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  • Re: BITCOINEX.XCP and the Counterparty Gateway

    @pooktwo @cryponaut I just directed a project here that may want to utilize this token. Is there a possibility to add more projects into using BITCOINEX?

    Yep, definitely, would be cool to see if being used outside of my own projects. Anyone can exchange it via the vending machine, so no permission required.

  • Re: Control Devices in Real Time with Bitcoin and Tokens?

    Yeah, Token Slot can handle something like that already. You can easily generate a unique payment address for whatever it is you want to unlock, and then Token Slot notifies your application when payment is received / confirmed - up to the App to decide what to do with that information though. Tokens are then automatically forwarded to an address under your control.

  • Re: GETREAL - New Token-Controlled Access forum for Real Names

    reminds me of this :p https://github.com/tokenly/tokenly-cms/issues/20

  • Re: LTBC Delay

    Another minor delay happening for this weeks distributions. There appears to be a new kind of network "stress test" except this time heavily exploiting transaction malleability, which appears to be causing issues with our token distribution service. Please stand by.

  • Re: BITCOINEX.XCP and the Counterparty Gateway

    @rob No worries, glad to clear up any confusion! :)

    So, like all user created assets, there is a degree of trust and centralization that you need to be aware of. The nice part is that tokens have many of the same properties as Bitcoin (due to living on Bitcoin), so the ability to create transactions, move tokens around etc. is totally decentralized, and as the asset creator, I cannot manipulate your balances or have any other direct influence over your stash.

    The parts that are centralized and require trust are 1) issuance and 2) value proposition.

    The issuance issue (heh) can be mitigated by simply creating X amount of tokens to begin with and then locking the asset, but that has its own set of trade offs. For instance, if I print off 100 BITCOINEX and am telling people they are worth 1 BTC each, but I can not actually prove that I have 100 BTC to exchange for them.. why should they believe me? Before BITCOINEX, there was a token by the guys at Vennd called XBTC, which is where I stole this idea from. Anyway, they issued an entire 21 million XBTC and locked it in an attempt to make it on par with bitcoin.. even though there is simply no possible way there will ever be even like 0.001% of bitcoin in existence deposited with them. Just does not make sense for "proxy" tokens like this IMHO.

    The value proposition issue is a lot trickier, and usually just boils down to "do you trust that the person who created this token is going to do what they say they are going to do and not disappear". If I go away, unless I hand off the BITCOINEX project to someone else and they keep it running, then it becomes worthless. If the LTB website shuts down, then LTBCOIN will probably become worthless to. However, it is possible that say if a whole bunch of websites used LTBC as their native currency, it would survive and still have some value... BITCOINEX on the other hand, since the current scheme requires someone to be able to actively issue new units and it's backed directly by deposits of another token - probably would not be able to survive on its own. Even with smart contracts (which we are still waiting on to become usable), because it interacts directly with BTC, there is still the question of "who holds the private keys", which AFAIK no one has figured out a good solution for yet.

    Ok, so here's how the BITCOINEX token works

    There is a single vending address, basically the same thing as swapbot (except using the old prototype that I built, because it has some features for auto-issuance and I also wanted it fully under my own control outside of tokenly for personal and potential legal reasons).

    You can see the address here: 1CoinEXLQtivDjckWMRBbhgVJk9RdwdYbR

    The vending machine is set up to give out 1 BITCOINEX for every 1 BTC received or every 1 XBTC received (Vennd.io's token, phasing it out :p), minus a small 0.5% deposit fee which mostly goes towards paying the transaction fees. It is also set up to receive back BITCOINEX in exchange for BTC on an exact 1:1 ratio (no fee). There is no front end interface, you can only interact with it by sending it BTC or sending it back BITCOINEX.

    The machine will use whatever BITCOINEX it has available to give out for new deposits, but if there is not enough in the 1CoinEX address, it creates a new issuance for whatever the difference is. For instance, if it only has 1 BITCOINEX available but somebody deposits 5 BTC, it will create 4 new tokens and then send it all to them. This is the only time new tokens are created, and currently after this whole time only a modest 4.7 exist lol. I could technically manually issue a bunch and give them to myself, but it would be super obvious and I don't think people would trust me any more.

    With the way that the issuance is done, it makes sure that for every 1 BITCOINEX in existence, there is always at least 1 BTC available in the vending machine to back it up. If you look at the 1CoinEX address and add up all the BITCOINEX + XBTC + BTC it has, it should come out to exactly or (more often) a little bit over the total amount of BITCOINEX in existence. There have been a few hiccups where I have had to manually rebalance things though (e.g bug causing accidental double payment)

    Are people using BITCOINEX? If so, how?

    Sort of. I'm pretty sure I am the only one with projects making active use of it. Specifically, the SPECULATE and EARNFREEBTC projects, which pay out dividends once per week. Probably about 50 or so people which are actively collecting the BITCOINEX payouts and trading them in for their BTC every so often.

    The reasoning behind using the BITCOINEX proxy token is that I quickly discovered that sending out dividends in pure BTC does not work very well. For example if someone only has 1 EARNFREEBTC token and I'm giving out 25 satoshis, that is well below the 5500 satoshi dust limit which means that user is simply going to get nothing. Also, say if you have 1,000 token holders, you would have to either create really big and expensive transactions going to 1000 different addresses, or split the dividend up into multiple transactions etc... either way paying way more in transaction fees.

    With Counterparty tokens, you can create a single "dividend transaction" (a specific transaction type) which instead of sending actual btc transactions directly to 1,000 or 10,000 addresses, it just embeds a message saying "any addresses holding token X as of block 310456 now have a bit more of token Y at rate of 0.00000025 per unit". This means that I can send out dividends as low as 1 satoshi per unit, to an unlimited number of addresses, and without polluting (as some would say) the blockchain and with paying just a single normal sized transaction fee.

    Something like XCP could be used (the only fully decentralized counterparty token), but using a fixed value proxy token like this just makes the math so much easier, since all people really care about is getting their BTC :P

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