This is a very good question. I'll give it my best shot based on my understanding.

Mastercoin will allow you to issue a user defined currency. So you would be able to name the currency as one of the specific products of your business or in the name of the business itself turning the currency into a gift voucher.

When they purchase the gift voucher in your store they are actually purchasing the Mastercoin wallet with $10 in it. It might even be possible to let them purchase a Mastercoin wallet with $10 in virtual USD in it which would allow you to directly back your escrow with a user currency called virtual USD. So this way $10 is $10 and you wouldn't have to concern yourself with dealing with Mastercoins directly, only with trusting whomever issues the virtual USD currency.

The virtual USD currency will maintain a stable 1:1 price with real USD. It uses the escrow to do this by having Mastercoins on the escrow side of the scale along with virtual USD. When people purchase virtual USD then some of the Mastercoins held in escrow will become virtual USD. If there the price is no longer 1:1 then some of the virtual USD is destroyed and turned back into Mastercoins until it is 1:1 or some more virtual USD is created until it is 1:1. This means virtual USD will always be 1:1 with real USD if the escrow is healthy.

Your store would have to purchase 10,000 virtual USD from the virtual USD issuer. To do this you would first have to purchase some Mastercoins ($10,000 worth however many that is). Then you'll send those Mastercoins to the issuer of virtual USD, and the issuer will send you $10,000 worth of virtual USD back to you for your gift cards.

Whenever someone redeems your gift card it will result in $10 being sent to you until all $10,000 worth of giftcards are redeemed. The virtual USD company could also send the Mastercoins back to you instead of $10.


That is just one way to do it. Another way would be for your store to issue it's own currency. 10,000 units of that currency. You'd then decide what you'd redeem it for which you believe is equal to $10 in value for each gift card. When the purchaser of the gift card redeems then you would have to provide a product and or service worth $10 in value. To do this you would need to hold Mastercoins in escrow and when they purchase the gift cards from you in the store they would actually be purchasing Mastercoins disguised as gift cards. They'd go home with these Mastercoin wallets or scan the QR code into their smartphone/Google glass and suddenly they'd have a balance of Mastercoins which would be taking the form of your currency. If the Mastercoin escrow isn't healthy then some of your virtual user currency would be destroyed until the price is 1:1 with USD and it's $10 per gift card. In my opinion if its backed by virtual USD then the escrow of virtual USD corporation would handle all that for you. If you back it with Mastercoins then you'd have to back the Mastercoins in your escrow directly with your goods and services so that if they redeem then they get a choice to either get $10 in Mastercoins or receive goods and services worth the value of $10.

They'll trade these with their friends, swapping them until eventually someone redeems and you'll have to offer a product and or service or send them the Mastercoins.

Please confer with dacoinminster for the details on the protocol, there are some things which are not in the whie paper or which I might not understand. That is the best of my understanding at this time.

I'm not against using Colored Coins. The problem I have with Colored Coins is that I must buy Bitcoins in order to interact with it. It forces Bitcoin to try to act both as a value of measurement and as a value of account and to try to be good at both. Bitcoin is not good at escrow when it goes in bubbles. It goes in bubbles because it has to be mined, because it's used in transactions and for speculation. If we use Mastercoins then we don't have to use Bitcoins at all or risk Bitcoin sat all. Both Bitcoin and Mastercoin can have independent values and grow in value independent of each other so that if one crashes then it doesn't affect the other.

I could buy Bitcoins with cash and play with Colored Coin or I could buy Mastercoins with cash and play with Mastercoin. The USD is where the value comes from in either case and in my opinion Mastercoin by design will hold value better than Bitcoin because Mastercoin is being designed specifically as a unit of measurement. It doesn't have to act as a currency or do anything but sit in an escrow.


Mastercoins are not a currency.  It only exists to hold the value like gold or silver. It's a measuring stick. A shorter stick just means more density. More density which means you can hold more value in less space which is good because the point is to hold as much value in the least amount of space possible for the purpose of the escrow. If the escrow coin, perpetual coin or whatever you'd like to call the unit of measurement isn't good at containing value then it's worthless.

Currencies on the other hand are more like vouchers. You can have as many vouchers as the issuer can redeem within a period of time. So if the issuer is willing to create 1 trillion oz of gold coins then you could issue 1 trillion vouchers, but you cannot issue more vouchers than all the gold on the planet and that is why you need to balance it out with a unit of measurement like Mastercoin. Mastercoin would represent all the possible value on planet earth and then the issuer on the other side of the scale with their gold coins. If the issuer were to try to announce that they are going to issue 1 trillion gold coins but there isn't even that much value possible on the earth itself then we'd know something is immediately wrong. They cannot issue those gold coins unless there is equal value somewhere else.

That means you can have an escrow with 1 trillion gold coins worth of value? Okay they can now issue 1 trillion virtual gold coins even if they cannot create 1 trillion physical gold coins. When the buyers try to redeem then they'll redeem their virtual gold coins for physical gold coins until there is no more gold left on the planet and then they'll want their Mastercoins back which will still have value because the Mastercoins represent all the possible value on planet earth.

Does that make the picture clearer? Mastercoins are meant to be the most valuable substance in existence so that when people put them in escrow it functions as a way to let anyone back anything and issue anything. Value comes from goods and services and not from precious metals, so ultimately the value in Mastercoins will come from goods and services too. That ultimately will be tracked back to national currencies that people will use either to buy Bitcoins with and then transform into Mastercoins (in which case I am concerned that the instability from Bitcoin speculation will pass on to Mastercoin), or they'll buy Mastercoins directly with USD which is the best way because the instability of Bitcoin cannot pass on to Mastercoin. The best way is if Mastercoins are bought with national currencies and then the value of the USD goes directly into Mastercoin without any interference. It lowers the signal to noise ratio.

You're correct it makes no difference how many there are in a certain context. The context is that when I go to buy Mastercoins in USD if there are an unlimited amount then I have no idea how many and cannot find where on the measuring stick the value is. For that reason you need a set in stone amount. You cannot have unlimited Mastercoins because how do you weigh something when the numbers on one side is infinite in both directions and the number on the other side is finite?

Mastercoin is supposed to be finite in that there is a limit to the amount of Mastercoins that can exist, but it should also be very divisible too. That means it has enough space to hold the value of the earth inside of it but maintains just enough limits to give it a useful structure so we can measure something against it. 1 Mastercoin vs 1 oz of gold can be measured only if we know what 1 Mastercoin is. And we only know what 1 Mastercoin is if the amount of Mastercoins are set in stone from the start.

A unit of account is something which should be able to expand and contract because a currency isn't supposed to be scarce. A unit of measurement is something which is inherently scarce because if value isn't scarce there is no way to distinguish whether or not anything is valuable. It's like if beauty was not scarce then you would have no way to determine what it is anymore. Mastercoins therefore have to at least seem scarce, meaning the highest units have to be scarce but if its infinitely divisible then the whole world can use it just not in the same amounts. That way we can distinguish the difference between 1 Mastercoin and 0.000000000000001 Mastercoins. If there were no upper cap we would not be able to distinguish a difference and what use would it be as a unit of measurement? There need not be a lower cap. Gold can be measured in atoms if you like but the fact is we use oz and carats to measure purity. What does infinite carat gold even mean?

If you're talking about a ruler and it goes on in one direction for infinity then yeah you can use it as a measure. That is how Mastercoin already is. But a ruler which goes on for infinity in both directions cannot work because then you cannot measure the purity, beauty, or value. You can have 10 as the highest purity, highest value rating, and go down for infinite with -0.0001 and that is what Mastercoin (and Bitcoin) does. No one wants to compete for the lowest purity, lowest value or anything, everyone psychologically wants the highest and that is why it can work.

This is where we disagree the most. BTC is extremely risky which is why I don't think Mastercoin or any escrow should be backed by it. BTC is empowered by speculation and easily forms bubbles because of block reward halving, the moods of miners, and the consumer trends. We don't need that to cause instability for escrow. When consumers lose a lot of money on Satoshi dice or when Silk Road shuts down then a lot of people say its time to cash out into national currencies. That means the real value is in the national currencies in the first place. When they go to work they got paid in national currencies and see BTC as play money. When they go to work and get paid in BTC then I could see BTC being used to back something else.

Ultimately goods and services back the USD. So this is like saying why don't we just rely on the USD and not even bother building Bitcoin? The reason is Bitcoin can do some things the USD cannot do. But the USD is more stable because people are working to earn the USD a lot more than they are for BTC and that is never going to change because BTC just isn't designed to be stable. Mastercoin could make it stable over time perhaps.

The point I'm making is, if I'm the issuer I'd rather people buy my products and services with USD because I know what USD is going to be worth in 6 months. so +1 for USD. If I'm the seller who is selling Mastercoins I'd rather sell it for USD because then I know I'll get relatively the same amount that was originally put into it.

It's the BTC that is the unknown variable and all the other user currencies that people might use to buy Mastercoins. Theoretically you can back an escrow with a user currency and that would include backing it with BTC. But why would anyone prefer to back their escrow with BTC when they can back it with USD using Mastercoins? I would choose the most stable currency to back my escrow so that I don't have to worry about waking up to -%60 in the price of BTC and then wondering what will I do. If It's backed by USD then the price of BTC is irrelevant.

If Mastercoin itself is backed by a basket of currencies including USD, the Euro, the Yen, gold, silver, platinum and more, I'd definitely believe that Mastercoin would be far more stable than BTC because Mastercoin doesn't exist for anything other than for people to buy it and hold it. There is no need to use Mastercoins for playing dice, or as a currency. You can turn your Mastercoins into Bitcoins and then use that as a currency or turn it into USD and use that and so on, so I see the only real threat to Mastercoin being whether or not the escrow can remain healthy and that is only at risk if Mastercoin itself is unstable due to Bitcoin speculators thinking it's a stock or a currency and not thinking about it as more a place to put their value.

Say you want to buy 100 gold bars with your Bitcoin wealth now that you've made a million dollars but you don't want to use a bank. What you could do is buy the virtual gold bars from a cash4gold company. That cash4gold company would let you cash out your Bitcoins, send them cash, and then they'd send you some gold vouchers backed by Mastercoins. When you want your gold bars you redeem the voucher and you get the physical bars but when you want paper gold then you keep the vouchers as a paper wallet.

In this way you could own gold without having to physically hold it. You'd own virtual gold bars which could be redeemed for real gold bars. The value of the Mastercoins would be exactly based on the fact that the virtual gold bars can always be redeemed for real gold bars. The value of Bitcoin is irrelevant for this, and the value of the USD is also irrelevant for this, because the value is directly backed by the gold itself.

So in this way Mastercoin is way more stable than Bitcoin will ever be if used right. If used wrong then people will treat it like it's some kind of stock, speculate and then worry more about the price of Mastercoins instead of worrying about how to get their virtual gold vouchers redeemed using Mastercoins as a vehicle.

And you could say Colored Coin can do the same thing but Bitcoin doesn't just exist to be used in escrows. That means all kinds of transactions and other currency related uses will cause price flucuations which will keep Bitcoin unstable. Bitcoin will also be getting the sort of media attention which will attract different people to it while Mastercoin doesn't even need anyone to buy them directly. You could buy Mastercoins and never have to even know it.

For example you could sell gold in a convenience store as a scratch ticket with Mastercoin. They buy the scratch ticket and find they've won a gold bar. So they simply redeem it and the gold bar is sent to their address. Colored Coin would require interaction with Bitcoin and who knows what the price will be for Bitcoins and why should anyone have to really care? Having that separation means we don't have to care about the price of any specific user currency.

Good, now would be the time to contact them now that there is a proof of concept to show them.
They'd probably run their own exchange but I don't see why they couldn't be on the Mastercoin protocol too.

Here you go:
https://masterchest.info/lookupadd.aspx?address=1MN3pJCKdywgr8QTenP69GQ4cEbxZJDZEc

Here you go:
https://masterchest.info/lookupadd.aspx?address=1PxxYyZNtfRJc5ikYJ5bKr3hHHfMeEmtAu



Here you go:
https://masterchest.info/lookupadd.aspx?address=1LefCDhpzacTZ2ibsAV987GUN5PNGGjgY

If you can get in contact with Max Keiser that would be excellent. He should know about the Mastercoin project because I hear he is working on something similar and the technology may interest his crowd funding projects.
Thank you for your contributions.

Please continue to support the project. You've a fairly large holder so it's definitely in your long term self interest.
https://masterchest.info/lookupadd.aspx?address=1EYe3HxCA9txmN9pfEADctC7v69wi3TbMC

I believe you do. Let me check with JR and if he authorizes it you'll receive Mastercoins today.

This is why in my opinion Mastercoin escrows should be backed by the actual goods and services of the issuer and not by BTC. A substitute for the actual goods and services of the issuer should be the national currencies because most human beings toil (sacrifice their time) for national currencies. So the value in the time spent toiling is actually locked up in the national currencies and this is why it's a better idea to buy Mastercoins with national currencies than with BTC.

As illustrated by the ByteMasterBank example, if that bank is backed entirely by BTC and BTC is volatile then that volatility in value will transfer over to Mastercoin. Mastercoin can only be as stable as whatever is giving it value so if its getting most of it's value from BTC and BTC is in a bubble then when that bubble bursts you can expect it to be felt in the diminishing value of Mastercoins which suddenly wont be worth as much in comparison to the currencies which truly are stable and which truly provide value (the national currencies).

The Zerg is also correct in that we need to have trust in the system to a certain extent. It's not completely trustless.



Ultimately we have to know for sure that the issuers will redeem their coupons, gift cards, currencies or vouchers for goods and services. The escrow works best when backed by trusted issuers who can guarantee that the value held within the Mastercoin is stable because the most stable way to create value is by goods and services, not by BTC, not by the USD, but the goods and services which actually bring value to any economy.

So there will have to be trusted issuers. This means the legitimate corporation has to be able to interface with Mastercoin. For instance Nintendo should be able to interface with Mastercoin and release Nintendo credits which we can trust 100% are coming from the digital signature of the Nintendo corporation and which we can trust legally to redeem. If it is set up like that then Mastercoin value will be stable and backed directly by the goods and services of every trusted issuer. The untrusted issuers will still exist and anyone who wants to interact with them will be taking their chances.

In order for the Mastercoin system to obtain the value of the goods and services of the issuer of Goldcoins the issuer of Goldcoins must legally be required to redeem their currency. This could happen like this, I give the issuer of Gold coins some Mastercoins and they give me some physical Gold coins worth the same value. Now the value of Mastercoins will remain stable as long as the value of Gold is stable. The demand for Goldcoins will increase the amount of Mastercoins in the escrow. If there is a sell off then people will want to send their Goldcoins back. Perhaps this could be accomplished with an expiration date where they could sell back the Goldcoins in exchange for their Mastercoins back.

Here is the problem though, if the Goldcoins are entirely virtual then those virtual Goldcoins can be destroyed. Physical Goldcoins would have to be created or the virtual Goldcoins would have no value at all and those physical Goldcoins cannot be destroyed, only sent back to the issuer and only by a certain date. As long as no value is created or destroyed and only transferred, and as long as the user has a preference for dealing with trusted issuers, there should be stability in the system if the initial value comes from national currencies.

If the initial value comes from BTC when BTC are $200 for instance and then we see a correction then a lot of people might start selling Mastercoins for USD to get out because they'll know that speculative value is behind the BTC buying the majority of Mastercoin and that this speculative value can collapse. If the Mastercoin holders sell for USD in the first place then the price of BTC doesn't matter, it doesn't matter if BTC is in a bubble, they'll get the exact amount in Mastercoin back in USD that they put in and as utility in Mastercoin increases more people will be putting USD into it and due to escrow they wont be taking it out of it as quickly as they'll be putting it in.

That is the only real problem I could find with the Mastercoin protocol It's weakness to speculation comes from the fact that everyone is thinking about what it's price is in BTC and BTC is weak to speculation. Mastercoin can be more stable than BTC for many reasons if and only if there are enough trusted issuers because the stability comes from them.


This is an interesting way around it. It would allow Mastercoin to try the escrow feature while also offering an alternative if the escrow feature fails. I don't think the escrow feature has to fail, I just think it matters how it's implemented.

This would be correct but why would I trust the data stream for Gold Coin if no gold is created? It's a derivative of gold, it's virtual gold, but it's not real gold. This allows for the GoldCoin holder to basically own the risk profile for gold without owning any physical gold. Why would they want to do that when they can just keep their Mastercoins?

If they buy real gold bars then it makes sense but then they cannot store it unless in a bank? But if its redeemable within a certain time period they can trade it to someone else who wants physical gold making it more valuable. So the real value is in that it's redeemable for real gold just as the US dollar once was when backed by the gold standard. If it's merely virtual and the issuer wont give me my gold bars if I ask for them then I don't understand where the value comes from. If I had Gold Coins I might be able to trade them if the issuer will redeem them for 6 months, giving me 6 months to spend/swap them. But they would have to create a real Gold Coin in their vault and store it so that it can be mailed to whomever owns the virtual coins at the time of redemption.

Finally my understanding on the escrow is that it load balances the virtual representations of the actual physical gold. If there are physical gold coins sitting in a vault those real gold coins do not get destroyed, only the virtual gold coins, coupons, or representations of those physical gold coins would get destroyed when sent back to the issuer to result in adjusting the price allowing it to track to the price of the real gold sitting in the vault.

Please promote Mastercoin in your signature and/or blog/post/tweet about it so that I can send you some Mastercoins. It needs promotion and it's according to the rules of the thread. Thanks.

As of right now to my knowledge you cannot send Mastercoins using thin clients. You have to use either BitcoinQT or Armory. Electrum can receive Mastercoins but cannot send them out.

It's an inconvenience but I don't know if I could say at this moment that it is a problem. In the long term it might become a problem.

Colored Coin isn't always at the disadvantage, because of how it works it does have some advantages. I just think Colored Coin is set up in a way in which it uses a unit of account as the unit of measurement. I think that the unit of account has to be independent and separate from the unit of measurement. And honestly no one has explained how Colored Coin can do derivatives in a way which is as simple to understand and implement as Mastercoin. I'm not saying it couldn't work, I'm just saying you're going to have a very difficult time explaining Colored Coin.

What I mean is that with Colored Coin everything rides on whenever or not there is demand for Bitcoin. The whole system relies on Bitcoin to an extreme extent which I don't think is all that safe. When I asked where Colored Coin will get it's value from people say Bitcoin and that is the problem with it. The value should come directly from the national currencies that are the most stable like the USD or the Euro, or it should come from goods and services. Value should not come from Bitcoin.

The Mastercoin protocol relies on Mastercoins for escrow but since Mastercoins are only used for one thing (to act as escrow and as a unit of measurement), it does not have to be connected in value to Bitcoin or anything else. This independence in my opinion is a very good thing because in my opinion a unit of measurement isn't supposed to be the coin we use as a currency. The unit of measurement is supposed to be the measuring stick for the value of everything we create on top of it. Initially the value of Mastercoins will come from the stable national currencies that people will use to buy Mastercoins with. The stability in the value will have to come from national currencies because Bitcoin has extreme price fluctuations, volatility, and in my opinion isn't very solid to use as an escrow because in a day the value can decrease 50% (we have seen it), while with the USD the value will never increase or decrease 50% in a day.

I don't think Bitcoin itself should be used for that because it will drain resources and make it so Bitcoin developers will eventually have to focus on issues to deal with all this Colored Coin. Mastercoin has it's own resources to develop it and does not demand resources from Bitcoin developers to develop it.

If Colored Coin can work that is great. My opinion is Colored Coin is limited to whatever Bitcoin can do and whatever perception Bitcoin has. Mastercoin is not limited to that, and because of that Mastercoin has a chance to develop it's own economic eco-system which does not rely on Bitcoin. To illustrate if I wanted to deal with Colored Coins I have to buy Bitcoins first or I cannot deal with them. If I want to deal with Mastercoin I will just buy Mastercoins. I currently need a Bitcoin wallet to receive and send from but in the future I might even be able to use a Mastercoin wallet which would mean I don't really have to associate with Bitcoin at all beyond the protocol level.

And that is a good thing because in my opinion if Mastercoin is to be successful it has to be purchased direct with USD. Not with other crypto-currencies and not with Bitcoins. The reason being that you want Mastercoins initially to have its value come from goods and services and not speculation. Since most people work for national currencies it does not make much sense to provide value for Mastercoin with Bitcoins which doubled in price possibly due to a bubble rather than any new goods and services. If people were to purchase Mastercoins exclusively with Bitcoins instead of with the USD or some other national currency then eventually when the Bitcoin bubble pops and the price crashes down again the value of Mastercoins would crash down with it and the value wouldn't at all represent the goods and services or anything other than speculation.

So the best way to buy Mastercoins to promote a stable value is to buy it with a stable national currency. There is plenty of money, trillions of dollars in USD just sitting waiting to be put in an escrow. We should be encouraging people to use the cash under their mattress to buy Mastercoins.

That is how I see it too vokain. If he sells that is actually good for the protocol. What matters is how he goes about selling it and whether it's dumped all at once or done intelligently over a long enough period.

I don't think it will matter if he sells 1% if the demand far exceeds the supply. Also it does make a difference how he sells it and whether or not he dumps it all at once or sells it in a very organized smart way.

If for instance he sells MSC for cash then it wont affect the BTC to MSC exchange rate very much because he'd be selling it to a completely different demographic.

For example, JR could start up a regulated exchange or wait until something like Coinbase comes around to MSC and then sell to Coinbase (they have to get their MSC from somewhere right?). He could sell a little bit at a time so that the price doesn't change and do it quietly. He could for instance sell only when demand far exceeds the supply and only after it reaches the level of maturity where if there is plenty of people trying to buy it.

As long as he doesn't sell before the community grasps the value of what the protocol is then it wont matter in my opinion if he does sell even if its more than 1%. At some point Mastercoin will be in so much demand, far more demand than we see with Bitcoin that there will be a need to match that demand with supply and he's the guy who has the supply.

This post needs to be copied onto Reddit and then tweeted.

An interesting set of quotes from Coinbase relevant to Mastercoin.
http://www.coindesk.com/coinbase-gmail-bitcoin/

Secure multiparty computation. That is called the millionaires problem and it has been solved.

I don't know whether or not it's solved in the Bitcoin protocol but theoretically it has been solved.

Paid translation might be a good use of some of the contest funds. If the spec / whitepaper can be translated into as many languages as possible and if more importantly the development documentation and concepts can be translated then it will probably catch fire.

I agree. If it's the first decentralized exchange I don't think PR will be a problem at all. Get in contact with the issuers and business owners. Have some useful goods and services using the Mastercoin protocol and then run the PR campaign to put it into the media.

It will be important to encourage business owners and issuers to keep using Mastercoins but the truth of the matter is, for any business it will make all the sense in the world based on functionality. For the users I think where else are they supposed to go for a decentralized exchange? There is no alternative so once you have that you'll automatically have the Bitcoin community.

Even if Colored Coin and Bitshares arrive soon or at the same time the demand for a decentralized exchange is so great that there are thousands of people waiting just for that. The more features you have the greater the demand will be and I do believe the potential market cap is big enough for Colored Coin, Bitshares and Mastercoin to all be successful.

Long term PR will be a major issue though. The other issue will be getting fiat currency into the Mastercoin eco-system. Mastercoin is a great idea but if its hard to get fiat into the system it's never going to take off as much as it could. I have ideas on how giftcards can be used to turn fiat into Mastercoins using a giftcard/scratch card approach to selling Mastercoins. I think scratch cards which contain Mastercoins should be sold in liquor stores, coffee shops and at college campuses across the globe.

My idea for marketing Mastercoin to the general public once the functionality exists
I would design the scratch cards so everyone wins something, but the amount of Mastercoins you win is random. Some people would win the jackpot and some would win just enough to want to keep buying Mastercoin scratch tickets.

So just as the giveaway thread gives away Mastercoins at 0.1-0.9, in the future a scratch ticket approach will be necessary. The scratch tickets will be sold so people will actually be buying the Mastercoins but once in a while there will be a jackpot in there so that some people win a lot more than others.

So for $1 to $5 to $20 anyone will be able to buy a scratch ticket. They'll scratch it off to see how many Mastercoins they've won underneath. If they won more than they paid for they hit the jackpot but the majority of people will just win any amount and be happy with that. The total amount sold is the same but the distribution is randomized so that it's got a gambling element to it.

Now you'll have the general public with scratch tickets with Mastercoins which they'll be able to use.

Download a Bitcoin wallet like Armory, QT or Electrum and then your Bitcoin address which you designate as your Mastercoin address becomes your Mastercoin address. Try to keep it to one Mastercoin address per Bitcoin wallet. Do not use web or cloud wallets like Coinbase but a wallet you control physically because Mastercoins may potentially be very valuable and also for technical reasons.

I hope you're aware that I cannot read mandarin. If someone would like to translate that and confirm what it says that would be helpful.

In the initial phase people will see Mastercoins and Bitcoins as an investment. In my opinion this is unavoidable because people are quite poor, the economy is bad, and people are looking for ways to up their monies. The real function of Mastercoin will be to reshape the global economy and allow you to be economically liberated from the banking titans of the establishment. If you have debts, or if you're an entrepreneur, Mastercoin will have functionality which will greatly benefit you.

Wait to see what it can do before you think about selling them because you might find out that there is nothing more valuable to sell it for.

What we need is a complete technical specification on the wiki. I can't develop for it either because as soon as I think I understand it, some change is made and it's slightly different. So it's a fast moving target.

A wiki is required which puts everything in one place. We also need a reference/command list so people know what to do because even the best programmer isn't going to just know how to do stuff. Basically a detailed road map is needed, code has to be commented so that other people can read it, and the specifications along with the to-do list have to be clear. Finally there needs to be an API or at least something similar to what Open Transactions has where you have a high level API which everyone can connect to. Python is relatively easy to read which is a good thing but for stuff like building a user interface or bug testing that is something people can help out with after the basic code is finished.

Documentation documentation Documentation.

This is pretty cool.

100:1, 100 Mastercoins for every Bitcoin.

It's a bit soon, wait until smart property actually works before contacting Friedcat.

Excellent work! This is actually happening faster than anyone expected.

Don't bother with blacklists. Just use micropayments to charge uses a fee.

More Mastercoins doesn't dilute anything if the project is a success. Development resources would come from Bitcoin once the decentralized exchange is built. I don't see how it will be an issue at all.

Also you'll have many commercial interests and venture capitalists who will pour millions into it if it even looks like its a success.