Well, then if Mastercoin is VERY successful, we'll end up with our very own version of OneCoin ( https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=200177.0).  Can't wait for the Smart Properties conversation to really get off the ground, so I can follow it and contribute feedback. It looks like you guys got a very qualified individual to run with it...really excited. I can see several areas around it where the spec needs to be expanded/improved, and would be happy to be a part of that conversation. Please feel free to submit pull requests where you believe the spec can be improved - that's why it is in github  Thanks! |
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There's a voting feature in the works which will use proof-of-stake. I have outlined how it might work, but I'm actually going to redesign it to be a more generic distributed bounty system (basically what the Mastercoin Foundation does, but using distributed proof-of-stake voting to disburse project funds). I have some ideas on that which I need to flesh out more. Mastercoin has a fixed supply, and I'll gladly destroy them as an anti-spam feature. You'll notice that distributed e-commerce destroys MSC to avoid gaming the feedback system. I think it makes sense to destroy MSC to avoid spam feedback, and spam property creation, and spam anything else. Deflationary = Good Investment = Bigger Mastercoin Community = Faster progress = Even better investment |
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It was very important for me to differentiate the alt because when I met DJohnston at the 1st meetup he talked about "mastercoin" I was an active member of cryptsy and I proceeded to buy 100K of the ALT coin and not by donating a bitcoin to the Exodus Address as I would have wanted to do.
Wow. That sucks . . . MSC would have been a great investment. MST, not so much. I'd just like to point out that the first rev of my paper describing Mastercoin (MSC) happened long before the alt-coin Mastercoin (MST) launched. I also differentiated this project from the alt-coin in the OP, hoping to avoid this confusion. I think it makes sense to do so as long as the possibility remains that someone could make this mistake (buying MST on cryptsy). |
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I have a few questions related to smart properties:
From the spec, it looks like the unique factor used to differentiate one property from another is the Property Name, in which one may put up to 21 characters, correct?
Question 1: What’s to stop people from spamming new smart properties? This could be like the domain name system, without any pricing required to reserve a name. Someone could reserve a smart property like “dog”, or “House Deed”, in perpetuity. Is any MSC required to be consumed to create a property, or is it just the BTC transaction costs to send the transaction?
If we are just limited to 21 bytes for property names in this kind of wild-west scenario, without any kind of payment requirement beyond the minimal BTC fees to keep away spam, I can see all of the intelligible choices for this filling up quickly. People would then be forced to use names like “HouseDeed_348dF” or even some kind of odd hash value. This may not necessarily be a ‘bad’ thing…worse case we could see Mastercoin property names devolving to the level of implicit legibility as Bitcoin addresses (i.e. a long string of numbers and letters).
If MSC is required (or you are considering this), you could have two options here: pay to the Exodus address (further enriching that, although I don’t know how necessary that is), or destroy the funds, similar to Peercoin transactions.
If destroying the MSC, to offset the deflation this causes, a future proof-of-stake type system could be even initiated that would inflate the supply at a low level (e.g. fixed 1%, or a variable rate derived periodically based on the MSC value destroyed over the past X period of time) to offset and attempt constant, or very slowly growing supply. I think that this idea is probably heretical and overly complex, since MSCs were created as a fixed supply (sounds kind of like a central bank, coded into the software, hah!)…just thought I’d throw it out there if in the future we find ourselves needing to allow for some controlling feedback to be applied to several aspects of the system (smart properties, bidding, etc) by allowing Mastercoin to require at least a small amount of MSC for most actions, in a way that didn’t unfairly enrich one specific party, or disrupt the balance of wealth in the system. Whether it would cripple the usefulness of Mastercoin in the process is up in the air though. If the fee was low enough, it shouldn’t.
Question 2: I see where dividends can be paid against smart properties. Can Smart properties be transferred? (I do see “Listing something for Sale” and “Initiating a Purchase”, but I’m a bit confused whether these have anything to do with a smart property, as their identifier is a 11 byte category and a 16 byte subcategory. If not currently, why not? Perhaps that’s an area of the spec that needs to be added.
If these were covered somewhere else, forgive me. Thanks for any answers.
1) Adding some sort of cost to reduce spam is a great idea. Thanks for bringing that up. 2) Yes, each new property gets its own currency id, so anything you can do with a currency can be done with a property (buy, sell, transfer, bet, etc) Regarding 1), this is a tricky problem, which I have thought about some already. There are several ways to add cost. I prefer a sliding fee scale which targets creating X properties per day. If more than the target are being created, the fee goes up, otherwise the fee goes down. I think the fee should destroy MSC, not send them to the Exodus Address. I'd be interested in hearing other opinions about this. I'd be really happy to see a pull request about this once we've got some consensus. I haven't added anything like this to the spec because everything I came up with seemed a bit too complicated. For instance, the number of properties created per day might need to go up once MasterCoin is getting widespread use, and it's hard to make the right formula for adjusting that automatically. |
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Guys, can we start moderating out haightst's posts such as this that do not add anything intelligible to the conversation? If he has an adequate argument, that is one thing, but things like this is worthless noise. I've ignored him but it forces everyone else to, to get the most out of this thread.
(And for the record, I am not an "MSC DEV" trying to censor him.)
I've been deleting them as I see them. I just wish there was a way to ban people from a thread altogether! |
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For somebody who did his homework the 'Master-coin' thing kinda bothers me  Heh. Didn't notice that the first time through. It's very cool to see this through the eyes of somebody just learning about it. Reminds me how exciting this whole thing is. |
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Willing to lower my sell to 50 @ 0.165, need a quick sale!
Ok, i'll not going deeper BTC rise blind me :/ If i sold @ 0.15 i'll regret this in less than a month ! I advice everyone to watch the hearing replay from yesterday How they speak about mastercoin as a layer on top of bitcoin the bitcoin 2.0 with escrow, etc etc http://c-spanvideo.org/program/DigitalCu 2:19:40 You tease! I almost had a heart attack reading that! In order to skip to that segment, I had to create an account on C-Span in order to create a sub-clip in order to listen to that part. Fascinating stuff, but no mention of Mastercoin (except possibly by allusion when they were talking about future features built on bitcoin). I'm relieved - I'd rather fly under the radar for now |
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I'd like to go on the record stating that Luke-Jr is NOT an idiot. He's a very respected community member that has had involvement in a ton of different bitcoin projects.
Sorry, Luke. You know how it is around here . . .
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The value of Test MSC will be whatever people are willing to pay for them. For instance, I'd imagine that the "testnet" coins used by bitcoin devs to try out crazy stuff is probably a good analogy. They can undoubtedly be bought if you want large quantities, but they are frequently given away too.
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That still doesn't answer the main question though.
Should multiple transaction be accumulated and should the sum be used to match the purchase order
or
Should the highest transaction be counted and matched to a purchase order
If we're talking about attempts to reserve MSC for purchase, the latest attempt replaces any earlier ones. I doubt the spec says that explicitly, but it should. If we're talking about attempts to pay for MSC which has been reserved, then definitely accumulate, otherwise the buyer potentially loses money! A pull request clarifying all this would be most welcome |
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I think that you made a typo: 1750 MSC for 1222 BTC is 0.7 BTC/MSC.
Fixed. Thanks! |
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The pull request looks good, but it does not appear to address the issue of what happens when the user sends a different payment than what they reserved. I think the right thing to do is to honor the payment as a purchase if at all possible.
For instance, if they send less payment before the time limit expires, the amount purchased is adjusted downward appropriately. If they pay MORE than what they reserved and there are still unreserved coins for sale, we adjust the amount purchased upwards, even though they didn't reserve that much. Obviously if another buyer reserves the remaining coins before the over-payment in the block-chain or the seller decides to cancel, the first one recorded in a block wins.
Another example is if the buyer foolishly sends payment without reserving anything at all. I don't think we can count that as a purchase, since it's effectively a bitcoin payment which happens to have an output to the Exodus Address. We can't be certain that they were trying to buy MSC with that payment.
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I plan to make available for sale 1750 MSC (1% of my holdings) for 1222 BTC on the distributed exchange once it has some more testing. The price will therefore be just a touch under 0.7 BTC/MSC. If my order gets filled, I will have recovered all of the BTC I originally invested, while still keeping 99% of my MSC holdings. If BTC prices are still around the current level, I will be able to quit my job and focus full-time on MSC. I have no idea how long it will take to get to that price, and I certainly can't promise that we will get there. I also can't promise that my plans won't change. This order can be put on the order book if you want, although I don't plan to sell anything the old fashioned way. I apologize to all of you who have asked me questions in various emails and forum posts. I'm drowning in unanswered questions at the moment, and they'll have to wait a while even yet. Hopefully other people in the community can fill in for me for some of it. |
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Dacoinminister, we havn't heard a reply from you about lukes patch, what's your take on this matter?
Sorry guys, I'm drowning in emails and forum posts that need replies, and I'm not going to be able to get to them all as quickly as I would like. I'll probably miss some, and I apologize for that. Luke's patch does not seem to be getting a very warm reception, but even if it doesn't ever get adopted there may be other patches which are unfriendly to MSC in the future. Our strategy is twofold: 1. Be generous with transaction fees, so that miners lose out on a lot of money if they exclude us 2. Be flexible. This particular patch is easily circumvented by creating multiple Exodus Addresses, as somebody already suggested. MSC transactions cannot be permanently excluded without breaking bitcoin in some very fundamental way. If somehow we did get permanently excluded, we'll just create a list of all MSC balances, sign it, and jump chains. I don't see that happening any time soon though. |
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We're going ahead with the 1500 MSC.
You guys are a huge part of the reason those coins are worth what they are.
It will still take me awhile to set this up. I'm very sorry about that, but 1500 MSC it will be. (split 4 ways, so 375 MSC for each of the four webmasters)
I will state it again. I personally have no problem if you reduce the amount to a more normal number. I won't hold it against you or the board. Don't do it because you blurted it out excited in a forum post and now want to hold true to your word. However noble it is, if you don't really stand behind it feel free to change it. Beside blockexplorer and blockchain are there other json api that show bitcoin transactions?
Check out this API based on bitcoin-ruby: http://webbtc.com/api I know you meant what you said. It's not just because I blurted something out. When I took this to the board, they saw it as an opportunity to give you guys a bigger stake in the success of MSC. It's not just payment for a feature, it's also a big grant of stake in the Mastercoin project. You of course are welcome to do whatever you want with the MSC we send you, but we hope you will hold onto them and get filthy stinking rich (And if you DO get rich, I feel you'll have a responsibility to use that money to help people, because a lot of people could get hurt from the rise of distributed currencies. Those of us who profit from it have a moral obligation to help those who are harmed by it. See the "dystopian" link in my sig for my thoughts on the matter) |
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We're going ahead with the 1500 MSC.
You guys are a huge part of the reason those coins are worth what they are.
It will still take me awhile to set this up. I'm very sorry about that, but 1500 MSC it will be. (split 4 ways, so 375 MSC for each of the four webmasters)
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