Quote from: dacoinminster on July 25, 2011, 09:59:31 PM

Quote from: jtimon on July 25, 2011, 06:21:44 PM

Imagine we have an intrade-chain denominated and paid in bitcoin (so not a good place to short BTC). The chain makes the escrow, but it cannot generate bitcoins out of nothing, they're real bitcoins from the btc network.
What I don't get is how you get from the intrade to an asset that can be sold at any moment for the current price (in BTC) of a barrel of oil.
How is that done with bets? How many parts are necessary?
I don't know how to do it even with a stable currency.

I think that the intrade idea was suggested as an alternative to holding "barrel of oil" type contracts. If speculation worked using binary options like intrade uses, you probably wouldn't be buying and selling bitcoin-backed contracts.

I'm disappointed. I thought you had a system with "hold a barrel of oil" contracts based on options instead of backing. It sounded almost magical to me but I was very curious. I think I get binary contracts, I just though there was a way to turn or combine them into a "hold a barrel of oil"-like contract.

It seems to me that you just want to have a currency based on bitcoin plus option based insurances for both bitcoin going down and going up. Option traders would sell those insurances. Still don't know where are you going to get all this shorts but it would be possible. It would not be stable, but more stable than bitcoin. I don't think a chain is needed nor useful for that.

Again, I don't know much about options.
But I still don't know what is wrong with having an intrade-chain like the one you proposed with an unstable currency. You could denominate them in whatever currency you like (even if it doesn't exist, a reference currency) and pay them with bitcoins. Once you have an input of information about markets you can redeem automatically the contracts before the money in the escrow can't meet the obligation. I guess you can't apply it to binary options. It should be possible to deposit more funds in the escrow to avoid the automatic redemption of the contract. It would be great to have bitoption in this thread.

Anyway, I think the best idea of the thread is to have a chain that "knows" the prices of commodities. I'm thinking about proposing freicoin 2 with a dynamic monetary base (You hated freicoin? Wait to see what's new in freicoin 2).
With price deflation the system would increase the demurrage rate but increase more the block reward (thus increasing the monetary base).
With price inflation you would decrease the demurrage rate but decrease more the block reward (thus decrasing the MB).
With that you just got the full feedback loop.
With stable prices you keep the demurrage and the annual reward equal.
But that sounds too complicated, let's think first about the intrader-chain without arbiters.