Absolutely, but it's going to take some time to develop. Please follow the development of the user currencies feature in particular as it might be the feature you're looking for.
Thanks. Is there a centralized location where I can follow updates? Is a rough timeframe available? In the MasterCoin Spec doc user-created currencies are described as the most important feature- so is this a priority on the dev timeline? You project sounds great! As far as updates: Try out blog.mastercoin.org we have updates there and also links to groups on facebook, google or linkedin, so whichever you prefer. I will be adding quora, twitter and others soon. Right now the devs are working on p2p exchange. I believe currencies and smart property come after that. Yeah. Although note that "currencies" will be first implemented as CFDs and not the original "backed currencies" concept, which may follow later on. In this case it seems they are requesting the backed currencies feature. CFDs seem to be more for reproducing USD because it can provide absolute stability in the price 1:1 with the USD. I think CFD is probably easier to implement and less controversial so I do not blame the foundation for choosing to implement it first. |
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better buy up those Mastercoins before they run out then!
there are really two possibilities:
1) the Mastercoin people pulled one over on the VC by telling them that they have a technology that they don't(this much has been confirmed).
2) the Mastercoin people and the VC are pulling one over on us by pretending to have a technology in order to market these Mastercoins.
It's really not very difficult to profit from a scheme like this. Start with 1 million in capital and start the first round of selling Mastercoins. Lets say they are priced at $10 each. Distribute a few to people with blogs and they just start churning out senseless crap with as many important sounding hot topic buzzwords as possible. Suddenly the things are retailing for $15. You just made a half-million dollars. Slowly sell them off, a few months later- 'Mastercoin? never heard of it'. Have you read the 'whitepaper'? this is the next big thing in Bitcoin? lol.
Just a few weeks back they had supposedly put out a bounty for $50,000 to build a 'Distributed Exchange'. To my knowledge the bounty was supposedly paid, but not to anyone who actually invented a distributed exchange, instead it appeared to have been paid to some pseudonymous programmers who made some kind of wallet app for Mastercoin. Meanwhile Alex Mizrahi is talking to IBM rep on the BitcoinX list(just days afterwards) about the Distributed Exchange that Mastercoin has, that has never been defined, and a bounty was put out for it only a few weeks ago(the thing was conceived, accepted, and developed all in a few weeks? covertly?), and a rep from Bitangels publicly claimed that it doesn't exist! The IBM rep is then writing on his blog about how awesome Mastercoin is.
None of these things exist. None have been theoretically proven. It's just people pumping up a digital asset, running around and avoiding any hard questions. If this is your thing I bid you best of luck, amigo. I think I might be one of the few people who is actually watching this thing who is not in on it.
Personally, I believe in open source. Developing truly accessible open technologies pays you back more than any other engineering approach.
It does exist and I tested it. It's in the blockchain forever for anyone to observe. I exchanged a test Mastercoins for Bitcoins. I first purchased the test Mastercoins and once that was successful I sold the test Mastercoins back to the distributed exchange for a nominal profit all through the blockchain. Here is the distributed order book: http://mastercoin-explorer.com/order_booksIt all take place in the blockchain and it's as decentralized as Bitcoin. It's not an advanced exchange but what do you expect for an ambitious project such as this after only a month? Developing truly accessible open technologies pays you back more than any other engineering approach. oh yeah? Just go to Antibes and look a Linus Torvalds yacht parked next to Paul Allen's yacht and see if you can sustain that position. You are an idiot AND you don't know what you are talking about. You'll see the exchange in action very soon. You'll be shitting bricks about it then. As far as I can tell these bounties were never paid. The code repositories are full of padding code, autogenerated code, etc. Im not opposed to making money with software. If you want people to pay you for your software, then you license it. If you want to trick people into buying into your pump and dump scheme, you start strutting around claiming you have all these things you dont, that you need to invest or 'miss the train', etc. This stuff is just pathetic. At this point Im not really sure how much awareness the VC has of what's going on here. Propaganda. The bounties have been paid and you can look at the blockchain. This is not how you win. You can win by producing some code. |
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J.R. suggested I reach out to the MasterCoin community, and I take it that this thread might be a good place to do so.
I am launching a project called notpriceless.com. notpriceless will facilitate a market for tradeable commodity pegged shares. These shares that will be initially obtainable only through contributing (donating or volunteering) to causes. The shares can then be traded on an exchange.
As I understand it, MasterCoin could potentially fit very well into this project. And so I have two questions:
Is it feasible at this stage to utilize MasterCoin to design and release such tradeable shares?
Is there interest in the MC community to aid with this initiative?
thanks!
Absolutely, but it's going to take some time to develop. Please follow the development of the user currencies feature in particular as it might be the feature you're looking for. |
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I'd like to remind everyone that we're gearing up towards launching our Documentation Contest Week. I've added many items that need documenting over the various channels Please see updated information on Trello. As you might remember, the rewards will be handed out retroactively. You can start working on it now and capture all the good parts even before we launch it. Documentation is an essential part in our outreach and war against FUD. It will be a tremendously useful tool for us and will enable us to do much more effective PR and lower the hate level. This is something I can help out with, keep me updated on what needs to be documented and on the contest. I will contribute to this when/if I get the chance to. |
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I can sell 220 PTS for 1.5 BTC.
How about 200 for 0.56 BTC? |
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I post often and my posts are read by many on the forum.
1463 total posts.
Activity 224.
16AgTxbEARQN2BnxVfZcLgtBFb1TBjbJiw
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I'm interested in buying some Protoshares. Anyone selling?
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There is one important point here which bytemaster touched on, but no one else seems to have picked up:
* mastercoin relies on a *centralised* price feed for its CFDs
* bitshares do not
Centralisation is something which bitcoin was designed to avoid at all costs, so this is a bit of a backward step for mastercoin.
The big question for me is whether the proposed technique for bitassets to track the 'actual' price of the asset they reflect will actually work. The white paper is somewhat lacking descriptively.
Cheers, Paul.
Trusted, not necessarily centralized. Having to trust the price feed is an issue, but having to trust the market which can be manipulated is the issue Bitshares will have. I don't really see an easy answer. I don't have complete faith in the market or in its participants. |
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http://ripper234.com/p/what-is-a-feature-owner/In this specific example, a poll isn't good enough. What's needed is: 0. As always, decide if you require compensation for this feature, or would just do it for free because it's relatively not a lot of work, or you want to use this feature to get involved in Mastercoin. 1. Decide on the correct person or company to actually implement the video (the board has a few suggestions). 2. Close the deal with them. 3. Brainstorm with the community. 4. Do a back-and-forth process with the implementor, review the results by the community and board. 5. Finally, get us to replace the video (you don't have editing privileges for mastercoin.org, so you just need to ask/nag us to do it. I say nag because for some features you'll sometimes have to nag us, because we'll be swamped with tons of other things. The general rule - if somebody, no matter who, is blocking you from implementing your feature, it's your responsibility to take care of that problem). I'm trying to grasp this conceptually, but if I think I can help out with this then I will let you know. I am interested in helping out beyond the Giveaway thread. The Giveaway thread seems to be wrapping up and will probably be replaced soon by the faucet site which in my opinion is a much better way to do it anyway. I especially like the Facebook component because if done right there might be a way to maintain contact with these people so that they can be part of the Mastercoin social/business network. It is my opinion that we'll see $1000 per BTC before the end of the year.
Do you really see it reaching $1000 per BTC before the end of the year? I see it happening in spring 2014 unless it's a bubble. But I understand the optimism and I think we might see it happen due to the Bitcoin Investment Trust. |
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In the Mastercoin dev thread, it is being admitted that the more order types there are, the harder it is to differentiate them. This is what I call a protocol-stuffing problem, and it results from trying to piggyback on Bitcoin.
So, the brilliant solution? You guessed it, they want to have an API that is a WEBSITE call, to differentiate transactions. Is that the smell of becoming CENTRALIZED I sniff? Oh my, it certainly is.
When you have to TRUST a CENTRAL server to tell you what your TRANSACTIONS are, you're pretty much boned. A+ for effort, though.
The project is not very technically rigorous. I'm surprised that more people haven't pointed that out yet. Rather than complain in a snobbish manner about everyone else's project why don't you crowd fund your own project so we can contribute to and work on your more rigorous technical solution? I look forward to seeing the source code. My opinion on the centralization problem is that the purpose behind decentralization is to protect the protocol and participants from compromise. Bittorrent is sufficiently decentralized even though websites such as the PirateBay are used. This is because as soon as one of these websites are shut down another can replace it. Mirroring can solve a lot of problems. The solution used by Linux distributions (repositories) can solve it, the point is you can have sufficient decentralization using the web. Whether or not they will find the right balance is yet to be seen, but it is a balance between convenience, usability and decentralization. |
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We need to produce a better video for the homepage of mastercoin.org. I opened a Trello ticket. What do you think should be the bounty for this feature? Please feel free to comment on top of the Trello item. I'd open another thread to discuss this, but we already too many thread ... we're discussing whether to open a subforum in bitcointalk or a separate forum. Aaron from bitfilm.com has offered to produce the video for about 30-35 bitcoins (at around $360 per bitcoin). We need a feature owner to lead this feature on our end, get community feedback, help define script etc. Please nominate yourself via info@mastercoin.com - thanks! Please give details on what a feature owner is? I might be able to help if I know exactly what is required? Is it just a matter of collecting information from the Mastercoin community because I don't think that would be difficult at all. A survey could accomplish it, and a few polls. If metrics/stats are what you are after I can do that. |
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Something could happen to the other blockchains. I don't see what you mean by "politically attacked" as Bitcoin is decentralized and therefor very hard to attack politically, just look at piracy. Let's say governments decide to centralize the mining function in the Bitcoin blockchain and gain control of it? That is just one attack. There could be exploits as well against Bitcoin, DDOS against the blockchain, or political attacks all which would stop Bitcoin but wouldn't stop Mastercoin. Mastercoin could work over any blockchain which means if something happens to Bitcoin or if Bitcoin somehow proves itself not to be technologically superior then Mastercoin wont be held up. For instance the MAX_BLOCK_SIZE problem will be an issue with ColoredCoin but is not an issue with Mastercoin or Bitshares. I just think it is wise to take advantage of the power the bitcoin infrastructure which is the largest cryptocurrency protocol by a long shot and it doesnt look like its going to stop anytime soon, but you are right, it is wise to look at all the alternatives[/b]
Of course, but it's also wise not to be limited to any specific infrastructure. We don't want Bitcoin to become too big to fail. I dont get what you are trying to say here. Mastercoin sounds more and more like an altcoin to me the more I hear people try to "pitch" it. The whole thing about Colored Coins IS about setting a certain amount of satoshis as being worth (in the case of a company share) something concrete in which the p2p market sets the price by how the company is doing and through its business plans. But how is the price of a satoshi concrete when the price of a Bitcoin is rising, while Bitcoins are being generated continuously, there is no way you can tell me what the price of a satoshi will be and it has nothing to do with the businesses behind it. We don't know because of other variables like mining, influence from institutional investment, speculators, government policies, there are a lot of reasons why we don't know what the price of a satoshi is. Mastercoin is a messaging protocol layer built on top of a blockchain (the Bitcoin blockchain at this time). It's more than a mere coin. It's an economy onto itself while a coin is just a unit of account. The beauty of Mastercoin is what you'll be enabled to do with it. If ColoredCoin enables us to do all the same stuff then we'll just have both. But at this point in time Mastercoin has the momentum and is in the lead. It's not like all of these solutions will implement all their features at the same time so one will be first in a certain area making us use that while another will be first in another area making us use that. We will have to use them all if they market themselves right and compete on innovation. Trying to use propaganda, or claim that Mastercoin can't work, I don't see that. Not only do I see Mastercoin as being potentially successful but I can already point to some successes. When it can do what we all want it to do then it will dramatically improve the economy for us all and that includes the people who promote ColoredCoins. ColoredCoins are not a bad idea, but if it were such a powerful and elegant idea then where is the proof? Where is the decentralized exchange with smart property and user currencies? Talk is cheap. Produce the code. |
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Because you have Mastercoins and because Mastercoins are stable. I am not convinced Colored Coins will be more stable than Bitcoin but if it can then it will do well. For me I like the fact that Mastercoin provides an escrow because I shouldn't have to trust the issuer to honor the contract and having Mastercoins as escrow will allow for people to have a place to put their wealth to use creating new currencies in a way which isn't too much risk. I also like that Mastercoin can act as a unit of measure for the entire system where all wealth in the system can be determined by an unchanging Mastercoin. There will be very minimal inflation in Mastercoin compared to Bitcoin and that means a lot less volatility and a much better measuring unit.
If you like Colored Coin then use it, but if you like Mastercoin then use it. Some people will certainly pick one or the other, some will use both. Some will use Bitshares and some will use all three.
Why wouldn't you use all three?
You could use all three but what I am interested in is what system is best for asset management such as stocks for a company. The thing with Colored Coins from what I understand is that it IS Bitcoin. It is just about assigning certain outputs with a certain value other than their corresponding Bitcoin value. Exactly, it is Bitcoin. So if something happens to Bitcoin what happens to your stock? If something happens to Bitcoin then Mastercoin can just use another blockchain. If something happens to Bitcoin then Bitshares has it's own blockchain. Colored Coin has no alternative so if something happens to Bitcoin such as if it gets politically attacked, or if there is some problem with it found it will affect Colored Coin because ColoredCoin is not platform independent. Unless you are a business oriented individual are prone to believe that Bitcoin will be the only cryptocurrency, that Bitcoin will be the final cryptocurrency, and that whatever your doing should die with Bitcoin, then perhaps it's in your self interest to diversify. For that reason if I had to choose between Colored Coin and Mastercoin I would choose Mastercoin. Between Colored Coin and Bitshares I would choose Bitshares. Additionally I would choose Mastercoin because I think you need a unit of measurement. For example the amount of energy in the universe is the same from the big bang right now and it never changes. Energy is never created or destroyed. This gives us the only sense of stability we have in this universe and allows for all the laws of physics, structure, and clarity in the electromagnetic spectrum. Bitcoin in my opinion is not a good foundation from which to build a unit of measurement because it's still in an inflationary period. Mastercoin is in an inflationary period too but we know exactly the rate that Mastercoins will be created and the bonus Mastercoins wont create any volatility because they'll be used for development and we are talking an nominal amount. So for our purposes Mastercoin will be fixed in time/space, will become very stable, and will serve as a good unit of measurement. I don't believe Bitshares will be able to do this as well because it too will be mined, but I think at least with Bitshares that mining will provide redundancy and diversification. I think redundancy and diversification are good for the long term security of cryptocurrencies in general because if someone could destroy the Bitcoin blockchain they would not destroy Bitshares or Mastercoin but that would destroy ColoredCoin's Bitcoin implementation. There is a way around this which involves implementing ColoredCoin on Litecoin, Primecoin, PPCoin and Freicoin. I think if it's implemented on enough altcoins then you could theoretically have redundancy but then you would have the problem of volatility and all these separate implementations would run any chances of trying to use it as a standard unit of measurement. How many atoms exist? Well if the number changes depending on how you look at it then it's impossible to form any includes on anything in the universe. That number has to be fixed, set in stone, unchanging, and then we can say gold has an atomic weight of 196.966569. We know gold has 79 neutrons. We know where gold rests within the 10^78 atoms in the visible universe and that says something. ColoredCoin wont be able to do that because it's not ever going to be a precise measure of the value of something else because it's abstract (Bitcoins posing as ColoredCoins) rather than something concrete (set in stone). If I ask how many ColoredCoins will exist on the Bitcoin blockchain no one can tell me that answer. If we assume every Bitcoin can also be a Colored Coin that is the closest thing to an answer I could come up with. If I ask how many Mastercoins will exist in the Bitcoin universe the exact measurement is 619478.59338440. This number will not change and cannot change ever. Knowing this and knowing that most of the Mastercoins that shall exist came into existence instantaneously, it can become very stable. If you want to know how many atoms are in an oz of gold you can ask, and if you want to know how many Mastercoins are in goldcoins you can find that out as well. The amount of Mastercoins which make up a gold coin is critical for measuring the value backing the gold coin escrow. The gold in their vault might or might not exist but we will know the value in their escrow exists.
The main use case is company stock. You have to believe in the company of course, but you don't need to rely on any centralized, cumbersome stock exchange.
And this is why, Meni, that Color Coins are generally irrelevant. Bitcoin was interesting because it had ZERO TRUST, not only at the technology level, but the financial level as well. Nothing was BACKING it. Color Coins suggest BACKING and exchangeability, thus you've removed zero trust AND you can safely remove the technological zero-trust(POW) from the equation as well. This is what has been done with Confidence Chains. This is why Mastercoin relies on escrow. You don't have to trust the issuer but the system definitely works better if you can. The other scheme is contract for difference which doesn't require any trust at all except in mathematics. |
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There are 21 million million Bitcoins that will ever exist.
There are 600 thousand Mastercoins that will ever exist.
I predict each Mastercoin will easily be worth between 20-30 Bitcoins.
But if we want to be conservative each Mastercoin is actually going to be worth at least 1 Bitcoin. Assume that everyone who has at least 1 Bitcoin will want at least 1 Mastercoin and you can easily see that the price of Mastercoins will easily surpass 1:1.
As for the particulars of how much this or that costs in Mastercoin, who knows? But you can be sure when people figure out what they can do, everyone will want some.
I think the balance JR has to reach is to have enough Mastercoins that they wont ever run out, but have it be scarce enough that the value can continue to appreciate over time.
600,000 is a good number, but the main threat I see to Mastercoin value will be from Bitshares. People will probably sell Mastercoins for Bitshares if that idea actually worked as well as they say it will, but it's very possible that Mastercoin could have first mover advantage and work better too.
JR will have to explain the math of Mastercoin, I don't fully understand and my calculations could be way off, but based on my calculations I'm not selling Mastercoins for less than 2 BTC each. The reason is I predict the demand for Mastercoins will be far greater than the demand for Bitcoins. People will be buying Bitcoins in order to buy Mastercoins so they can do certain things which can only be done using Mastercoins.
Whether my math is off or not depends on whether or not Mastercoins are destroyed after use. If they are destroyed bit by bit over time as I understand it then they'll be absolutely deflationary. The rate of that destruction would determine how deflationary and JR has to answer that. In his whitepaper he suggests 1.5 Mastercoins for 1000 Bitcoins. My calculations suggest that everyone will want to own a few Mastercoins and the price would for sure be at least a few Bitcoins probably prior to the launch and could get as high as 30 Bitcoins per Mastercoin depending on how it works.
I believe that is all assuming Mastercoin does something that colored coins can not. I'm not convinced that is the case. If I was a business who wanted to do an IPO why would I choose Mastercoin to represent my shares over colored coins? If both do the same thing, why convert some of my BTC to MC when CC does what I need? Especially since CC allows shareholders to not have to have the whole blockchain for security? If the price of MC gets expensive why choose it? I'd rather pick BTC CC and then it will cost just a few cents a share to start. It just seems MC hypes a lot of the future potential and people are seeing it as another currency that will have massive demand but they are forgetting that CC has the same potential for everyone and will be dirt cheap because its just uses a few cents worth of BTC to use. This is a great video where an Executive Architect from IBM basically explains the colored coins concept https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDO7TDMlxsYIf I was a business who wanted to do an IPO why would I choose Mastercoin to represent my shares over colored coins?
This is a great question which I haven't seen answered yet. Because you have Mastercoins and because Mastercoins are stable. I am not convinced Colored Coins will be more stable than Bitcoin but if it can then it will do well. For me I like the fact that Mastercoin provides an escrow because I shouldn't have to trust the issuer to honor the contract and having Mastercoins as escrow will allow for people to have a place to put their wealth to use creating new currencies in a way which isn't too much risk. I also like that Mastercoin can act as a unit of measure for the entire system where all wealth in the system can be determined by an unchanging Mastercoin. There will be very minimal inflation in Mastercoin compared to Bitcoin and that means a lot less volatility and a much better measuring unit. If you like Colored Coin then use it, but if you like Mastercoin then use it. Some people will certainly pick one or the other, some will use both. Some will use Bitshares and some will use all three. Why wouldn't you use all three? |
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I can't work with bytemaster because he and I don't agree. He wants to make a socialist coin where everyone receives their fair share just by sitting on their coins, and I would want to make a capitalist coin which doesn't steal (ahem redistribute) value to give to the collective of coin owners. The coin owners are already profiting from the rise in value of the coin.
I do talk with others behind the scenes.
Are you saying he doesn't believe in the survival of the fittest? He doesn't believe in the market? That doesn't seem to be what his documents say on his websites. What gives you the idea that its a socialist coin? I never heard of that before. The public discussions he and I had (in his bitcointalk threads) about how everyone gets what is akin to an interest payment, and how everyone who owns the domain name coin gets a payment. He claims to be Austrian economics based, yet apparently he and I disagree about what that entails. I'd rather not rehash that here. The prior discussions are available. My summary is inaccurate I am sure. Better to go read the prior discussions. I never knew that. Maybe these coins have inherent value afterall. How is it socialism though if we had to mine it (work for it) or buy it? Since when was interest socialism? The only problem with interest is where does that money come from? I wouldn't say it's socialism because it's more like property owners charging rent, but I suppose you could see it as a sort of tax but isn't that the same as what Bitcoin miners do with transaction fees? |
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I can't work with bytemaster because he and I don't agree. He wants to make a socialist coin where everyone receives their fair share just by sitting on their coins, and I would want to make a capitalist coin which doesn't steal (ahem redistribute) value to give to the collective of coin owners. The coin owners are already profiting from the rise in value of the coin.
I do talk with others behind the scenes.
Are you saying he doesn't believe in the survival of the fittest? He doesn't believe in the market? That doesn't seem to be what his documents say on his websites. What gives you the idea that its a socialist coin? I never heard of that before. |
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I believe someone is already GPU mining it and planning to dump thousands of coins.
And your evidence for this is what? People kept believing that Primecoin was being GPU mined, without any evidence. And still no-one has admitted to being able to mine it on GPUs, the two well publicised efforts both ending in failure. Primecoin wasn't made by a corporate entity with funding. I'm not saying Bitshares is a bad idea, I like the idea. I'm saying this new algorithm seemed to be untested and their parameters I immediately knew were right. But hey, if you manage to get some coins thats fantastic. I just don't see those coins going for a lot right now. I think the smart person will be the one who mines now and holds onto them until they convert them to Bitshares. Do not sell a single coin. Each coin may be worth something decent but not for the next 6 months. Bitshares needs time to develop the decentralized exchange which will be powered by this coin. |
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Its time to stop mining. This coin is not profitable to mine.
There isn't even an established market price. But we know the drill, mine the coin while people figure out it exists / how to mine it. Whatever the price is, you wont get very main coins. You'll be lucky if you can get 100 and that is around half a Bitcoin. It's profitable now but it wont be once difficulty goes up. Its time to stop mining. This coin is not profitable to mine.
How can you make that conclusion when you don't know the future value of the coin? Doesn't it largely depend on whether the coin will be truly CPU-only or not? Or are you saying you can buy the coin for less than the cost to mine it? I believe someone is already GPU mining it and planning to dump thousands of coins. I would not count on it being profitable to mine. Where are all the coins going? Seems no one has more than a few hundred. The people who get thousands will be the professional mining companies like Ciphermine. |
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