Here is a link to his profile, try sending him a PM.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2167

I don't think you have enough feedback to become a trusted escrow.

Name: Anotheranonlol
Type: Fixed
Position: Hero Member
Post Count: 1126
Bitcoin Address: 1FBFibi6gARPFZhwoT8ciDUJKYheLcHoYC
UID: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=7480;sa=showPosts

I wasn't going to trust it long term as i feared it might just be a clonecoin with added gimmicks but now I see it has a 3D wallet I'm sold!

Damn.. I thought that technology was reserved for hollywood film studios, I'm impressed the development team has managed to bring it to our desktops. I think that's a sure sign of it's longevity

True, someone or something has to maintain a backing if we are dealing with something physical.
However there's no requirement that someone or something has to be a single centralized point of failure... There are degrees of centralization.

Last I checked there was only around 13 actual miners in bitcoin.(going by the actual definition of those who actually mine tx into a block) Really right now only 3 of them need to be compromised for (at the very least) bitcoins decentralized trust narrative to be classified as  compromised , and in reality a malicous actor controlling one or 2 of these entities could yield serious problems. Yet that is a much better position than last year. That's not as decentralized as some people imagine

Take the simplified example of backing a crypto asset with gold. We have an agency who'll accept your 1 gram gold and issue you 1 DIGIGOLD token. When you want your gold back you send the token and receive your gold. Simple enough, but there's the fair centralization issue you talk of. That one agency could go ahead and print as much DIGIGOLD as they want, playing fractional reserve with current supply etc.

So we can add another party in the form of a depository who'll independently verify inventory, and perhaps another party in the form of an external auditor. Then perhaps we'll segregate the trust by dividing the holdings amongst many vaults, and divide the actual issuance process to multiple agencies who have to sign off to try to prevent collusion.

Now that is nowhere near optimal (and it never will be) but it's not simple binary centralization, it's distributed trust. You write that you don't need a blockchain-based cryptocurrency, but whilst on-chain it has many of the same properties as bitcoin. (Users that hold DIGIGOLD can trustlessly send that gold token to anyone, anywhere, anytime)

 

from cursory glance seems bobbax same user as operator of cryptokk exchange
no surprise to hear that exchange left with users funds, with the cover of being hacked by adding a backdoored daemon  

Well said my man. We did not have to get Inspector Jacques Clouseau or Monsieur Poiret on the case to catch this slippery frog before he pinched our communities moneroj. Simple due diligence could well have prevented these losses.

After instawallet & mt gox debacles I think basic lesson clear: frenchmen not to be trusted keeping hands out of crypto cookie jars!

portefeuilles d'utilisateurs is the french speak or "user wallet". Yes it looks like "I'll use this in my portfolio".. do you think this is purely circumstantial?
it was hacked = il a été piraté . Yes! it looks like "I am a pirate". Coincidence? i think not!

Tour de Corse

Regarding the "massive amount of trust that has to be put into their partners to ship the metals and not turn into some type of fractional reserve system"

Precious metals are stored  bonded, insured and extensively guarded  at segregated accounts (meaning you could withdraw even if the company dissolved) at International Depository Services of Delaware. Holdings are audited daily and you yourself may request an audit. Individual proof of custody is issued for each and every unit added to inventory. The whole setup is fairly transparent compared to many "digital gold" offerings on the market today. Delivery is via the custodian if it's requested later or directly via the dealer-partner if delivery is requested immediately. I found it fairly simple to find delivery costs.

As for why Palladium is being sold for 0.0% over spot, that's because it's not being directly sold by serica, it's a user on the platform who has listed that for sale. They could well sell it for 50% under spot if they wanted (on site or via the decentralized exchange.. they could swap it for any other asset there too). It's kind of like amazon, where multiple sellers can offer the same product at whatever price they choose and a user can choose who to purchase from. . If you play like to play with both bitcoin and precious metals and perhaps want to merge between the two often this may well appeal to you. If you just want the physical metals straight away there is no need for this, same if you want futures, derivatives anything where you don't really truly care if you what you are trading is redeemable for physical..

It's easy to pick holes, harder to suggest a stronger approach. We are dealing with tangible goods- there is only trust minimization, no complete trustless approach, it's just about narrowing it down to parameters you can be reasonably comfortable with. I have to say I would be more confident storing PM"s with this service via the approach you suggested, which amounts to "occasionally taking pictures of the physical assets with a webcam" and "Dropping the silver rounds on a counter so people can hear the silver for themselves"

I definitely see the appeal of protocol defined supply (hard limit) of btc that has no requirement for physical backing.. with clear incentive mechanisms .. at least now and clear rules on how those coins are minted

However I argue creating arbitary assets backed by something physical on top of Bitcoin is not a fundamental misunderstanding, if anything those that imagine the scope of the applications of blockchain technology is limited to moving bitcoins back and forth have a short-sighted viewpoint of the potential we have here.

Perhaps the biggest problem this technology solves is verifiably replicating a uniform ledger across many untrusted or competing participants.
That ledger can act as a database for user defined asset registration of anything.. control of a private key grants control of property rights- You then have a cryptographically secure, transparent custody enforced by bitcoins well understood blockchain consensus mechanism . We're far from using this tech as  magic pill yet but i think there will be constant evolution and dramatic progress in that field.

Tangible goods are not going to disappear. Neither are those that want to hold or speculate on them. Bitcoin isn't a dominating currency or commodity right now..Even  if it was there will always be diversity. These tokenisation/'blockchainification' systems are bridging traditional commodities onto the bitcoin network where they do not lie on any central server, can be trustlessly traded p2p or used as digital representations of bailment receipts etc. Obviously risk outside of the blockchain walled garden requirement for trust is not eliminated entirely so a semi-trusted approach is taken. In the case of precious metals example above they issue a certificate of order from dealer & proof of custody with a depository (which themselves have external auditors) where it is held under segregated accounts. I'd say it's a better peace of mind than you'd get from traditional paper gold. It's a kind of physical/digital hybrid- the past has certainly shown demand for things like that.

In future Novel Banking API's, Smart contracts , Trusted computing/secure enclaves, Homomorphic computing, Zero knowledge proofs, sidechains etc open the gateway to way more advanced applications of the blockchain than the primitive apps currently built on it today.  

The classic example given here https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Smart_Property is of a car who's ownership is linked to a private key.  Based on that model you could, in theory create a token "Backed" by BMW's, and since both the BMW-token and the bitcoin could be swapped at once whilst the requirement for trust has not been eliminated entirely it has been reduced. A middleman has been cut out.

Smart property could be purchased, transferred or rented on the blockchain. Blockchain becomes a form of DRM. Airbnb for cars, bikes is possible.. I think it will be interesting to see some of the huge innovation here in the sharing economy and rise of decline of ownership in the coming years, I think it's wise not to discount it too quickly

Another example is banking API's  that can show you a cryptographic proof certain amount of fiat was sent/received and currently owned. In conjuction with moving control of the accounts to open smart contracts it's possible to represent fiat on the blockchain. This strategy can potentially ameliorate doubts with fractional reserves of fiat on centralized exchanges.None of these are anywhere close to being total panaceas. There are always external (often human introduced) weak-links but they do help in bridging intangible with the tangible.

"premined" Crypto-assets on the bitcoin blockchain backed by physical goods like silver already exist now:



https://sericatrading.com/leaderboard/

Realcoin became tether - https://tether.to/
It's used on bitfinex, poloniex etc

Voted no
Reason; laziness

Your vision has been realised. DPoS is used.

http://signup.skuchain.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7an9RkCG4s

Seems like a discrepancy on this data with daily volume reporting?

Wheres the trust weakness with that for the application you require?

They've enabled CNY withdrawals for now, Next USD, then NXT, then XCP. You can only withdraw when they turn on withdrawal for a coin.

As far as the btc goes they are trying get info from bitcoinfog mixer op.

That's essentially the point of the counterparty protocol.

For decentralised bets you can use certainly make use of it. I touched upon it briefly in the following comment:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=395761.msg10565006#msg10565006

There is functionality in the protocol for more advanced Contracts for difference and such. It is also possible to run schellingcoin (or similar) on CounterParty as a smart contract instead.

perhaps this is somewhat relevant to your multiple competing currencies platform design:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Bc-kZXROTeMzG6AvH7rrTrUy24UwHoEcgiL7ALHMO0A/pub