploits are not likely to participate in a simulation.  There are a ton of varying scenarios.  Businesses are built around a single domain over a log period of time.  There really is no way to simulate this and expect to learn anything.  Even people participating in a dry run would not be motivated to give accurate information on their intentions.

I think it comes down to what is likely to scare off customers vs the price gained.  A lot of very complicated pull it out your butt math which I'm nowhere smart enough to attempt.

[vikram]

1) Press for the simulation/testing phase. 2) Gameify the simulation/testing phase. 3) Exploits found go ASAP 1 again.

Maybe my intellect is just too limited, but I don't see any other way to figure this stuff out than by being experimental. It is like when you sit inside too long and you go outside and become astonished at how detailed everything is.