Quote from: becoin on September 02, 2013, 03:27:51 PM

Quote from: bytemaster on September 02, 2013, 08:49:50 AM

Imagine you wanted to start a bank, so you create a cooperation and issue 1 million shares of stock to the shareholders. On the date the bank is formed, it has no capital.

What is the face value of every share?

That question seems to me to hide quite a can of worms.

Suppose five banks launched, each bank issues one million shares, and offers their shares for sale for one bitdollar per share.

Each bank sells shares to each other, in equal amounts, so basically they barter, "I will give you X dollars worth of my shares for that same value worth of yours".

Now if the purported valuations of "all the other corps/banks thus far created" are to be believed, each of them can have a value of a million bitdollars, as witnessed by the fact they each own a million bitdollars worth of shares.

Another can of worms is when a share is put up for sale, is its market value to be considered to be different depending on who puts it up for sale?

That is, if corp one offers corp one shares for sale, are they worth a different value than if corp two put corp one shares for sale?

If not, why do some jurisdictions value the shares of itself that a corp owns differently than when others own them?

( That is: some jurisdictions apparently would not count corp-one shares that are owned by corp-one itself as being valuable assets/inventory contributing to the value of corp-one. But, if we substitute nation for corp, all of a sudden we see that USD in the possession of the US does count as inventory/assets/value even though ultimately it is backed by the nation in much the same way that shares of a corp are backed by a corp... I actually made a devtome page about this weird glitch, see http://www.devtome.com/doku.php?id=martian_accounting_galactic_milieu ... If owning my own shares makes them not count as valuable for inventory/'assets, won't I merely create holding companies to hold my shares for me, so I can own their shares instead of mine, in order that the actual current market value of my shares can be felt and used by me just like it can by others? I wonder how much of the world's on paper "wealth" is basically just such a shell-game or dutch-nesting-dolls game type of weirdness? )

-MarkM-