[High level vision]

I have an idea for a cool project - ibackbitcoin.org.
I have a bit of money I can use to finance this, but zero (negative?) time to work on it ... looking for good people to join and help me build and manage it.

This is not a for-profit endevor, just a cool project that I want to start.

If you're serious, feel free to comment and edit on the document, and contact me at info@ibackbitcoin.org

High level vision

The question What Backs the value of Bitcoin has been discussed to death. The site I’m proposing is a novelty (not for profit) website where people can provide answers to this question by backing up bitcoin themselves.

Initial Mockup

I believe this doesn't exist yet: A website (and API) that lets you input a specific date (or date+time), and a currency e.g. USD, and get the historic price at that time.

There are some ways of doing this e.g. via investing.com, but no simple, clean website that is dedicated for this specific task.

Again I'll state the interface - the inputs are:

1. Date
2. Currency

And the output is price of 1 BTC at that time.
No more, no less.

Any takers on implementing the idea?

http://mastercointalk.org/index.php?topic=408

The Mastercoin Foundation is offering up to $500 for any fix of a Medium, High or Critical bug, in either of these two projects:

https://github.com/mastercoin-MSC/omniwallet/issues
https://github.com/zathras-crypto/masterchest-wallet/issues

Terms and conditions:

• We pay out $150 for a Medium priority bug, $350 for a High, and $500 for a Critical.
• The bounty is paid for actual committed code (pull request) that is merged into the appropriate repo.
• The bounty is paid in BTC, no extra MSC is awarded (BTC rate determined upon payment).
• If multiple people submit pull requests, only the one that is accepted qualifies (if you're working on an issue and don't want someone to race you to it, please comment on it - play nice!)
• It may take us some time to review and merge pull requests - please be patient as we're reviewing the PRs.
• Only issues that have been tagged by us as Critical, High or Medium are eligable - Note that priorities may change for bugs without keeping a log on github ... when you start working on a bug or submit a fix, please note the current priority you see on a bug.
• Role Based Bounties (full timers) are not eligible for this bounty.
• Any work done on these bounties is outside the scope of the monthly $100,000 contest.

Note on Masterchest - a new version (0.4) of Masterchest is being released within the next few days. Any code that is merged into Masterchest should be based off the new version. I advise people to start your work with Omniwallet.

You can get online help on the dev Google Group, and on skype (ping me at ripper234 or Craig at udecker to be added to the MSC/Omni skype groups).

Someone had this idea yesterday: A Bitcoin fork that by design allows no mining or transactions on Shabbat (Saturday).

I believe this has zero practical usage, but it would be a fun idea to experiment with and perhaps even market to religious Jews.

(We originally thought about calling this JewCoin, but this has too much of an antisemitism ring to me, so I prefer KosherCoin)

[The goal]

FYI this mind-blowing idea was given to me by someone, whom I wish not to expose at this point.
They can join the discussion and reveal their identity if they wish.

Have there been any attempts at creating a "cryptocurrency" that isn't based on money, but rather on human beings?

The goal:

To see whether we can create a cryptocurrency that lets every human vote on issues.

Possible angle of attack
Base the cryptocurrency on hashed fingerprints.

Each human in the world (mostly) has a unique unforgable fingerprint.
We distribute voting machines to all places of the earth (even on smartphones etc.)

These voting machines are in fact a p2p network using a public ledger/blockchain.

When a person votes, a cryptographic time-dependent hash of his fingerprint is created and distributed over the network.
The hashing algorithm depends on the issue that is being voted.

E.g. if we ask the world "Who do you love more, dad or mom?", the hashing algorithm turns each fingerprint into a unique vote for this specific question and broadcasts it into the network, and results are revealed.


Use Case
World government. Instead of the semi-centralized / hierarchical government structure we have today, we can have a truly decentralized, anonymous government for the entire earth.

[this thread is moderated]

I have sent this email to a few devs, Gavin asked that we conduct the discussion publicly and we're happy to oblige.

Hi all,

I think you guys are unaware of the rate at which we are accelerating. Hell, my own board of directors (of the Mastercoin Foundation) has more conservative estimates than me ...

However I think that Mastercoin is going to blow up in scale much sooner than we originally planned.

There will be a lot of transactions on it very soon. I think that perhaps in 2-3 months we'll put a lot more strain on the network that SatoshiDice.

We should prepare.

FYI, we have a small $100 bounty for anyone who documents a migration plan off Bitcoin to another dedicated chain. However this is just a backup plan and we don't see this as likely. We want to stay on top of Bitcoin and support its development and usage.

I think we should have a talk about this ASAP - it's in the best interest of both our projects.

I know you all are busy people, let us know when and how and we'll adjust our schedules.

FYI I think we can sponsor or co-sponsor some research into the scalability of Bitcoin itself. What are the current research problems that can increase Bitcoin Scalability? How can we support this effort?

Please add more core developers to this discussion.

Note that this thread is moderated, and trolling will be deleted.

[Document a rough plan to migrating off the Bitcoin blockchain into a new altchain]

Hi all,

We at Mastercoin have a task that requires someone familiar with the details of Mining, specifically merged mining.

How much would be a reasonable bounty in your opinion?

https://trello.com/c/2PiTRxy7/22-document-a-rough-plan-to-migrating-off-the-bitcoin-blockchain-into-a-new-altchain

Document a rough plan to migrating off the Bitcoin blockchain into a new altchain

A lot of people don't know this is possible, but it is. Mastercoin isn't a specific technology, it's a project that can switch backends/infrasturcture if needed.

I think we need to brainstorm about this a bit, and see whether this can help us combat some potential future scalability issues / changes in the Bitcoin protocol. This ticket is for creating a wiki article or whitepaper documenting this scenario.

We decide on a certain block height in the future. The decision is done via decentralized voting of course.

Then we start a new dedicated alt chain which is entirely premined by holders of Mastercoin. Tokens on the new chain are initially owned by private keys of MSC holders.

He's a long time user, and he can't even post on the newbie section.

An Error Has Occurred!
The last posting from your IP was less than 360 seconds ago. Please try again later.
[18:55:30] Richard Boase: username joboase

[How to apply?]

Newcomers, please check out:
* https://trello.com/mastercoin
* https://trello.com/b/6FMStLsg/autonomous-application-infrastructure
* https://trello.com/b/uRutPlms/exchange-project
* Updated spreadsheet of bounties

Note - this will be a self-moderated thread to combat the trolls and keep it clean.

Hi all!

Sorry to open yet another Mastercoin thread. FYI, we're talking with theymos about allocating a forum for Mastercoin and other blockchain-based technologies. In the meantime: The purpose of this thread is to announce new positions and bounties as they become available. There is a need for this thread because new positions and bounties are added daily and the main thread is too messy.

Everything is organized on Trello, you can find the current bounties there.

I remind everyone that on a lost of the tasks you will have to specify how much BTC/MSC the bounty is worth for you, instead of us thinking about the sum for each bounty. If you need extra budget to get something done, let us know. You are expected to be Feature Owners.

How to apply?

1. For bounties, you can just work on them and let us know once you're done.
2. You can also comment on the Trello card and mention @ripper234 or others to get out attention
3. You can also email info@mastrecoin.org telling us that you're interested in a particular bounty or position.
4. You can invent your own! If you think there's a bounty we need to add or position we need to open, let us know!
5. If you have some idea, but are worried it's not refined enough - feel free to brainstorm with the community. They can help you refine your idea into a bounty or position.

Guidelines
- Make sure to write open source code, hosted on github.

Please ignore this thread and check out the self-moderated thread.
This thread will be locked now.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=330867.0

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Compilation_of_legal_and_regulatory_information

Please help me fill it with good stuff. You can borrow from https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=96118

[customers]

Hi all,

We are looking for someone to lead the Smart Property feature of Mastercoin.
Just to clarify - we're not necessarily looking for a Tech Lead, but rather for a Feature Leader.

The responsibility of this leader would be to total, start-to-finish responsibility for driving the feature. This means, among others:

1. Defining the precise business use-case
2. Generating the PR material (e.g. one-pager, blog posts, whatever is needed)
3. Communicating with potential customers of this feature, understanding their needs, and ultimately converting them to actual customers.
4. Driving the technical implementation, schedules, testing...

You don't have to be a technical purpose to achieve the above.

You will get any help you require from The Mastercoin Foundation and community, in the form of information, budget, and connections. I'd like to remind everyone that we have a budget of over 5000 bitcoins (and some mastercoins) dedicated to promoting the project. We will be able to allocate appropriate parts of that budget for this feature.

I'm super excited to see this taking off!

Ron

P.S.
Please send applications to info@mastercoin.org
Personal queries can be sent to ron.gross@gmail.com - I hate bitcointalk pms 

This important post was made by a newbie.
Can we please move the post to Development & Technical Discussion?

I just found this video explaining BitShares.
I must say the video is much more effective at explaining what BitShare does than the whitepaper!

Essentially as far as I understand, here is my TL;DR:

• ProtoShares in a new alt currency, that will be used for the issuance of BitShares and various derived instruments. The details are here. It's uses a CPU-based hash algorithm called Momentum which is much more GPU/ASIC resistant. ProtoShares are mined over a period of a bit more than a year (from the chart I see about half are mined within three months, 90% something of the protoshares are mined within a year). This is an alternative, more decentralized / "fair" to create the protoshares than Mastercoin's 1 month issuance.
• BitShares use a new blockchain for time synchronization (5 minute blocks), while Mastercoin uses the same Bitcoin blockchain. Merged mining is not mentioned, not sure it's possible - so a large pool of honest miners will be needed to ensure there are no 51% attacks.
• BitShares functions like the Mastercoin CFD feature we're just discussing. It acts as a marketplace for interested parties to trade long/short positions with each other.
• Most of Mastercoin's planned currency features revolve around the concept of Price Feeds, where the feed is provided by an trusted 3rd party. There are some thoughts about removing the need for a 3rd party, but nothing concrete has been designed yet. BitShares suppose to not need 3rd parties at all, and claim just naming something "BitUSD" will drive the market to price it accordingly. I seem to be missing something here - I don't understand how the BitShares blockchain determines who wins the result of a long/short position on a given currency. If it relies completely on the market for this currency (actually, for CFDs), it sounds like someone can manipulate this market in order to corrupt a previously closed CFD. I am curious to hear from BitShares/Invictus about this point

Overall these two features - BitShares and Mastercoin CFDs - sound a lot like each other. I know that Mastercoin has a lot more planned, and Invictus seem to have a big agenda as well ... it would be interesting to see the two projects compete and complement one another over the next year/s.

[Bounty size]

Hi all,

I discussed with the board and approved a small allocation of funds for a bounty for building a Mastercoin Faucet.
While this part of the ecosystem isn't strictly required, because soon everybody will be able to buy mastercoins directly off the distributed exchange, I still think that giving small amounts of mastercoins to new users is a cool additional service we can provide.

Bounty size: $500+$50 per authentication method beyond the first, from the ones listed below. You can start by implementing just a few authentication methods, but at least one premium authentication method has to be supported.

Acceptance criteria:

Create a webpage that sends a small amount of mastercoins to anyone that passes certains qualifications, in order to prevent abuse. Qualifications we can start with:

Premium authentication

• Anyone who's had a github account with either (at least 3 public repositories) or (stared one of the mastercoin github repositories listed here) and (account created before date Aug 1st 2013).
• Anyone with a reddit account with karma above 100.
• Anyone who had a bitcointalk account with activity score > 10, at least 10 posts, accounts created prior to Aug 1 2013. This one would be more difficult to implement given the lack of API, and so this feature is awarded $150 instead of $50.

Basic authentication
Anyone with a Google/Facebook account (amount given here should be smaller, this criteria might be easier to spam)

Security
The service should be "hard to hack". We will delay awarding the bounty until 30 days pass from the site's launch without a serious security incident.

Funding
The site will display available funds at time of access. The Mastercoin Foundation will award:

$0.5 worth of mastercoins for the first 1,000 people that authenticate via premium authentication.
$0.1 worth of mastercoins for the next 10,000 people, or to people that authenticate via basic authentication.

In other words, we will allocate a total of $1,500 for the faucet's visitors. The faucet will award visitors based on their chosen authentication method. When the $500 allocated to premium authentication runs out, these users will be served by the $1,000 pool dedicated to basic authentication.

The worth of each mastercoin in USD can be hardcoded at first (updated at least weekly).

Bonus $50 - find the value of MSC in USD by first finding the value of MSC-BTC via the distributed exchange, and then multiplying by the value of BTC-USD via bitstamp or another exchange.

The website should be open source, with the code hosted on github.

Maintenance
The site is expected to be maintained even beyond the 30-day "hack test" period.
We are not yet committed to additional funds as rewards beyond the initial $1,500 - we will consider this when the funds run out.

[Spending Limit]

Hello everyone,

I'm starting this thread to discuss the specificaiton of a new Mastercoin feature suggested by Vitalik.

Here is the way I originally specified this feature:

I had an interesting conversation this week with Vitalik from the Bitcoin Magazine, and he suggested this cool feature:

Spending Limit

This feature would limit the rate at which a particular address can send mastercoins.

Here is how I would specify the feature: We would add two new operations SETUP_LIMITED_ACCOUNT and SET_LIMIT.

SETUP_LIMITED_ACCOUNT(priv_key_x, pub_key_y)

This operation would designate address Y as the "limiting address" of address X.
This means the owner of address Y can control the spending limits of address X.

SET_LIMIT(priv_key_y, pub_key_x, currency_ID, limit, time_period)

After a SET_LIMIT operation is transmitted (by the owner of address Y), only if there was a prior matching SETUP_LIMITED_ACCOUNT with Y's public key, then from now on outgoing transactions from address X in the specified currency are limited - for any window of blocks with length time_period, if any send operation would cause the sum of all send operations from address X within this window to cross limit, this send operation would be invalid.

The reason to use two different addresses is that we want to prevent an attacker that gained the private key of X to cheat the system by changing the send limit. You would use a more secure address Y to specify a send limit on address X (just like the Saving Account feature uses a Guardian Address (Y)).


The above is just my initial specification, we can beautify and formalize this a bit more.
I think it's a useful easy to implement feature and would love to see it in an upcoming version of the whitepaper.

Here is Vitalik's suggestion on how to implement this feature:

setup_limited_account(privkey x, pubkey y, limit, time period, currency) -> lets address y withdraw from address x at a maximum rate of limit per time period as measured in some currency

The advantage of this is that (i) it would be simpler (one command instead of two) and (ii) more importantly, you would be able to set up multiple limited accounts with different limits for the same main account. This would also then kill two birds with one stone by simultaneously serving as a Coinbase-style recurring payment feature (eg. I give Private Internet Access a key to withdraw $5 USD per month from me).

I do like his proposal, it's an interesting twist.
It's slightly different conceptually than what I had in mind - in this proposal, X is really the owner of the funds, and he's letting Y use his (X's) funds. It would be an interesting challange visualizing this in a wallet software.
In my proposal, the owner of the funds is X, and Y can set withdrawal limits on X, but can't withdraw any of X's funds.

I still need to give this some thought, I think there are pros and cons to each approach.

I'm posting this on behalf of my friend Nimrod Lehavi, who unfortunately cannot create a new bitcointalk user at this time.

He is the founder of ProxyCoins. It is a new P2P alternative to bitspend that lets you buy anything anywhere with Bitcoin, and easily obtain Bitcoin – www.proxycoins.com.

FYI - I am not affiliated with the project and Nimrod cannot reply to this thread right now because he can't create a bitcointalk user, so replies to questions here might take a while. You can try contacting on their Twitter in the meantime.

Is there a playlist of Bitcoin-related "songs" on youtube?
Something silly to play at bitcoin parties ... ?

E.g.

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jq57BjBVq7o
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIeVbykXkcc

I believe that in the medium range (say in the next 6 months), we need to decide, formalize and code a distributed voting mechanism for changes in the Mastercoin protocol. I will copy a similar post I made in our lonely Google group:

I think that above everything else, MasterCoin is an infrastructure with yet unknown capabilities. As one of the first tasks in the MasterCoin protocol, I would like us to implement a way for MasterCoin holders to vote on protocol changes (hardforks).

Before proposing a way to evolve MasterCoin past forking changes, I'd like to explain how MasterCoin can have forks, even though it's not really mined. MasterCoin 1.0 was defined in Willet's original whitepaper ... but Willet is not the master of MasterCoin. If everyone in the world except Willet decides to add feature X to MasterCoin and call that "MasterCoin 1.1", then this will be the de-facto new MasterCoin. The new MasterCoin can contain new operations and transaction types that Willet's original spec does not support, and so the two "worldviews" of MasterCoin 1.0 and MasterCoin 1.1 will diverge - in other words, when we let the MasterCoin 1.0 program parse the Bitcoin blockchain, and also let the new MasterCoin 1.1 program parse the same blockchain, they will disagree on the balance each address contains (1.1 might even contain new types of addresses unrecognizable by 1.0)

With Bitcoin, there is a clear, decentralized way for miners to vote on protocol changes - by hash power. In MasterCoin, there are no miners (well, they're hidden in the Bitcoin layer and are irrelevant to MasterCoin).

I propose the following protocol that MasterCoin can use to control its own evolution:

1. We build one reference implementation of MasterCoin 1.0
2. We now encode the hash of the git commit for the reference implementation of MasterCoin 1.0 in MasterCoin's own code, forming MasterCoin 1.0.1. Everyone starts running MasterCoin 1.0.1.
3. Whenever there is a desire to add a forking change to MasterCoin, anyone can publish a protocol change request into the MasterCoin network using a special message (the message contains a URL of a repository and a git commit hash within that repo).
4. Owners of MSC can vote whether they approve a particular valid fork request (a fork request is valid if its git commit hash is a descendant.of the currently accepted master hash.
5. Once more than 50% of all MSC have voted on a particular fork, it becomes the new standard, and everyone should upgrade to the new client (or else, they will be stuck on the wrong side of the fork).

(The above assumes that Willet will control less than 50% of all MSC).

BTW the above kind of reminds me the rules of Nomic ... it can get quite crazy.

I suspect there are other easier way to implement this, feel free to butt in.

[Requirements:]

Hello all,

Inspired by SunnyKing's awesome PPCoin Weekly Updates thread, we are looking for someone to start a similar thread of Mastercoin.

Requirements:

• Good faith effort - you should be someone who is actively interested in the Mastercoin project, and already follows the many project developments.
  
• Decent writing skills - you need to be able to create short English posts that summarize information in a concise manner.
  
• Commitment - while no rock-solid commitment is needed, we are looking for someone who believes he has the time to publish one update post per week and continue with this for a while.

The channel of communication is TBD. It can be a self-moderated here (that only the op can post to), or a blog (I personally don't want the channel to be just a twitter account, because you can't easily subscribe to get all updates from a twitter account).

Regarding compensation for this "job" - the board needs to discuss this, but I think we will be able allocate some funds for this purpose. I don't expect the monetary compensation to be particularly big - you should be interested in Mastercoin to begin with, and I think putting yourself in this position of a communications officer is a great way to be involved with the project, and might offer other non-material benefits.

Any applicants can submit themselves via this thread or a pm.

Cheers,
Ron