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

In 2010, bitcoins were worth 25 cents. I told everyone I knew that Bitcoin was going to be huge.

In 2012, I published a paper on this forum about how to raise funds to build a protocol layer on top of Bitcoin, an idea which later became known as the “Initial Coin Offering.” After 1.5 years, still no one had taken the action to develop the idea. To show that it could be done, I launched Mastercoin (now Omni), in 2013, also on this forum. Today, the Omni platform hosts assets worth half a billion dollars, including MaidSafe and Tether. Only Ethereum assets are worth more.

In 2014, I predicted other things like the hacks on overly complicated Ethereum contracts losing millions of dollars.

These predictions were largely ignored.

Now it’s 2017. For years I have been waiting for “the perfect token sale”, and I finally found it. It may sound bonkers, but I predict crypto ATMs are going to be a really big deal in the coming years, and I helped design a token, UpToken, which captures that opportunity. I’ve partnered with a crypto ATM company that I think is best positioned to make a big move in this space (Coinme), and helped them design a token for ATMs called UpToken (uptoken.org). The proceeds from the token sale will be used to deploy bitcoin ATMs all over the world. We want “a bitcoin ATM on every corner.”

Here’s why I think UpToken represents “The Perfect Token Sale”

• UpToken helps us all. Cryptocurrencies are changing the world, and a lot of people are getting left behind. Crypto ATMs can change that. Developing countries and the non-technical aren’t being reached. As ATM infrastructure improves, everyone can have access to fair money and financial services.
• UpToken doesn’t care who wins. Will Bitcoin win? Ethereum? Something else that hasn’t been invented yet? UpToken doesn’t care. In a gold rush, you’d rather be selling shovels than digging, and I think crypto ATMs represent the ultimate example of picks and shovels for the crypto economy.
• UpToken can help your favorite coin. Coinme ATMs currently buy and sell Bitcoin, and ethereum will be added shortly, but the owners of UpToken get to choose which coins are added to the ATMs after that. With UpToken, you can ensure there will be an ATM selling your favorite coin “on every corner!” (This is the main reason I am personally buying UpToken - I want to see “An Omni ATM on Every Corner”).
• UpToken already has traction. Most token sales are just an idea. Coinme has existing, operational hardware. Coinme wrote all the software, from the ATM firmware up to the web wallet. UpToken takes an existing functional technology and scales it up!
• Coinme continually buys UpToken. 1% of Coinme ATM fees in perpetuity are devoted to buying UpToken, which will be given to ATM customers as a rewards program. This “cash back” is locked from sale or transfer until the customer has done $10,000 worth of transactions at Coinme ATMs. In the meantime, UpToken can be used to pay Coinme ATM fees at a 30% discount. See the whitepaper for details.
• UpToken is scalable. In the ICO world, an idea that is worth only one million dollars might attract a hundred million dollars, which is grossly inefficient and wasteful. The perfect token sale should scale with the funds raised. If UpToken attracted a billion dollars, we’d use it all to build out our ATM network, each of which would use UpToken. In fact, the more funds UpToken attracts, the better, thanks to economies of scale.
• UpToken has no pre-sale. Most token sales give the best prices on tokens to rich insiders. UpToken gives everyone access to the best prices available. You can see on our signup spreadsheet (check out the millions of dollars pledged already!) that I am signed up alongside the rest of you, and my purchase will be treated the same as yours.

Can you see why I am so excited about this? I am posting about UpToken in various places, even though history suggests only a few visionary people will listen. But, if you are among them, you can learn more and sign up for the token sale at uptoken.org.

You can read more about me and see videos about my “crazy” predictions on my LinkedIn profile.

Laura Shin has a nice article about my story and UpToken on Forbes.com: https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2017/09/21/heres-the-man-who-created-icos-and-this-is-the-new-token-hes-backing/

TL;DR: I predicted Bitcoin would be big in 2010, invented the “ICO” in 2012 and tried to get someone to do the first one, but no one did. So I did. Now I have a new prediction: “UpToken is the perfect token sale.”

If by "exiting" you mean selling ~3% of my position so I could quit my job and work on Omni, then yeah, I guess I did. Then I gave about 10% of that position to David Johnston to invest exclusively in projects building on Omni (I assumed I wouldn't get anything back but he put some of that into MaidSafe, which did very well - I probably should have held onto that). I gave away lots more Omni in the form of options to developers working on Omni, so they could keep working on it when project funds ran low. I've also bought Omni at very low prices, so I still have about half of my original position.

As you can see, I have never parted with Omni except to help the Omni project. I doubt any other founder of any other crypto currency project could make this claim. When the proceeds of my original 3% sale ran low, I returned to my day job rather than sell more Omni at stupid-low prices, but people still assume that I made a huge exit when Mastercoin was worth hundreds of millions and am living on an island somewhere. Sorry - I still have my day job!! I get to follow the developments on the project I founded only as time allows between work and family commitments. I can't see myself selling more Omni until it gets up there with the other big boys again, where it belongs. Have you compared the market caps of other crypto platforms to the market caps of the assets they host? By that measure, Omni is hilariously undervalued, and has been for years.

My daughter has (comparatively minor) long term health problems resulting from her brain bleed 3 years ago. We were just in the ER with her last week for a very bad seizure. Otherwise, she is doing very well.

I can't tell you how excited I will be to see distributed exchange between Omni and the other tokens made available in OmniWallet. I might just soil myself.

Hmmm. I hadn't heard Tether had been sold to bitfinex. My suspicion/hope is that they bitfinex owns Tether but they are financially separate. Will be interesting to see what happens.

The USE tether. They don't own it.

Well, it seems clear that it will trade at some number less than face value, but it's definitely a big issuance.

Have you guys seen the market cap of tether over the past few months? It's really taking off. Also Maidsafe is doing really well. The assets on the Omni layer are huge and getting bigger all the time. Most recently, this: https://www.bitfinex.com/posts/129:

I don't have any inside information, but I think this is what happened:

1) Bitfinex realized they needed a token, and looked around to see what protocol would be best
2) Due to existing exchange infrastructure, it's really easy to add bitcoin-based tokens like Omni, and our system is already well-proven
3) Ethereum-based tokens, let's face it, are a little scary right now to the public, even though I'm sure they are safe if set up correctly
4) So it's either Omni or Counterparty. What would you choose? (I'm restraining myself heavily right now from talking about their history . . .)

I'm just stating my intention, as I have repeatedly before in various contexts. Not trying to make a binding contract or prove anything.


Sadly I didn't get nearly as much as they were "worth" (according the speculative bubble at that time) - the price couldn't support that volume of a sale and I had to sell at a discount. I was dismayed at the time, but of course it turned out that I was selling close to the peak, which I did NOT expect.

Another factor was that my daughter almost died from a brain hemorrhage shortly after that and we spent a lot of money on medical bills from that, even with insurance. Plus, I wasn't willing to let the bank account dwindle all the way to zero. When I realized I would have to sell more to stay on, I decided the healthiest thing for the project was for me to step away from it, as I am comparatively very expensive for what I was contributing. It was, I am still convinced, the right thing to do for the project. If I had tried to stay on and sell more Omni, the price would probably be 10% of what it is now (just guessing).

I decided I'd rather get a day job than sell Omni to pay my mortgage, so I'm back doing normal software development again. If you are curious about my career, you don't need to ask about it here - you should connect with me on LinkedIn! https://www.linkedin.com/in/jrwillett

I assumed things would peter out without me around, but Craig and the devs (and Judith) didn't lose any momentum! They've been doing a spectacular job, and I love seeing the new code being checked in all the time.

I've devoted most of my large stockpile of Omni for compensating those who continue to work, especially those who took big pay cuts or didn't get paid at all (structured like stock options with vesting periods). I haven't sold any of it, so no beach sitting for me, I'm afraid. I feel tremendous loyalty to the people who work on this project and the people who invested in it, and any Omni that doesn't get given to the developers will stay with me until the project is a runaway success (or I take them to my grave).

I definitely never said anything like that, or turned anybody away who genuinely wanted to help out. The only person I turned away was this one random stranger who approached the foundation asking for a huge lump payment to develop the reference client for us. We actually briefly considered it, since he seemed possibly legitimate, but decided if it was too big a gamble. That guy went on to fork our project and create Counterparty. With the benefit of hindsight, I might choose differently if I did it over again, but with the information available at that time, it was the right decision not to hand over roughly half of our cash on hand (if I recall correctly) to a random guy approaching us on the internet.

Oh, and there was this other really smart guy, not so random, who we asked to look at our protocol and make some suggestions. He came back with this really complicated scheme for turing complete money. I told him we needed to finish our core features before tackling something that ambitious. He took the idea and ran with it to become Ethereum.

Craig would be a better person to answer that question. I've heard it's about a month out.


dEX will be used by people who don't want to trust a centralized exchange, which really should be everyone eventually. Also, it doesn't require you to convince an exchange to list your asset, so for new/small projects, dEX will be their only option.


Dunno. Another good question for Craig. Recommend using a VM in the meantime. Most people should be using Omniwallet anyway.


That is certainly their goal. Our mission is advanced features on top of bitcoin. If bitcoin goes away, so will Omni.


Maybe. I hope they are worth far more than that someday. Crypto coins are an absurdly risky investment, with equally absurd payoffs. I think we've always tried to emphasize that. I think we tried to list ALL available markets trading MSC, without trying to judge how fair their prices were.

We almost never watch this thread anymore, since it tends to be more of a trollbox than a forum, I think you'll usually get better results on reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/omni/

That said, I'll try to answer the most recent questions.


My answer is the same as it has always been. The near-term reason is the phase-2 distributed exchange which has all child currencies trading decentralized against OMNI. (phase 1 was Omni trading against bitcoin). The longer term plan is: http://blog.omni.foundation/2014/06/11/mastercoin-is-for-burning/


I can't imagine any way this might happen, and there has never been any discussion of doing anything even remotely like this.


They will be released quarterly. It looks like most of this 60k will be released in 2016 due to incentives I set up to reward longer vesting periods. What they do with them is up to the devs. I have no plans to ask. Over the next 3+ years, I hope to put the vast majority of my Omni in the hands of the developers working on the project. The impact on the price will be driven entirely by them, (what features they write to create more demand for Omni, and how much they decide to sell). When we ran out of BTC I decided I'd rather be a small holder of something huge than a huge holder of something worthless, so I'm trying to make sure the long-term incentives are in place for that to happen.

I have put enough features in the spec to keep them busy for a long time

I mostly concentrate on guiding the evolution of our specification (https://github.com/mastercoin-MSC/spec). I also talk a lot to people interested in using our platform (we have more than ever before).

Perhaps the biggest "trial" for Mastercoin/Omni was the first few months when I tried to hold down a dayjob while running everything. I think it's fair to say that a couple early blunders could have been avoided if my time had not been split. Now other people are making those kinds of decisions, so my mistakes have far smaller impact

OMNI === MSC; Mastercoin has been renamed to Omni. No new tokens are getting a piece of the pie.

It seems like once a week I see a "where is J.R." question somewhere.

Every time I poke my head in here I try to emphasize - it doesn't MATTER where I am. I could be dead, and project would see very little impact. I participate in many ways, but we have so many smart people my presence is no longer critical to the success of the project.

People who keep asking where I am don't seem to be getting that message. What matters is the state of the project, not where J.R. is. I would argue that Satoshi's disappearance helped bitcoin more than hurt it. Too bad everybody knows my real name, or I could mysteriously disappear too!

The stuff with Counterparty is very . . . interesting. I didn't see it coming, but the distancing makes sense. It's too early to bet entirely on one horse (unless you are crazy like me). I doubt they are severing their relationship, but they probably did some more research and saw that there are a lot of projects which have a shot at becoming the next big thing, and didn't want to limit their options going forward.

I don't think such an idea would get much traction. At least, I hope not. I paid for my coins like everybody else.

Regardless, I seriously doubt a divided camp would be more effective than a united one.

Remaining BTC has been sent to David Johnston, for paying the people working on the protocol. The RBB tab is out-of-date though and does not show these funds yet.

Future funding is coming from our sponsors, as David described in the blog post.

J.R. here. Major announcement about additional funding is forthcoming, but I'm not allowed to say anything yet. Watch the blog

I think you would be disappointed if you tried