Bitcoin Forum

Hi all,

I discussed with the board and approved a small allocation of funds for a bounty for building a Mastercoin Faucet.
While this part of the ecosystem isn't strictly required, because soon everybody will be able to buy mastercoins directly off the distributed exchange, I still think that giving small amounts of mastercoins to new users is a cool additional service we can provide.

Bounty size: $500+$50 per authentication method beyond the first, from the ones listed below. You can start by implementing just a few authentication methods, but at least one premium authentication method has to be supported.

Acceptance criteria:

Create a webpage that sends a small amount of mastercoins to anyone that passes certains qualifications, in order to prevent abuse. Qualifications we can start with:

Premium authentication

• Anyone who's had a github account with either (at least 3 public repositories) or (stared one of the mastercoin github repositories listed here (http://wiki.mastercoin.org/index.php/FAQ#Is_Mastercoin_open_source.3F)) and (account created before date Aug 1st 2013).
• Anyone with a reddit account with karma above 100.
• Anyone who had a bitcointalk account with activity score > 10, at least 10 posts, accounts created prior to Aug 1 2013. This one would be more difficult to implement given the lack of API, and so this feature is awarded $150 instead of $50.

Basic authentication
Anyone with a Google/Facebook account (amount given here should be smaller, this criteria might be easier to spam)

Security
The service should be "hard to hack". We will delay awarding the bounty until 30 days pass from the site's launch without a serious security incident.

Funding
The site will display available funds at time of access. The Mastercoin Foundation will award:

$0.5 worth of mastercoins for the first 1,000 people that authenticate via premium authentication.
$0.1 worth of mastercoins for the next 10,000 people, or to people that authenticate via basic authentication.

In other words, we will allocate a total of $1,500 for the faucet's visitors. The faucet will award visitors based on their chosen authentication method. When the $500 allocated to premium authentication runs out, these users will be served by the $1,000 pool dedicated to basic authentication.

The worth of each mastercoin in USD can be hardcoded at first (updated at least weekly).

Bonus $50 - find the value of MSC in USD by first finding the value of MSC-BTC via the distributed exchange, and then multiplying by the value of BTC-USD via bitstamp or another exchange.

The website should be open source, with the code hosted on github.

Maintenance
The site is expected to be maintained even beyond the 30-day "hack test" period.
We are not yet committed to additional funds as rewards beyond the initial $1,500 - we will consider this when the funds run out.

Hosting is not cheap. Especially if you want to do it in a secure fashion. Secure hosting is needed since the server needs access to a private key with a sufficient Mastercoin balance. I also doubt that the people who will go for a 500 USD bounty are the same the people who know how to securely host and build their code. But I hope I'm proven wrong :)

Well, security is relative.
This server won't hold large amount of funds at any time ... we can fuel it in $100-$200 increments.

I'm more concerned about people trying to game the authentication system.

If that's the case I would also setup an IP filter, just in case. I know this would rule out a lot of University/Office/Proxy based users but it will also greatly reduce the abuse.

My recommendation (since you almost asked)  Mastercoin dev team should pay for (and own) the server hosting accounts, as well as the SSL cert registrations, though perhaps let the bounty winner specify the environment.

be careful with the bitcointalk accounts, it turned out that whoever hacked this site last month created a ton of bogus accounts in order to take advantage of the script that ran for the XRP giveaway

https://ripple.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3800&p=18691

Let's modify the criteria to require 10 posts per bitcointalk account, I assume that it's hard to make 10 bot posts and not get flagged.

This authentication method is optional, whoever implements this bounty - you can skip it for now if you want.

OP updated.
I also updated the github auth method:

Cool bounty, will inform the dev community in Kuala Lumpur.

While Reddit, GitHub, Google and FB allow authentication via OAuth, this leaves bitcointalk.org alone. A possible solution is to generate one-time tokens which the user could put in his profile for a short time. The profile is easily scrapable, but I still see no simple way to fetch the user id solely based on an username.

Does each authentication offer a potential reward for the user or is he only allowed to redeem one?

following

We feel that this feature is of low priority, given the distributed exchange and the many many bitcoin faucets.
This is why it receives a low bounty - it's nice to have but we can get along without it.


Well, a user can obviously connect multiple authentication methods and then clear their cookies between them - I do not expect the site to try and guarantee each user only receives one reward.

Faucets are mere gimmicks.  Mastercoin doesn't need a gimmick to attract attention because the quality of the spec speaks for itself.  Why waste even one more second making a gimmick to attract freeloaders?  

This is a legitimate project - not a pump and dump scam.  Pump and dump scams love things like faucets.  Time to give up on this stupid effort and get back to contributing to the real function of the Mastercoin core.

Gavin ran a faucet for Bitcoin for a long time ...

As I said, it's a low priority feature, so we won't concentrate a lot of effort into it, but if someone wants to pick this up and create the first Mastercoin faucet, he'll get a token reward for his effort.

We're focusing most of our energy on other projects, don't worry.

That is a matter of opinion, and there are plenty of people who do not get it or learn by doing rather than reading a spec.  The give away portion is almost nothing, and I doubt anyone is going to go after it as a serious source of income.

Mastercoin is a new concept on top of a new concept and giving these away allows newbies to have some small incentive to play with it in order to learn how to use the various tools and software involved.  

For example, some people might want to try a few test transactions in order to be confident in the inner workings of mastercoin before they throw down serious btc. 

Mastercoin cannot benefit from those kinds of people who are motivated by a few pennies to learn to use some tools and software.  We need to attract a different sort of thinker.  People who are attracted by faucets for free pennies are not the type of people who will materially effect the protocol in the long run.  Drop the faucet - it is dumb.

People are motivated by not losing real money, that is why a faucet allows them to test a system and gain confidence that their money is not going into some black hole.

For example, just the other day when I was writing a tutorial I overlooked the transaction fee portion and had an unconfirmed tx that locked all of the funds in my wallet even though I was only spending about 1% of the total.  I had to spend 1 hour to download and set up pywallet  to clean up my wallet.dat and do a rescan.  Now, I am not a technical wizard, but certainly there are people out there who will use these technologies and do stupid things, it is better that they make errors with insignificant amounts rather than doing something with larger amounts.

They could accomplish the same thing by spending $.1 - ten cents - of their own money.  They don't need a faucet (free money) to experiment with small values in testing a system. 

Hey,

I created a first test version of a Mastercoin faucet.

The actual payout module is not yet created. I want to create raw transactions and push them to blockchained.info (or similar).

4/5 authentication methods are implemented. The code is not complete and not optimized.

http://faucet.bitwatch.co/img/faucet_01.png (http://faucet.bitwatch.co/img/faucet_01.png) http://faucet.bitwatch.co/img/faucet_02.png (http://faucet.bitwatch.co/img/faucet_02.png) http://faucet.bitwatch.co/img/faucet_03.png (http://faucet.bitwatch.co/img/faucet_03.png) http://faucet.bitwatch.co/img/faucet_04.png (http://faucet.bitwatch.co/img/faucet_04.png) http://faucet.bitwatch.co/img/faucet_05.png (http://faucet.bitwatch.co/img/faucet_05.png) http://faucet.bitwatch.co/img/faucet_06.png (http://faucet.bitwatch.co/img/faucet_06.png)

GitHub: https://github.com/dexX7/mastercoin-faucet

Website: http://faucet.bitwatch.co

Let me know, what you think.

looks good but i got this message when I tried out my bitcointalk profile:


I actually did not follow this part below, it was a bit unclear to me what I am supposed to do? clear out everything in my signature and just put a BTC address? or do I need to put in "mastercoin faucet" followed by my btc address?

Could it be that there is an error with the signature? There should be an explicit warning now, if this is the case.

I tested:

Profile:

Signature:

For address:

Message:

okay i get it now,  you mean sign the message with bitcoin qt.

when I read the directions I thought it was referring to the signature in bitcointalk's profile information (a little tired from writing lots of essays)

and how many people would not have learned what BTC was before me through this mechanism, who in turn may have been implementive in me jumping into BTC? Consider secondary, tertiary effects...

everything worked using the forum option

I tried with reddit, and got this:


Not sure if it worked it's not showing yet, and tried it a second time to no avail with my public key.

Sorry, I should have made this more clear probably. This is just a test, there is no payout yet and what there is, is not 100 % finished. Just wanted to share some progress. :)

Great stuff, looking good!

I officially forked your code over to https://github.com/mastercoin-MSC/mastercoin-faucet

For the record, the project isn't sponsored by me, but rather by The Mastercoin Foundation.

So cool! Somehow I forgot to sign up for notifications on this thread, so I am only just now seeing this. Please post to reddit when you are ready for the masses!

Have we made provision to fund this faucet somehow? I assume that is in addition to the bounty money . . .

Tested the site with bitcointalk authentication, everything went smooth!

Good job, waiting for the site to be active   ;D


Cheers, jaspita

Yeah, we agreed in one of the board internal emails to fund it with $850 bounty + $1,500 faucet rewards.


BTW, can we make sure that the faucet sends Test Mastercoins alongside the real mastercoins?
We will of course fund the faucet with TMSC alongside the MSC.

FYI I redirected faucet.mastercoin.org to your website.

If you want, we can set that up as a CNAME instead of a URL redirect.

I'm still not publishing it officially, we need some more testing of course.

Awesome, thanks for the feedback!

I'll push a few improvements over the weekend and I also want to start with experimental payouts soon. When it's ready, I'm going to announce it here. :)

And regarding my proposal for a CNAME from faucet.mastercoin.org?

Please make sure you use multisig transactions.

+1

I think Willett said it once already, but to clarify - all new Mastercoin projetcs must use the latest encoding by default.

Tachikoma - there are three different encodings, right? Willett's original one, multisig, and something using what Gavin introduced in 0.9?
Or am I mistaken and #2 = #3 ?

i think you ought to explain here that Mastercoin address is a Bitcoin address, and that the address should either come from blockchain.info wallet (maybe even link to the blockchain wallet set up page) or bitcoin-qt.

Sorry for ignorance

But What i need to do to achieve "sign the message Mastercoin faucet with that address." with my BTC Adress?

I believe what this means is in bitcoint-qt go to File  then Sign Message with that text.

Can this be done from Blockhain.info account? I can't get the Bitcoin QT on my hardrive (using only SSD), it eats too much of space (although i'm not even sure it needs to sync fully for this to be done).

does your code check if they subscribe to http://www.reddit.com/r/mastercoin? or just checks karma?

faucet.bitwatch.co goes currently to a webhost. I was looking for ways to process the payout. My first idea was to generate the raw transactions via PHP (which works perfectly fine) and then sign and push them, but I'm stuck at the point where the tx are signed. Therefore I came to the conclusion that I do want to run my own bitcoind instance on a VPS. faucet.bitwatch.co is probably not final and I was also thinking about purchasing mastercoin-faucet.com or mastercoinfaucet.com.


Yes, of course. Dispite the frown I also want to generate tx that send the change to the 1-of-2 output to minimize wasted coins (= 1 input [sender], 3 output [exodus, receiver, 1-of-data/sender]).. even if those tx take a while to be confirmed (it's not that bad), this can be countered by using a pool of multiple payout addresses.


Agreed. There needs to a some more explaination anyway, like a smallish tutorial how a user can use their MSC and generate transactions.


I think blockchain.info is able to generate signed messages, yes. Another great thin-client that allows signing is Electrum (www.electrum.org).


No, it just checks karma. I think making it a requirement (if this is even possible) would be too intrusive, same goes for Facebook and potential MSC pages or groups. But this brings me to the idea to suggest users to join the FB group and to subscribe to the subreddit! :)

I tested this just now, using the Bitcointalk version.

Says I have an invalid address...  

I entered in the first box my correct Bitcointalk PM user link and it does have a BTC address posted in profile.

Also used my Bitcoin QT Wallet to get my signature for the BTC address and entered that in the second box...

Am I doing something wrong? Or is this a normal error message since its in testing?

Thanks!
StewartJ

Invalid address? You mean "invalid signature", right?

Please try:

Link: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=104899
Signature: HDnUuQqQoHEJoJPiPMbHKGlWvCm5bmilfNfOB4IVo/UafJE8Zikg8tqfdkuLdULSFki5dEjw5uj8UhG08Xa1co8=

Does this work? :)

I'm a little behind schedule, sorry for that. I have quite a busy week.

Here is the good news: I now have a VPS with bitcoind running and purchased mastercoin-faucet.com. The website is not yet transferred and still hosted on the webhost, accessible via faucet.bitwatch.co, so the only missing step is going live with the payout module enabled.

Sorry again for the delay, I'll keep you updated. :)

Yes that works fine entering your info.

Wondering if this could be the problem... my Bitcoin Wallet is still syncing with 20 weeks to go...as its been off for a while.
Does the wallet have to be synced for this to work?


I would make one suggestion, I was confused with your instructions for entering the Signature part... you did not indicate that we needed
to go to our Bitcoin wallets for this, and a noob like me had to come here to this thread to figure it out. Maybe you could add a blurb about
"Open your bitcoin wallet and retrieve your signature, and enter it in the second box here...."  :)

Keep up the most excellent work!!

StewartJ

Your client doesn't need to be in sync, the faucet just scans your profile and grabs the Bitcoin address and then compares the signature for the message "Mastercoin faucet". But you are right and you are not the first one who said it's difficult.

What do you think about this:

To authenticate via bitcointalk.org the user would need to put a generated text into his profile for a short moment.

For example: "Please put the text ##MSCFAUCET10109818181## somewhere in your profile and submit your profile link"

The faucet then would only need to scan the profile and check, if the text "##MSCFAUCET10109818181##" exists somewhere. Would that be easier and preferred?

Edit: thanks for testing by the way, very appreciated!

I think the message embeded in profile is far easier and cleaner approach. Especially if we do not happen to have access to our btc wallets while getting authorized.

Be happy to test it for you  :)
Stew

Any more updates coming for this?

Would be happy to help test, new MSC volunteer here.  :)

Stew

Nice! ;)


1. The website is now http://mastercoin-faucet.com.

2. Payouts are enabled. 40-50x 0.0001 Test Mastercoin are available and distributed via 5 rotating addresses. I'll add a few more, if there are no problems. Please try crazy things, so potential leaks are uncovered.

3. One reward per authentication method and user account. There are no checks to prevent a user to redeem multiple rewards via different accounts.. yet.

4. The message signing authentication for bitcointalk.org will probably be replaced with one-time-token strings (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=321358.msg3574996#msg3574996).

5. Too bad that transactions with a multi sig input and no additional change address are not accepted like this transaction (https://blockchain.info/tx/6d68b101c8b92b38c02595a084aa5c8b0308c4f2f5714070d7656251075dbbcf), but on the other hand those weired tx are not very nice to handle anyway. It 0.0002092 BTC transportation cost vs. 0.0003184 BTC for regular transactions (https://blockchain.info/de/tx/8a83b4f34e2238c9c34471e3665aba796c7f5bd7d749d4a3966213ce045afacd).


Cheers! :)

man took me 15 minutes to get that $0.5,

Edit: not yet, crap

Urgh.. There is a transaction problem.. :(

Yup, sorry.. I did something stupid and now I'm downloading the whole blockchain again... :-\

Well anyway, don't grind all test MSC please. ;D

The $0.1-$0.5 rewards will come, but I want to do some tests with less value first. ;)

+1

FYI I'm unsubscribing from notifications from this thread for now.
If you need anything, or when you feel the product is well tested and well used enough to claim the bounty, drop us a line at info@mastercoin.org

I'm glad to see this picking off!

Filled in the faucet but havent received anything yet. (After 15 hours)

tested again, with bitcointalk profile.

everything worked perfectly and i received shortly after

Strange.
Received nothing:

TX: https://blockchain.info/nl/tx/735bd357b0ce7d684d53b10a0cb108663739c0e6a1d9f850880e20def218a2ec

Ah, thanks. Initially there were tx with a fee of 0.00009999 BTC which didn't confirm and I sent out the tx manually again. Yours was one of them.

Not confirmed:
https://blockchain.info/tx/6ac69ed30c7599351ed416fe195aa724361919988588263fecdb974b91a5750c

Manual resend:
https://blockchain.info/tx/735bd357b0ce7d684d53b10a0cb108663739c0e6a1d9f850880e20def218a2ec

This tx has the data address 1Dpuuq4as1nBUbtw8WaEvdzPuCJCT4c8hW, which is invalid and should actually be 1JKyyt9rbsb5TagFEFk8Z6sHo4bwUwYdv7, so it seems that I created an invalid tx manually.

I fagged your tx and you should be able to claim this reward again. I'd apprechiate, if you try again, it should be fine now. :)

any update on the progress of this?

The test run with smallish amounts goes well with no problems till now.

http://mastercoin-faucet.com/

A few more days and then going live? What do you think? :)

i sent a msg to info@mastercoin for you so whoever was running this bounty should check up soon

I'm running the bounty.
dexX7 - when you officially launch and are fully tested, please email info@mastercoin.org with details on the product, what was done, how it was tested, and how much real world usage it sees (stas + Google Analytics would be great).

We can then evaluate on our end and award you your bounty.
Do you need some amount to fuel the faucet itself, for now?
You can email J.R and ask him for some MSC and TEST MSC to fuel this.

Yeah, I have a bunch already earmarked for giving away.

What exactly is mastercoin? Is it an alt coin??

No. A new protocol layer being built on top of bitcoin. Mastercoin is to bitcoin as http is to tcp/ip.

Our website: http://www.mastercoin.org
Our subreddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/mastercoin
The bitcointalk thread where I launched our kickstarter: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=265488.0 (used for ongoing Mastercoin discussion)
The spec: https://github.com/mastercoin-MSC/spec
Wiki FAQ: http://wiki.mastercoin.org/index.php?title=FAQ
Thread for buying and selling Mastercoins: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=287145.0
Our current 300 BTC coding contest: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=292628.0

http://wiki.mastercoin.org/index.php/FAQ#What_is_Mastercoin_and_why_is_it_needed.3F

I just gave a talk yesterday that explained this, we'll the upload high quality video soon.
In the meantime, here's the low res video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEmmqLb2F9c&feature=youtu.be) we have + slides (https://www.dropbox.com/s/u43ylvjvqf0p9f7/Mastercoin%20Status%20Nov%202013.pptx) (hit Play to see animations).

my  account 

14Defj1xE3CyJmVuiFdLaZ5GKCa4nWe9zn

my english is not very good.

is this a test phase for the faucet , with bounties given out for any bugs found ?

Theymos forgot to send this to altcoin hell.

It's a test phase giving out very smallish amounts of Test MSC to see, if everything goes smooth.

Is there something you found?

The real MSC are ready to be distributed, so let's fix it before going live. ;)

Bug bounties were not intended, but if it's worth, then a report shall be worth something, too.

Please contact me via PM or at dexx@bitwatch.co, if it's sensible. :)

I would be interested in doing this, but that's quite a low bounty for something that takes so long to do...

FYI I posted your request on the main thread

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=265488.msg3801432#msg3801432

great job on putting this together

if anyone wants to help spread the word for the faucet on bitcointalk you can use this code in your signature:

how many people have tried this out so far?

My mastercoin address :

K3N6M6VLLPYSiCBFSDKecaHsKnsqcv7Tgk

Thanks

where to get mastercoin wallet please? ???

you can use bitcoin-qt for the time being

check http://wiki.mastercoin.org for how this works.  all mastercoins are stored in the bitcoin blockchain.

Wow, I'm not really a fan of flashy signatures, but it look great! Thanks for including it into yours!

So far:

 - 222 Mastercoin rewards (unique, 0.0005-0.0025 MSC)
 - 301 Test Mastercoins rewards (0.0001 TMSC)

... were claimed. The amount of daily visitors is very constant over the last days and mastercoin.org is the main source of new visitors.

I have received a great suggestion about some UI changes via email which I will implement sooner or later. I wish I would invest more time in the faucet. Still need to mail the follow up.. ::)

Just received the Mastercoin thx! awesome! Question: Can i go back to get more after 1 day? Where can I get more Mastercoin, I am new to this so I don't have much other coins like btc.

Right now you can only receive one reward, sorry! But it's still enough to play around a bit - you can send small amounts. :)

Here is a very large thread with buyers and sellers:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=287145.0

JqUVdikDtwSxZVsRQ3vbfRVmuWKjN1CgEp

That's not how it works! ;D

Please visit www.mastercoin-faucet.com to claim some MSC.

Notice to all:

It has come to my attention that the signing/message verification considers some (valid) signatures as invalid. Will be fixed after the weekend. Some UI changes are on the way, too and I'm thinking about dropping the verification via bitcointalk.org and replaced with something else. It's not intuitive and causes confussion, but on the other hand, it's educational. Seems that the instruction is not good enough, I guess.

Cheers!

Hey Dexx,

I see that Ron originally listed the bounty as $500 to $850 in this thread.

It appears that you have done the full $850 worth of work, so I have put a pending payment for $850 for you in our ledger (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AtCyUJvk_IyNdGpVcnpBN2tOczFmbVRnck5TWjZuRFE&usp=sharing#gid=0).

I will send BTC worth $850 (according to the 3-day average from bitstamp) the next time I access project funds (probably within a few days) to your address 11NiSNoGYomEA3ZHEN4R9ne4kwDjECsAy.

Thanks for your work on this!

-J.R.