Didn't you buy them by sending bitcoins to the exodus address, which are going to pay you?
Or perhaps to pay someone else. They will be spent on the best interests of all MasterCoin holders, as determined by the oversight board. |
|
|
|
So you are planning on using the entirety of the money sent to the Exodus address to pay yourself a nice salary plus all the benefits you want?
What happened to the whole idea of an overseeing board to parcel the money out?
And given that most of the bitcoins sent to the Exodus address were yours to start with, you are actually asking them to kick in far more than 50%.
The current plan is for me to NOT quit my job and NOT take any payment at all, while keeping my day job. David and Sam are on the oversight board, and are asking what it would take to get me to quit my job, so I told them. I realize the details of what it would take are scandalously generous, which is why I haven't been planning on quitting my job! Also, the outline above is not to pay myself the salary and benefits that I want, but rather what I currently have. Anyway this is all theoretical. I do expect to see a noticeable investment, but I don't expect that the investment will close that gap, unless something miraculous happens. Does this figure include how many Mastercoins you will own once the buy-in is complete, and don't those become compensation too? It may be years before there will be a big enough market to absorb my MasterCoins in any quantity, so no. Also, I bought those on the open market using funds I already had, just like you guys did, so they aren't compensation by any stretch of the imagination. |
|
|
|
So you are planning on using the entirety of the money sent to the Exodus address to pay yourself a nice salary plus all the benefits you want?
What happened to the whole idea of an overseeing board to parcel the money out?
And given that most of the bitcoins sent to the Exodus address were yours to start with, you are actually asking them to kick in far more than 50%.
The current plan is for me to NOT quit my job and NOT take any payment at all, while keeping my day job. David and Sam are on the oversight board, and are asking what it would take to get me to quit my job, so I told them. I realize the details of what it would take are scandalously generous, which is why I haven't been planning on quitting my job! Also, the outline above is not to pay myself the salary and benefits that I want, but rather what I currently have. Anyway this is all theoretical. I do expect to see a noticeable investment, but I don't expect that the investment will close that gap, unless something miraculous happens. Plus, the oversight board would have to approve the details of my compensation, and they may decide that bounties are a better idea after all, even if the target is reached. |
|
|
|
The number: $564,600 Warning: Gratuitous, sickening details about my current cushy job follow!From: J.R. Willett Date: Wed, Aug 28, 2013 at 4:20 PM Subject: MasterCoin - What will it take for J.R. to quit his job? To: Sam Yilmaz, David Johnston Cc: Jen Willett Hey guys, The number is $564,600 (the project is currently at 2439 BTC x $118@coinbase = $287,802, leaving us short of that mark by $276,798 = 2346 BTC). Nearly doubling the project fund does seem like a pretty big stretch in just the next couple days, even if we get some big investments from bitangels. However there are a couple ways we might still get there, which I'll get to later. First, the breakdown. My wife loves my job at Cozi for a large number of reasons which I will enumerate, and she has agreed to my quitting my job there if I can prove I have funds to provide equivalent benefits for three years. Here is what I promised her we would get if I quit: - Three years of my current base salary (<Redacted>)
- Three years of fully paid health insurance for our family (Cozi is very unusual in that they pay 100% for employee AND dependents medical/dental/vision). The individual coverage plans I can find are significantly less generous than Cozi's plan, and cost in the neighborhood of <Redacted>/month for medical alone. Taking that into account, including our plans to have more children, dental, vision, and the expected further rises in health care costs, I set this number at <Redacted>/year (we had individual coverage on my wife when our second child was born - the most generous coverage we could find - and he still cost us <Redacted> out of pocket!). Note that money not used for health coverage and expenses could return to project funds.
- Direct replacement of costs formerly born by Cozi, such as their share of my Social Security contributions, estimated at <Redacted>/year
- To avoid risk of a bitcoin crash, we would plan to take large chunks of salary in advance (exact amounts to be determined, with amounts largely driven by resulting tax liabilities)
- Total yearly cost: <Redacted> + <Redacted> + <Redacted> = $177k
- Three-year cost = 177*3 = $531k
In addition, I promised her the following items would be paid for out of project funds - Desk rental at a co-working space, estimated at $350/month ($4200/year)
- Daily transportation costs (Cozi funds my Orca card at about $8 per round trip = $2000/year)
- All travel expenses, including bringing family along if desired, estimated at $5000/year for attending two conferences
- Yearly estimate = 4.2 + 2 + 5 = $11.2k
- 3-year estimate = 11.2*3 = $33.6k
Total for 3 years: 531 + 33.6 = $564.6k Also, I promised the following intangible benefits of Cozi would be fully matched: - 5 weeks PTO (combined sick and vacation)
- 4 weeks paternity leave when a child is born (we do plan to have more kids)
- Modest hours (I am consistently home for dinner and rarely work late)
- Continuing my habit of being completely off the internet evenings, weekends, and vacations to focus on family and church
Lastly, in the event of a bitcoin crash or other unforeseen circumstances require me to abandon this project, I reserve the right to seek employment for up to six months while living off project funds before turning over remaining funds to the exodus address (or possibly to the oversight board, or possibly returning funds directly to MasterCoin holders). This is based on the three months it took me to find my position at Cozi in a healthy job market (being very selective and rejecting multiple offers). Looking at the above, I am embarrassed to see spelled out how cushy my current job is, which is of course why she doesn't want me to leave Cozi . . . I would appreciate it if you would keep the specifics of the financial breakdown confidential. I'll be publishing a sanitized version of this for general consumption soon. While the target above may not be imminently achievable, we could conceivably get there if bitcoin prices take off in the coming months. Another possible way would be if MasterCoin prices take off, and I could then sell off some of my personal ones to get us the rest of the way there. Sorry the number isn't lower. That's the best I could get. Thanks, -J.R. |
|
|
|
David Johnston, Executive Director of BitAngels, has said he will be investing. Here is what he said on the bitangels email list: On Wed, Aug 28, 2013 at 10:03 AM, David Johnston wrote: Ron, Thanks for the input. I talked with JR about this topic today and he is on the same page. Meaning there will be NO additional Mastercoins outside of what the spec calls for. The spec has the initial Mastercoins created based on the exodus address investments and at the same time a 10% pool of "Reward Mastercoins" for developers over the years contributing to improved features of the Mastercoin protocol. The bounties will be competitively awarded by what amounts to a "Mastercoin Foundation" of which JR has asked Sam and I to join the oversight board, in order to provide full transparency. I believe this is the right approach, when distributing a new coin, offer everyone an equal opportunity to invest at the beginning and reserve a portion to reward those with intellectual and development capital to invest in the project. In the absence of a "minable" solution I think this a logical and fair way to do the initial distribution of a coin. Full disclosure, after much due diligence I'm planning to invest in this project. I hope others here will be joining me. This project will offer several of the new capabilities I've been looking for in the Bitcoin eco-system, peer to peer exchange, prediction markets, creation of new currencies (stocks, bonds) and more. If you haven't read the specification it is worth a review. http://tinyurl.com/nqun98h Best Regards, David A. Johnston Executive Director of BitAngels.co One thing the folks at bitangels are concerned about is that they really really want me to quit my day job, and the size of their investment is somewhat contingent on their confidence that I will do so. They are keenly interested on what my threshold is, as I'm sure some of you are. Consequently, I'm having discussions with my wife which are . . . intense. She's VERY risk adverse and she loves my current job for many reasons. I also love my job, but I'm super optimistic about the project and very gung-ho that everything will work out fine if I jump into this full time. When I give bitangels the final number for "what it will take" for me to go full time, I'll publish the final number here too. |
|
|
|
I'm getting somewhere with the ruby implementation (on testnet): Building a data transaction. 1.9.3p286 :077> options = {receiving_address: "n3wLS8G69kD96Czw3xbUg17ipsb2W1NGvB", amount: 100000000, transaction_type: 1, currency_id: 2}
1.9.3p286 :078> Mastercoin::Address.new(options).encode_to_address
=> "mppHDcxP8tmLU44CN5jkVtTgutf34cSEFE"
Parsing a bitcoin transction via Mastercoin. 1.9.3p286 :079>Bitcoin.network = :testnet3
1.9.3p286 :080>Mastercoin::Transaction.new("e4ed08ec03ff42e40b9be85cea97b24232e471d1efec23022403a1fd8ed55516").to_s
=> "Simple send:: Send 1 'Test Mastercoin' to n3wLS8G69kD96Czw3xbUg17ipsb2W1NGvB"
However I'm having trouble generating the same sequence as the python script. I was wondering if you could explain what base58_found.b58decode returns exactly; my terminal doesn't really know what it is suppose to be: http://cl.ly/image/0p343M1G3d0I. My ruby version returns a pretty string (like 6ff5ef3b2e5adb597313a91ea898ae1314032bbbe4df3360d0) so I am not creating the same sequences as you are; which is pretty important ^^ Dang. I've been so busy managing the PR of this thing that you guys are in danger of getting ahead of my reference implementation! base58_found is a base58 library I found online and blatantly stole for encoding and decoding bitcoin addresses. (I believe I included a comment in the source code with a link to where I found it). I believe b58decode returns a byte array, so your console is probably trying to interpret each byte as a character. |
|
|
|
Hi dacoinminister! I read the paper and essentially read the whole thread here. Surprisingly, I didn't find the answers to the following questions: 1.) If a user registers a new currency, let's call it new_coin, is there an upper limit of new_coins that can be supplied? 2.) Who owns them initially? Is it the user who registered the currency or is it the escrow fund? Or is it the escrow fund generating them, as soon as there is demand? 3.) What real-life 'objects' can be made a new currency out of? 1oz of gold is obvious. But, can I make a currency out of a company share (company XYZ), called XYZ_coin, or can I make a currency being worth one gnome in my own garden, called MyGnome_coin? What are the rules?  4.) How does the escow fund determine the price of a Mastercoin? It must do that, in order to e.g. know the equilibrium value of a Gold_coin, etc to which it tries to couple. Obviously, it cannot look at the orderbook of a user currency, since this would be redundant. So, is the Mastercoin value determined by the Bitcoin/Mastercoin ratio? 1) Great question. Currency amounts are stored in a 64-bit unsigned integer divided by 100,000,000 for the 8-digit decimal precision which would give us a maximum of 184 billion units or so in a user currency, with each unit divisible to eight decimal places. 2) If a new currency is created, none of them exist until people buy them. MasterCoins used to purchase these currencies automatically go straight into the escrow fund where they will later be used to support the pegged value. 3) You can make a pegged currency for anything that has a value published as a data stream (for instance, the price of an ounce of gold). Shares of a company would be something different, called smart property. I plan to add smart property transactions to the next revision of the spec. 4) Since we are running a distributed exchange between bitcoins and MasterCoins, and between MasterCoins and the stabilized currencies, we have all the data we need to determine what the current price is of any asset. Data streams publish their prices in units of the currency held in escrow. Typically this will be MasterCoins, although it would be possible to hold a user currency in escrow too, so that USDCoins could be backed by GoldCoins held in escrow, for instance. In fact, I thought that there was only one escrow fund in the whole protocol, while reading the paper and the whole thread. You should definitely make this clearer in the paper!
Moreover, can you explain 'One escrow fund for each stabilized currency'? What is a stabilized currency? Isn't there an escrow fund from the beginning on? In this case, where does the supply of coins come from?
See #2 above. Thanks! |
|
|
|
Trying to wrap my head around everything so please bear with me. - I buy a few MasterCoins by sending a payment from 'mmFjJ4P1bC43yd7v7FNMHPtezn6re2HCrA' to the exodus address.
- I want to send one of my MasterCoins to a friend so I fund mmFjJ4P1bC43yd7v7FNMHPtezn6re2HCrA again so I have some coins with which I can create transactions.
- I create a transaction guided by the advisor and set up one payment of 0.00006 to the exodus address an other one of 0.00006 to the address of my friend n3wLS8G69kD96Czw3xbUg17ipsb2W1NGvB and the data packet n3fpVfk96uq3kiGMQBsTPdhFfhc3hF9cef.
- I press send but I forgot that I send more then 0.00006 * 3 to that address so now there is also a change address involved.
How would MasterCoin interpret this transaction? Would it be invalid and reject? Would it assume the receiving address is is the address that had the 0.00006 payment and not the one with the change address? Would it divide the the amount send over the two outputs that were neither the exodus address nor data addresses? Or am I misunderstanding everything all together?  It looks like you've got everything exactly right! I haven't addressed the issue of change addresses publicly (thanks for bringing that up), but it will be easy for the protocol to ignore them since they will typically be much larger in value and of a different amount than the other addresses. Still, there is a tiny possibility that if your change address happened to receive exactly 0.00006 BTC AND happened to have a sequence number which conflicted with the data address, you could have an invalid transaction that would have to be resent. I usually send exactly 0.00028 BTC to the address I'm sending from so that there is exactly 0.00006 (x3) + 0.0001 transaction fee and no change, but I only do that because I think it looks prettier to not have a change address. You might notice that the first transactions I did had a change address, and then subsequent ones did not. All of them are perfectly valid though. Eventually we'll have pretty UI to hide these complexities from the user, so they can just pay X MasterCoins to Y address for cost Z, just like bitcoin does now. |
|
|
|
From our subreddit comes a request to "explain it like I'm five": http://www.reddit.com/r/mastercoin/comments/1l68y1/request_explain_it_like_im_five_the_mastercoin/ 1. What type of users would benefit most from MasterCoin? 2. Are there any similarities between the protocols of MasterCoin and, say, that of PayPal? If so, can you elaborate? 3. Is there only one escrow fund throughout the MasterCoin protocol, or are there as many escrow funds as the market will bear? I'm referencing this image in particular. 4. Can you dumb down what is meant by user currency? In dacoinminster's paper, he says, "The Most important feature of MasterCoins is the built-in support for users to create their own currencies out of existing MasterCoins." Could a user currency, if there was a market for it, be based on something as farfetched as bottle caps? 5. Could a user currency be based not on goods but also on services? For instance, could there be a market for auto mechanics who could benefit from the ease of an online payment system and also the customers who could benefit from the system's ability to reverse disputed charges? Excuse my naivety on this topic, I'm an English major by trade. Input is appreciated! Feel free to chime in. Here's what I wrote: Thanks for your interest in my project! I did make an attempt to explain what I am up to using the most accessible form of communication known to man (memes): https://sites.google.com/site/2ndbtcwpaper/using-memes-to-explain-bitcoinHere's my attempt to answer your five questions: 1) Criminals. Seriously. I'm really worried about this. 2) I guess they are similar in that one person can pay another. Other than that, they have almost nothing in common (which is good) 3) One escrow fund for each stabilized currency 4) Yes, we could have a currency that tracked the value of bottle caps, as long as we have a data source publishing the value of bottle caps 5) Reversibility of savings wallet transactions is not intended for merchant disputes, but to prevent theft. I think someone could build services-based currencies on top of MasterCoin, but that would probably involve features which haven't been added to the spec yet. |
|
|
|
firstly... amazing concept, well done to you
I will be sending my donation tomorrow, I hope it helps birth your idea and energises your creation
I say donate as that is how I see it, its a gamble, it could pay off, or not, but its only money, a string of numbers, really, its nothing more than you make it
If all goes well and we are blessed, we will see a return, if not financial then hopefully by it helping us to understand the limits of of our ideas and learning to expand on them, evolve them, into a greater model that will be stronger and more sound ( the solution )
The control of our monies by faceless entities must come to an end
Some say it is impossible, it cant work, this or that cant happen, wont happen, or will happen and will bring down the whole system... they could be right...
We must strive to do whats good, and righteous, we must at least try to change things for the better, or life really would be pointless
Those who never try never fail, but they can also never succeed
My donation wont be particularly big, but if we succeed, it will have been worth it, and I will be able to say " I helped make that happen "
dacoinminster - my only advice to you - dont let the dollar blind you - remember whats really important - and make your dream come true
many people moan about you cutting the trolls posts... I understand completely, this is a place for positive and useful debate, if you cant post with that in mind, this is not the place for your postings
sorry for going on for so long, all that is left to say is
GOOD LUCK BE WITH YOU
bones - -- --- breaking boundaries and re-writing the rulebook --- -- -
I really appreciate your support! I'm definitely remembering what is important. You can probably tell from reading this thread that the single biggest risk to this project is my dogged determination to put my family first. |
|
|
|
So I sent .42 btc... Now what?
same here. was there supposed to be something coming back? Nope - you have created MasterCoins via your transaction, and you own them until you publish a message sending them to somebody else. So how do I access them? Well, right now you can see how many you bought using the GreaseMonkey script, or you can send them to someone else using a standard bitcoin client. You'll need the MasterCoinAdviser software to tell you the proper format of your send transaction. Links to download the appropriate software can be found here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=265488.msg2841329#msg2841329 |
|
|
|
OP: I messed up and I just sent 3BTC which were not sent from a single address (e2a2ada035f096ddccd60925f6c051aac56be7ccfe0865453ff7b28fefc02de3), I see now that I should have used coin control with armory... How big is the problem? Any way to solve that?
No worries - the current plan is to write the code so that those MasterCoins are awarded to the address which paid the most bitcoins. The other option is to award them proportionally to the addresses which contributed, but that seems like it would make things needlessly complicated. I expect that your address 1C9RKyQ9X77iA6ARd182dRyGiacedGwYec owns them all. Of course, if somebody contributes equally from two different addresses, I may be forced to add more logic to choose one . . . |
|
|
|
Kudos on the interview (I didn't have time for it all, posted it on the Hebrew Facebook group). One thing I did catch was at 27:10: If at some point in the future it becomes clear that creating more (MasterCoin) would be in the benefit of people who currently own MasterCoin, we might explore that. It wouldn't be just me saying "here are some more MasterCoins", it would be some sort of vote.
This is a big no no. A big one. See Prohibited Changes on the Bitcoin wiki. Changing the number of MSC would similarly require the consent of every MasterCoin owner, not just 50% or 99% of them. Such basic economic properties cannot ever be changed. Precision, on the other hand, can be increased. That's a very good point. If I or someone else tried to release more MasterCoins, that would create a hard fork (and rightly so) just like on bitcoin. I doubt that will ever happen, but I was trying to avoid the word "never" with that question, which can come back to bite you later  |
|
|
|
So I sent .42 btc... Now what?
same here. was there supposed to be something coming back? Nope - you have created MasterCoins via your transaction, and you own them until you publish a message sending them to somebody else. |
|
|
|
Hi J.R.,
I decided a couple of days ago that I would put 1 BTC to your exodus address; I was just transferring from MtGox to my bitcoin client, except I got ahead of myself and instead of sending first to my bitcoin client on my PC (to then send to you), I accidentally used the Exodus address straight off, direct from MtGox - silly mistake and I realized just afterward (when I thought, "OK, this should show up in my wallet any time now.... Opps!"), and would have been very helpful have that backup wallet (although maybe not exactly for this type of human error!) that MasterCoin proposes....
however, and I have discussed this with MtGox, there is no way of receiving anything if anything is returned to the sending address, so I would ask is there anyway I can transfer the 1BTC I sent to another address? Or somehow get it sent back to my clients address (I can provide later if you wish) to be able to resend you?? Have read up quite a lot and understand that this same address would be used to return credits earned at a later date (something that I HAVE to avoind as MtGox have no way of taking account anything that comes into that address), so I need to fix this so this does not happen "as-is"....
FYI, if it helps you locate the payment address, it was from 1Q2kjs7MjWgCtf8CfVkXHUkAeKbaMqrK9R, and the transfer was registered at blockchain info on exodus address on 25/8/2013, at 18:01:00, which is exactly 30 seconds after it showed up on my MtGox funding page.... if necessary I can send you a screen capture of my funding page (can't seem to see upload on this page thou!) with the transfer, but MtGox will not give me any more detailed info about this issue...
Hope we can get this sorted! Sounds like an interesting idea - I have BTC, LTC, FTC & WDC, so would be interesting see them all linked up!
Cheers
----
:-)
Hey ----, Oh man, that really sucks. I have bad news for you: MtGox owns your MasterCoins. If they are willing (and able) to send a message FROM 1Q2kjs7MjWgCtf8CfVkXHUkAeKbaMqrK9R using the proper format, they can transfer those MasterCoins somewhere else for you, but I really doubt you will have any luck with that. I knew this would happen to somebody sooner or later, which is why there is a stern warning in the OP of the project thread that "YOU COULD LOSE YOUR MONEY" buying MasterCoin from a web wallet. I'm really very sorry. I'll post this on the project thread (without using your name) to see if anyone has any ideas, but I've thought about this situation quite a bit and I don't see any way to remedy this.  -J.R. |
|
|
|
I've read all you have written and watched your talk at the conference and screen-cast and still have problem with your design - escrows are flawed.
Besides you've "invested" 1200 BTC into MasterCoins i.e. send BTC from address you control to address you control, and all other funds you've gathered from people so far sum up to 31% of all MasterCoins, so you control most MSCs.
Secondly, you want still more money from us, yet you have not provided ANY business plan for actually using the funds in productive way.
And finally, what problem are you solving really?
Hi, and welcome to the bitcoin forum. I'm sorry to hear you don't like what I am doing. I'm adding functionality to bitcoin which doesn't currently exist, which I believe solves numerous problems, but you should already know that since you've read everything I've written and listened to everything I've said. This protocol layer is opt-in, and it doesn't sound like you will be opting in. That's cool. I hope you find other fun uses for bitcoin. |
|
|
|
dacoinminster, is buying some mastercoins a kind of promotional activity one can include in his/her post here?
I'm looking for promotions that reach new people who haven't heard about the project, so that probably wouldn't cut it. Sorry! |
|
|
|
BTC: 182osbPxCo88oaSX4ReJwUr9uAcchmJVaL * promotion on free webspace, which attracts search engine traffic, especially when looking for last week/24h: http://pastebin.com/zKbBqJFQ* Added link to signatue. Good luck! I love this quote from the pastebin: That's 100x return on investment. You are nearly as optimistic about this project as I am Still, that pastebin is probably not going to reach very many people who don't already know about the project. I got your PM about other ways you'll be promoting, which I'll take into consideration. Thanks! |
|
|
|
|
Note: aTriz send me screenshots of his IRC promotion, so I'll include him in the next round, using 1LjT88X7Zu8BdbqJw8vfRa83NJuzYL9kqm
|
|
|
|
|
Show Posts
