Quote from: ProfMac on October 15, 2013, 05:50:14 PM

Quote from: itod on October 15, 2013, 05:20:02 PM

Quote from: ProfMac on October 15, 2013, 05:06:55 PM

Quote from: ProfMac on October 15, 2013, 04:52:49 PM

I did not try to snipe. I was consistently ahead of several hundred bidders and my bid seemed safe. I monitored the auction on an ongoing basis. Their site failed to respond with several minutes remaining. I did not find a mechanism to increase my bid, only to cancel and re-open.

I was not able to express my intent to bid on their auction site. I am sure that this was true of others as well. Not only that, the site does not show the bidding results anymore, they were taken down when the auction was over. I think that an essential aspect of an auction is transparency, and the final results are not transparent.

I think there is a wide open field for anyone else to compete at auctioneering.

And Furthermore ...

Some of you may remember that I held an auction on the blockchain. It was a multi winner auction, and it ended at a certain block number. All bids included in or before that block were valid. I have had an interest in auctions for a very long time. It was trivial to increase a bid. It was less trivial to see standings during the auction, but that is an opportunity for someone to develop software to interpret a known auction address on the blockchain.

What is missing from my auction, and from this auction, is a mechanism similar to eBay where a maximum bid can be entered and the little bump bids are made automatically. That is also a feature that an auction companion could implement on the individual bitcoiner's machine.

In contrast to this auction, my auction results are still visible, as the bids and refunds are in the blockchain. The entirety of "approvals" to move payments within the TradeHill system seems to be a pointless labor cost to me. I need help to see the motivation or utility of it.

I have also considered developing such a service, had a very similar idea like yours, but there are two problems I don't know how to solve:

1) block finding times can oscillate for serious amount of minutes, so there can not be fixed ending time of auction, feature people like and may be essential for successful auction

2) some bids may fail to be included in the current block because:
a) it depends on which nodes broadcasted individual transaction (bid),
b) it is discretionary to the mining pool which finds the block if it will include any individual transaction or not, especially the ones close to the actual block finding time.

If you have any ideas how to solve these two issues I would very much like to hear them.

1. I saw disagreements in many auctions over the exact ending time. The use of block inclusion does not reduce the uncertainty of when to bid, but it does make after the fact auditing completely transparent.
I also had an extension mechanism, when a valid bid transaction was confirmed, the auction was auto-extended 10 more blocks past that block. I think any software would want to let this be an auctioneer decided option.

2. My instructions to bidders was to bid early, or pay a premium miner's fee. Many of my rules are a philosophically antagonistic toward sniping. In the event that many people bid at the last minute, the bid extension also helps mitigate any odd behavior from the miners.

I think that a good auction client would pay attention to any unconfirmed transactions paid to the auction's bid address. This would give notice of bids that could be included in the blocks. It should be possible for the auction client to pre-fill the auction amount to a winning value plus a safety amount, and the bidder could either click "Bid" or edit the value.

Regarding the 10 more blocks extension I think that is bit too much. It's an hour and a half, nobody has that much time to waste bidding, IMHO even extending one block at a time my lead to too long auctions and bidders losing interest, but it sure may be configurable and left to auctioneer to decide.

I'm not so antagonistic towards sniping because it saves bidders much time and effort, and people tend to like it. You leave your maximum bid and system is responsible to apply it but not disclose it to others, and off you go just checking latter if you won or not. It's a feature actually IMHO.

Thanks everyone for the input. Sorry for this off-topic chat. I may just decided on project to work in my spare time next few months. If anyone else is interested in this please PM me and we can discuss things off this thread.