Overstock.com Assembles Coders to Create a Bitcoin-Like Stock Market

This is sort of the idea I&#x27;ve been waiting to come out of the bitcoin universe for some time now. A decentralized stock exchange seems like an obvious killer application for bitcoin. Though, the only thing I don&#x27;t like about it is counterpart. Was never a fan of them, nor open transactions...<p>Why go to the SEC? I feel like the advantage of doing something like this would be the ability to build a trading exchange without any authority over looking it.. I&#x27;d say that&#x27;s what&#x27;s wrong with the current system (NYSE,NASDAQ,etc).

Given Patrick Byrne&#x27;s history[1] with stocks, markets, regulators, etc. I am not surprised to see him involved in this kind of project.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.deepcapture.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.deepcapture.com&#x2F;</a>

This is great. Patrick Byrne is doing a great service here. Development of crypto-security tools being pushed by an already successful publicly traded company adds instant credibility to the project and will lead many more successful business leaders to give it closer inspection, sooner.

So what happens when somebody doesn&#x27;t secure the private keys to their Overstock shares well enough? A hacker steals your Overstock shares, and now they own them? What happens if someone steals the shares from the CEO? Obviously the hacker could never make use of those shares or else they would get caught. In a system like this, it can&#x27;t be truly decentralized, can it?

A veritable explosion of innovation is coming our way. This decentralized stock exchange is just a hint of what is to come. Technologies using bitcoin, and technologies built on bitcoin, are the next thing that will change the world. Don&#x27;t get me wrong, I&#x27;m happy we&#x27;re also democratizing taxi services, but democratizing finance makes me so much more excited.

It&#x27;s an exciting prospect to trade financial assets on a decentralized, trustless network. Definitely the right direction.<p>But I&#x27;m not psyched about having to think about Counterparty&#x27;s internal XCP currency, even if it isn&#x27;t used for most purposes. It&#x27;s an annoying barrier to have to transact in an altcoin to access certain functionality.<p>Other implementations use pure Bitcoin only, and are much less overwrought with complexity than Counterparty: <a href="https://coins.assembly.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;coins.assembly.com</a>

The issue I see is there&#x27;s no avoiding putting your trust in the centralized issuer. You can issue and trade inherently centralized assets on a global ledger, but why? What is the advantage for the common man?

Can anyone knowledgeable (especially those that do not like bitcoin) weigh in as to why this would be a bad idea ?<p>I&#x27;m asking this sincerely, and not being sarcasm, as I don&#x27;t know enough about either Bitcoin or stock market to make a judgement. And this seems ... different enough that I&#x27;m not sure my reaction should be &quot;damn the future is here&quot;, or &quot;what a bunch of craps&quot;.

Whether Overstock succeeds in this or not, it&#x27;s coming and it will be huge; I so predict.

I&#x27;m nitpicking, but it&#x27;s bizarre to see Karl Popper being described as an &quot;economist&quot;.

With the current low price of bitcoins, wouldn&#x27;t it be a good time to burn bitcoins into XCP ?

check the overstock&#x27;s original website, after few seconds it was evident that I shouldn&#x27;t be bothered reading the article.

The title is misleading: the exchange will actually be built on top of Bitcoin using Counterparty (counterparty.io).