Etheropt, a decentralized options exchange built on Ethereum | Hacker News Reader

Etheropt, a decentralized options exchange built on Ethereum

etherboost.github.io

134 pointsfrenchhoudini30 comments

Very interesting, I hope you are not in the United States. I doubt the CFTC would take too kindly to this especially since they are binary options. Good luck!

From the intro:

>Etheropt has no owner. Its entire operation is described and executed by an Ethereum smart contract.

That smart contract was written by a person and they should realize that there might be legal repercussions in the US at least. I have a great interest in this space (I started a failed cryptocurrency options exchange myself) and I hope that it blossoms.

I would like to see regular puts and calls instead of binary options, the latter is ill-suited for hedging and really just a speculative instrument.

>That smart contract was written by a person and they should realize that there might be legal repercussions in the US at least.

Satoshi Nakamoto created the world's most powerful cryptocurrency and nobody knows anything about that person or group, remember.

Nakamoto took careful steps to hide his identity. The creators of Ethereum have not.

That said, this is one of those "holy shit" moments for me. Once a DAC is running, there isn't a damn thing a government can do about it.

Or even its creator. It's like a creature let loose in the wild, or a virus with a checkbook. The mind reels at the possibilities.

Isn't this limited to binary options because binary options have a set price and payout?

Regular puts and calls have a potentially unlimited payout which means the seller would have to put up some serious collateral and/or hedge their exposure. If nothing else, I'd figure that would add some complexity and/or counterparty risk.

I'm not well versed in these matters, so perhaps you could enlighten me.

How would they prove that a certain person wrote it ?

And also, what if someone publish the code of someone else, who is responsible then ?

The CFTC can eat one. Seriously, there's not a goddamn thing they will be able to do about DACs. Better call a hearing.

It's funny to realize that a DAC can go on existing even after its creators may have been charged or imprisoned for breaking a law or regulation. I don't agree with the CFTC but I acknowledge their power.

Is there a distinction between developing software and operating it? Usually. Always?

This isn't just software though. This is an organization.

As long as net-neutrality exists, yes.

I am sure this will be very comforting for the creators of this once they are sitting in some US jail. Ask the leadership of FIFA how pissing off the US government by double crossing the USA over the 2018 world cup worked out.

Wait until "those who jail" start watching code check itself into a decentralized git repo on IPFS after receiving a consensus based payment from a thousand anonymous individuals. Seriously, they have no fucking idea what is coming.

Yes I know this genie can’t be put back in the bottle, but if they decide to go after you it can be very unpleasant. Given how the USA financial sector and law enforcement work together it would be a good idea to follow Satoshi’s example and be very hard to find.

The author created an account to post this "french houdini". Maybe it was Satoshi!

That would be amusing, but I do hope the author has taken a lot of care to keep him/her/themselves hidden. Angry bankers are not toys you want to play with.

I have always wondered if the NSA knows who Satoshi is.

Ted Nelson knows who he is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emDJTGTrEm0

the dudes github name is the french houdini. Nobody can keep him locked up!

> ... verified by Reality Keys. Etheropt has no owner. Its entire operation is described and executed by an Ethereum smart contract.

Tell me if I'm wrong but isn't your trusted third party now simply Reality Keys?

If they used Oraclize (secured by TLSNotary), impossible to forge any data, it would be as authentic as Poloniex/Kraken's APIs say it is.

so it means trusting Poloniex/Kraken's API, so not decentralized and trustless.

it also means trusting TLSNotary

Yes, 'smart' contracts are great until they actually have to interact with the real world, and suddenly they lose their automatic, unstoppable, trustless features.

So far it seems that the only true reliable ethereum use cases have been ponzi schemes and dice games, because these can be implemented completely in the system.

Ethereum's much-promoted gambling app, 'Augur', gets very messy when it comes to settling market winners. I wonder how they will cope with fixing wrongly-settled events, and who will foot the bill?

Yes, but it at least reduces your counterparty risk to trusting someone to deliver an accurate price feed, rather than trusting them to deliver a pile of money. There are various ways to reduce the trust in a single party, from simple multiparty voting to ambitious betting schemes like Augur.

This is awesome! I've been wondering when we were going to see some of these DAOs come online. (Assuming OP is author or author is reading) Have you written up/do you have any resources on writing a smart contract like this?

I am the author, and I think the best way to get started is by looking at existing contracts, which are generally written in Solidity, Ethereum's language for writing smart contracts. Here are a few examples that I found helpful:

- https://github.com/etherpot/contract/blob/master/app/contrac... - https://etherdice.io/#contract - https://ethereumpyramid.com/contract.html - And of course the main docs, http://solidity.readthedocs.org/en/latest/ (see also https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Solidity-Features)

Once you have a smart contract, it's a good idea to provide some interface to help people interact with it. There are a number of JS libraries to help you interact with Ethereum available at https://github.com/ethereumjs.

Please contact me using my email address or kwikiel at Gmail. I would like to ask you few question about feasibility and technical complexity of creating things on the ethereum

Once Ethereum's gas price adjustment is operating, what would you think of an option contract that uses the gas price data instead of an external feed?

Adding a couple more, i.e. 3 of mine - tried to comment thoroughly.

https://github.com/thelooneyfarm/contracts

In my experience it is not that much of an uphill battle to start, it is quite similar to the stuff devs do in their normal dayjob.

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