I did watch the senate hearings yesterday and today, and heard at least two separate (one from the Foundation representative, and one from the Bitpay guy) where Mastercoin-type features were alluded to (the bitpay guy mentioned making a house sale up against the blockchain to both reduce closing costs and record the property). I think it went over the heads of 99% of the folks in the room (especially the politicians), but that was a super promising development.

I'm thinking many of the Bitcoin folks are starting to see how something like Mastercoin helps Bitcoin values and adoption as a whole, and can benefit all Bitcoiners, even if they aren't personally invested in MSC.

Great stuff!

I got some Bit-Coin I'd like to sell you. I can e-Mail you the offer from my i-Pad. 

Guys, can we start moderating out haightst's posts such as this that do not add anything intelligible to the conversation? If he has an adequate argument, that is one thing, but things like this is worthless noise. I've ignored him but it forces everyone else to, to get the most out of this thread.

(And for the record, I am not an "MSC DEV" trying to censor him.)

I have a few questions related to smart properties:

From the spec, it looks like the unique factor used to differentiate one property from another is the Property Name, in which one may put up to 21 characters, correct?

Question 1: What’s to stop people from spamming new smart properties? This could be like the domain name system, without any pricing required to reserve a name. Someone could reserve a smart property like “dog”, or “House Deed”, in perpetuity. Is any MSC required to be consumed to create a property, or is it just the BTC transaction costs to send the transaction? Is there any rate limiting on new property creation, or any way to detect and control abuse?

If we are just limited to 21 bytes for property names in this kind of wild-west scenario, without any kind of payment requirement beyond the minimal BTC fees to keep away spam, I can see all of the intelligible choices for this filling up quickly. People would then be forced to use names like “HouseDeed_348dF” or even some kind of odd hash value. This may not necessarily be a ‘bad’ thing…worse case we could see Mastercoin property names devolving to the level of implicit legibility as Bitcoin addresses (i.e. a long string of numbers and letters).

If MSC is required (or you are considering this), you could have two options here: pay to the Exodus address (further enriching that, although I don’t know how necessary that is), or destroy the funds, similar to Peercoin transactions.

If destroying the MSC, to offset the deflation this causes, a future proof-of-stake type system could be even initiated that would inflate the supply at a low level (e.g. fixed 1%, or a variable rate derived periodically based on the MSC value destroyed over the past X period of time) to offset and attempt constant, or very slowly growing supply. I think that this idea is probably heretical and overly complex, since MSCs were created as a fixed supply (sounds kind of like a central bank, coded into the software, hah!)…just thought I’d throw it out there if in the future we find ourselves needing to allow for some controlling feedback to be applied to several aspects of the system (smart properties, bidding, etc) by allowing Mastercoin to require at least a small amount of MSC for most actions, in a way that didn’t unfairly enrich one specific party, or disrupt the balance of wealth in the system. Whether it would cripple the usefulness of Mastercoin in the process is up in the air though. If the fee was low enough, it shouldn’t.

Question 2: I see where dividends can be paid against smart properties. Can Smart properties be transferred? (I do see “Listing something for Sale” and “Initiating a Purchase”, but I’m a bit confused whether these have anything to do with a smart property, as their identifier is a 11 byte category and a 16 byte subcategory. If not currently, why not? Perhaps that’s an area of the spec that needs to be added.

Question 3: Can creating of smart properties be done with a Class A transaction, or is B or C required for this? (And more to the point, can any Mastercoin transaction be done as Class A, or just sending funds?)

If these were covered somewhere else, forgive me. Thanks for any answers.

"Maybe we should just leave it alone"

Senator Hietkamp FOR THE WIN.

Alright guys, this Mercedes lady said we should let the whole psuedo-anonynimity part of bitcoin go. We gotta redesign the protocol now. Sorry about that. 

Yeah, bitcoinwisdom is more intended for traders and people experienced with reading charts. However, with MSC aiming to offer things like betting, DEx, and custom currencies trading, I believe traders will naturally end up gravitating towards it in a major way. Thus eventually having a readout like bitcoinwisdom does will end up being crucial. For just normal users, a simpler "full screen" type chart site would be good enough.

Isn't the orderbook probably going away pretty shortly (once the distributed exchange takes hold)?

http://bitcoinwisdom.com/ is an awesome charts site. It would be great to have MSC charts like that...I've reached out to him about adding PPC charting but that didn't get very far. Looks like it may be proprietary JS (all of it is minified so it's hard to tell).

Did you just hear the senate hearings? Patrick Murck just made an indirect reference to Mastercoin (and related things like BitShares) by making a statement on the future of where Bitcoin was going. Sorry, don't have the exact quote...came on about 4:40PM EST.

Did someone miss the memo that bitcoin is not a "company". Jesus.

Oh, and "child pornography". Gotta make sure to mention that. At least 20 times. Definitely need to protect the children.

Any update regarding the progress of the PR group hired?

(Kudos to the board for recognizing this, I think it will be money well spent. First mover advantage with a few articles outside of the Bitcoin community especially..e.g. Techcrunch, Slashdot, Forbes, etc will be HUGE.)

revealing the public key as-in exposing the address to a potential future quantum attack, or something more than this?

Armory client can as well (on Expert mode)

Live video feed is here: http://www.c-span.org/Live-Video/C-SPAN3/

Man, that sounds awfully familiar.....

Thank you for these weekly updates. Much appreciated.

Thanks everyone for the help, I will try what zathras/milkyman said (can't believe I didn't think of that... I'll attribute it to being tired, lol).

Newbie question...what's the easiest way to send Mastercoin if I'm using the bitcoin qt client?

* I could run mastercoin-adviser.py, but I'm not sure how to craft that transaction it wants me to make, in bitcoin-qt (could probably do it in armory, but I can't import my bitcoin-qt wallet over to armory)
* mastercoin advisor is disabled on mastercoin-explorer so I can't make the raw transaction there
* pymastercoin is broken up against bitcoin 0.8.3 (some error regarding multisig returned via JSON RPC...can provide more info if needed)
* mastercoin-tools ... can't figure out msc-send.py ....
* The ruby GUI wallet does not allow for sending of mastercoins it seems (only test mastercoin is available)
* The FAQ isn't much help here, beyond what I've tried.

So that's 6 dead ends...

From what I can tell, technically this is not "on" slashdot yet (i.e. still awaiting editorial approval).

Please, everyone go to that link and (once logged in with your slashdot account) click on the plus icon to the left of the title to vote it up. Hopefully they will pick it up and publish it!

Ron, you may want to note that in your reddit post about this as well, let's mod it up and turn the topic 'red' and hopefully it will have the best chance to actually run.

More info on the firehose submission process here: http://news.slashdot.org/story/07/08/02/1719238/introducing-the-slashdot-firehose

Thanks for the note about the offline storage, that's great.

From your spreadsheet, it also clicked with me just now that $10,000 is only 30 BTC. Man...I remember trading 30BTC like it was not that big a deal just even this past summer...how times have changed.