Pretty bold claims from Middleton, but I have tried it and it works, at least in a beta phase, not vapor phase or proof of concept phase, but beta phase. You can trade all tickers that Cypherdoc mentions on here.
I still don't understand how the tickers are fed into veritaseum to settle the bets. Can you explain that?
Saying "it works" without understanding how it works is short-sighted.
Twice or thrice I tried to find technical documentation (wading through all the promotional crap) and was stifled, so
I assumed it is centralized bullshit.
That's my assumption, too... until it's explained how it works and it works in a way I can trust (which I doubt, but I've been wrong before).
If it's Reggie typing in 50000 tickers every hour then there might be no "counterparty risk", but there's plenty of other risk.
EDIT: I PMed him, maybe he'll show up here and explain. If not, it hardens my assumption.
See slide 14 here
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1UxB33wp1rCncBtPbuzQbkS1SZg_fjCTNMqu-wZGii-o/pub?start=true&loop=false&delayms=10000&slide=id.g7b8415063_38Thanks for chipping in! Your other post ("centralized oracle") confirmed my suspicion. I don't share TPTB_need_war's view that that fact makes veritaseum centralized bullshit, though. I suspect it might be a great system. I love the fact that it lives on the bitcoin blockchain and has no other token. I also love that there's no counterparty risk and in addition I'm guessing it ties up some bitcoins in contracts and I
do like that, too.
About the "other risk": where is the oracle on your server getting the tickers from? I guess that process should be made transparent at some point so we can at least know how it could be manipulated.
Certainly the incentive is high for some rogue employee somewhere to falsify some ticker feed you're pulling for just long enough for a large bet to be settled in his favor, no? Clearly there's noone capable/willing to fix something like that after the fact.
Only the data feed is centralized, everything else is fully distributed, which is better than centralized (reference the first link that I put up which explains this). A decentralized data feed just wouldn't work and it would be taking a step backwards from the current legacy system unless and until we have more activity than the centralized exchanges. Securities data fees are commodity items, and very easy to corroborate, very difficult to get away with in terms of fraud and/or manipulation.
As for someone in my camp manipulating a data feed, he/she would have a hard time doing so (we get them from 3rd parties) and even a harder time concealing it, and even a harder time than that getting away with it (each client plus the server has the ability to audit, although that is not implemented yet). You'd have to somehow change a data feed, hack into 3 disparate systems to inject that false data feed (whose real feed is freely availalble to all) and then hope nobody notices.
As it stands now, I believe our system is safer than the status quo by a long shot.
I understand. Thanks again for clearing some things up.
For the second time I will try to get my hands dirty with this. I have the client installed and the wallet backed up. Now I need some newbie type of help. I checked veritaseum.com for documentation and found the quick start video. It's hard to dig through the promotional talk and I stopped midway for now.
Is there some kind of written documentation somewhere on how to use the client and formulate orders? Is there a support chat on irc or a bitcointalk thread? I don't want to spam this beauty here.
First of all, thanks for giving us a try. I personally appreciate it.
Look in the products menu at the top of the site for the following links (and more stuff):
Quick start tutorial
http://veritaseum.com/index.php/download/veritaseum-wallet/quick-start-tutorialTrade modelling utility
http://veritaseum.com/index.php/download/veritaseum-wallet/trade-modelling-utilityIf you wish, I can walk you through a trade right here in this forum. It's actually very simple, it's just based on the general concept of a swap thus possibly quite different from what many are used to. Think in terms of buying one exposure and paying for it with another. Use tickers to describe each exposure you'd like to buy (receive) and sell (pay) and voila, you've created your first swap contract! Don't use time based tickers that contain dates (ex. options or futures). If you want a high leverage contract based on an underlying or an index, you can use a ticker to access that underlying or index directly (ex 10 year treasury) then use our leverage option to dial in as much gearing as your stomach can handle. Its digital, and its unlimited (theoretically up to 10,000x). This way you avoid theta and time decay issues inherent in options, as well has delta and gamma and sensitivity to volatility. As I mentioned to the guy in the previous post these are swaps, not options. Options are not well suited for bitcoin speculation due to their sensitivity to volatility and bitcoins extreme volatility.
The trade modelling utility is an excel spreadsheet that allows you to fully model any trade with expenses, sensitivity analysis, etc. Veritaseum is actually a very power platform that can allow you to create a structure that has exposure to up to 5 different assets simultaneously with leverage of several hundred times! As you may be able to ascertain, this can be very difficult to do in your head! At the same time you can do a simple buy Apple for USD trade or short BTC for USD (or EUR or EURGBP pair, etc.).
If you are going to explicitly trade forex, you must use "=x" to indicate your desire to have that ticker represent a forex symbol. For instance, "USD=x" is the symbol for US dollars, while "USD" is the ticker for ProShares Ultra Semiconductors (USD) -NYSEArca. With ~45,000 of so tickers to choose from, you have to be rather exact. The client will attempt to validate the tickers for you, but it can't tell that you meant USD currency vs USD leveraged ETF without the correct input. I mention this because this is a mistake that I assume is being made.