Quote from: tumak on June 10, 2013, 06:59:01 AM

Op is, however, just "contributing" useless blabber on forums and reddit.

I'm not sure if that will be the case forever, but the following canned response to a deeply thought out submission doesn't exactly inspire confidence.

Quote from: bytemaster on June 09, 2013, 09:58:41 PM

We have had this discussion in other places, but I think the problem needs to be divided into several distinct areas:

1) Escrow Services:
The purpose of these services is only to facilitate already agreed upon trades over a long distance as in-person trades in theory require no escrow. Escrow exchanges are almost by-definition multi-day events due to the slowness of traditional banking.

* The challenge posed by escrow is that all banking transactions are 'reversible' and therefore simply confirming a wire transfer, bank transfer, credit card payment, paypal, or dweller transfer is not enough.
* The third party is in theory subject to various laws if they actually hold fiat to facilitate the trade. This third party also risks being brought into any investigation the government may have regarding that transaction.
* The most decentralized version is NashX, though NashX only works between two people who already own crypto-assets.

I would submit that the P2P exchange system should not attempt to solve the escrow problem because 'traditional' escrow services that are entirely legal and 'not exchanges' nor 'money transmitters' could be used. There are other approaches that could be taken as well. 1) Both parties could have certified identities with a signed arbitration agreement with Judge.me or something similar. 2) Both parties could post and maintain a surety deposit that is entirely independent of the 'escrow' transaction. These approaches would probably be sufficient for anyone involved with a lot of trades but the 'setup time' would make the 'first transaction' the most difficult. This approach is also not as 'anonymous', but then again if you are transferring money through the traditional banking system it isn't really anonymous anyway. Lastly, do you really want to 'trade fiat' for 'bitcoins' with a random stranger via direct bank transfer in an environment where governments are cracking down on all such exchanges?

2) Digital/Crypto Currencies
- These carry value and can facilitate trade and be used as collateral. If a crypto-currency could be created that maintained near parity with actual dollars or gold then it could be used as part of a P2P exchange and enable in-person trades without having to worry about the exchange risk. I think this is probably the biggest part of establishing a truly decentralized exchange.

3) P2P Exchanges
- Ripple already covers this in a manner that is relatively fast, unfortunately Ripple depends upon people publicly publishing their 'trust' for others. The ultimate result of Ripple is that all parties are public and ultimately they end up trusting a 'centralized' gateway which will almost certainly require all of the same licensing as Mt. Gox. If Mt. Gox is not viable then neither is Ripple.

- A true P2P exchange would have to deal with digital crypto-equivalent of various currencies and ultimately not depend upon any 'public' issuer. If there is a 'public' issuer they would be breaking laws, represent a 'concentration of wealth' and thus a profitable target for government action. Therefore if there are issuers they must be anonymous.

- Any 'IOU' is only as valuable as the person standing behind it or the collateral they post to back it. As a result, IOUs are not perfectly fungible unless the collateral has sufficient margin and is held in a decentralized manner. The conclusion here is that short of 'ripple without gateways', all decentralized exchanges will require a means of holding collateral in a decentralized manner. The challenge then becomes how do you resolve disputes regarding collateral? Can it be managed by an algorithm? If the collateral is 'held by a 3rd party' how can we trust that 3rd party? I conclude from this that all collateral, margin, settling, and trading must be performed by some kind of crypto-currency with pre-defined rules that does not require trusting any 3rd party to hold funds nor settle disputes.

- Lastly, any P2P exchange will suffer from the 'speed-of-light' problem synchronization overhead. If it truly is a global order-book, then all orders must be matched, confirmed, and settled in a defined order. These exchanges will never be able to have Mt.Gox like performance until faster-than-light communication is possible. The closes we could hope for is something along the lines of many Open Transactions servers that run behind a 'BitMessage' like anonymous system with the backing of the OT servers being held in an anonymous, peer-to-peer manner. OT currently depends upon non-anonymous issuers who must be trusted and who ultimately could be shutdown by the government.

4) High Speed Exchanges

- These are 'centralized' but anonymous. They have to be 'trusted' in some manner, perhaps by having a surety bond posted somewhere to back all trades on their exchange. I do not think that 'high-frequency' trading is a *requirement* for a P2P exchange because as long as a low-frequency trading P2P exchange is available someone can and probably will set up anonymous high-frequency trading sites. The key to making high-speed exchanges decentralized is to make them so easy to setup and run that it could be done in an afternoon. Unfortunately, part of high-frequency trading is having a large market and the more 'decentralized' you make these exchanges the fewer people will exist at any one. As a result, we can conclude that high-frequency trading will always tend to be centralized with perhaps 1-3 major players in each jurisdictions as the upper limit to what the market could support.

To conclude, I believe that the requirements mentioned here: http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/11116/what-is-the-definition-of-a-p2p-exchange are mixing too many different and logically incompatible systems. So, instead we should attempt to break these requirements down into individual 'parts' and decentralize each part as much as possible given the constraints.

So here is my approach:

First we must establish that the *goal* is to exchange 'value' or 'purchasing power'. You don't actually need gold or silver so long as you have purchasing power that enables you to buy gold or silver without exchange rate risk. With this concept in mind we need to focus on moving and exchanging purchasing power without exchange rate risks in a decentralized manner. To move purchasing power does not mean a decentralized system must move the underlying asset.

1) We need a crypto-currency to back all trades and serve as collateral. If you want 'trustless IOUs' then the IOU must be collateralized in a 'trustless' manner and that implies some kind of crypto-currency block-chain that holds the collateral *AND* distributes it without needing to trust any party. No voting, disputes, or requirements for 'outside' information. These IOUs must not depend upon any action taken by any specific individual to 'fulfill'.

2) To be without any central points of failure, no-one must publicly back the issuance of any IOUs whether in the form of colored coins or new alt-chains. As a result, all debts must ultimately be settled via crypto-currency even if the debt was denominated in gold or silver. If an IOU requires a debt to be settled in actual gold, silver, or dollars and the person dies then you have a 'defaulted IOU' and thus a failure. These kind of negotiable digital bearer instruments are already 'illegal' in many places and there is no way for a decentralized system to force someone to make good on this kind of IOU or even be able to tell that they defaulted on it! The solution here is to have an 'IOU 1 $USD' backed by 2x that value in crypto-currency that will automatically be sold to cover the position and therefore no one is ever out the 'value of a dollar'.

3) All IOUs involve risk and in any sane would would have an opportunity cost associated with not paying them off. In effect, all loans must pay interest to the lenders in order to motivate both parties to take part in the transaction. What incentive does someone have to 'lend' a $USD to someone else while taking risks in gray areas of the law?

Given the above we can create a decentralized bitcoin-like crypto currency that pays dividends. We can then use this dividend paying crypto currency as the collateral for IOUs where the dividends serve as the 'opportunity cost' to the borrower and the reward to the 'lender'. A P2P exchange can be encoded into the blockchain that allows people to trade these collateralized crypto IOUs and establish a market price from which automatic covering via block-chain rules can be applied. The result will be a P2P system with trust-free IOUs denominated in Gold, Silver, USD, etc that also pays dividends.

This P2P system can then be the foundation upon which anonymous centralized exchanges can offer high-frequency trading and by which 'local-bitcoins' can facilitate much larger local markets for trust-free in-person exchanges. It would still be 'difficult' to move over $5K at a time as you would have to meet up with various people, but it should still be possible with a proper 'trusted' escrow agent.

Quote from: charleshoskinson on June 09, 2013, 10:04:49 PM

Bytemaster I'm glad you could make it here. Your feedback is always welcome and I look forward to collaborating with you in the future. I like some of the ideas you bring to the table.