Quote from: bytemaster on June 13, 2013, 12:00:16 PM

So my question is this: suppose you were to create a new Alt Chain, what features should this chain support for best integration with MarketCoin?

I think the current requirements for integration with the system as I've written up are:

Can be used as a parent chain for merged mining
Uses transactions where outputs can be confirmed
Uses transactions which are confirmed in a blockchain
Irreversible transactions

One of the advantages is it works with standard Bitcoin transactions, and can be used with addresses (instead of pubkeys) if the same keypair is used on both the Bitcoin and Marketcoin network.

The last three properties are important for proof-of-payment, the first is important for having a perfect-knowledge system (or close enough for these purposes; not sure of the limits here). Maybe knowledge discovery is a better term.

I'm planning to expand the proof-of-payment algorithm so 'pledges' (similar to what Marketcoin uses) can be used as proof-of-intent-to-pay, where once the trade is made coins will be released. This is a little more complex though. It would be nice to support this for the first mainnet release, but I'm unsure if it's properly do-able or feasible as I haven't put that much thought into it yet.

Quote from: bytemaster on June 13, 2013, 12:02:19 PM

Please enlighten me on these more productive uses?

I think there plenty of productive uses if we use liberal amounts of imagination, in terms of salient productive uses, not so sure.

Quote from: bytemaster on June 13, 2013, 12:02:19 PM

Would the 'bitcoin' foundation ever sponsor an alt-coin if it looked to solve problems that couldn't be added to or directly integrated with Bitcoin?

I hope so, that's what Marketcoin is, ultimately. Let's see in 6 weeks

Quote from: bytemaster on June 13, 2013, 05:02:13 PM

Conclusion:
I believe that BitShares would enable all of the above interactions without the need for 'market coin'. When dealing entirely with crypto-currencies, no escrow would be required to get BTC,LTC,NMC,etc in/out of BitShares. Once you have crypto-BTC it would be easy to do a lot of exchanges between any other crypto* sub-currency without having to always find a real-time counter party (like MarketCoin would require).

With this latest setup I believe I have 'unified' MarktCoin, BitShares, and BTC Luke's crypto-bond system. I have significantly simplified the ability to find local people to trade with by minimizing the buy-sell spread between crypto-USD and USD and demonstrated how someone like Grandma can use a trusted (decentralized) 3rd party to gain benefits from the system without even having to use a computer.

Awesome! I look forward to seeing how this pans out!

On the note of the atomic trading alg and comparing it to Marketcoin:

Marketcoin requires no changes to the Bitcoin/altcoin network
Marketcoin does not use nLockTime (Marketcoin's finalisation system is different, you can look at the reversal as similar to nLockTime but it isn't the same thing)
Marketcoin has very interesting economic properties such as eliminating arbitrage between all currencies on the exchange
After the orders are locked in a block only one party has to do anything, the seller of MKC just sits back and waits
Way fewer steps
Possibly less opcode needs, but this won't fall either way until the protocol is fully developed

Also, love the use cases.