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According to multiple sources close to Overstock, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has approved a S-3 filing for online retailer Overstock.com (NASDAQ: OSTK) to issue new publicly traded shares of the company on the Bitcoin blockchain.
Overstock's t0 (tee-zero) platform has been working on bringing equity trades and settlement to the blockchain since it was first announced in April 2015. In July, Overstock sold the first cryptobond on the blockchain. As a proof of concept, FNY Managed Accounts agreed to buy the $5 million bond, with assurances in place in case the technology failed.
The t0 platform is built utilizing colored coin technology, which allows for fractions of bitcoin to be used to track ownership of many assets besides bitcoin. For example, a colored coin could be used as a token to prove that an individual owns shares of Overstock. This technology is built on top of the Bitcoin blockchain and is secured by the distributed public ledger.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 10 2015, @05:43PM
This is the first time I hear of coloured coins. Can coins be identified as coloured or uncoloured by a third party? That is, if I send you a coloured bitcoin without telling you, can you determine that the bitcoin I sent you was coloured?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 10 2015, @05:57PM
It's not actually a different type of bitcoin, they're just nicknamed this because the metadata is stored on the blockchain but they represent something other than an actual bitcoin.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 10 2015, @06:01PM
This is bad for Bitcoin is some ways because it involves overloading meaning onto the block-chain, making it less useful as a currency.
For example, "coloured coin" schemes discourage coin mixing, making Bitcoin less fungible.
(Score: 2) by tynin on Thursday December 10 2015, @08:51PM
Anyone here following talks with the bitcoin platform devs? What is there thoughts on this? Wasn't the staggering growth of the blockchain one of the primary concerns with the core of this technology? I've been out of the loop on btc dev politics for a while now.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Snow on Thursday December 10 2015, @09:39PM
Yes, there is a lot of... different ideas.... about the size limitations of the blockchain (currently 1mb/block). There was a meeting in Hong Kong last weekend to discuss this issue, and a new idea was presented called 'Segregated Witness'. It's a new idea to me, so it hasn't fully sunk in, but from what I understand, the transaction would live in the main blockchain, but the signature of that transaction would live in a separate, but linked, blockchain.
So why do that? Why not just increase the block size for the main chain and be done with it? There have been some arguments about block propagation times, and there is fear that by raising the block size, it may unfairly benefit certain players. By using this segregated witness, the main blockchain block could be sent quickly (so miners can start building on top of it), while the segregated witness blocks might take longer to send. It's kind of like multi threading bitcoin.
(Score: 3, Funny) by darkfeline on Friday December 11 2015, @01:58AM
>It's kind of like multi threading bitcoin.
You know what they say: 'Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use multithreading." Now they have two problems.'
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 11 2015, @06:14AM
A prominent member of the community has decided that peasants do not need sound money, and has vowed to sabotage all attempts to increase the size of the block-chain: at least until such time as they have trouble moving "old" coins.
That said, there are legitimate concerns with raising the block limit. Bitcoin becomes harder to hide in the "noise" (via tor for example) the more popular it gets. Miners in China already have difficulty with available bandwidth to the west.
(Score: 2) by Snow on Thursday December 10 2015, @06:01PM
Here is the spec for colored coins:
https://github.com/Colored-Coins/Colored-Coins-Protocol-Specification/wiki/Coloring-Scheme [github.com]
I don't quite understand how it works, but to answer your question, yes, you should be able to tell if a coin given to you is colored by checking the OP_RETURN data. If the protocol is 0x4343, then you have a colored coin.