MasterCoin: New Protocol Layer Starting From “The Exodus Address”

[Meni Rosenfeld]

Whoever is behind buymastercoin.com thinks that MasterCoin values have doubled since the fundraiser. I don't know if the site is legit, but that's pretty cool. Hopefully we'll have that distributed exchange soon, but in the meantime we need a thread for buyers and sellers to find each other, with instructions on how to do it correctly. I'll try to set that up soon.

FWIW, I know the owner of buymastercoin.com personally. (I'm not saying you should use the site or anything.)

The reasons that could lead to the displayed pricing have to do with the very weird market conditions that the Mastercoin issuing creates. Mastercoins were issued with a very short time scale (1 month, as opposed to Bitcoin's effective 12 years), so there are people who would want to buy because of all the hype but missed the deadline. On the other hand, there is no new information that could depreciate mastercoins in the eyes of early investors, so they would not be eager to sell; and in general, tools for transacting with Mastercoin are still crude, creating friction. So there could be people willing to pay a premium (compared to the original issuing price) to get their hands on some mastercoins.

[mechs]

So any idea what will the first coin be which uses this protocol?

[klee]

So was it essential to include 0.0005btc fee in order for the transaction to be valid? I used 0.0001...

[bybitcoin]

FYI I know the owner of buymastercoin.com.

I trust this man to honor deals.
I am not promising anything regarding his site personally, and am not affiliated with buymastercoin in any way.
Do you own due diligence / risk assessment.

I do not know what is the "correct" value of MSC right now, nor am I selling MSC.

His price (buymastercoin.com) was 1 MSC= 1 BTC for the first few hours after the deadline, then he changed it to 0.02 BTC
Well I think 1 MSC= 1 BTC is a fair price and will happen to be soon, but he was a bit hasty in his pricing-timing strategy I guess

[TomHirsch]

FYI I know the owner of buymastercoin.com.
I trust this man to honor deals.

Good to hear.  However, I don't trust him to understand why he shouldn't use Spam to promote his activities.  I hope his exchange goes up in red flames at an early date. 

[markm]

I am delighted to see that the community seems to understand now that the escrow fund is not vulnerable to a "speculative attack".

This seems a total non-sequitur right now. Did you somehow end up deleting all evidence that anyone whatsoever other than yourself imagines for a moment that this repeatedly mentioned, hammered home over and over and over again fatal flaw/vulnerability does not exist

I am reading from the start and have not read farther yet than the post I just quoted, its taken hours to get this far, so maybe I am not the first to perceive the above as a total non-sequitur, not sure if I can stay up long enough to read far enough to find out though...

-MarkM-

[peer2peer360]

from the look of things, it's seems many are holding their mastercoins close
No one wants to sell their mastercoin except buymastercoins dot com (very expensive)

im interested in this project & anyone who is a motivated seller
please PM if and only your willing to offer 100 mastercoins to 1 bitcoin?

I had every intention to invest in Mastercoins
a week before the deadline & on Aug 22 my blockchain
wallet app unsynced from my device with my bitcoins in it
for this Project

Here is my blockchain wallet  also check time & date as
you will notice no large amount of btc was ever entered until Aug 22
specifically for the mastercoin project & has not been touch since

https://blockchain.info/address/1N22onS78dnGBvQB4LW3XLQ4RezL19DdmU#

[markm]

Right but people are inherently self interested in economics. They won't sell to the escrow unless they can make money from doing so. They won't buy from the escrow unless that also makes them money. So how does the escrow ever make any money unless people are willing to sell at a loss?

I certainly hope you aren't claiming to have changed the laws of economics and made people fundamentally not profit motivated?? Can you address this problem? How do you get people to sell at a loss (which is what is required for the escrow to gain money).

When a target currency is above target, that means that people want that currency so badly that they are willing to pay a small premium for it, which the escrow fund collects.

When a target currency is below target, that means that people want OUT of the currency so badly that they are willing to pay a small premium to get out, which the escrow fund also collects.

It would be irrational to give that premium to the escrow fund if there was another choice, but there is not.

I don't think that is always true, unless all traders are bots that are online 24/7.

I suspect that actually a good number of cases of offers to buy a commoditycoin at a higher price than the commodity itself can be bought for will be in effect cases of penalising human beings for failure to be awake and online and monitoring commodity and coin prices 24/7.

Or in other words, if a commodity to which a coin is pegged goes down in market value, I suspect not all offers to buy the coin pegged to that commodity for a price that recently was the target but now is above the target will be retracted fast enough aka soon enough for the person making the offer to avoid being left in the lurch, that is, to be left offering more than the new target value.

Who knows soonest what the next target value is going to be? The publisher of a ticker?

If the escrow only acts periodically, how likely is it that there will be any offers to buy at above market value by the time the escrow acts to take advantage of an offer to buy at a price that is higher than the latest target value? That is, how likely is it that arbitrageurs or other traders or bots will snap up those offers sooner than the escrow gets around to doing so?

-MarkM-

[crazy_rabbit]

I'm unbelievably excited about the money that has been raised. We actually crossed the seemingly impossible threshold I set earlier to be comfortable quitting my job. However, I'm not quitting my job, since my investors and I agree that a huge salary for J.R. is not the most efficient use of project funds.

I disagree and I think many other investors like myself will disagree as well. You have raised a good portion of a million dollars. I think many, if not most, of us would prefer to see you dedicate yourself full time to the mastercoin project. Taking a salary is entirely reasonable, it does not have to be 'huge', but there is nothing wrong with being able to pay your bills. Had you been a regular startup you would have budgeted a salary for yourself as well. Keep the accounting public knowledge and pick some salary number that is considered average for coders in your region/area. It does not have to be 'huge' you are personally invested in Mastercoin as well so if it works out, you will be more the adequately compensated.

I don't mean to be tough, but not quitting your job sounds like you are taking the better part of a million dollars to fund a weekend/after work hobby. People put money into this believing it would be serious project, and when you have so much money in your "angel fund" it would be a serious cause for doubt in your seriousness if you didn't quit your job and take the project full time. Indeed, if you won't work full time on mastercoin, I would argue that you should hire developers who will.

Sorry to be so tough, but I love the project.

EDIT: Maybe I misunderstand- are the funds on the exodus address actually spendable by you, or not? You do have the private key, right?

[markm]

So what profit motive do you have to buy GC at 50% backing over just owning MC?

The motive would be because you want to own GoldCoins, and you believe the escrow fund is still healthy enough to maintain their values. Maybe that will be too risky for some people. For me, 50% does seem dangerously low, but not necessarily destined to crash. I think I'd be just fine with 75% though.

Hopefully I'll have a lot better idea of what level is safe once we create a few unsustainable ones "just to watch them die".

Despite my seeming to have a bias against what I have read so far, to be fair I think one ought to remember the concept of stability aka peg right about here.

Supposedly one of the nice things about a pegged cryptocurrency is that a merchant can accept it from a customer without finding that by the time it is turned to fiat in their bank account it turns out not to be worth what they thought it was when the customer handed it over to them in return for merchandise.

So how long does it have to be stable, in practice, for actual real online shopping use or actual buying of a coffee at a coffeeshop or whatever?

If the merchants are confident that the amount of actual fiat (or actual gold or actual barrels of oil, or whatever it is pegged to) they will end up with by the time they take delivery of the actual [whatever] that it is pegged to will be close to the amount they supposedly were being paid by who-ever they accepted the coin from, isn't that good enough, for the merchants?

If the shoppers considering buying something from a merchant are reasonably confident that the prices the merchant is going to charge them in whatever weird currency the merchant is asking for in return for things the shoppers are considering buying from some merchant who is asking for some weird cryptocurrency instead of the normal fiat the shopper normally uses at their corner-store and to pay their taxes are not going to change by the time they have bought some of the specific cryptocurrency the merchant is asking for, isn't that good enough at least for shoppers who don't happen to stock their pockets with some of each of the hundreds of weird currencies various merchants might or might not turn out to be asking for before setting out on a shopping expedition or surfing some online shops?

What other major use-cases are there for "stable" units of value? Speculators prefer unstable ones, right?

Who in addition to merchants and maybe their customers actually values stability of unit of value in and of itself?

(And how much premium is that preference worth to them?)

-MarkM-

[markm]

If the total value of the backing drops below the total nominal value of the issued currency, then why anyone would ever bother to buy this one over a freshly created copy?  The latter always begins its life with full backing, and thus has a relative advantage over the former.  It seems to me that once this threshold is breached, the old currency will have to sell at a discount to compete with the new one, thus depleting the escrow fund until it's wiped out completely.  Notice that the old currency remains technically insolvent no matter how much buying the escrow fund does, and it can never eliminate the advantage that the new currency has over it.  Its demise is a certainty at this point.

All GoldCoins are backed by the same escrow fund, to the same degree. GoldCoins are fungible, and there wouldn't be one that was more funded than another.

That sounds almost impossible, given that these currencies are pegged to arbitrary tickers. The protocol has no knowledge of whether or not ticker 254326626778378 is the price according to its publisher of the same thing that ticker 7883689934799834 is the price of, surely?

Over time the protocol can observe that both tickers report the same price each day over some span of time, but the two publishers might not even agree every day that the price of gold or oil or whatever they are trying to publish the price of is the same wherever they each are located, so maybe even though both are doing their honest best to publish the price of the same commodity that commodity might legitimately not cost the same amount at the spot-sales shop on the block they live on.

How can the code even begin to even try to decide whether the stuff i am trying to publish "the" (or a)  price of on my ticker is or is not the same stuff that someone else is trying to publish a (or "the") price of on their ticker?

-MarkM-

[markm]

These constraints are artificial.  The market is much bigger than your system.

I must be losing my mind after so many posts with bytemaster. This is another post which makes no sense to me. Maybe I just need to be done for the day . . .

I'll elaborate:  Your response was that your system prevents fully solvent competitors from stepping in and wiping out a currency that has just become insolvent, by the mechanism I described.  Namely, where the simple existence of the better positioned competition forces the market price of the currency below its target, and thus forces perpetual buying by the escrow fund until it's emptied.  My point is that there will always be competition from outside your constrained system that you must take into account, and as soon as the backing of a currency in your system drops below 100%, then it's automatically at a competitive disadvantage with any freshly created one in an outside system.

Now THAT is an interesting point. An escrow fund could continue to operate successfully in a closed system, but given another competing GoldCoin launched by someone else, people might flock to the new one which would start at 100% backing.

Of course, over-funded escrow funds would work just fine, but it may be that under-funded ones will immediately face competition.

Very interesting. I'll need to think about this.

The freshly launched coin can be in your own system even was the point I was aiming at in my previous post; I suspected that was at least part of the 'larger market" d'aniel was pointing toward though of course there also could be DigiXAU on various Open Transactions servers, Pecunix unlike e-gold hasn't been killed by the Feds yet, there might come more on the BitShares system and so on and so on...

My own Open Transactions server for example I run in a way that should force there to always be more than 100% backing, because my policy is that cold wallets are frozen solid, hopefully until some future when I foresee no future use for supporting a particular currency at all. Hot-wallet providing is a totally separate business, which I'd actually prefer not to do myself. So for example the 200 BTC that I froze in order to issue 200 DigiBTC (dBTC) on my server I hope never to move on the blockchain until there seems no future use for having such a thing as DigiBTC exist ever again on my server; and I have no plans to freeze more until I foresee a continuing need for my server to be able to provide a transaction pipe fatter than "200 dBTC at a time" going forward...

(I don't plan to issue new dBTC on receipt of blockchain BTC and un-issue dBTC when someone wants to sell some dBTC for actual on the blockchain BTC. I prefer the model e-gold used where if you want to cash in or out you go to third party market-makers aka exchangers; it'd be those exchangers I'd consider selling bullion or blockchain-coins or fiat or barrels of oil or whatever to or buying bullion or blockchain-coins or fiat or barrels of oil or whatever from, greatly limiting the number of people at whose prompting I'd ship stuff into my fortress of solitude vaults or dig stuff out of those vaults - if indeed I'd ever consider digging anything out of the vaults before the time comes that I no longer plan to support that commodity going forward. So, I have 100% backing for all my assets and anyone offering to get people in or out of the system would be doing so using commodities that are over and above the frozen ones that my digital tokens serve as a way of keeping count of.)

-MarkM-

[Meni Rosenfeld]

I'm unbelievably excited about the money that has been raised. We actually crossed the seemingly impossible threshold I set earlier to be comfortable quitting my job. However, I'm not quitting my job, since my investors and I agree that a huge salary for J.R. is not the most efficient use of project funds.

I disagree and I think many other investors like myself will disagree as well. You have raised a good portion of a million dollars. I think many, if not most, of us would prefer to see you dedicate yourself full time to the mastercoin project. Taking a salary is entirely reasonable, it does not have to be 'huge', but there is nothing wrong with being able to pay your bills. Had you been a regular startup you would have budgeted a salary for yourself as well. Keep the accounting public knowledge and pick some salary number that is considered average for coders in your region/area. It does not have to be 'huge' you are personally invested in Mastercoin as well so if it works out, you will be more the adequately compensated.

I don't mean to be tough, but not quitting your job sounds like you are taking the better part of a million dollars to fund a weekend/after work hobby. People put money into this believing it would be serious project, and when you have so much money in your "angel fund" it would be a serious cause for doubt in your seriousness if you didn't quit your job and take the project full time. Indeed, if you won't work full time on mastercoin, I would argue that you should hire developers who will.

Sorry to be so tough, but I love the project.

EDIT: Maybe I misunderstand- are the funds on the exodus address actually spendable by you, or not? You do have the private key, right?

JR says his wife only allows him to quit his job if he gets all the salary and benefits of his current job, which are pretty huge.

JR is in full control of the exodus address but has committed to use those funds only for the development of Mastercoin.

By "a huge salary for J.R. is not the most efficient use of project funds" he means that a more efficient use is to pay other developers with the money, which is what he plans to do. Not to abandon the project.

[crazy_rabbit]

I'm unbelievably excited about the money that has been raised. We actually crossed the seemingly impossible threshold I set earlier to be comfortable quitting my job. However, I'm not quitting my job, since my investors and I agree that a huge salary for J.R. is not the most efficient use of project funds.

I disagree and I think many other investors like myself will disagree as well. You have raised a good portion of a million dollars. I think many, if not most, of us would prefer to see you dedicate yourself full time to the mastercoin project. Taking a salary is entirely reasonable, it does not have to be 'huge', but there is nothing wrong with being able to pay your bills. Had you been a regular startup you would have budgeted a salary for yourself as well. Keep the accounting public knowledge and pick some salary number that is considered average for coders in your region/area. It does not have to be 'huge' you are personally invested in Mastercoin as well so if it works out, you will be more the adequately compensated.

I don't mean to be tough, but not quitting your job sounds like you are taking the better part of a million dollars to fund a weekend/after work hobby. People put money into this believing it would be serious project, and when you have so much money in your "angel fund" it would be a serious cause for doubt in your seriousness if you didn't quit your job and take the project full time. Indeed, if you won't work full time on mastercoin, I would argue that you should hire developers who will.

Sorry to be so tough, but I love the project.

EDIT: Maybe I misunderstand- are the funds on the exodus address actually spendable by you, or not? You do have the private key, right?

JR says his wife only allows him to quit his job if he gets all the salary and benefits of his current job, which are pretty huge.

JR is in full control of the exodus address but has committed to use those funds only for the development of Mastercoin.

By "a huge salary for J.R. is not the most efficient use of project funds" he means that a more efficient use is to pay other developers with the money, which is what he plans to do. Not to abandon the project.

ok! Sounds good! :-)

[TomHirsch]

except buymastercoins dot com (very expensive)

Missing the boat is very expensive.  Mastercoin is now worth far more than the moment before the deadline passed.  I am selling mine for 1:1.  But why on earth do you think anyone would want to sell for 100:1?  That is just nonsense.

[dacoinminster]

I've been working on some proof of concept code for Mastercoin since there is not much around yet. I decided to put my work to some practical purpose and made a quick page that uses the Mastercoin libraries to run through the blockchain and count how much coins were bought by a specific address.

A huge disclaimer: This is not the official code and things are often guestimated. For instance the whitepaper does not mention which time to use as basis for the extra coins for early adopters. I've opted in to use the time your transaction got added to a block but the reference spec might change this, although I'm not sure how.

You can check how many Mastercoins you bought here.

Full transparency; IPs for visits site are currently logged by the webserver software. If you don't want your ip in combination with your bitcoin address logged don't use it.

Hey Tachikoma,

I just checked this out. SO COOL!! It appears to work correctly with the addresses which purchased with only one input, and for the simple-send transactions I have tested. It breaks on multi-input transactions (for instance: http://blockchain.info/tx/4eb12949ed57e8ba3495ef4c51c5b8675c780f7586c59fa62c3bf18246f8d52d which should have purchased a little over 500 MasterCoins for the input address contributing the most funds. It appears that multiple inputs are each being credited with the purchase.)

It appears that blockexplorer timestamps agree with your method. Can you confirm this? I wonder if blockchain.info timestamps are based on when their client first saw the transaction broadcast (i.e. data not stored in the blockchain). If so, then we can't use that timestamp (and my greasemonkey script is slightly wrong!)

It appears that some payments were sent in good faith before the deadline, but not included in the block chain until Block 255365 (four minutes after the deadline). If we have to use the timestamps of the block itself, I think it makes sense to include transactions up through that block, and refund ones which came after that.

What you have here is already a great entry into our programming contest (thread coming soon), and could earn you thousands of dollars worth of prize money (depending on how much further you develop it and what cool stuff other people come up with)

[rbdrbd]

I've been working on some proof of concept code for Mastercoin since there is not much around yet. I decided to put my work to some practical purpose and made a quick page that uses the Mastercoin libraries to run through the blockchain and count how much coins were bought by a specific address.

A huge disclaimer: This is not the official code and things are often guestimated. For instance the whitepaper does not mention which time to use as basis for the extra coins for early adopters. I've opted in to use the time your transaction got added to a block but the reference spec might change this, although I'm not sure how.

You can check how many Mastercoins you bought here.

Full transparency; IPs for visits site are currently logged by the webserver software. If you don't want your ip in combination with your bitcoin address logged don't use it.

Hey Tachikoma,

I just checked this out. SO COOL!! It appears to work correctly with the addresses and transactions I have tested.

It appears that blockexplorer timestamps agree with your method. Can you confirm this? I wonder if blockchain.info timestamps are based on when their client first saw the transaction broadcast (i.e. data not stored in the blockchain). If so, then we can't use that timestamp (and my greasemonkey script is slightly wrong!)

It appears that some payments were sent in good faith before the deadline, but not included in the block chain until Block 255365 (four minutes after the deadline). If we have to use the timestamps of the block itself, I think it makes sense to include transactions up through that block, and refund ones which came after that.

What you have here is already a great entry into our programming contest (thread coming soon), and could earn you thousands of dollars worth of prize money (depending on how much further you develop it and what cool stuff other people come up with)

I agree, great tool. FYI, there are still some issues with certain addresses (especially those that have a change address in the transaction). I have reported these to Tachikoma and he's confirmed them and will be fixing the code when he can. Just wanted to put this out there for other's benefit in the meantime.

[dacoinminster]

I agree, great tool. FYI, there are still some issues with certain addresses (especially those that have a change address in the transaction). I have reported these to Tachikoma and he's confirmed them and will be fixing the code when he can. Just wanted to put this out there for other's benefit in the meantime.

Yeah, I just noticed a problem with purchases using multiple inputs, and edited my reply above to mention that

Still, this is way better looking (and way easier to use) than the code I have written!

[dacoinminster]

I just launched a MasterCoin buyer/seller thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=287145.0

Anybody who missed the deadline (and anybody wanting to sell to them) should go there.

[Patel]

Is Mastercoin competing with Bitcoin? Or does it help Bitcoins price go up?

I am trying to figure this out