Bitcoin Forum

I have spent the last few months writing and editing a document which I am ambitiously calling "The Second Bitcoin Whitepaper".

Today is my birthday, so as promised (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=56600.0), I took the day off work to do some final polishing and to publish it for public comment.

Here it is: https://sites.google.com/site/2ndbtcwpaper/2ndBitcoinWhitepaper.pdf

The paper calls for a "trusted entity" to hold funds, hire developers, and probably make a lot of money for themselves. (Read more about it in the whitepaper.) The most important feedback I need from the bitcoin community is who that entity should be.

What company, person, or group of people do you consider most trustworthy to play this role?

I will be online for a couple more hours to answer questions about the paper, then I'll be off to celebrate my birthday and finally publishing this.

You did a splendid job thanks for sharing this I now have some good reading material!  ;D

I've been wondering when someone would write this. Is there now a general consensus of where Bitcoin is going?

That's what I'm trying to build!

I'm off now to celebrate my birthday and the publication of this paper, and I'll be offline for a good long time. I'll be back to answer any questions, but maybe not for a few days.

I think it's a non-question: I say we have numerous developers compete for the top.

Thanks for all the hard work! I can understand the amount of thought and effort that went into this. Out of respect I did spend some time and thought on this post. I only offer critique in hopes that it will help you achieve the success you are seeking.

Let me start off by saying flat out: MasterCoins wont work.

Here are a few reasons why.

I fail to see those as being the primary barriers to widespread adoption. This is subjective unless there is evidence to this effect. This flaw also results in a greater error:  Solving instability by manipulating markets, and solving insecurity by centralizing control (see below) as this will only increase instability and insecurity in the long run.


All of the above stipulations (there are seven) also rule out any privately owned company.  No company is going to let you into their operations and into their books.  Is the bitcoin community going to ask them to move to a different county? That leaves only volunteer type organizations, like charities or non-profits. These organizes could serve this purpose but if you think things aren't progressing as you want now, wait till NGO or NP politics and bureaucrats get a hold of it.


If the entire system depends on market manipulation, I would say from the very start this system is unsustainable.  Manipulated markets always eventually "buck" the manipulators.
Surely it will succeed in some instances but ultimately it will fail. There is no guarantee that destroying the bitcoins would increase their value, the best you can hope for is that the signal you send in saying "we are destryong bitcoins now to support the bitcoin market" actually effects the market. In fact in the example of destroying bitcoin in the manipulation of Mastercoin prices, actually destroying the bitcoins is impossible . Sending them to some address that apparently isnt accessible doesnt destroy them.

Similarily the stability mechanism (page 10) is also flawed as it explicitly relies on market manipulation.  Take the goldshares example. You cannot increase the value of shares by destroying them.  Destroying them means you have them to destroy them.  If you have them in the first place that means they arent in the market which means destroying them will do nothing to the market. The only thing you can hope to achieve again is that the signal that you are destroying shares will affect the market.  Are the shares going to be bought then destroyed? If so, bought with what? And who suffers the losses from the destruction?

As I see it, what MasterCoins essentially does is, using the existing bitcoin network, buy up bitcoins using a centrally-controlled, non-democratic, closed and non-transparent currency. Then attempts to manimupate and regulate the bitcoin market, the Mastercoin market, and all user currency markets. Wow, thats gonna take a lot of money.

Who would ever trade their bitcoin for MasterCoin given this?

Now admittedly I may be wrong, it's happened a couple of time before. So let me offer some suggestions.

First the idea of adding additional data into the blockchain is probably good and as far as I know, very easy to do.

Therefore I think you should drop the idea of a trusted entity, drop the idea of price manipulations, and promote the concept of useing mastercoin as a way to add more data to transactions to give the features you mentioned to bitcoin itself.

Other features require third parties.  If there is profit to be made in offering these services then people will provide them.

Dont take this critique personally, it is better to be proven wrong then to waste your efforts in vain. I appreciate anyone who proves me wrong for that begins the process of enlightenment.

It's nice to read comments like this from time to time. Also you're right.

First of, Happy Birthday! Second, what an elaborate piece of work you've concocted.

I remember reading about your idea way back when BTC was trading above $14. However, I never understood why the need for such complex system when the bitcoin network already provides everything that you would need to assign a different value to each bitcoin mined (or just to a tiny fraction of each bitcoin). Unfortunately, I still haven't figured out how to put my vision into words that would crush the dreams of even the most audacious of BTC speculators. Perhaps you wouldn't mind helping me solidify that vision in what can be called "The Third Bitcoin Whitepaper" one day?

Basically, I don't see raw bitcoins (those traded on Mt.Gox, etc) to be worth more than the cost of their production + maybe some profit margin that reflects a level of competition among the miners. But once those raw bitcoins are used in transactions for something of value (e.g. an hour of someone's service, an ounce of gold, a product, etc), their value can grow or shrink from the value of those transactions. So, if you are up for a simpler way to build "new currency layers" within the bitcoin network (rather than on top of it, as proposed in your paper), then we should talk.

We can refer to that data as bitcoin annotations, or 'bitnotations' for short.
I just love how many similarities there are between a tweet and a bitcoin transaction.

Looks great. You clearly put a ton of work into it.

Just as cool of a name as SolidCoin.

I think its an amazing idea to but other data into bitcoin transactions.  It opens up a whole realm of possibilities, including placing other types of transactions in them.  Insofar as I was very critical of the authors work, I should have spend more time pointing out the great ideas for putting other currencies on top of bitcoin.  We do it all the time in national currencies.  Gift cards, coupons, vouchers, prepaid cards etc.

@dacoinminster please continue your courageous work.  You are a leader and an honest person, much respect.

The paper is nicely written. I will keep this as a reminder for the potential of bitcoin.

Happy Birthday.

I'll critique your paper and contrast it with my own thoughts on similar matters.  While from a mile high view some of the solutions I envision have some similarities, I have some rather diametrically opposite views on a lot things.  I may someday produce a contrasting whitepaper, but don't hold your breath.  Also, forgive me in advance for any lack of tact, and everything I say should be prefaced by 'in my opinion'.

1)  I do think that it is almost unconscionably presumptuous to title the work 'The Second Bitcoin Whitepaper' given the nature of the content.

2)  I find one of the biggest threats to Bitcoin's long-term viability is that the blockchain will be bloated with spam (or more accurately just small transactions.)  Your solution perpetuates that issue from what I can tell.

3)  I believe that the most viable design philosophy is one where it is assumed that all parties are interested only in maximizing their own gain and will do so at the expense of all other considerations.  Good engineering practice would be

  3a)  to ensure that there exists no chinks which can be exploited by any party which create more harm to the system than the attacker suffers himself.
  3b)  to harness this force and leverage it to benefit the system.

4)  A currency system which is to live along side a state sponsored complement should anticipate state sponsored attack.  Probably the best strategy would be to outwardly ignore any state level legal services while considering internally how to mitigate potential avenues of attack.  The last thing it should do would be to rely on any form of legal protection from any state.

5)  Any form of centralized control should be avoided.  Minor centralized development decisions are probably unavoidable, but there is a great deal of experience to turn to in the long history of open source endeavors for resolving disputes

3,4,5 R)  Your 'Trust Entity' structure, although vaguely defined, seems to violate all of these concepts (except arguably #4 as I re-read things.)  Similarly, your Appendix B on Moral Issues.

6)  Between the complexities of initial distribution, ongoing reward, and hopefulness of fairly astronomical wealth generation, things 'feel' a bit scammy.  Whether the intent is there or not, I would expect that things would devolve to that characterization for a variety of reasons...or at least become fairly dysfunctional when more than a handful of people are involved.

7)  Most of the child currency features and protections you mention do not seem to require a 'MasterCoin' construct (though the 'distributed exchange' probably would and is a nice feature.)

8)  I felt a visceral abhorrence at the thought of destroying Bitcoin.  I suspect that it would take a lot to make that fly, and getting over the initial adoption issues necessary to make it fly seems unlikely.

8.5)  Trying to range-bind Bitcoin and (something like) MasterCoin by manipulating the supply of Bitcoin seems like a moonshot given that nobody has a crystal ball, and would likely produce to few degrees of freedom anyway.

I think I agree with this statement and I think "unconscionably presumptuous" is a perfect way to put it.  I would like to kindly ask you to change the title of the thread.

I also don't think I agree with the assumption that the biggest barriers to adoption are instability and insecurity and therefore a series of child currencies is the answer.  Child currencies seem more like they would answer scalability problems that have not yet even been taken seriously by the development community, let alone by the public at large.

The child currencies seem like a non-starter, because if you have currency A, and want to shop at a store that takes currency H, you need to engage the services of an intermediary for no clear benefit.  If a store decided to take all the currencies just to adapt, then suddenly there's a mountain of unneeded complexity, as if Bitcoin isn't already complex enough - and the smorgasbord of currencies yields no useful effect.

I believe that the biggest barrier to adoption is simply that people just don't know what the hell Bitcoin is, how it works, how to get their hands on it, and requires understanding of a lot of new concepts just to be comfortable with.  If they could go on their E-Trade or their Schwab account, and type "BTC" and click "Buy", and "wire" (send) them out of their account to a Bitcoin address, things would be a whole lot different.  Since Bitcoin is a wild frontier right now, built on concepts the media and our governments barely understand, only the geekiest among us can see through whatever the media says and realize the value on the merits alone.  If the media says it's going downhill or to the moon, that's what people will believe.

I'm more inclined to say that the creation of normal banks - as they are understood by the public at large - that offer the same kind of banking services that the public at large expects out of a bank - would be the answer to both the scalability issues and the learning curve.  If you could walk into a branch - or click on a signup process - with an institution where there were some sort of formal auditing and accountability in place, it would be a whole different story.  That's admittedly less possible, as all of the banking shenanigans that help banks be magically profitable are much more difficult when they have to deal with real units of account that can be fully audited and accounted for by anyone.

The child currencies would be totally unnecessary, because if you bank at bank A, and want to shop at a store that banks with H, a simple handshake between the two to ensure the transaction - denominated in BTC - settles off the blockchain - is all that would be needed.

http://t3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSQxGQLyw8jXTFtIVK5c0AOk2jptwFlQYysduwN9LScN3Wd1VrgKte9mfc

No doubt your a very smart person. But most people show a very strong hostility to bitcoins simple because they don't understand it.
This "white paper" of yours would just add 20 more layers of shit on top of the already convoluted system that Bitcoin appears to be.

Confession - I skimmed the PDF.

Is it fair to say the problems you are trying to fix are instability and insecurity and by that you mean.

Instability - price volatility ?
Insecurity - Counterparty risk ?

I think you should really spell out what you're trying to fix and articulate how you think you've fixed it.

+1

From what I understand, you want to allow users to create their own currencies over the Bitcoin network and then be able to exchange them easily. I remember a similar proposal of Digital Coin - http://digitalcoin.info/ , but requiring a lot less hassle and probably being what one needs:

-Anyone can create any amount of their own currency that can be destroyed (as in, not Bitcoins or other cryptocoins)
-That person is responsible for backing up its value in their goods or services
-The market determines the value of each currency
-Value of currency is measured in a currency that cannot be destroyed - Digital Coin (for example Bitcoins)
-Anyone can use any currency they want for payment if both parties agree, if not, they settle it in Digital Coins

So for example Coke could issue Coke$ that you can use to pay for anything, and when you come to Coke, they will exchange it for a fixed amount of coke.

That is the idea in a nutshell. Is there anything more that the "MasterCoin" does that can't be done with Bitcoins and the Ditital Coin concept?

When I read the paper quickly, from my gathering of it, it seems the "MasterCoin" concept is something that in theory was probably intended to be another alternative coin that was stand alone, but since the introduction of all these other digital currencies has shown that people, despite if they like technical changes made to other coins, will stick with Bitcoin based on trust and other things.   So instead of making another coin, attempt to force more features on top of the Bitcoin client itself, require the Bitcoin client to run, but have enough changes where it seems a whole other coin is created without creating another coin.   I'm sure I have it wrong, but I actually don't think I do.


Also, this should not have been called the second whitepaper, takes away from looking at it too seriously.  That its a title reserved for something Gavin could blog about one day.

I think Blizzard's upcoming release of Diablo 3, featuring a real money auction house, is instructional. Currently, the global release of this game is being held up in South Korea due to their gambling laws. If instead of using "real money", they layered their entire system over the bitcoin technology, then it would most likely not be subject to the various legal hoops that prevent such highly anticipated products from being released to market. Blizzard is more likely to do this than not, having used bit torrent technology for years now in their World of Warcraft patching system.

It's highly improbable, but perhaps something they might do in the future.

we all should be working toward layering an existing, real world currency over the top of Bitcoin. 

THAT is the USD.

This talk about establishing bitcoin-based banks is getting too old.
It's time to look at bitcoin for what it really is rather than for what it should be.
Enough trying to convince the public that bitcoin is just as conventional as fiat money.

From the marketing perspective alone, mimicking the banking system is a bad idea.
In order for it to succeed, bitcoin should be positioned as very different from the fiat money.
It's time everyone realizes that bitcoin is only a protocol (http://twitter.com/#!/BTConomist/status/155690444729229312) upon which new currencies can be built.

This post made me login for the first time since cosbycoin hacks...

First off: The problem with the internet and software in general is that at any given time there are 1000 different people all solving the same 1 problem with 1000 different softwares and 1000 different methods... This is no exception. Instead of making this you should be putting all your effort into supporting Open Transactions, it already is a layer on top of bitcoin that can do everything you want, plus a whole lot more. And it is already at least 50% done! (It does need alot of ease of use improvements still)

People mention the title of it... and that does say something about your character personally, but doesn't really portray any negative points about the idea itself.

So here is a negative about the idea itself:

YOU WANT TO CONTROL THE VALUE OF BITCOIN BY DESTROYING IT???

Jesus christ man, what a terrible idea. You didn't even come up with some elaborate scheme of hoarding and then releasing when bitcoin value is taking a slump... you just up and decided that you would DESTROY bitcoins incase value was growing too fast?

So you started out as a half decent idea: You just like bitcoins so much, you want more functionality and versatility... but with the idea of destroying bitcoin to control its value you have devolved into WORSE than alternate scam blockchain by actually destroying the original bitcoin... a finite resource underlying your own coins?

A slight aside,  my own opinion is that bitcoin is only amazing if there is ONLY one bitcoin... If anyone can up make their own blockchain, then every single of one them is valueless. There can be only one to be able to trust its value at all.

Once again, I urge you to scrap the idea, and do whatever you can for Open Transactions. All of the info is on his github wiki I think  https://github.com/FellowTraveler/Open-Transactions/wiki (https://github.com/FellowTraveler/Open-Transactions/wiki)

How about the talk about scalability?  I haven't interacted with you personally much to know you too well, but your name makes you sound like you understand the economics far more than the technology.  Bitcoin will only scale so far, and then that's it.  Period.

Did you ever use Gnutella?  When it came out, it was awesome!  You could find and pirate anything you wanted for free.  Then everybody heard about it, then it didn't work worth a damn anymore.  That's because it requires computing resources exponential to the number of participants.  It was a peer to peer network where nearly everybody had to hear about all activity on the whole network.

If Bitcoin gains in popularity, it will hit some limits.  You will know this is happening when downloading the full client is considered a joke due to the amount of bandwidth you need (isn't that already starting?).  Soon thereafter, only people with major computing infrastructure will be able to run the protocol (that's centralization), and people will start worrying about how much storage space the transactions consume since they will grow exponentially, and miners will start making sure people pay for it (that's centralization).

How is that not like a bank?


And of course, a protocol that consumes resources exponentially with respect to the number of participants (not scalable) just like Gnutella.  It is a peer to peer network where nearly everybody has to hear about all activity on the whole network.  Of all the possible solutions, I see (as a matter of opinion of course) bitcoin banks as being the most plausible and practical.

On the scalability issue, is it not possible that advances in networking and computer technologies may advance faster than Bitcoin adoption/use and at least delay the issue if not solve it?  Or allow a better mix of Banks to centralized data centers running the full protocol?

I have very little doubt that processing and network bandwidth capabilities will advance well in excess of the needs of Bitcoin.  Probably even if Bitcoin became the dominant currency solution of the world.

The problem is that these technologies will be available through and controlled by a very small number of powerful entities.  It will be decades before such technology becomes available at a consumer level, and will likely be restricted by law if not by normal economic factors.

When Bitcoin is an operational system only at the pleasure of Amazon, Google, AT&T, and a handful of other technology providers, my interest in the solution will long since have evaporated and my stash will have been sold off for a more promising store of value.

I have just a moment online today, and I thank you for all of your comments. I hope to write a detailed response soon addressing some of these concerns, and it may be a guest post on bitcoinmedia.com in which I will elaborate on why I did this and address a few of the thoughts I see here.

Please keep the feedback coming! I believe we all share a similar set of goals, but it sounds like we have a very wide variety of ideas about how to get there.

+1

I wish more people would learn about OT before trying to bring forward their ideas of what needs to be changed to improve Bitcoin etc.

We already have bitcoin banks: MtGox, Tradehill, Virtex. Just like bitcoin itself is both a currency and a commodity (nobody likes my "commodency" monicker?), the exchanges also function as banks.

Bitcoinnhas often been called a singularity. I tend to think of it more in terms of duality myself.

See this video for plans for OpenTransactions to support Bitcoins in what I guess I would call in layman's terms, a decentralised bitcoin bank (via pooled voting):

http://vimeo.com/28142096

Exciting! :-)

Could this be the start of the mythical decentralised exchange?'

+1

I read this initially on my android (small font), so I missed one important detail:

While there is a minimal bitcoin value and maximal MasterCoin value, there is no minimal MasterCoin value.
So, suppose you gather up let's say 10,000 BTC in the initial bootstrapping process, and then 10,000 + 1000 MC are created.

Those MC can drop to being worth 0 BTC, and never recover.

Let's hypothesize that the MasterCoin protocol is deemed to be unnecessary:
 - Centralized Bitcoin Banks will naturally arise, fulfilling some of the needs described in the paper
 - The core Bitcoin protocol will be enhanced to support other needs (e.g. multi-sig is on its way as we speak)
 - The core MasterCoin is deemed too complex to serve any real use case

In this event, MasterCoin value will plummet. The BTC used for bootstrapping will have been spent for various purposes ... and early adopters of MasterCoin will effectively lose their pants.

When I first read this paper, I thought that MC will always be within a constant factor of BTC. Obviously, investing in a new currency is risky business, but if there's a bottom price, then the damage (in case it flops) is controllable.

How about keeping 20% of every BTC used to create MC in a "reserve pool", such that the owner of that MC can always cash out - destroy the MC, and get 0.2 BTC? This will make MC effectively "backed by BTC", and increase its stability.

On second thought, this is quite useless - I believe that this "value protection" protocol change is entirely equivalent to each potential MC buyer simply buying 20% less MC.

Here's some feedback:

Piggybacking protocols that solve the same problem: don't do it. Especially if the existing protocol already has massive scalability issues.
Naming your system 'Bitcoin2' although it has little to with Bitcoin except for the above-mentioned piggyback: don't do that either.
Attempt to 'stabilize' the value of currencies without being an economist well versed in the theory and history of such endeavors: don't.

There are many more problems and open issues with this proposal (such as how would 'voting' go, who would count the votes, etc.), suffice to say it's a non-starter.

Thanks so much for all the thoughtful replies!

I've posted my response on bitcoinmedia.com:

http://bitcoinmedia.com/the-second-bitcoin-whitepaper/

It's a fun and exciting time to be a bitcoin enthusiast. Anyone with more feedback, please post it in this thread. If anyone wants to chat about collaboration, please get in touch!

Thanks for writing the post ... I'm really interested in learning more, and all else aside, I think it's an interesting paper. Comments below:

Necessity

I don't think you have sufficiently demonstrated that this protocol is necessary:

1. Instability - if/when Bitcoin becomes a major force in the global economy, its value will be stable because of the larger market cap. Its current instability is simply because of the tiny market. Why do you doubt this scenario will happen on its own without extra layers?
2. Insecurity - Isn't multi-sig a very good step towards security? In what ways exactly is your protocol secure, where Bitcoin is not? Can't Bitcoin be augmented to be "secure enough" without changing its fundamental properties or building abstractions over it?
3. Disunity - I think Alt Chains are a superb idea. They are a place to experiments, and good ideas from them can be imported into the main chain. I don't think they really "confuse our message" - let the coins evolve, and the best one wins. The alts don't seem to be hurting Bitcoin so far.

It took me a while to understand this, but I now do - your protocol does not guarantee a minimal value of a Mastercoin. Let's assume you set a maximal value of 1 MC = 5 BTC. Then if I invest BTC when MC is launched (1 MC = 1 BTC), I can gain a max of 400% on my initial investment, but I can lose all of it. For anyone to make such an investment, they would need to believe there's a decent chance (I'd say around 40%) it will succeed. 20% chance is just the break even point.

A lot of people on these forums believe that just by holding BTC for the next ten years, they'll already become rich. You have to have really convincing arguments why MC is necessary.

Mastercoin - Bitcoin ratio

What do you mean by

"every single person buying MasterCoins with bitcoins ignored the cheaper MasterCoins and chose the more expensive ones instead" ?

I agree with your point that destroying bitcoins has to increase the worth of the other bitcoins, and this price ration can be maintained - just the sentance above is not very clear.

Second price manipulation - shares and currency

I might be thick, but I still don't understand how it actually works.

Satoshi's objection to embedding
Can you provide a citation? (http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/2604/did-satoshi-object-to-embedding-data-in-the-block-chain-why)

Also, check out my previous post on Stack Exchange about your paper (http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/2458/is-dacoinminsters-second-bitcoin-whitepaper-logically-economically-consistent).

Hey guys,

Here's a sneak peak at the complete MasterCoin specification: https://sites.google.com/site/2ndbtcwpaper/MasterCoin%20Specification.pdf (https://sites.google.com/site/2ndbtcwpaper/MasterCoin%20Specification.pdf)

I spent a lot of hours on it, and it is ready to go. I've been privately circulating it among bitcoin experts since Monday, with positive responses.

MasterCoins will be available for sale soon, and I hope it will make a big splash :)

Excellent, I'll review it shortly.
MasterCoin was a very interesting concept at the time, I'm excited to see your improvements.

BTW, are you attending Bitcoin Amsterdam (http://theconference.eu/)?
I'm on the alt currency panel there, would be interesting if you presented/talked about MasterCoin there.

Sadly, I can't go to Amsterdam. I barely convinced my wife I should spend the money to get to the San Jose conference :)

Here's the official launch thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=265488.0

I'm locking this thread now, since that thread is live.

It's been a loooong time since Mastercoin was launched. I'm briefly unlocking this thread to let you guys know about my new project which was recently featured at Forbes.com, UpToken, which I believe to be "The Perfect Token Sale". Check it out on this thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2199751.0