Sorry, I should have said "I have never sold on an exchange". My point is that people on this forum have been saying "J.R. is selling" which is NOT TRUE. I'm HOLDING, and have been since February. I'm the ultimate insider, and I see cool stuff coming down the pipeline, and I know selling now would be the height of stupidity.

The atmosphere about bitcoin as it crashed and burned in 2011 was downright poisonous. Only a smattering of people with cast-iron stomachs held onto their bitcoins completely, because we KNEW the technology was worth far more than the market was valuing it at. I didn't sell one measly bitcoin into that crash. As far as I could tell, 90% of people thought bitcoin was dead, and moved on to other things. Most of the people who still believed in bitcoin talked like lunatics. And yet, every time I worked through the logic, I saw the potential still there, so I held. If I could have convinced my wife, I would have bought more.

I didn't sell any bitcoin in the subsequent run-up, or the following crash. The only thing I was willing to spend my bitcoins on was a higher protocol layer built on top of bitcoin, and that is what I did.

Mastercoin was designed to be MORE deflationary than bitcoin. That means bigger crashes, and bigger price explosions. So far, everything is going exactly as I imagined. If you don't like the ride, maybe you should find some nice "safe" government bonds.

I see people here assuming I am selling. I AM NOT. I HAVE NOT. My last sale was in February to a private individual. I have NEVER sold on the open market.

I'm sticking with my plan which I announced in January: http://blog.mastercoin.org/2014/01/24/j-r-coming-full-time/

My only deviation from that plan is that I have NOT been using MSC to pay my expenses, because I haven't liked the price since then.

Our loose cannon, whom I mentioned earlier, had sold only 20% of his holdings the last time I checked in with him. I don't know if he caused this most recent drop, but it wouldn't surprise me. We had a rather acrimonious clash over this issue recently, and I don't plan to raise the issue again - it's outside my control.

We're working on improving Omniwallet, we have a cross-platform wallet proof-of-concept, and we have a dozen major projects releasing MSC tokens over the coming months (I heard David Johnston say he'll post the list soon). Our next major MSC feature will be distributed exchange between MSC and these tokens, which will have a double-sided order book and an inherently better user experience than BTC/MSC distributed exchange.

The current MSC price is just silly, IMHO, but I thought the same thing about bitcoin when it sunk from $30 to $5 in 2011, but it didn't bottom out until $2, so I obviously can't call a bottom precisely. I CAN say I feel sorry for people selling here. I consider them in the same light as the people who gave up on bitcoin in 2011.

hahaha! That's great!

They knew the payer was a large MSC holder, and the payer (who is a generous, trusting soul) wanted to get the payee more invested in the MSC ecosystem while working on some private MSC projects. After my warning that the payee would almost certainly crash the market, they spoke and the payee said they would only sell ~10% on the open market, but I was dubious that this person who never had the next months rent would suddenly develop responsible money habits.

Sure enough, the entire sum went straight to MasterXChange. Bah.

I'm a little annoyed that this happened to be sure, but it doesn't affect our long-term prospects. Just an opportunity to get some cheap MSC, IMHO.

I just spoke to 40 people in a room doing a Mastercoin hack-a-thon (http://tinyurl.com/mastercoinhack)

We've got multiple fronts of dev effort happening right now, on Omniwallet, on a new cross-platform desktop wallet, a cross-platform command-line client which will become the parsing engine for all implementations, and of course the spec.

Now, regarding MSC price:

Of course, we all hate to see MSC price taking a beating, but I am pretty sure I know why. One single person convinced a major MSC holder to pay them a large sum in MSC as an upfront payment for some promised work, despite my warnings that I was certain from previous experience that this person would immediately liquidate most, if not all of them. Sure enough, as soon as they got their hands on the MSC, it went straight to MasterXChange, and the price started dumping hard. Sigh . . .

I'm convinced that as we demonstrate more uses for MSC (for instance, the distributed exchange between MSC and child tokens), we'll have more people enter on the buy side.

Please keep in mind that MSC is volatile by design, and it can spike up just as violently

We actually get a fairly painful amount of spam, even with captchas and email verification. Definitely don't want to do anything to make that problem worse!

These have been paid:

https://blockchain.info/tx/833181606cd133de46da165f71683eb30ee9c6593d3e75c9214276f2ef81b57d   https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AnnInaIJVqrtdFhyb1ZHQ3FHajNJTFEyUGVZTGF1QlE#gid=0

Thanks to everybody who participated.

This thread can be locked now.

Just a quick note to vouch for maxmint. He provided early exchange services between BTC and MSC when I first launched MSC, and to my knowledge he never defrauded anybody in what must have been dozens of transactions.

Geez, um ok. Let's see. Google Translate says: "This time you are going to and fro many msc sell high, right? Sister-in-law must be very happy ah"

I have two sister-in-laws, who as far as I know, are blissfully unaware of most things bitcoin.

I suspect something got lost in translation there.

Geez guys. It's not like you didn't have some warning the crowdsale was ending soon. I'm sure there is a reasonable explanation for the blockchain numbers. Chill out.

In other news, look at that order book fill up!: https://masterxchange.com/market.php?currency=maid

Yeah, I'd probably seize the coins just to spite the criminal and out of my sense of justice. I'd do that for someone else's stolen coins too if I was 100% certain. That's what I meant by "the kindness of a stranger". I'd want to be a kind stranger.

You can now deposit and trade MSAFE coins on MasterXChange: https://masterxchange.com/market.php?currency=maid

As I understand it, they are not doing withdrawals yet (out of caution until they are happy with their security model).

Regarding tainted coins, I do NOT speak for Maidsafe, but speaking for myself, I support complete bitcoin fungibility, and the Master Protocol was written with that as an underlying axiom. Our distributed exchange allows you to sell Mastercoins for bitcoins without using an exchange website at all, but it gives you no ability to discriminate between bitcoins. The lack of a trusted third party means that third party cannot lose your coins to theft or idiocy, and they also cannot seize your coins if they do not like their history. Anybody selling Mastercoins on the distributed exchange today is also accepting the axiom that one bitcoin is as good as another, regardless of where it came from.

If I were running a crowdsale, I wouldn't care if 100% of the bitcoins I received were "tainted" because the protocol assumes one bitcoin is as good as another. If you ran a convenience store and somebody told you the cash in your till had been tainted by some criminal act in the past, what would you do? Nothing of course. You'd be hard pressed to find a dollar in circulation that wasn't tainted in some way. Dollars are fungible. Bitcoins are fungible. Stolen bitcoins are GONE, and the only way you'll get them back is through the kindness of a stranger who feels sorry for you.

So all this nonsense about where the MSAFE coins came from is a bunch of noise. One bitcoin is as good as another!

Again, Maidsafe may completely disagree with this position. I speak only for myself (and for the principles of the Mastercoin Protocol I designed).

Wow. Here's what I wrote on MastercoinTalk about this:

http://mastercointalk.org/index.php?topic=415.msg1032#msg1032

Thanks, we'll look into it ASAP:
http://mastercointalk.org/index.php?topic=345.0


Yeah, we have some custom logic that makes our forum look empty to certain people.

So, our parsing code runs on thousands of computers, not just a couple. If miners were time-stamping a side-chain, they would run the exact same code. The only measureable difference I can see would be how much easier it would be for someone with a lot of mining power to attack the side-chain between checkpoints on the main chain. Sure, we could make our side-chain run some kind of ASIC-resistant algorithm for its hashing, but that doesn't help a lot.

Sidechains are great if everybody likes you and nobody wishes to attack you or double-spend you, but that's not the world any of these projects live in, unfortunately.

I don't want to create something vulnerable to a double-spend attack by anybody with access to a botnet. I have to wonder if maybe some people with botnets are hyping sidechains. That would be one explanation why something so insecure would get so much promotion . . .

I'm at the Toronto conference, and people keep coming up and asking me about side-chains, and I keep having to explain why they are vulnerable. Clearly somebody is very effective at getting people interested in this.

It didn't seem wise to give miners the keys to turn off Mastercoin if I didn't absolutely have to.

Yes, robustness against censorship was definitely a design goal. I hope I have been upfront about that from the beginning.

I can't think of any way in which side-chains improve "trustlessness". You have to trust the mining pools to run your code, and since you'll never get 100% of them, you are by definition more centralized (and slower) than somebody who uses all bitcoin miners.

Can you elaborate?

As I understand it, sidechains need miner cooperation. This is their biggest vulnerability versus systems like ours, which can operate just fine when miners are ambivalent or even hostile to your project.

Another way to put it: miners have to opt-in to sidechains, but there's no effective way to opt-out of mining Mastercoin transactions without running a full Mastercoin node.

So you make a new side-chain, then you have to start making the rounds to the mining pools, trying to get them to put your bit of custom code into their client, and then continue to keep that code through every bitcoin upgrade. This is one of those things that sounds good on paper (it's technically sound), but turns out to be a logistical nightmare.

So, the trusted party DOES have a lot of MSC which they may choose to use, but if SafeCoin really raises the funds they think they can raise, well, the MSC will have to be purchased from whoever is willing to sell. ;-)

Eventually, Maidsafe will sell their MSC to pay their expenses, but by that time, we hope to have dozens of companies doing fundraisers at any given time.

This is the whole point of MSC. We make it useful in a wide variety of ways, and we hoard it like filthy misers when people suddenly realize they need some to play in our sandbox.

Actually, every major MSC holder I know of (including me) is investing a big chunk of their MSC into companies who release tokens on our system, so we're not hoarding all of it.


Everything currently public should be here: http://safecoin.io/

Doubtless more detail will be added to that site and buysafecoins.com in the coming days.

Actually, MaidSafe is coinciding their fundraiser with the release of the first version of our user currency feature, and their coins will be entirely purchased and traded exclusively within the Master Protocol. The bitcoin address is run by a trusted third party who will will receive bitcoins and then send Mastercoins to the fundraiser and then send the resulting SafeCoins back to the purchaser, making the process a little more streamlined for some people who don't already own MSC.