
Overstock Will Issue a Private Bond Powered by Bitcoin Tech - prostoalex
https://www.wired.com/2015/06/overstock-will-issue-private-bond-powered-bitcoin-tech/
======
JDDunn9
What's the advantage to Overstock? Saving the 0.5% underwriting fee? Then you
also have to sell the bonds yourself.

~~~
aquilaFiera
Overstock has been the target of naked short selling before and now Patrick
Byrne, CEO of Overstock, is on a crusade to change the stock market to make it
impossible to do so. This is an oversimplification, but it is also a great
motivating factor.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_short_selling](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_short_selling)

~~~
this_user
He seems to be doing all kinds of things regarding Bitcoin lately - and has
actually lost the company quite a bit of money by holding it on their balance
sheet. None of this has really anything to do with OSTK's core business. Maybe
Byrne is trying to pull a Bezos, but I wonder how long investors will let
these adventures go on.

------
dankohn1
If you want to discredit Bitcoin-related finance, have Overstock CEO Patrick
Byrne be its poster child. He has an embarrassing history of making absurd
statements about short selling and analysts rather than focusing on running a
successful business.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_M._Byrne#Campaign_again...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_M._Byrne#Campaign_against_naked_shorting_and_analysts)

~~~
yc1010
The venom on HN regarding anything to do with bitcoin is surprising and rather
sad.

The guy is trying to do something new and innovative (what are you doing?), it
might fail or it might be a success, you think a poster on a forum frequented
by geeks and entrepreneurs would understand this.

As for Overstock it is nice to see competition in a space dominated by the
Ebay/Amazon duopoly.

~~~
Moshe_Silnorin
Bitcoin was so ridiculously overhyped, the backlash is natural. "Call me when
is scales," is my take on cryptocurrency. 3 transactions per second is
laughable. Hundreds of millions of dollars worth of energy intentionally
wasted per year for that? It just seems to lack promise.

~~~
qopp
It can scale:
[https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability)

~~~
mpyne
The 3 trans/per second limit is an inherent limit in the protocol right now.

Fixing that is being discussed but will require a fork (and has already lead
to a lot of religious warfare). Even after the fork, the requirements of
supporting humongous blocks just to support more than 3 transactions per
second will lead to even more centralization of Bitcoin than what's already
happened, as full nodes are forced to move onto server-grade hardware instead
of an actual decentralized swarm.

You don't trust the USG? Great! But now you have to trust China and GHash.io
instead, it's been years since Bitcoin has actually been "decentralized" in
any meaningful sense.

But even with the low current block size, money supply inflation, and
plummeting Bitcoin price, the network has still failed to scale as judged by
the only thing that matters: Cost per transaction is _still_ $10, and it would
be even more expensive if Bitcoin price ever went back up!
[https://blockchain.info/charts/cost-per-
transaction](https://blockchain.info/charts/cost-per-transaction)

~~~
grubles
Keep in mind that the cost-per-transaction is the total value of the block
reward of a block (currently 25 BTC + fees) divided by the number of
transactions confirmed on the network in that block.

~~~
mpyne
Oh, I'm quite aware. So are the miners, and so are the Bitcoin core
developers, who are increasingly starting to think that Bitcoin will never be
able to shift completely over to miners' fees as a way of funding the Bitcoin
network, and that the existing block reward subsidy (read: money supply
inflation) might have to continue instead of being phased out the way Satoshi
had envisioned.

------
tessierashpool
On my company's blog, we predicted this a short time ago:

[https://www.pandastrike.com/posts/20150422-bitcoin-is-
bs](https://www.pandastrike.com/posts/20150422-bitcoin-is-bs)

[https://www.pandastrike.com/posts/20150527-bitcoin-
central-b...](https://www.pandastrike.com/posts/20150527-bitcoin-central-
banks)

Apologies as this is obviously a self-serving comment.

~~~
maxerickson
What is it you are saying you predicted?

One way to answer would be to take the "this" in your first sentence and
replace it with a clear description of what you are talking about.

"Read the posts" isn't really a satisfactory answer, they are not particularly
focused or easily distilled to a concrete prediction.

(One company issuing a tiny bond is not particularly significant news and is
probably not a harbinger of the future. It is not unusual for companies to
issue billions of dollars of bonds, so $25 million is not a large amount in
this context.)

