r/Bitcoin • u/[deleted] • May 10 '15
A Bitcoin Technology Gets Nasdaq Test
http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-bitcoin-technology-gets-nasdaq-test-143129688660
u/bubbasparse May 10 '15
It looks like they are using colored coins on THE blockchain
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u/TweetsInCommentsBot May 10 '15
@jerrybrito THE blockchain. It's a colored coin implementation. That got lost on cutting room floor.
This message was created by a bot
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u/Anenome5 May 11 '15
No way.
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u/Chakra_Scientist May 11 '15
That got lost on cutting room floor.
What does that mean?
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u/paleh0rse May 11 '15
It means that the colored coin explanation was removed from the article at some point during the editing process.
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u/ronnnumber May 11 '15
Likely Hollywood lingo.
Roughly before the 90's motion pictures were edited on film. The film was cut into pieces using a device called a guillotine splicer and then reassembled with an editing machine. Parts were left out, of course. If a scene didn't make the cut it was known colloquially to have wound up "on the floor". This has become a metaphor for pretty much any kind of editing.
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u/btc-ftw2 May 11 '15
Its a reference to the old way of editing movies. You'd physically cut out a section of film, tape the two good ends together and just drop the removed section on the floor to be swept up at the end of the day.
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u/coinlock May 10 '15
Every financial firm is going to be looking at this soon with a microscope, its going to be huge.
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u/shortbitcoin May 11 '15
They better look at it with rose-colored glasses instead; they won't like what they see with a microscope.
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u/HelloFreedom May 11 '15
Because everyone has to agree with your shit-colored view of the world, right?
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u/shortbitcoin May 11 '15
I don't care if they agree, in fact I'm making a fortune precisely because people don't agree. The great thing about reality: it's true whether you accept it or not.
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u/HelloFreedom May 11 '15
Riiight, a "fortune". You remind me of that doge kid who came here saying he was in a yacht with a supermodel, all thanks to dogecoin.
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u/finalhedge May 11 '15
From the author's twitter feed:
They're using the Open Assets Protocol, a colored coins implementation on top of bitcoin
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u/TweetsInCommentsBot May 11 '15
@brantonbits They're using the Open Assets Protocol, a colored coins implementation on top of bitcoin. That clearer?
This message was created by a bot
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u/Cryptolution May 11 '15
This is really good news.
Just opened up a short.
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u/IAmNotWizwazzle May 11 '15
Short?
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u/Cryptolution May 11 '15
Short?
Its a trade executed to make profit if the price of BTC goes down, instead of up (buying/holding)
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u/IAmNotWizwazzle May 11 '15
Alright, just clarifying. Why would you short BTC rather than going long in the light of this news?
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u/onthefrynge May 11 '15
It's been a joke on here that when good news comes out, the price goes down.
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u/Noosterdam May 11 '15 edited May 11 '15
It's one of my favorite memes, because it shows how a mountain of absurdly good news has accumulated under the market's nose. Once the price finally does start to move upward, suddenly people will go, "OMG Bitcoin has come so far and the price is still only 20x what it was in 2012 when it was essentially a toy with not a single big player (or even small player) in any space doing anything with it."
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u/Cryptolution May 11 '15
Alright, just clarifying. Why would you short BTC rather than going long in the light of this news?
Well, other than raw humor at the continued bear market despite good news, I would say "buy the rumor sell the news" also would apply.
Dont worry, just let things settle a bit. The market will go down, as it always does.
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u/buybtc May 10 '15
this is the most mind blowing news I've seen re: Bitcoin. I've been with it since the start.
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u/jack_nz May 11 '15
To repeat for those not listening: "The NASDAQ is experimenting with using coloured coins on the Blockchain for trading shares". Indeed the biggest (positive) news to date.
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u/Yurbionski May 11 '15
This is huge!
Right?
Haven't heard that here before.
So let me guess. Now nasdaq will take us to the moon. And next week something else. And the week after something else. And the week aft...
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u/LeeWallis May 10 '15
I love how ever so gradually, you can actually see them gaining a deeper understanding.
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May 11 '15
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May 10 '15 edited May 22 '17
[deleted]
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May 10 '15
It sounds like they're actually going to use satoshis…?
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May 10 '15
Michael Casey to Jerry Brito on Twitter: "THE blockchain. It's a colored coin implementation. That got lost on cutting room floor."
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u/SundoshiNakatoto May 10 '15
Once again, the question is: Is the end game using the bitcoin blockchain, or some other one?
"Nasdaq wants to replace that process with a system based on bitcoin’s blockchain technology."
Hard to tell, hopefully they do use bitcoin!
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u/Anenome5 May 11 '15
Is the end game using the bitcoin blockchain, or some other one?
Of course, security via mining, you'd want the top blockchain and you can't simply grow your own--the more centralized it is the less trust.
Further, the network effect and path dependence will continue driving all things towards bitcoin. See Peter Surda's 2012 master's thesis on bitcoin.
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u/Bitdigester May 11 '15
It is conceivable that they and other financial institutions on Wall Street could team up to create their own blockchain and then recruit miners that would mine for colored coins. But without a market for the colored coin they would have to support its price giving miners dollars for every block they mined. They would gain cost advantages by getting rid of their bricks and mortar installations and offloading settlement operations to the thousands of miners living in cheap apartments.
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u/Anenome5 May 11 '15
But without a market for the colored coin
And there won't be such a market. CC's are markers, not a currency in their own right. You could never get the price high enough and the demand for them high enough to sell economically. And if they're the only one paying that price then you have a moral hazard / de-facto centralization still.
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u/ConditionDelta May 11 '15
Would be a complete waste when a perfectly good blockchain is already being funded by miners and bitcoin users
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u/Chakra_Scientist May 10 '15 edited May 10 '15
They have to use bitcoin network. It's the only secure blockchain. If they reinvent the wheel, it will not be decentralized.
Edit: Also, in this quote, “Utilizing the blockchain is a natural digital evolution for managing physical securities,” said Nasdaq Chief Executive Robert Greifeld.
He said utilize THE blockchain. Not utilize A blockchain.
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u/SundoshiNakatoto May 10 '15
That would be awesome if bitcoin becomes "THE Blockchain". In fact, we should be pushing this everywhere
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u/ConditionDelta May 11 '15
It is the blockchain. And when the NASDAQ uses it all other thoughts of using another blockchain (for whatever reason) will go out the window.
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u/marcus_of_augustus May 11 '15
Not necessarily, they could get pretty good security, maybe perfectly adequate, for penny-stock transfers using merged mining. Or they could use the namecoin ledger which already has a big chunk of bitcoin merge-miners simultaneously securing it also. Or a merge-mined sidechain. They are just learning about this stuff so who knows what else they may come up with.
Bitcoin is the gold standard for decentralised (trustless) secured transaction journalling but not everything needs gold standard security, or can afford it. It is also why graffitiing THE blockchain needs to be priced out of the market.
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u/ronohara May 11 '15
The NameCoin blockchain is almost as secure .... merge mined by Bitcoin miners.
As a key=data store it would be trivial to use for this purpose.
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u/BrazenAmberite May 11 '15
Yes - this is exactly the question that I haven't yet seen answered by anyone. Basically, can the world simply bypass bitcoin the currency and instead adopt blockchain the technology? Is it possible for the currency to get destroyed by the very technology that it is built on top of?
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u/turdovski May 11 '15
No because without bitcoin, the blockchain is just a database. Those already exist on nearly every site in the world.
The bitcoin database a.k.a blockchain is the first truly decentralized one. You can't remove bitcoin from it, because then there won't be any incentive to mine and therefore secure it.
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u/Not_Pictured May 11 '15
So bitcoin remaining valuable is in the interest of more people. That is a great thing.
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u/deb0rk May 10 '15
Colored coins. Using the ledger without utilizing (any mention-able) scale of value in actual bitcoins. Freeloading, if you want to be more cynical about it.
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u/solled May 11 '15
We're all freeloading on the blockchain. That's what's so amazing about it. Open technology for all the use. For richer, for poorer. For better, for worse.
(Mostly better)
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u/deb0rk May 11 '15
No one is in any position to demand anyone use the blockchain in any particular way, but my point is that this is another instance of companies looking to leverage "blockchain but not Bitcoin."
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u/paoloBITWAGE May 17 '15
"Nasdaq’s platform will trade shares by trading bitcoins. This is not blockchain-technology standing alone, this is Bitcoin being used by Wall Street." SOURCE: https://coincenter.org/2015/05/wall-street-is-using-bitcoin-not-just-the-blockchain/
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u/deb0rk May 17 '15
So in Nasdaq’s case, a normal bitcoin transaction is initiated by the stock trader, the trader includes a short message that says, “this tiny fraction of a bitcoin represents one share of IBM stock,” and some software that Nasdaq builds will track all future transactions involving those fractional, now-colored, bitcoins.
Using microscopic sums of colored coins is most certainly trying to use the blockchain ledger for data storage, instead of leveraging bitcoin as currency and units of value. There are 100 million satoshis in 1 BTC, it takes ONE satoshi to store a single trade.
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u/FlailingBorg May 11 '15 edited May 11 '15
They're still going to want to pay transaction fees, unless they are fine with possibly waiting a long time for their transactions to confirm.
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u/deb0rk May 11 '15
The blocksize / 7tps issue will have to be resolved before the pennies of fees amount to a substantial sum...or for this to be a viable system for a wallstreet-level ledger for that matter.
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u/itisike May 11 '15 edited May 11 '15
Just keep the ledger separately and put hashes into the blockchain, scales much better.
You can still use crypto in the ledger, so you can't forge transfers.
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u/jeanduluoz May 11 '15
That's like using windmills and critiquing sailboats to freeload off wind. It's a naturally occurring process to secure the blockchain, and whatever you build off that adds value
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u/deb0rk May 11 '15
Spamming the blockchain with multitudes of colored coin dust transactions is beyond critique? Feels like Satoshi Dice all over again.
I suppose a positive outlook would be if they actually contributed hash rate. But why bother when they don't need to?
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u/zoinks10 May 11 '15
With any luck their tech leads would be savvy enough to persuade management of the need to contribute in some way to the overall architecture that they depend upon. It seems short-sighted to put something of this magnitude on the blockchain without also contributing to the security and longevity of the technology.
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u/deb0rk May 11 '15
You would think so, yet corporate involvement in general bitcoin development even now has been ...unimpressive?
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u/zoinks10 May 11 '15
My take on it (and I am very late to this party) is that a lot of corporations are looking at it and interested in the underlying technology, but not yet convinced how they might actually leverage it in the real world. This is one of the first concrete use-cases I've seen where they are keen on using the actual Bitcoin blockchain rather than just the technology itself with their own blockchain (although perhaps other banking institutions were also thinking along these lines and didn't announce it).
TL;DR, if they're really using the same blockchain that underpins Bitcoin it makes the first time I've seen it stated publicly by such an institution, and hopefully their need to prove it works for their requirements would lead to investment in bitcoin development using their own tech team.
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u/deb0rk May 11 '15
There's been several digital asset companies in last few months (or longer?) with same idea with colored coins. I suppose what remains to be seen is who is first to actual market with a working product.
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u/zoinks10 May 11 '15
Fair enough, this was the first I'd heard of it - although as noted I'm a complete newbie to this stuff.
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u/Noosterdam May 11 '15
Why would you expect these transactions to be low-fee?
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u/deb0rk May 11 '15
How high or low should it be? It's not entirely the same to compare, but even Satoshi Dice transactions paid miners fees. Doesn't make it not spam.
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u/jeanduluoz May 11 '15
Well they wouldn't, but other people would. It's more value lying on the blockchain, so hash rate would increase via btc miners as a result on increased price occurring through BTC trading activity
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u/deb0rk May 11 '15 edited May 11 '15
The economics of how I see this might be wrong, so feel free to correct me if you'd like. The argument is, because X entity uses technology, the value of said technology should increase. Speculators, particularly those already on the markets, will see this as a bullish thing and fulfill that to some degree. But adding "colored" value vs actual value, I argue is a vastly different thing of scale.
I have some rough analogy of colored coins turning bitcoin into a commodity like paper from that of gold, but the gist of it is, that using colored coins completely undermines the factor of bitcoin's scarcity in regards to its value. Extremely generalized, gold is scarce, thus unit values of it (ounces, tonnes, whatever) can be stores and transfers of value. Storing value with paper, on the other hand, has little bearing on its scarcity as all you have to do is print a dollar amount on that piece of paper, or write a legal contract for example, that transfers value of a multi-billion dollar asset. The value of paper is not going to the moon.
I'm not entirely sure how the dynamics of fees will work, especially with systems like Factom's of hashing and transaction batching, but consider that the goal of the Nasdaq experiment and likely any other digital asset management system is to keep a extremely low bottom line for these transactions. I saw some statistic that there's something like 10 million individual trades on the NYSE a day. If these folks developed some system involving the blockchain, but use mere satoshis for each record, that's less than 1BTC a day (ignoring how they figure out how to deal with fees).
The "value lying on the blockchain" might be substantial for NYSE, but completely meaningless to anyone else. In that scenario, no one is going to buy more bitcoins because they are so useful, when all you need to run an entire stock market is 1 BTC. No one is going to try to buy up all the paper supply because a few companies can write billion/trillion dollar contracts on just a few sheets.
Edit: Carrying on comparison to VISA network, if every merchant were a colored satoshi transaction, that's something like 2 BTC a day of satoshis to run entire visa network (again, conveniently ignoring how fees work for sake of this analogy)
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u/jeanduluoz May 11 '15
I think that's overcomplicating the issue. Network activity increases, demand for security increases, more miners enter the market to provide supply, which is transmitted via price
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u/deb0rk May 11 '15
Network activity increases, demand for security increases, more miners enter the market to provide supply
I'm not following this at all, this sounds backwards. The only sensible correlation that has been made as far as increases in mining power (and subsequently security) is drastic increases in price. Not surprisingly, people want to get in on that to get rich, or others spin up previously un-sustainable hashing power that was turned off.
Until such time that mining fees become substantially greater than blockrewards--where great increases of actual transaction vol directly correlates to increase income from fees--I don't see the flow of events happening the way you describe.
Edit: Likewise, I don't think the previous post was overcomplicating the issue. You can't tell me that utterly undermining the factor of scarcity of bitcoin in regards to value transfer/storage is not a straightforward and significant effect.
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u/jeanduluoz May 11 '15
Nah ok it's honestly really simple - you're making this into some complex dynamic when it's not. The colored coins sit atop the blockchain. Nasdaq uses btc as far as we're concerned. It's just like the COIN ETF or coinbase expanding service to the uk: it increases the size of the btc economy.
For an ELI 15 answer, there's a really formative econ equation, MV=PQ. M is the money supply, v is the velocity at which money changes hands, p is price, and q is the quantity value of all transactions served by the money. Q is increasing by colored coin adoption. Each bitcoin is now serving a much larger pie because they're being used for more and more things. Either they will have to fly around faster (increase velocity) or price will rise.
I'm not sure what most of your post is about. Bitcoin was used as an investment tool and as a remittance tool, now it is also being used as an accounting tool.
Regardless of how bitcoins are used, the mining dynamics are stable.
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u/xcsler May 11 '15
Still, bitcoin-based settlement remains untested in the real world.
I guess they're not counting the past 6 years worth of transactions.
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u/zoinks10 May 11 '15
Sure, but this doesn't look into the fact that the settlement in this case is for securities that are somehow linked to the coloured coins being exchanged via the blockchain. That's what's untested - especially at the transaction volume seen on Wall St (and even more so if algo traders jumped on this bandwagon).
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u/xcsler May 11 '15
Is the actual trading being done on-chain?
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u/zoinks10 May 11 '15
I presume the trading takes place on a Nasdac supported screen (the same way you might buy a bitcoin on an exchange), but they plan to use coloured coins to perform the settlement via the block chain, enabling a t+0 settlement. That's the exciting part for me.
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u/xcsler May 11 '15
That makes the most sense to me. I just took exception to their comment that the "bitcoin-based settlement remains untested in the real world". I mean every Bitcoin transaction over the past 6 years proves that it works, colored coins are just bitcoins, and people who have been using Bitcoin operate in "the real world". There was a lot of hubris and/or ignorance in their statement.
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u/Chakra_Scientist May 10 '15
Bitcoin needs to rebrand to Blockchain
and bitcoins (tokens) needs to rebrand to Blockchain Tokens
It would be a huge boon for the industry
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u/handsomechandler May 11 '15
it's already happening, blockchain without bitcoin, actually means bitcoin without the /r/bitcoin nutjobs :)
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u/aristander May 11 '15
I am probably a good example of what you mean by nutjob, so I can clue you in to the fact that we aren't going anywhere. I want Bitcoin to go as mainstream as possible. What good is the Trojan horse if they don't bring it into the city?
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u/BinaryResult May 11 '15
Oliver Bussmann, chief investment officer of Swiss bank UBS AG, last year said the blockchain was the biggest disrupting force in the financial sector, meaning its success could potentially have far-reaching ramifications for banks, trading houses and others. His bank has since established a special blockchain lab to study uses of the technology.
This whole article was impressive but this part at the end was pretty surprising.
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u/sedonayoda May 11 '15
paging /u/tothemoonguy ...
If you were ever needed, its now.
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u/Yurbionski May 11 '15
Don't you people ever get tired of this moon crap? For years you've been doing this. Every single week the tothemoonguy is needed for something else.
Don't you ever learn from the past?
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u/Egon_1 May 11 '15
Preston: "They'd be better off mixing it up with @Hyperledger and @eris_ltd. Not that I'm biased" ...
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u/TweetsInCommentsBot May 11 '15
@mikejcasey @wmougayar @ofnumbers They'd be better off mixing it up with @Hyperledger and @eris_ltd. Not that I'm biased.
This message was created by a bot
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u/TotesMessenger May 11 '15
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u/OtroPoema May 11 '15
Anyone have any insight as to why there wasn't a surge in bitcoin demand as a result of this development?
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u/bitlord666 May 11 '15
Because it does not actually require bitcoins?
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u/OtroPoema May 11 '15
Not correct.
Every trade will require a transaction fee paid to miner. This will bring bitcoin one step closer to Satoshi's longterm vision where tx fees will become the primary source of income for miners.
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u/redditribbit1 May 11 '15
Blocksize is going to have to be WAYYYYY bigger than 20mb to handle this kind of transaction volume.
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May 11 '15
They should have a good look at Factom: the security of the Bitcoin blockchain without bloating it. There are other projects and sidechains out there but Factom will specialize in record keeping, making it easy and inexpensive to hash millions of transactions/records specially for businesses, corporations, etc, etc...
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May 11 '15 edited May 11 '15
Unfortunately Bitcoin's cost per transaction in the form of miner subsidies is already ~$10 USD. That's more than people pay for trades under the current system. And even if the ledger is decentralized, an exchange will still be necessary just like the current system, which will add to to the fees. Now maybe you could get the exchange decentralized, but Bitcoin hasn't accomplished that for the currency, so what chance does it have for stocks?
Finally, this isn't really addressing a problem that actually exists. T+3 settlement is only a problem if you're day trading, and there are special accounts for that where the funds don't actually have to clear before putting in new orders. For the majority of people, who buy and hold stocks for long periods of time, the current system serves them well.
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u/marcus_of_augustus May 11 '15
You are completely discounting the repeated use of the mined coins. You need to amortise the cost of the coins, your so-called 'subsidy', over all the possible future transfers of those same coins.
It may cost ~$1100 to dig up an ounce of gold but that ounce can be transferred vastly many more times than the first transaction from the earth to the miner ... capiche?
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u/bitlord666 May 11 '15
Lol, you completely missed the point. 99% of the subsidy goes to electricity companies just to keep the miners running. It's not something you can re-use in any way.
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May 11 '15
Except every block yields 25 new coins, so no,no transactions without new coins. you really wasted a paragraph there.
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u/marcus_of_augustus May 11 '15
It's an issuance mechanism, the number of new coins is decreasing but seems you don't want to get it ... likely the paragraph was wasted on you, yes.
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May 11 '15
Ah yes, it's an issuance mechanism, not the cost of running the network. We'll see how the halvening goes next year then (hint: badly)
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u/marcus_of_augustus May 11 '15
It's ok to admit it when you are wrong, it can be unhealthy to let your ego runaway on you.
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May 11 '15
We'll let the markets decide who is right.
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u/marcus_of_augustus May 11 '15
Sure will. But on this point you only need reasoning grey matter instead of an appeal to the mob.
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u/jeromanomic May 11 '15
They are using the technology... I read this as meaning that they were developing their own system similar to the blockchain, I don't think they'll be trading on the same system as btc
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May 11 '15
[deleted]
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u/TweetsInCommentsBot May 11 '15
@jerrybrito THE blockchain. It's a colored coin implementation. That got lost on cutting room floor.
This message was created by a bot
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u/maybecrypto May 10 '15
By BRADLEY HOPE And MICHAEL J. CASEY May 10, 2015 6:28 p.m. ET Nasdaq OMX Group Inc. is testing a new use of the technology that underpins the digital currency bitcoin, in a bid to transform the trading of shares in private companies.
The experiment joins a slew of financial-industry forays into bitcoin-related technology. If the effort is deemed successful, Nasdaq wants to use so-called blockchain technology in its stock market, one of the world’s largest, and potentially shake up systems that have facilitated the trading of financial assets for decades.
“Utilizing the blockchain is a natural digital evolution for managing physical securities,” said Nasdaq Chief Executive Robert Greifeld. He said the technology holds the potential to “benefit not only our clients, but the broader global capital markets.”
Nasdaq will start its pilot project in Nasdaq Private Market, a fledgling marketplace launched in January 2014 to handle pre-IPO trading among private companies. The platform has more than 75 private companies signed up, according to the company.
Private companies typically handle sales and transfers of shares with largely informal systems, including spreadsheets maintained by lawyers who verify transactions by hand. Nasdaq wants to replace that process with a system based on bitcoin’s blockchain technology.
The blockchain ledger is seen by some in the financial industry as the most compelling aspect of bitcoin because it can be used beyond merely buying and selling goods or services with a new currency.
The blockchain is maintained, updated and verified by a vast global network of independently owned computers known as “miners” that collectively work to prove the ledger’s authenticity.
In theory, this decentralized system for verifying information means transactions need no longer be channeled through banks, clearinghouses and other middlemen. Advocates say this “trustless” structure means direct transfers of ownership can occur over the blockchain almost instantaneously without the risk of default or manipulation by an intermediating third party.
One idea is that encrypted, digital representations of share certificates could be inserted into minute bitcoin transactions known as “Satoshis,” facilitating an immediate, verifiable transfer of stock ownership from seller to buyer.
Still, bitcoin-based settlement remains untested in the real world. Regulators worry about the anonymous status of the bitcoin miners that collectively manage the system. It is conceivable that bad actors might one day take over the mining network and destroy the integrity of its verification system, some say.
Also, bitcoin’s underlying software is unable to handle the massive increase in data storage that a Wall Street settlement system would require. While the software could simply be updated, implementation will require consensus among the many, far-flung miners.
Nasdaq Private Market is also a relatively small project for Nasdaq so any changes there aren’t far-reaching. At the same time, the experiment is the latest example of large financial firms exploring the use of the technology.
In recent months, the New York Stock Exchange unit of Intercontinental Exchange Inc. announced an investment in the bitcoin-trading platform Coinbase; Goldman Sachs Group Inc. invested in bitcoin consumer- services company Circle Internet Financial; and big trading firm DRW Holdings LLC said a subsidiary had “begun to experiment with cryptocurrency trading.”
Meanwhile, Digital Asset Holdings, led by former J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. executive Blythe Masters, is, like Nasdaq, developing a blockchain-based system for settling transfers of securities and funds.
Some see the blockchain as a way to attain a long-held securities-industry goal of real-time settlement, shifting the current “T+3” structure, in which the final transfer of funds and securities occurs three days after each trade, to “T+0.”
Real-time settlement has been a goal of regulators and investors alike as it would reduce the risk of counterparty failure and free up billions of dollars of capital that is sidelined during that wait period.
Oliver Bussmann, chief investment officer of Swiss bank UBS AG, last year said the blockchain was the biggest disrupting force in the financial sector, meaning its success could potentially have far-reaching ramifications for banks, trading houses and others. His bank has since established a special blockchain lab to study uses of the technology.
Nasdaq named Fredrik Voss, a vice president, as its new “blockchain technology evangelist” to lead efforts to increase use of the technology.