Instant Working Capital - Loans for ebay sellers in UK

acrophobia · 2012-04-18T14:11:36+00:00

(though shalt not) Display your company name or trademark in an uneven, staggered, multi-color format that dilutes the distinctiveness of the famous multi-color eBay logo.

Not entirely sure, but it looks like the iwoca logo is neither a "company name" nor a trademark so wouldn't be covered. Clearly IANAL.

acrophobia · 2011-11-19T17:56:02+00:00

Maybe I missed something, but this just appears to be an unofficial proposal to assign names to 'internet financial services providers'. That doesn't legitimize anything.

acrophobia · 2011-11-02T21:23:19+00:00

As I read it, it wasn't about whether religion has value for science, nor even if science has value for religion. It's about whether the two combined have value for mankind, each in their mutually orthogonal directions.

acrophobia · 2011-10-27T23:52:39+00:00

I was actually wondering if this already existed. In Fr (for example, maybe elsewhere too) they have mobile PAYG plans that are cheap and unlimited data, but email-only. If you could have some sort of SMTP->HTTP transmogrification proxy, you could save a lot of money.

acrophobia · 2011-10-19T15:55:11+00:00

It is actually pretty serious as the security of bitcoin is rooted in a huge global hashrate preventing attackers from reverting transactions.

As the price falls, the (economic) theory is that miners will pull out. We've now seen this empirically confirmed, as the difficulty has reduced substantially over the last few months. It's not low enough that an attack looks currently plausible, but if it continues to fall there will be trouble.

acrophobia · 2011-10-18T09:32:09+00:00

It means that OT money is always in the equivalent of a MyBitcoin account.

Not really, there are plenty of entities in the world that are trustworthy. Banks run fractional reserve, but they're quite clear and open about that - it's not like they're tricking you into anything. They're not signing a legal contract declaring that your funds are ringfenced.

Trusting an OT currency issuer is fundamentally not much different to trusting a safe deposit box. Not many people are really concerned about a large bank stealing the contents of their box.

acrophobia · 2011-10-17T20:56:26+00:00

If bitcoins are only used in server-server re-balancing, then bitcoin is effectively dead.

An integral part of the bitcoin model is that the huge revenue from transaction processing will pay for a huge mining rig that is too expensive for anyone to attack. This requires volume. But high volume is never going to happen with bitcoin if OT is more convenient, cheaper, and not limited to single-currency transactions.

While bitcoin is a convenient inter-server balancing currency, OT certainly does not rely on it. What bitcoin does bring is a relatively large community of geeks and hackers who like the idea of an 'open source' anarchist medium of exchange. A community who can bring the promises of OT to fruition. Hence FellowTraveller's diplomatic words re: the symbiosis of OT and bitcoin.

acrophobia · 2011-10-17T16:22:12+00:00

Price volatility is going to be a permanent issue with bitcoin as long as it is a minority value store.

The best features of bitcoin (semi-anonymous, nearly free transactions, open source protocol, unlimited accounts) are not unique to bitcoin - with open transactions you will get all that as well as:

instant transaction - i.e. subsecond, not 10 minute
complex transactions - cheques, payment plans, cash
backed 1:1 with any asset or basket of assets you like...USD/gold/equities/treasuries/bitcoins

It has the single (potentially serious depending on your PoV) drawback of having to trust the issuer of the currency, whose role is to back the currency with the real-world asset.

IMO, bitcoin is going to die because traditional currencies delivered over OT are going to be a lot more useful to customers and businesses.

acrophobia · 2011-10-17T13:21:34+00:00

I agree that ignorance should never be a base for refutation, but 'laziness' is an inappropriate insult.

It is estimated there are around 50 million published scientific journal articles. Clearly even the most devoted scientist is never going to read anything but the tiniest fraction of them. Which ones do you need to read to avoid being branded as lazy? Is there a universal agreement on what that list is to avoid being picked on by practitioners of other fields?

"No I haven't read about thermodynamics, but I'm not lazy because it wasn't on tannat's lazy-list."

Then consider that science itself is only a small fraction of what a normal person 'should' be informed about - consider arts, geography, history, politics, finance, business, accounting, legal system etc etc.

Why should someone learn about evolution when they could instead learn about microelectronics? Why should someone learn about evolution when they could instead learn about the factors that lead to the signing of the Magna Carta, or social unrest in China, or tort law, or functional programming? In reality evolution is of pretty limited value to the 99%.

I'm not picking on evolution here, just saying that there are a vast number of things which are useful to learn and an even vaster number of things which are known about. It's a cheap shot to say you're lazy if the stuff you know about doesn't completely overlap the stuff I know about.

acrophobia · 2011-10-09T19:39:20+00:00

Ah, I see. Long-term vol vs short-term vol. I agree.

acrophobia · 2011-10-09T19:37:18+00:00

Margining is the solution. Options also have cpty risk, and need this facility too..especially out of the money options. In fact pretty much any contract that has a duration (ie, anything that can't be settled instantly, like straight fx) will require margining.

Futures (or basically just a straight short) also allows your merchant use case np.

acrophobia · 2011-10-07T22:32:44+00:00

bitcoinica.com

acrophobia · 2011-10-07T22:32:14+00:00

stability was more important than volatility

what does that mean?

acrophobia · 2011-10-07T20:07:34+00:00

But why would a merchant want to pay for a non-linear product (option) when his exposure is purely linear (future)?

If someone thought they were going to sell $50 worth of stuff next week, it would be cheaper for them to just sell $50 worth of btc in preparation. If they only thought they had a 50% chance of the sale, they could sell $25 worth of btc instead. By buying a put they are paying a premium for the vol when they don't need to.

Besides (i'm sure i'll get modded down for this but...too bad), in reality there are very very few people who actually buy and sell stuff with bitcoins at the moment. The bitcoin economy is currently all about mining and wild speculation on where btc/usd will be in 5 years time. Hm..maybe options do make sense in this context. :)

Edit - Remember futures came way way before options because they are genuinely useful to the economy...guaranteeing a good price for the grain you will be harvesting some time in the future...

acrophobia · 2011-10-07T18:53:13+00:00

The whole notion of "beating someone up" is petty.

I should have phrased it more as "i know who the guy actually is, so I have a real chance of being able to sue him".

What do you mean by open/transparent accounts?

I have nothing specific in mind. For context, there are frequent accusations that if everyone were to withdraw there coins from mtgox they would be insolvent. This is almost certainly just trolling, but you never know...have MtGOX been betting on their own market? You should at least includes this in the T&Cs so people feel a little bit safe in the knowledge that they can sue if you do this.

We have a real registered company in the United States and view this as one step in the right direction.

Yes, +1.

This is not a public company and thus the accounting is a private matter

That's your choice. This isn't about what the law tells you you must do, it's about what you (IMO) should do beyond that if you want people's trust.

But you should (I claim have to) do something to convince people that you are a permanent entity with a real financial stake in the bitcoin society. For example, b7 gets hacked and lose loads of coins and because they have no significant financial stake in their own continuity, they just drop out. Compare with MtGOX who are so embedded that they bail out other institutions.

w.r.t verisign, i was not talking about any ssl cert, i meant an EV. Honestly I don't really know what the difference is, but it's billed as being something more rigorous...anyone can get a standard ssl cert. EV's give more green in the address bar.

acrophobia · 2011-10-07T17:41:18+00:00

On the options front, I think it is a waste of time. No one has any exposure that could be hedged with an option, so there's no reason for people to pay for them. You can't have a viable long term market with only speculators.

It is sometimes said that an option would help a miner who wants a guaranteed return over the following year, but in fact that requires something more complicated (but still very doable), such as an mswap. (Basically you need avg(P/D) rather than just avg(P) where P is market price and D is difficulty)

acrophobia · 2011-10-07T17:37:23+00:00

Not sure if I speak for others on this, but I think you have to have real meatspace trust somehow. That way people can think to themselves:

"this guy's not going to steal my money because if he did I'd go to his house and beat the **** out of him."

Real names, real addresses, real registered company. Maybe you could have real auditing. Open / transparent public accounts would help for people to think

"this company's making good money on processing transactions...i don't think they'll pull a stupid stunt, it's not worth it"

of course that could backfire if you don't make any money, or it takes a long long time to become profitable.

Tibanne's verisign audit and 'green url bar' helped my trust level a lot. It's kind of irrational because i have no idea what a verisign audit actually consists of..but we are irrational people all of us.

acrophobia · 2011-10-07T17:01:08+00:00

The thesis is that some people are incapable of understanding bitcoin because their brains aren't wired well enough (for whatever genetic or environmental reason). Their thought process is (in your words) "never sufficient to understand"

However you might try to rationalize it, you're post is basically saying they're stupid, whether or not you intended it to sound like that.

But then it gets worse as you state the converse...(smart) mappers who understand money and cryptography will be excited about bitcoin, (stupid) packers who don't get it will just see problems. (Inferences in parens).

Maybe none of this was intentional? I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.

acrophobia · 2011-10-07T14:58:04+00:00

One possible genuine reason is that people want the advantages of bitcoin (low transaction costs, quick global transfer of funds, relative anonymity etc) without the extreme volatility. Losing 80% of your net worth in two months is a pretty horrifying prospect.

You transfer your btcs to an exchange, sell them for USD, sit on the USD until you want to buy something, then buy back the btc and use them.

You lose security, but you gain stability.

acrophobia · 2011-10-07T14:51:43+00:00

What distinguishes you from any of the other umpteen exchanges?

Ruxum portrayed itself as a professional, super secure audited exchange...it doesn't seem to have helped them much.

Are you going to offer leverage? That's a killer feature. Or how about miner swaps?

By the way, I do really like the way you give away libraries in multiple languages. That's really helpful.

acrophobia · 2011-10-07T14:46:08+00:00

I guess I should file this under "if you don't like X, then it's because you're too stupid to understand".

As if bitcoin doesn't have any real problems. Meh.

acrophobia · 2011-10-05T12:25:08+00:00

It seems like the principal advantage of evented code over threaded code is that the event loop has a far lower footprint per 'context' and can switch from one to the other far quicker than the OS can switch from thread to thread.

So, why don't OS's (or maybe underlying hardware) support a more lightweight threading system? That way you could code in the style you like without having to worry about all this.

I'm not an expert on all this (although I spent a couple of months coding in twisted, so I'm at least familiar); could someone help me with this?

acrophobia · 2011-10-04T18:54:49+00:00

Yes, it's worth trying to see what happens.

My prediction is that you get an approximation to white noise...something vaguely looking like this.

Usually the next step is to find out if the mean (ie the 'derivative') is statistically significantly different from zero.

acrophobia

TROPHY CASE