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Re: AUCTION VENDING MACHINES ARE NOW OPERATIONAL

The idea is that the incentive covers the bounty paid by the top bidder (plus some), since he never gets paid a bounty by being outbid.

The whole purpose is to incentivize the highest bids possible.

This might end up going to the platform as a fee as well. It is all in an experimental stage right now.

Re: AUCTION VENDING MACHINES ARE NOW OPERATIONAL

@rob Can you weigh in on the BTC that's also spent by the seller when setting up an auction? I think it would be great for transparency to understand where that goes (no hard feelings if some of it helps to pay for the work done to make these auctions happen).

As of right now:

The 0.005 BTC fee paid by the seller goes to the LTB network (along with any received BTC dust).

The 1,000 LTBCOIN incentive paid by the seller goes to the winning bidder.

I would treat both of these statements as subject to change. It is in an experimental stage right now.

Re: AUCTION VENDING MACHINES ARE NOW OPERATIONAL

Well, I suppose it is possible to generate a unique incoming address for each bid and then apply those bids to the auction.

This does not ensure secrecy, but it would help mask which auction your bid is going to.

A determined and astute observer would likely still be able to guess your true bid by looking at the timing of your bid and the amounts reported by the block chain around the time it came in. With the low traffic in Counterparty right now, that would be pretty easy.

I think what you really want is a bot that watches the auction for you and then bids on-chain as needed up to your pre-set amount. This would be a more literal "proxy" bid system. This would incur some fees for multiple bids though.

Re: AUCTION VENDING MACHINES ARE NOW OPERATIONAL

@bcohen Proxy bidding occurs Off-Blockchain Winning bid releases that number from escrow.

You are right that this would likely need to happen off-chain. I don't want to take this off-chain as it introduces a substantial new number of moving parts to the system.

And on-chain auctions have the great benefit of being fully visible and publicly auditable.

Re: AUCTION VENDING MACHINES ARE NOW OPERATIONAL

@faceface

That's good. A notification when I'm outbid would be nice though.

Notifications would be nice. You'd have to associate an email address with a Counterwallet bidding address.

Just testing the waters here... Would you pay a one-time LTBcoin fee for a premium service like this?

Re: AUCTION VENDING MACHINES ARE NOW OPERATIONAL

Here are some FAQ points that @adam wrote up:

Q: I have my Armory/Mycelium/Core all set up, what do I do?

A: Visit http://counterwallet.co, create a wallet and use it instead of your normal wallet. Your wallet cannot see sponsor tokens or any Counterparty assets, so for now Counterwallet is the best tool.

Q: I've been outbid - What happens now?

A: Either send more tokens FROM THE SAME ADDRESS to increase your bid or wait until the auction expires and your non-winning bid will be refunded.

Q: I sent in a bid at the last minute and I should have won, but I didn't - Why?

A: It can take up to an hour for your bid to be included in a Bitcoin Block, at which point it becomes confirmed. Bids are only accepted after they are confirmed, please make sure to bid early and leave plenty of time before the end of the auction to account for this unpredictability.

Q: I won a token that I don't want! What do I do with it?

A: You can try trading it for LTBc, Bitcoin or something else on the http://counterwallet distributed exchange, or try to find someone interested on the forums.

@rob and others on this thread - if you have more to add, please add it below. I'll put up a FAQ page.

Re: AUCTION VENDING MACHINES ARE NOW OPERATIONAL

You can top-up your bid by sending a second bid from the same address. The bids are cumulative.

@faceface - I'm pretty sure someone will outbid you. 25k is very cheap for 2 HOURCONSULT tokens.

Re: AUCTION VENDING MACHINES ARE NOW OPERATIONAL

So, @bcohen, I hear your request for proxy bids.

Here is what I am struggling with:

I key component of proxy bidding is secrecy. Because all blockchain transactions are public, that secrecy is lost when bidding Counterparty tokens.

Say you, Brian, throw down a 200,300 LTBc proxy bid. You overtake the high bidder and are sitting at the top for 100,000 LTBc.

I, being the sneaky guy that I am, will then check Blockscan and see that you actually sent in 200,300. So, what I do is send in 199,000 LTBc with the certainty that I will be outbid. You will outbid me, pay me a bounty, and you'll then have a public bid for 200,000 (You paid me a 199 LTBc bounty for outbidding me).

You would have been better off just jumping up to 200,000 in the first place because you would have paid a much smaller bounty to the previous bidder.

My conclusion is that the bounty system (e.g. you get a reward for being outbid) actually penalizes people when their bid is held in proxy by an automated system.

Re: AUCTION VENDING MACHINES ARE NOW OPERATIONAL

I'll clear up the re-bidding question:

The bids are cumulative.

Say you bid 50,000 LTBc, then get outbid, and then send in an additional 50,000 LTBc. You will now have a single bid of 100,000 LTBc. This assumes that you sent both bids from the same address.

Re: Auction Question

Yep. Separate transactions are fine.