[EM] A secure distributed election scheme based on Bitcoin's Proof-of-Work protocol

[Mike Frank]

Shorting essentially just means borrowing the item to short, and then
selling the borrowed item below market price.

You could certainly borrow bitcoins from someone (if they were willing to
loan them to you), and then sell the borrowed coins on an exchange.

However, the existing exchanges don't support "naked short selling," which
would means posting an "ask" to sell bitcoins that you don't actually have
on deposit in your exchange account.

But, there is nothing to prevent someone from making such an exchange, or
just posting a Craigslist ad that says, "I have 1 million Bitcoins which I
am willing to sell to anyone for $0.001 cents each," when you don't have the
actual coins yet, just some friends who have agreed to loan you their coins.

That would essentially be a retro-tech equivalent of a naked short sell.

-Mike

On Sat, Jun 18, 2011 at 6:16 PM, Warren Smith <warren.wds at gmail.com> wrote:

> By the way, re Jameson Quinn saying he'd short-sell bitcoins...
> is it actually possible to short them?
>
> --
> Warren D. Smith
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