The Structured Conversation

Since a questioning session with yours truly is the fabled daunting experience I hear it is, let us record an instance where one dared and it worked well, for public aedification.

wywialm Hello, I would like to request your comments on the project I am collaborating on
assbot Quedex Bitcoin Derivatives Exchange
shinohai Dat javascript.
wywialm Works without :)
mircea_popescu Can you instead make statements ?

wywialm Sure, statements about the exchange?
mircea_popescu Like "I'm collaborating on a project based on P1 P2 P3 being true and P4 and P5 being false, it is supposed to achieve Q. Any comments ?". That works a lot better, not likely I'm going to form much of a useful idea from looking at a web interface.ⁱ

wywialm From the security perspective, it is based on the MPEx PGP standard
mircea_popescu In the sense that what, users give you their key and all subsequent communication's encrypted and signed by it ?

wywialm That is true.
mircea_popescu Pretty cool.

wywialm From the financial perspective, it assumes that when running futures exchange, one should also provide options and have a complete market.
mircea_popescu Options on what ? For instance I had an open offer for a TSLA short in here weeks ago, could it have filled it ?

wywialm And that market should be bitcoin-oriented, i.e. contracts should be structured treading fiat currencies as foreign currencies.
mircea_popescu Oh, FX futures you mean ?

wywialm Currently - on fiat currencies, but I'd very much like to introduce stock options.
mircea_popescu How do you resolve the liability issue ? Suppose I buy a million dollars to be delivered in Q4. How do you resolve the part where you have to make sure whoever sold me the million actually has it by then ?

wywialm Currently the contracts are financially settled, but when we move to the physical delivery (as soon as possible), the margins would increase as the contract approaches notice date.
mircea_popescu So sellers get daily margin calls ?

wywialm Margin calls might appear in real time, if the margin is not replenished quickly, the position is liquidated.
mircea_popescu "Quickly".

wywialm Where quickly is defined in terms of price move. :)
mircea_popescu So it gets liquidated. What's that do for buyer ? I bought 1mn in Q4, yoiu're gonna give me 3/4 mn in Q3 because hey, why not ? I'm suing you.ⁱⁱ

wywialm The liquidated contract is sold on the market at the market price
mircea_popescu But you see what i mean do you ?

wywialm Yes, ultimately, the exchange provides reserves to cover for members' losses, which are planned to be strenghened by credit default swaps.
mircea_popescu This will be the bane of your existence, on the general theoretic front. Because like it or not, the unappealing dilemma is, either offer "renegotiable contracts", which is roughly what you're describing, and which fails at the only job futures have to do (ie, ensure the buyer of specified amount of specified merchandise on specified date), or else full reserve, which will kill your speculators without which no market can function (irrespective of what idiots such as the eu central bank think). So there is that. But in point of fact, for your daily life, you'll have a much more annoying problem. What btc price do you use for settlement ?

wywialm Currently - an average across 4 USD exchanges, with cutting out outliers
mircea_popescu Problem being the marketⁱⁱⁱ's illiquid enough to be easily pushed. But that's not something you'll manage to fix or really should be fixing. What's the meaning of "collaborating on" in this context ?

wywialm I am the economist behind all this.
mircea_popescu Are you an outside consultant on a salary, a board member with an equity interest, a volunteer academic, none of the above. (Note that deferred salary payments and other promises make you a 3).

wywialm Re spot illiquidity - I acknowlegde this, currency futures as well as commodity futures should have physical delivery and we're working on it.
mircea_popescu If your future doesn't deliver it has a hole in it, sooner or later it'll infect and puss out. Anyway.

wywialm 3) academic with deferred salary payments dependent of the performace of the exchange.
mircea_popescu Why would you wish to risk your reputation (which, whatever you may think of it, is significant enough that you can come here and have my ear whenever you want to) on this thing ? For all you know you're reliving the NeoBee nightmare. You remember that ?

wywialm I think it's a good idea, and I know personally people involved, and I needed your comments - how else could I get these? Btw: thank you for kind words.
mircea_popescu Why're these people involved not in the WoT for instance ? Who are they ? How do you know any word they say is true ?

shinohai NeoBee provided so many lulz.
wywialm Yes, I remember NeoBee very well.
mircea_popescu The way this usually works, and it has worked about 500 times to date with 0 variance, is that scammer gets a coupla sluts and a coupla "credible people" to contact respectable, well meaning folk, launches project. From the perspective of the public the respectable folk form an impenetrable visual barrier^iv. From the perspective of said folk, the coupla sluts and coupla salesmen idem. And a year to a year and a half lat er scammer runs with the money and the entire stack of noobs is left apologizing.

wywialm I will of course invite them to WoT - but I know them for a long time irl.
nubbins` Re:neobee, wonder what happened to thickasthieves
shinohai That means little to potential investors though.
mircea_popescu Wywialm there's know and there's know. Not something I can help you with - but know you are in fact taking your fate in your own hands and make the call as to these people in full light of that.

nubbins` I guess he got his cream and moved on.
mircea_popescu Iirc he narrowly survived that, a settlement being involved.

nubbins` O! He got way too much of a pass in here for the amount of shady things he was into.
mircea_popescu It's a forum^v, this. Really very free passage throughout.

n6 Hey mircea_popescu I have been coming around last few days getting a ton of help, but it has all made me feel awful. Last year I really let your ideas down and ended up getting tricked by someone pretending to be a friend of mine. But in the end the basic ideas saved me from going to jail. Would you help me work out?
mircea_popescu Work out ?! Like what, aerobics ?

n6 Yep
mircea_popescu o.O

* nubbins` takes notes
mircea_popescu What the fuck am I, Jane Fonda over here. Talk to a woman in good shape, they know.

nubbins` ^ bummer
wywialm mircea_popescu, I acknowledge this.
mircea_popescu !rated wywialm

assbot You rated user wywialm on 27-Nov-2014, with a rating of 2, and supplied these additional notes: Polish econ guy..
mircea_popescu !rate wywialm 3 Polish econ guy, trying to make quedex.net work.

assbot Request successful, get your OTP: http://w.b-a.link/otp/f2dbea7a4193912d
nubbins` !s thickasthieves
assbot 49811 results for 'thickasthieves' : http://s.b-a.link/?q=thickasthieves
nubbins` o jeez
mircea_popescu !v assbot:mircea_popescu.rate.wywialm.3:8bbdc73128302d7bd5c78c2e2521b516d2041fa396c65d8d866b13e26f149a02

assbot Successfully updated the rating for wywialm from 2 to 3 with note: Polish econ guy, trying to make quedex.net work.
nubbins` LEL all those unrates.
mircea_popescu wywialm best of luck. There isn't anything glaringly obvious to say else.

wywialm I didn't expect this, but I'm thankful.

In closing : please always remember that talking is more akin to playing chess than to gargling at the dentist's ; that words do in point of fact have meanings and synonimy is a fiction not a fact and so on. You'll do fine.

1. Think about this for a second. Please, think about it.

   You come back home, your girlfriend opens the door naked, lets you in, does a pirouette and goes "Look at this!" So you look at that. Then she wants to know "what do you see ?" and you say... What do you say ? What do you see ?

   Tits, right ? Too polite to say cunt and "slit"'s too truckery. Or what, you're the sensitive guy and look at her hair ? The greedy golum type that notices the new, hairline ankle bracelet ? The hypermetropic type that sees the new painting on the wall (true story, this happened). It's just, hopeless.

   The notion that any understanding worth the mention can be formed through off the cuff visual inspection of any man made item is a necessary correlate of one being about nine years old. Yes, doctors used to do this. A century or five ago, before they discovered handwashing as a medical procedure.

   Now think about the fact that most "people" CODE LIKE THAT. Live like that. Yes, yes they do. This is the deep meaning of "Hey my name is jwz and don't care about anything" - what he means is, that he expects "things to just work" which is to say according to whatever harebrained notion he might have formed on casual visual inspection, and it's the responsability of the whole world, his parents and myself included, to make it so!

   Let's do our part to discourage the retarded visualism of the derps unfortunately contemporaneous. Words matter and no image to date was worth a thousand words. [↩]

2. Stop thinking "suing" has anything with the obsolete court system, by the way. It does not. You can sue in #b-a, and it works way better. [↩]
3. The part of it visible on the web, at any rate. [↩]
4. Again with this. Seriously.

   Visuals are for cows, get it in your head. [↩]

5. Term of art, not what you imagine it to mean. [↩]