Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Decentralized digital asset exchange with honest pricing and market depth

From: Jorge Timón <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 28 Feb 2014 00:48:33 +0100

First of all, sorry for the delayed answer.

On 2/10/14, Peter Todd <[email-masked]> wrote:
> Got this:
[...]
Thank you, I knew this wasn't new for us but I doubted we had written
it anywhere.
As said in those mails, being only able to offer AAA for BTC and not
BTC for AAA nor AAA for BBB is enough of a limitation to justify a
hardfork IMO.

On 2/17/14, Troy Benjegerdes <[email-masked]> wrote:
> Is there a simple way to do cross-chain trades that doesn't need a third
> chain to somehow facilitate things?

These are the two methods I know for cross-chain trading (no third
chain needed in any of them):

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Contracts#Example_5:_Trading_across_chains
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=321228

On 2/14/14, Peter Todd <[email-masked]> wrote:
> You're assuming the seller cares about fairness - why should they? They
> offered a price for an asset and someone bought it; exactly which buyer
> willing to buy at that price was able to complete the trade is
> irrelevant to them. What they do care about is being sure that at
> whatever given price they offered 100% of the buyers willing to buy at
> that price actually see the offer in a reasonable amount of time - at
> the best price the seller will get there will be only a single buyer
> after all so you need that solid proof that said buyer was actually able
> to get the offer.

In fact, I don't think the seller will care enough about this to pay
the proof of publication fee either. Assuming sellers can either
broadcast the order on a bitmessage-like network or use your proof of
publication scheme, the later will be always be more expensive. So my
prediction is that most people will just use the simplest, fastest and
cheapest method, but I guess only time can tell.
I don't think this will be a tragedy, because like we discussed on
IRC, I don't think the primary goal of markets is price discovery, but
trade itself.

About historic data, the actual trades are always public, and some
kind of "archivers" could collect and maintain old orders for historic
bid and asks, etc.

As an aside, nLockTime would be nice not to always have to
double-spend the inputs of an order to cancel it.

-- 
Jorge Timón

http://freico.in/