is there a windows client i can download?


i am eager to generate myself 100oz of non existent GOLD  and sell it on this crazy system! 

I would also add a section that attempts to model the economic behavior and effects of MasterCoin. How many mastercoins will there be now? Ever? How is the expected rate of Bitcoin-Mastercoin expected to behave under a few  scenarios? Didn't you have such text in the first version of the paper?

0. What is the MasterCoin three letter abbreviation? You should clarify that your original MasterCoin, and the new "usurper" MasterCoin are not related in any way, and that you have prior claim to the MasterCoin name.

1. Aren't you begging the question?

2. Fair release schedule

You should pre-declare a date on which you will reveal the precise exodus address. Since the protocol gives bonuses to early adopters on a per week (and part of) before August 31th 2013, which isn't too far away, the address should be revealed way before that, and ample time (at least 1-2 days, preferably 7 days) should be be given where no extra bonus is given. In other words, people should have at least a few days from the moment the exodus address is revealed, in which all funds sent to the exodus address are capped in the amount of Bitcoins they send. There can be a bonus for early adopters, but everyone should have a fair chance to invest.

3. Who has the private keys for the exodus address? If it is you, this should be stated explicitly. It can also be a m-of-n address where there are n "MasterCoin project directors". Or rather, is this a sinkhole address like the original MasterCoin design, which has no feasible private key? (instead of this, you can send to an unspendable script which is guaranteed to be a sinkhole, not just computationally infeasible)

4. Hiding MasterCoin Protocol Data in the Block Chain
I would rename it to Encoding MasterCoin Protocol Data in the Block Chain.
I think this section deserves some more elaboration on motivation and technique.

5. Fake bitcoin addresses require more explaining. How does one generate a fake address? Where did the magical "20 bytes" come from?

6. Using block times gap to encode transaction is vulnerable. A coalition of miners might collude in order to postpone some of a group of transactions that were broadcast to the network at the same time. This might also happen naturally as network traffic grows - we do not know enough at this point to predict how fast transactions will get mined, and how that would depend on fees.

7. I think that the Saving/Guardian model, while perhaps not adding anything qualitative to Bitcoin (it can be "implemented" by correctly securing and backing up your private keys and passwords), does add some nice ease of use to the protocol.

8. "Selling MasterCoins for Other MasterCoin-Derived Currencies" seems to lack a time limit parameter, by mistake I assume.

9. "Registering a Data Stream" can use some motivational example. When would someone want to "publish the price of Gold" in the blockchain? What does this mean? (which Gold price? His price?)

10. <s>"Only the first payment sent from that address in a given day (as determined by block-chain timestamps) will be considered ticker data" - why is the timespan of "a day" special here? What does it mean to "be considered as ticker data"?</s>

After reading ahead, I understand the motivation of the division to days is the aggression factor of trust funds. It should be noted at this point of the paper ("Tickers and the reason for their granularity will be explained later on").

11. Bet fees ("The other 0.5% goes to the creator of the data stream") - These should be configurable by the stream owner. I should be able to create streams with arbitrary fees.

12. Aggression factors - when during the day do the trust funds take action? One idea is at the end of each day, or (giving the data sources ample time to publish data whenever they want during the day).

I suggest giving an option for alternate aggression tactic - instead of increasing the buyout each day, simply buy X% of the relevant currency each day, without increasing X. It is not immediately clear which aggression tactic is "better", so it would be prudent to support both and let creators of coins decide which tactic they prefer. More variations on the aggression tactic is possible (you can allocate a protocol field to the tactic, and not necessarily decide on all the precise tactics now, but allow room for improvement in a future MIP (MasterCoin Improvement Proposal).

all i've seen about this project is this post, i am interested, i'm not sure i like the idea that my MasterCoin are sold at a fixed price by 1 central authority, and the fact that the MasterCoins are piggybacked on the blockchain, why not create a new Alt Coin?

Interesting conversation with my wife this morning:

She's not willing to trade my vacation/weekend/evening time for ANY amount of money. The poor woman hasn't learned to be materialistic, and is satisfied with what we have. She just wants my time and attention for herself and the kids.

However, she IS willing to trade very small amounts of that time as an investment in my project and in our future. For instance, she might take the kids to her parents' house for a weekend at some point to give me time to work on this.

Consequently, our burn rate using up project funds is going to be very slow, which is good, and progress will be painfully slow, which is bad.

Once I have the basic code in place, I should be able to set up some bounties, which should speed things up a bit, but it looks like I won't be paying myself directly to work on this unless I start doing this full-time.

I am VERY excited to announce that I now have a complete specification for building a protocol layer on top of bitcoin (like how HTTP runs on top of TCP/IP).

The coins of the new layer have

• Additional security features to make your money much harder to steal
• Built-in support for a distributed currency exchange
• Built-in support for distributed betting (no need to trust a website to coordinate bets)
• Built-in support for "smart property" which can be used to create and transfer property such as titles, deeds, or stock in a company
• Capability to hold a stable user-defined value, such as an ounce of gold or U.S. Dollar, with no need to trust a person promising to back up that value

This is a significant improvement over anything we've had before, including colored coins. This protocol has been my life's work for over two years now, and you can finally get a piece of it today!

The name of the new protocol layer is “MasterCoin” (a name I invented and published long before the alt-coin of the same name), and it is 100% message-based, meaning that it encodes all its protocol data as hidden messages in the block chain which have special meanings, such as placing a bet, or transferring MasterCoins to another address.

Once you own MasterCoins, you have the building blocks for creating GoldCoin, USDCoin, EuroCoin, and any other real-world asset you can imagine! These child currencies will then be “meta stable” (holding their values as long as they remain sufficiently backed by MasterCoins held in escrow). Their target values are maintained by protocol actions which control the available supply.

Want more details?

• Readthe complete MasterCoin specification here: https://github.com/mastercoin-MSC/spec
• Watch this video of my explaining MasterCoin to the bitangels investor group, in which I use screen-sharing to explain MasterCoin and demonstrate what it could already do at that time (we've come a long way since): https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B3nInaIJVqrtc3NqdkloLTZNOXM/edit?usp=sharing
• "Let's talk Bitcoin" has an episode in which they interview me about MasterCoin: http://letstalkbitcoin.com/e37-meeting-mastercoin/ (my segment is towards the end)
• We now have a wiki with a FAQ: http://wiki.mastercoin.org/index.php?title=FAQ

About me:

• I've been a software engineer for over 10 years. Here's my LinkedIn profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jrwillett (connect with me!)
• I've been pushing for new bitcoin protocol layers since 2011. Here's a video of me as an expert panelist at the Bitcoin Conference in San Jose in May, talking about this idea (I'm the second guy from the left): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qdr_Z3hrqQ

MasterCoins are intended to be an investment opportunity on par with buying bitcoins when they first came out. However, as with bitcoins, there are a lot of risks too. Before you buy MasterCoins, please take a few minutes to read my summary of some of the ways this could go wrong and you could lose your money: https://sites.google.com/site/2ndbtcwpaper/MasterCoinRisks.pdf

Perhaps you have heard of the Genesis Block, from which the first bitcoins were created. MasterCoins have a similar starting point in the bitcoin block chain, called the “Exodus Address” (http://blockchain.info/address/1EXoDusjGwvnjZUyKkxZ4UHEf77z6A5S4P). MasterCoins were created by sending bitcoins to the Exodus Address during the month of August 2013. That fundraiser is now over, and anyone wishing to buy MasterCoins will have to purchase them from an early adopter.

Bitcoins raised in the fundraiser are being used to fund the development of software implementing the MasterCoin protocol. The fundraiser was structured like a kickstarter, but it is also an investment. If we're successful, the purchased MasterCoins could be worth a tremendous amount of money someday. Thanks to everyone who participated, helping us raise over half a million dollars worth of bitcoins. We're tracking every every expenditure of that money in a public ledger: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AtCyUJvk_IyNdGpVcnpBN2tOczFmbVRnck5TWjZuRFE&usp=sharing

Again, the fundraiser is over, and bitcoins sent to the Exodus Address do not create MasterCoins anymore. Until we get the bitcoin/MasterCoin distributed exchange set up, you can purchase MasterCoins (using a very manual process) here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=287145.0

Do not attempt to purchase or use MasterCoins with a web wallet such as MtGox or Coinbase (YOU COULD LOSE YOUR MONEY). You must use a wallet where you can control a sending address by sending all your funds to that address first, then creating a "message" by sending funds from that address in a special format. Web wallets such as BlockChain.info will work fine, since they give you complete control over the addresses in your wallet.

Many MasterCoin functions are now available online (Note site disclaimers! There may still be bugs!):

• http://mastercoin-explorer.com by tachikoma
• https://masterchest.info/ by zathras
• http://masterchain.info/ by grazcoin
• http://mymastercoins.com/ by bitoy

We now have:

• Our own subreddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/mastercoin
• Our own website: http://www.mastercoin.org
• Master Protocol forum: http://mastercointalk.org/
• Development blog: http://blog.mastercoin.org/
• List of tasks on Trello: https://trello.com/mastercoin
• Multiple local chapters: http://wiki.mastercoin.org/index.php/List_of_Mastercoin_Foundation_Chapters
• A non-profit foundation managing project funds: http://www.mastercoinfoundation.org
• A legal / self-regulatory group (CODAP): http://www.codap.co/
• An IRC channel irc://irc.freenode.net/mastercoin

We are currently running a 300 BTC coding contest towards implementing MasterCoin's distributed exchange feature. ALL serious entries win a prize. Details here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=292628.0

Feel free to ask any questions here, although please keep a civil tongue and be aware that I will delete posts on this thread which are off-topic or impolite.

Thanks!

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How do you feel being exactly 1 year ahead of the curve on this one?

Yeah, I'm calling it here. And from now on, the rounds are 24 hours. Starting when I post this round's results.

Are you aware of this pull on github (#2577: Treat dust outputs as non-standard, un-hardcode TX_FEE constants)?

I called your proposal a "colored coin" proposal because it is built upon moving satoshis around. At current fees in the default client, moving those satoshis around costs 5430 satoshis. That tiny price will quickly add up if you try building stuff on top of the standard protocol.

Edit: to answer my own question:

dacoinminster, the project you are seeking to start is already underway. I'm not sure if you remember, but we met at the conference after your panel. As I said then, we the Freicoin developers have been working on a proposal with similar goals for some time. It now has a name: “Freimarkets: assets, credit, and exchange”.

Explained in bitcoin terms, it is basically colored coins on steroids, plus decentralized, distributed p2p markets. Together with the “smart contracts” possible though the bitcoin scripting language, these provide all the primitives necessary for the issuance and management of just about any kind of financial instrument. We are currently working on a white paper describing in detail the modifications to bitcoin protocol, but here is the high-level executive summary:

Therein we propose a new transaction format, nVersion=3 transactions (Freicoin's interest/demurrage modifications having defined nVersion=2), which enable one level of independently verified sub-transactions, as well as relaxation of the rules regarding coin generation via coinbase transactions for the purpose of supporting user-defined assets on the block-chain. Combined with suitable extensions to the peer-to-peer, JSON-RPC, and user interfaces, these two protocol changes complete bitcoin’s repertoire of low-level constructs, allowing the emulation of a wide variety of financial instruments.

Together this enables the following sorts of applications:

* Issuing new assets by means of asset definition transactions (coinbase transactions other than the usual first transaction of a block), then transferring ownership of these “colored coins” through normal Freicoin transactions. Such assets are allowed to specify their own interest/demurrage rate, reference an external legal contract (typically governing their redemption) and may be destroyed when no longer needed by a special class of non-spendable, prunable output script.

* Atomic exchange of assets of differing types through inclusion of inputs and outputs for both in a single transaction.

* Signing orders (partial-transactions) that are binding but not completed until they get into the chain as part of a balanced transaction, and have attached expiration dates or can be explicitly cancelled by double-spending the signed inputs.

* Executing an arbitrary number of these orders atomically by creating a complete valid transaction where the orders are included as sub-transactions, thereby executing an atomic trade/exchange without requiring both parties to be online or in direct contact with each other.

* Composing orders from separate markets into an atomic trade with intermediate assets, enabling payment based on transitive trust relationships

In other words, any of the multitude of things Open-Transactions or Ripplepay were designed to do, could now be done on the block chain. Further, there is no reason why this could not be implemented on Bitcoin itself. However, it is such a drastic change in scope from what bitcoin has traditionally been that getting the required consensus may not be worthwhile or even doable. The smaller, more focused Freicoin community has already rallied behind this as the next major technical development, and it will be deployed to that network within as soon as development and testing is finished.

As you may know, I'm currently working on UTXO indices for bitcoin, and you would be excused for wondering how these two proposals could be related. The thing is, we anticipate user-issued assets and distributed exchange to grow demand for blockchain transactions considerably. Actually considerably is an understatement: I would not be surprised if it exceeds regular bitcoin traffic by a factor of 100x or more. Therefore we are working to get UTXO indices implemented first so that the core bitcoin layer can scale, then implement “Freimarkets” on top of Freicoin. Using existing scripts, users would be able to make atomic trades across chains (bitcoins <--> freicoins), and then use Freimarkets to issue their own transactions or participate in the p2p exchange.

I obviously feel Freicoin will succeed as a currency, on its own merits. However playing devil's advocate, even if you are not bullish on FRC it's still true that it's unique system of demurrage makes it an ideal fee currency that doesn't threaten bitcoin's utility as store-of-value. And the scale of hard-fork changes required for Freimarkets makes it a non-starter on bitcoin itself for pragmatic reasons.

Your idea about exchanging NewCoins for the bitcoin crowdfund investment is interesting, but unfortunately mismatched to the current situation on the ground. If you want to invest in this new idea, invest in freicoins - they will soon be the fee currency for the proposal. If you have bitcoins to contribute to the effort then contact me offline. My time is only paid for for the first couple of months, but this is expected to be a year-long endeveour. If additional funds were available, I'd be able to bring on extra programmers to make it happen sooner. (I already have one in mind, but if anyone technical is reading this and interested, contact me offline.)