Quote from: TPTB_need_war on January 16, 2016, 07:44:51 PM

Quote from: masterOfDisaster on January 16, 2016, 06:44:45 PM

I beg your pardon for being off-topic.

Afaics, it is not off-topic. Decentralized exchange is an integral aspect of overall decentralization of crypto currency.

Quote from: masterOfDisaster on January 16, 2016, 06:44:45 PM

But as you have an immense understanding of crypto currencies, I thought I might ask a question regarding a part of the recent conversation.
I'd have asked via PM, but I bet a lot of people are interested in your assessment.

Quote from: TPTB_need_war on January 16, 2016, 06:27:21 AM

Quote from: The Pharmacist on January 16, 2016, 05:18:49 AM

, but the Cryptsy thing pisses me off. The high level of scuntitude they've displayed and complete disregard for their customers just makes me want to scream. I did in my car on the way home, but it didn't help.

Why do you scream when you've been incessantly warned that storing your crypto currency with any third party is inherently unsafe and can never be safe.

That is why we need decentralized exchanges, but these have technical challenges that have yet to be overcome.

Don't you think that decentralized exchanges like
MercuryEx or
Blocks & Chains Exchange
are on a good way, because in difference to other decentralized exchanges they use no proxy tokens, but do transactions on the native blockchains.

My understanding is, that MercuryEx has been stopped, because transaction malleability makes using it unsafe until OP_CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY is widely available.

And Blocks & Chains Exchange is not as decentralized as some might wish, but for a corporation that might still be ok and much better than the current centralized exchanges.

There was another project for a decentralized exchange I was looking at recently but I can't remember the name off the top of my head. Go to monsterer's thread where he is selling the 200 BTC profit shares in his metaexchange and I put some links there about decentralized exchange. The name of that other project can be found from there. Monsterer could you quote my post from there over here for us? I don't have time to go digging for your thread.

Afaik, the insoluble fundamental problems of decentralized exchanges that operate directly on the block chains of the coins being exchanged are:

Block chains don't have fast enough transactions and can't handle the trading volume.
The exchange protocol requires long delays (partially because of the third issue below), which means the paradigm can be DDoS attacked, thus rendering it unsuitable (since exchange is normally a very time sensitive action).
Orphaned blocks can lead to one of the parties losing all the coins.

And yes afaik malleability makes decentralized exchange impossible. But even after fixing that, the block chains of all the altcoins need to have special changes made to their protocol (hard forks) and still you will have the insoluble problems I bullet-pointed above.

I think the more viable solution may be to have digital assets as Bitshares has done, e.g. BitUSD, BitBTC, BitShitCoin, etc. And these can be traded on a single block chain in a decentralized manner. So then all the inconsistency and DDoS issues of the latter two bullet-pointed above are afaics ameliorated (but let me dig deeper into that in the future before I can say this will 100% confidence). You'd still have the problem though of needing a centralized exchange to obtain the digital assets, so I am not sure this solves anything. The entire problem of decentralized change seems rather insoluble. The issues that plague decentralized exchange are related to some of the issues that probably make Blockstream's side chains insoluble.

As for the block chain scaling issue of the first bullet-pointed above, that is what I am working on now with my proposed design which was discussed upthread.

As for Bitshares, they have some ideas that are useful, but they seem to shoot themselves in the foot continuously as the following linked posts exemplify:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1319681.msg13566505#msg13566505
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1090964.msg13515793#msg13515793
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1090964.msg13513902#msg13513902
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1319681.msg13501040#msg13501040
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1319681.msg13516897#msg13516897

I think bitshares has made some very good design decisions and are one of the more underrated projects around here. They are due to correct to the mean of top 2 or 3 cryptocurrencies.