This works only for stuff like shares though. What if I want to create a transaction where I make a bet with you that the price of Bitcoin will be $1000 before December 2014? If you don't believe they'll be over that price then you'll agree to buy the Bitcoins from me thinking that they wont be that expensive by December 2014.

How would a futures contract be possible with Colored Coin?


Show me how derivatives trading can be done without an escrow? I do not understand where Colored Coins get their value. And don't say from Bitcoin. That is like saying dollars get their value by being dollars. Dollars got their value originally by being backed by gold and now they have no value at all and represent debt. The gold standard at least allowed for dollars to originally be worth a specific price in gold. That gold was used to provide the initial value for the dollar.

Mastercoin is like the gold which is set up to provide the initial value. Mastercoins themselves can be backed by gold itself if you buy Mastercoins with gold bars. Now you have Mastercoins backed by gold bars. Now Mastercoins inherit the value of gold and you can use that value to create an escrow to create gold coins which can actually be redeemed at some time in the future for gold bars because.

I don't understand how Colored Coins get any value at all. Stocks are worthless unless the company is successful and it asks us to trust that the company will be successful for trading stocks is often on faith in the Bitcoin community because it's unregulated and could very well be a scam.


I'm sure people will fork it but unless they can get just as much value into their cloned coins as the original Mastercoin their protocol wont work at all. Their escrow would never be healthy. It might work as an attack on Mastercoin but I don't see any incentive to doing it other than for pump and dump. I don't see how it would necessarily remove the value put into Mastercoin once that value is put in.

For instance Cunicula confronted this question. He proposed a scheme which utilized demurrage to provide interest for issuers. As long as there is interest there will be a reason to put your value into Mastercoin because that value will have the potential to increase through demurrage over time.

I think it's like with MCXNow. If MCXNow were cloned it doesn't mean everyone who owned Feeshares and who has their coins on MCXNow receiving interest on their deposits would suddenly go to that other clone which couldn't offer nearly as much interest. The end result is that by providing interest you can actually encourage loyalty to the original Mastercoin protocol and maintain escrow health. Mastercoin would be the best place to put your Bitcoins when the Bitcoin price collapses for no reason like it does sometimes, and when the price of Bitcoins rises tremendously like it's doing now then you could switch your altcoin holdings to the stable Mastercoin instead of Bitcoin and then switch back.

The point is that Mastercoin would be the perfect store of value. You can use it to back all kinds of other currencies and smoothly switch from alt currencies to Mastercoin.

The problem with Colored Coin is what do I do if I'm holding a bunch of Litecoins and the price of Litecoins are collapsing while the price of Bitcoins are going up?  I don't want to buy Bitcoins because the price of Bitcoins could collapse back down again soon after I buy it causing me to lose money. So enter Mastercoin, I could buy a bunch of Mastercoins and know for sure the price will be going up and will be more stable than Bitcoins. If I could earn interest on my Mastercoins in some way then it would guarantee that I'd have an incentive to do this in that scenario and every time the price of an alt coin or some other coin collapses I'd be able to go to the Mastercoin safe haven.

When Bitcoin prices collapsed people were putting their Bitcoins into Litecoins and when those collapsed too then people started putting their coins into Asicminer and other stocks. When the centralized stock exchanges went down and the price of Asicminer collapsed then people started putting their coins into MCXFee shares and MCXNow.

People need a place to put their value as investors and they want to have interest. Right now there is the Xbond but you have to rely on a centralized exchanged, or there is Mastercoin.

It could be cloned, it could fail as a project, but if it doesn't and if it's designed to promote loyalty to its implementation of the protocol in the form of interest then if a clone does form that clone would have to recreate the same amount of value, attract the same amount of investment, and pay interest. If it's profitable for investors then they'll probably use both and it wouldn't make a difference. If there were too many clones then people would probably just use the original because there would be no logical reason to use the copy.

No you really can't. Bitcoins are way too volatile. If even the slightest bad news happens then Bitcoin prices can crash. Also most people use Bitcoins as a currency and not for speculation.  

I just don't think you can get enough value into Bitcoin. Why would I trade Litecoins for Bitcoins to use Colored Coins when I can just build Colored Coin on top of Litecoin and its even better?

So now we have two Colored Coins with half the value they'd have if they were one. Every coin will have its Colored Coin implementation, but Bitcoin will have Mastercoin and Bitshares which go far beyond Colored Coin.

With Mastercoin we can put all our value into that one thing, use that one thing as the maximum value on the exchange from which everything else is weighed. We cannot use Bitcoin for that because Bitcoins aren't valuable enough and even if you put every single Bitcoin into an escrow it wouldn't be valuable enough to even be compared to Forex (5 trillion dollar market cap). Bitcoin is just a 2 billion dollar market cap. Litecoin is maybe $50-100 million market cap. Mastercoin has a potential market cap of 180 trillion or perhaps even more than that.

What I mean is, it's true you could probably do it with Colored Coin and have every altcoin have it's own Colored Coin implementation, but I fail to see how Colored Coin can do derivatives. In 2008 the US derivatives market cap was 182 trillion dollars. How much would the price of a Bitcoin be if the market cap were a conservative 50 trillion dollars? Each Bitcoin would go for around 12 million dollars. But I don't think that will happen because I think not enough people own Bitcoins to put that much value into it right now leaving the door open for Mastercoin.

Forex is a 5 trillion dollar market cap. Derivatives were a 182 trillion dollar market cap for just the United States in 2008. Mastercoin is set up to handle derivatives and all the value could be held in Mastercoins while we could still use Bitcoins for our day to day transactions. Colored Coin on the other hand I am skeptical if it can even do derivatives, or smart property, as it seems to be just about doing shares and a decentralized exchange. There seems to be no standard implementation of Colored Coin and no one can even explain how it works or what it is other than in the most abstract way.

You're basically saying every satoshi can be a color? Colorize the coins to give them object properties?

I get that, but I don't see how it will be better than Mastercoin. Even if we use Colored Coin we will have to transfer value to Bitcoin so basically the same value transfer process has to take place only Bitcoin is too politically volatile in my opinion. Something could happen politically and Bitcoin prices could crash overnight as everyone panic sells and acts retarded. We have seen it over and over, but the markets we do not want that.

It makes sense to me to have Mastercoin exist on top of Bitcoin providing stability for Bitcoin in the form of escrow. Mastercoins do not need Bitcoins to obtain their value and can gain value independent of Bitcoin. All the alt coins which depend on Bitcoin are losing value right now, look at clones like Litecoin, or even coins like Peercoin, Primecoin, and any others. Bitcoin is going up because a bunch of people are buying Bitcoins for unrelated reasons and it's negatively affecting the prices of all other coins as people have to get out of those coins to put their money into Bitcoin again.

And that is the problem of backing everything on Bitcoin. It just isn't going to work very well. I think if everything is backed on Mastercoin and a Mastercoin is worth say 3 Bitcoins then why would Mastercoin owners care if the price of Bitcoins go up or down? Mastercoin owners really only have to care about whether or not miners will try and block them or what Bitcoin developers do. Mastercoin owners have to care about what issuers might do and about keeping Mastercoin escrows healthy but they do not have to care about the price of Bitcoin and I think that is a good thing about Mastercoin.

I also think the fact that Mastercoin could be a magnet for value could actually provide massive funding for development which wouldn't exist under Colored Coin. If a single Mastercoin is worth 2 million dollars in a few years then there is no way in hell Colored Coin is going to be able to keep up but also Mastercoin could develop all kinds of businesses around it and useful tools to do things we all want to be able to do but cannot find the developers to build it.

Colored Coin proponents assume developers will somehow go to the Bitcoin money tree and receive funding. Good luck.

It's not even on a decentralized exchange yet so these are the early adopter stages. In a month when the distributed exchange is working expect 1:1.

It may be a good time to approach the issuers of securities and tell them to buy some MSC prior to the launch of that exchange.

So what backs Colored Coins? I don't understand.

It seems Cunicula has some ideas on this as well. So let me repost his solution and see what everyone thinks.


For this reason I think one of the biggest challenges Mastercoin will face will be to come up with ingenious incentive mechanisms to encourage the set of investment behaviors which maintain escrow health. I think interest would do that similar to what we saw with MCXNow Feeshares. Those Feeshares originally were around 0.2 and went all the way up to 1 BTC each. The same scenario will happen with Mastercoin only a lot more dramatic.

Mastercoin will at least be worth 3* BTC when everything is running and once derivatives get built onto it it could potentially be worth 20*-30* BTC. I don't predict it can go much higher than 30 BTC a coin unless it's a bubble or in the case where people deliberately hoard it. Generally Mastercoin will produce Asicminer type investment madness but that will only happen if the incentive structure is just right to produce that kind of behavior.

Perhaps Cunicula can comment more on this.

Just buy it in smaller amounts.

It's going for 0.25, you can say thats around $50 a coin in USD so that is around 25 Bitcoins to get 100 MSC.

It's cheap enough right now where anyone who really wants them can buy some. Over time when it's 1:1 with BTC then people will buy in smaller amounts and will probably start trying to buy Mastercoins directly with USD. I don't predict it will get to 1:1 until people can buy Mastercoins from a decentralized Mastercoin exchange.

The first Mastercoins will probably be sold 1:1 on that exchange if it works. I don't see anyone selling a Mastercoin for less than a Bitcoin if its working. I wont be  selling for less than 2 BTC each.

Mastercoins can become anything but anything can become Mastercoins.

Believe it or not 0.25 is still really cheap. We are going to see at least 1:1 with BTC if it works. Remember that Mastercoin has the hash rate of BTC and works on top of it so it should at least be 1:1.

Buy in now and you can get significant returns.

I actually agree with your opinion that it is about the protocol. But the protocol requires an escrow and cloning might break the protocol if the value of Mastercoins becomes 0.

As long as Mastercoins can serve it's function as an escrow then competition wont be a bad thing. The competitor to Mastercoin could also have their clone work as an escrow but in either case even the clones would have a higher price than BTC because it would have to.

The only problem would be if the clones release infinite amount of coins and at a price of 0, in my opinion it wouldn't even work technically. To sum up my opinion, if it doesn't work as an investment vehicle then it doesn't work at all because Mastercoin by design is built around escrow in such a way that it requires Mastercoins to be worth a lot.

Now if Colored Coin works better somehow and is somehow free of course we'd all switch to it, but it wouldn't be able to have escrow unless something of value is used.


No amount of technical magic can produce value from nothingness. Value is only transferred from one thing to another. Even in the case of Bitcoin value isn't created from nothing. The math and protocol did not give value to Bitcoin alone, but the services, products, and the computing resources dedicated to mining produced the value.

So we need to see Mastercoin as an abstract object which we can inflate with value. This inflated value gives weight to that abstract object. Then we put that abstract object on a scale and we use that object to measure it's weight/density against everything else. So it is a requirement of the Mastercoin protocol that Mastercoins be very valuable (the most valuable object in that closed system) because that is all Mastercoins exist to do.

To say we shouldn't be concerned about it as an investment vehicle? What exactly is supposed to power the user currencies if it's not the value of Mastercoin held in escrow? If the Mastercoin value were to go too low then you cannot do as much with it. This rule applies to clones as well, so the clones should want to be valuable too.

Since we require that for Mastercoin to work (or really for any clone to work), then even the clones would have to be over 1:1 with Bitcoin to be useful at all. If it's not over 1:1 with Bitcoin then why not just use Bitcoins for that purpose?

The reason we can't use Bitcoins for that purpose is because Bitcoins cannot adopt the functions of Mastercoin and keep the functions of Bitcoin. Colored Coin is an attempt but it's not going to be able to match the capabilities of Mastercoin.

Mastercoin can work because it gives the community something to spend on. The mad rush to buy into Mastercoin will power up Mastercoins, the protocol, and make it bigger and heavier on the scale. The bigger and heavier it is on the value scale the more useful it is (the more value density it has) as an escrow. And if people buy Mastercoins directly with cash, gold or physical items then it adds even more weight/density to the scale and powers it up to function even better as an escrow.

Value of Mastercoin --> Value of user currencies -> value of Mastercoin. It's a loop where value is just transferred back and forth to create an exchange and it is a closed loop and by my understanding it has to be a closed loop.

I don't know how Colored Coin will offer escrow. Someone will have to explain if it can even do it. But if it does then at some point we will have to add value to it in some organized fashion. So are we going to be buying Colored Coins to feed the escrow or what?

I don't think just writing code produces value. People have to be willing to work for those coins, or sell something for them, or trade their car for them, and when it's an escrow then imagine houses, cars, private islands and mansions held in escrow vs an escrow with a lot less stuff in it. Which one would make a better protocol and be better for users?

Inmates already have currencies. I think it depends on who is in prison. When more people from the Bitcoin community find themselves in prison then prisoners will be using Bitcoins.

So Mastercoin will work or not based on whether it works or not. If it works then Mastercoins will easily surpass 1:1 and will be 10-20x the price of BTC. It has to be if it's going to act as an escrow and it can easily do this because unlike with BTC, people will buy Mastercoins directly and it will be in even more demand than BTC.

You don't have to buy BTC to get Mastercoins like you usually do with most altcoins. Most altcoins have no inherent value so no one is going to go wire $1000 in cash to buy Primecoin. No one is going to set up a business to help people turn their cash or their gold bars into Primecoins. Mastercoin will be in so much demand that businesses will form overnight and people will be selling Mastercoins OTC. Those gold bars that people buy Mastercoins with will give Mastercoin value as escrow but also the unique functionality will give Mastercoin value as a protocol.

If Mastercoin can survive the threat you mention (and with the network effect it's very possible it can), then the rest is history.


Thank you for resolving this debate.

Value and price are not the same thing. The price will end up where it ends up and other coins will go up and down just like with Forex. The value will be what matters most. What can you do with it?

How about Bitcoin stickers?

A request for whoever maintains the wiki, can we have a full wiki with all the technical details in one place? I know there is a whitepaper but shouldn't all of that be on the wiki along with updates to the specification? It is changing too fast and is becoming hard to keep up with where Mastercoin is now or is going.

Better organized documentation will make it easier to write code for this project.

@dacoinminster
dillpicklechips mentioned that a potential threat to Mastercoin is that a bunch of alt clones could be made which offer free Mastercoins, piggybacking off the infrastructure and development of the original Mastercoin in an attempt to drive the value of Mastercoins down to 0. Is this attack feasible and can anything be done to prevent it if it is?

My understanding of the Mastercoin protocol is that initial value has to be in the Mastercoins in order for the escrow to work.

Bitcoin has a potential market cap in the trillions. Mastercoin built on top of it puts it at least at 5 trillion (Forex level). Readjust your calculations.

My argument is it would not have the same momentum. Infrastructure without incentive or momentum wont be sustainable.

Mastercoin's crowdfunding provides incentive to develop it. Mastercoins are like stock/shares in the Mastercoin project allowing us to track the value of the Mastercoin protocol to the community and discover a price.

The issue of how to encode Mastercoin in the blockchain, blockchain bloat from altcoins trying to use the Mastercoin model, those are real issues. But I don't think Mastercoin owners will ever deem their Mastercoins worthless and I don't think Mastercoins are worthless because they have a function.

The criticism was that Mastercoin prices could fall through the floor but if that happened how would you have an escrow? So if someone released a Masterclone with free Mastercoins which do not have to be purchased how would the escrow work? What would back the goldcoins so that the supply of the gold coins can be precisely controlled?

If there are too many goldcoins they get destroyed. If there are too few goldcoins they get created. The escrow is the source of value for gold coins and the escrow gets it's source of value from Mastercoin which gets it's source of value from whatever people used to purchase the Mastercoins or whatever work people did to earn them. So if you made a clone system where you have infinite Mastercoins and they are distributed for free then how would you use those worthless Mastercoins as a source of value for the escrow? I don't understand how it would be possible.

I do think Mastercoins might be highly volatile but I don't see how it could easily fall below 1BTC per Mastercoin. I don't see how something built on top of Bitcoin and can hold the value of Bitcoin, Litecoin, Primecoin, USD or anything else, and which has far more functionality and potential market cap than BTC could be worth less than 1 BTC. The only way would be if the clone of Mastercoin somehow could duplicate the escrow system with empty Masterclones and I don't know if that is possible.

Basically why would I trust a currency created with an escrow of infinitely divisible valueless coins when Mastercoins have a price and I know exactly how much they are worth and that tells me how much it weighs on the value scale. So 1 Mastercoin is equal to 4 gold bars? Now the escrow system can work. Just like if you had a vault with fake gold in it you could probably fool a bunch of people into trusting it but if you know the original Mastercoin vault has real gold in it why would you choose the vault you know has fake gold? Because it's cheaper?

It's almost like going off the gold standard. Mastercoin represents the gold standard because it's based on real value that developers, investors and the community as a whole put into it. The Masterclone would just be some copy without being backed by anything of real value so it could be considered cheap money but it doesn't seem very intuitive to me why people would choose that.

The same could be said about Bitcoin. The momentum means businesses will be built up around Mastercoin and everyone will be looking at what Mastercoin is doing. Free isn't as good as profitable and people want to make money. Bitcoins are expensive but people buy them as an investment because the price continues to rise up. You could release a version of Bitcoins now and start over but all the businesses built around it and all the current Bitcoin stakeholders aren't going to put their support into that.
I'm betting that if you own Mastercoins and they are rising in price you're going to stick to it. So yeah you'll be loyal if you own Mastercoins because it's like owning stock. New people might not care about owning Mastercoins but the latest software updates will go to Mastercoin first and whatever copies it will always be playing catch up.

I'm not saying its impossible. In theory a large corporation could try to create a corporate Mastercoin and launch it as a free alternative but other than that I don't see how you can get the momentum without paying people to develop it. You're saying a bunch of programmers developing it for free will be as motivated as people who work on Mastercoin for a living. If you got a lot of Mastercoins and you don't have to worry about money anymore you're going to do a better job programming than a part time hobbyist. My argument is that momentum will build to a point where the people who are established early in Mastercoin will never have to work doing anything but improve Mastercoin. I'm betting that those people will be loyal and will be dedicated to keeping the value of the Mastercoin stock high. I consider the Mastercoins as a type of stock. I also think you will need some kind of coin whether it be free or not, and I don't see why anyone would switch to a new coin due to it being free for the reason that a new coin if its free cannot be seen as an asset. An asset is something you can purchase and watch its value increase over time, while if the coin were free it's not really an investment so how would it attract speculators in the first place?

The reason is Mastercoins are something people can use to track the value of the Mastercoin project. The ability to attract the value of the project has value to speculators. If Mastercoin didn't have a price and it were built up using Colored Coin or some alternative we would just have a user defined currency or smart property created within Colored Coin called "Mastercoin" which people would be trading to determine the true value of the Mastercoin project. Speculators are going to want to speculate on that regardless. So even if a new competitor or Colored Coin came about we would still have people trading Mastercoins within Colored Coin or within that competitor product. I don't know that the price would be as high with competition if the competition were able to keep up with the development but someone would for sure create a way to track the value of the project because that is the reason why these technologies are built.
For instance within The MastercoinClone you could create a bet as to what you think the price of the original Mastercoin will be within 6 months. You could speculate on that and back it with empty MastercoinClones but I see problems with having it be empty value. I think it's better if everything in the system has a price/value, especially when you're trying to create escrows. Nothing would stop a clone of the clone from doing the same thing to TheMastercoinClone and then creating prediction bets on the price of the original Mastercoin and the Mastercoinclone. This could go on forever until the price of all clones and the original reach 0. So that might be a legitimate threat if it went like that because then the clone makers would be able to profit from a race to 0. Ultimately it would just be a transfer of value from the original Mastercoin into a new group of speculators betting that Mastercoins will be worth 0 Bitcoins.


Can you tell me how you could create an escrow with a coin which isn't backed by anything of value? Mastercoins are backed by Bitcoins but not only by Bitcoins. The value of the Mastercoins allow you to create an escrow and to my understanding the whole system works around that, I don't even know if you can do it if it were free.

For an IPO maybe you're right but thats not all Mastercoin can do. Colored Coin can do that and you have a point. Mastercoin can let you create a bitUSD. How do you create a bitUSD if it doesn't have something to give it value?

If Mastercoins have no value, if they are empty, how would we use them to create something which has value like bitUSD?
While I don't fully understand Mastercoin yet, it seems to make sense that in order to create value you must have something of equal or of greater value. Value doesn't just come from thin air. So Mastercoins have value and you can put that value behind anything and create an altcoin but if it didn't have value then how do you guarantee that the usercoins or altcoins created have value and how do you manage the price? bitUSD has to track exactly to the price of USD which means that it has a fairly precise value. So just like a scale something backing it has to precisely track the real world value of USD and I don't know how you do that without having something behind it. I don't see how Mastercoin could be completely free because some Bitcoins will have to be used to give it value at some point but I could be wrong.

Provide more detail on how escrow can be done with a completely free Mastercoin.
Mastercoin allows users to create user defined currencies by using Mastercoins as escrow. This means value isn't created or destroyed as far as I can tell. It's transferred from the Mastercoin into the user defined coin. How do you do that if Mastercoins are completely free and anyone can have as many as they want?

It wont get expensive. People will just use less of them. The question is what makes you think it can be done completely for free? How do you do escrow or back a currency for free? If you're creating goldcoin how can you do that with a free Mastercoin? If it's possible to do that then you have a point.
That isn't true. Colored Coins are not exclusively built into the Bitcoin blockchain and do not work the same way. Which implementation of Colored Coins are you talking about?

If just 1 satoshi were used then it would definitely be cheaper than Mastercoin. But would it be better?
Let's say you want to make a bet, how do you make a bet if you don't risk anything? How exactly will those user defined currencies which start out like that gain any value? Explain to me where the value would come from if not backed by something else? If people don't have to spend any valuable Mastercoins to give value to it then where does the value come from?

Explain your system in detail please.


Miners provided security but Bitcoin mining isn't as decentralized as Litecoin. It's not the only reason people stay on the Bitcoin blockchain. People are using Bitcoin because more businesses accept Bitcoin whether Bitcoin is better or not.

The argument you're making is that a stream of Mastercoin clones will come along and reduce the value of Mastercoin down to nothing. The clone, and the clone of the clone, and the clone of that clone, etc. The bigger problem would be whether or not the Bitcoin blockchain could handle all that traffic.

The important thing to note about Mastercoin is momentum. It has the momentum. It has around half a million dollars from crowd funding to provide incentives for developers to actually build it. Owning the coins is like owning stock in Mastercoin and that provides incentive for developers and anyone else to prefer it over Colored Coin.

That is the mistake of Colored Coin. Colored Coin is like GNU Hurd which was the basis for Linux but most people don't know about it because it never had the same kind of developer support, marketing, or incentives to draw people to it.

When all is said and done speculators require incentives to do things. Mastercoin is being designed to attract speculation. Colored Coin is being designed by technical programmer types but since there wont be anything to trade initially and no crowd funding, and no momentum, in my opinion it's going to be left in the dust.

What would you choose as a developer or investor? Would you choose Colored Coin which by design will never be as powerful as Mastercoin? Which does not have momentum? But which I suppose could produce a simple solution to solve a simple technical problem? Or would you go with the momentum? If Colored Coin can capture the momentum and actually do a good job explaining what Colored Coin is then people will use it but it still isn't going to catch on fire like Mastercoin will.

Mastercoin will allow people to make bets and that feature alone will attract a very dedicated following. For example if Mastercoin works as intended we could bet on anything from which team will win the superbowl, to whether or not difficulty will double, to whether or not AsicMiner will be able to achieve 10% of the hash rate and we'd be able to do it in a completely decentralized manner. On top of that anyone who owns Mastercoins now is going to prefer using Mastercoin over Colored Coin because their Mastercoins gain value over time while Colored Coin is at best a platform which no one really has a stake in so who would care about it if everyone were a rational actor?

I know people are not rational and there will be plenty of people who like Colored Coin for ideological reasons. I can even think of some reasons why I might prefer Colored Coin and I own Mastercoins. One reason is that Colored Coin works on altcoin blockchains and Mastercoin works only with Bitcoin. There would be no real benefit to building an alternative fork of Mastercoin on top of Bitcoin if the original Mastercoin works as it should. There will definitely be demand for Colored Coin and perhaps Bitshares and Hops, and the market is going to be big enough where all of them will succeed on different blockchains but on the Bitcoin blockchain we will see Mastercoin dominate because it's basically build into it the blockchain and you cannot really beat that. Colored Coin is not built into the blockchain and that is both it's strength and weakness.

It's a strength because for Litecoin we'd have to use Colored Coin so perhaps they can create a niche around Litecoin and other altcoins. For Bitcoin it's going to either be Mastercoin ,  Bitshares,  or both but I don't think Colored Coin will be able to compete when both Mastercoin and Bitshares have lots of cash to build with and attract speculators with interest, dividends, and other kinds of incentive mechanisms which Colored Coin lacks.

I don't even see how you could build something like Mastercoin without some kind of coin which people would have to buy with Bitcoins. How would you get people to buy something with Bitcoins? People buy Mastercoins because they can be used to create new currencies. Those new currencies require backing in the form of escrow so that the supply can be controlled.

It's not just that Mastercoins are scarce, it's that they are incredibly valuable because they can allow so many possibilities but I suppose you could do some of it with Colored Coin or with some alternative to Mastercoin but it's all about speculation and liquidity,  once Mastercoin gets established its not going to be so simple to just clone it. If it were that simple then Bitcoin would have a difficult time competing with Litecoin because Litecoins are cheaper.

And it does do things CC can't. You'll find out in 3-6 months.

Megaupload doesn't infringe copyright. The users may have done so but how is that any different from the users of Bitcoin or anything else?

Don't argue with stupid. It's one thing if they don't believe Mastercoin will work. If it doesn't work then it probably isn't going to be worth anything, but if it does work then each Mastercoin will probably go for 2-3 Bitcoins and that is just with the most basic features of a decentralized exchange and smart property. User defined currencies and the more advanced features will bring the price to 20-30 Bitcoins a piece.

But just like people couldn't understand Bitcoin they will be late to Mastercoin. Mastercoin is the first protocol which everyone who understands can see will be more important than Bitcoin if it works. The potential market cap is way bigger than Bitcoin which is why it will be worth 10-20x more.


Mastercoin is nothing like Bitbar. Asicminer went for 5 BTC a share and it was just an Asic mining company. Mastercoin has a market cap potential which is in the tens of trillions. Right now we don't know whether or not it will work and that is the only reason its selling for under 1 BTC. If a decentralized exchange is working no one will sell a Mastercoin for less than a Bitcoin because it would be considered throwing money away. Mastercoin should be considered the first Bitcoin protocol layer extension. It allows Bitcoin to literally take over the global economy if you understand.