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

[bybitcoin]

Nice design and taste, please just don't change that block background to some typical white neutral in future
Lovely, thank you!

[maxmint]

As I mentioned a few posts back I'm transitioning priority from web wallet to desktop wallet - could I solicit a little feedback on UI design?  What do you guys think?  I'm thinking of dropping test mastercoins from the overview as my feeling is most 'regular' users wouldn't be interested - thoughts?



Thanks

Looks great!
Only thing I would change is increase contrast between the background and the dark font – for readability's sake.

[ASICSRUS]

That looks beautiful

A full  MasterCoin wallet will eventually have to support display of dozens and dozens of currencies (and smart properties). Most users may not care about Test MasterCoins right now, but handling both coins is a good way to start thinking about the UI needed for all those kinds of coins.

why don't you answer me , will current "Mastercoins" aka MST get wiped out or are you planning a buyout of sorts?   thank you looks like you are keeping busy here

[Tachikoma]

That looks beautiful

A full  MasterCoin wallet will eventually have to support display of dozens and dozens of currencies (and smart properties). Most users may not care about Test MasterCoins right now, but handling both coins is a good way to start thinking about the UI needed for all those kinds of coins.

why don't you answer me , will current "Mastercoins" aka MST get wiped out or are you planning a buyout of sorts?   thank you looks like you are keeping busy here

Why would you even think that would happen?

[StarenseN]

I'm not fully understanding all the technical specs currently. But with BTC-TC who's winding down and the current developement/tools/knowledge is it possible to offer an elegant prototype solution to handle shares of an asset over the bitcoin protocol/with mastercoin protocol within a few weeks ? It's a good timing to do so I think because a lot of speculation are done also about the possible shutdown of the 2 others important securities exchanges which are Bitfunder and Havelock. And without these exchanges, a lot of people are afraid to hold only bags of non-existing shares.

With what happened to Btc-tc and the SEC inquiries, that would be a KILLER feature in a perfect timing (and very profitable).

[zathras]

Nice design and taste, please just don't change that block background to some typical white neutral in future
Lovely, thank you!

That looks pretty awesome

Looks great!

Thanks for all the positive feedback guys, appreciated and I'll stick with this design then

Nice! I'd like to see it with a white background and black font - reversed basically.

I tried this but I wasn't too impressed with the results so I think I'll stick with current - thanks though.

Only thing I would change is increase contrast between the background and the dark font – for readability's sake.

I've pushed up ~20 points to get a little better contrast (labels changed from RGB(81,81,81) to RGB(100,100,100)) which should give a small boost to contrast without affecting the overall look.  Thanks for the feedback

That looks beautiful

A full  MasterCoin wallet will eventually have to support display of dozens and dozens of currencies (and smart properties). Most users may not care about Test MasterCoins right now, but handling both coins is a good way to start thinking about the UI needed for all those kinds of coins.

Very good points - I also realised I was short of anywhere to manage addresses too (I've been spending too much time in my debug console).  I've added both currency and address panels (though they're empty functionality wise right now, I have some work to do there!).

I'm not yet adding placeholders for things like distributed exchange and smart properties because I think it's bad form to release software with empty bits waiting for functionality - I (we) can always expand the UI to add additional concepts as Mastercoin implements new feature sets.

--

Also in the interests of clarity and managing expectations I wanted to just state once more that the Masterchest transaction engine (used by the wallet and masterchest.info) is dependant on bitcoind/bitcoin-qt (all data is retrieved over JSON-RPC).  I think longer term we'll want to embed connecting and working with the bitcoin network directly into Mastercoin wallets but this is not currently the case.

I don't think I've seen it posted in this thread so I'd also like to make mention of the database changes in bitcoind/qt - as of 0.8.x only unspent outputs can be queried - we need to add txindex=1 to the conf and -reindex to get the transaction index back and query tx's where already spent.

--

And another screenie for good measure taking into account the feedback received - again thanks

[dacoinminster]

I'm not fully understanding all the technical specs currently. But with BTC-TC who's winding down and the current developement/tools/knowledge is it possible to offer an elegant prototype solution to handle shares of an asset over the bitcoin protocol/with mastercoin protocol within a few weeks ? It's a good timing to do so I think because a lot of speculation are done also about the possible shutdown of the 2 others important securities exchanges which are Bitfunder and Havelock. And without these exchanges, a lot of people are afraid to hold only bags of non-existing shares.

With what happened to Btc-tc and the SEC inquiries, that would be a KILLER feature in a perfect timing (and very profitable).

Hmmm. A lot of people seem to be excited about this feature of MasterCoin.

I went ahead and bumped it up a few places in the list of project milestones: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=265488.msg2841329#msg2841329

Now it's listed right after distributed currency exchange. Once we've got the distributed exchange going, we can jump right into Smart Property (which allows for creation of IPOs, which should just seemlessly work with the distributed exchange logic.

Thanks for the idea!

[ASICSRUS]

That looks beautiful

A full  MasterCoin wallet will eventually have to support display of dozens and dozens of currencies (and smart properties). Most users may not care about Test MasterCoins right now, but handling both coins is a good way to start thinking about the UI needed for all those kinds of coins.

why don't you answer me , will current "Mastercoins" aka MST get wiped out or are you planning a buyout of sorts?   thank you looks like you are keeping busy here

Why would you even think that would happen?

I own Mastercoins and here we have you guys "the real Mastercoin" lol i heard about this on Let's talk bitcoins and sounds legit i'm just pointing out something i find as a major issue, apart from the concept here which i support and find interesting!=) easyyyy

[lishbtc]

I don't think the 'other' Mastercoin is of particular concern, I don't think anyone is taking it seriously - even the logo is quite literally the (no doubt copyrighted) Mastercard logo with the 'card' cut off lol

[maxmint]

I agree that with the shutdown of BTCT it would be perfect timing for Mastercoin to come up with a smart propery feature. Share issuers are actively looking for new ways to do their business, e.g. the issuer of RSM is reaching out here on Google groups.

Also, I want to bring attention to this posting about colored coins / smart property.
The OP killerstorm about Mastercoin:

To progress faster, we need more developers.

But not just more developers, we need developers who can participate in design of protocols and architecture, who have opinion on various design considerations, and who can make decisions on their own.

Even though we do have several developers now (working in their free time, i.e. after the day job, on weekends, etc), but only I'm responsible for all planning, design architecture, etc. So it is the bottleneck: when I'm not making a progress, project isn't making a progress.

So in the light of btct.co announcement, it is a pressing issue now. It might be a good opportunity for issuers to switch to colored coins, but software isn't ready yet, and if we won't increase development speed, it will be too late.

There are many competing projects, for example, Bitshare, Freimarkets, Mastercoin.

But with colored coins we had almost-working software back in January of 2013, and design was reviewed by many people, so it might be the best thing to deploy quickly.

Also colored coins is one of few projects which allows trading in Bitcoins directly, with no reliance on 3rd parties.

The only other one I'm aware of is Mastercoin, but Mastercoin's design is often criticized as being immature.

I think that this topic should be priority #1 right now – because Mastercoin could solve a burning problem.
J.R., would it be possible to fund a special developer force to work on this?

[ninjaboon]

I'm not fully understanding all the technical specs currently. But with BTC-TC who's winding down and the current developement/tools/knowledge is it possible to offer an elegant prototype solution to handle shares of an asset over the bitcoin protocol/with mastercoin protocol within a few weeks ? It's a good timing to do so I think because a lot of speculation are done also about the possible shutdown of the 2 others important securities exchanges which are Bitfunder and Havelock. And without these exchanges, a lot of people are afraid to hold only bags of non-existing shares.

With what happened to Btc-tc and the SEC inquiries, that would be a KILLER feature in a perfect timing (and very profitable).

If I got a Bitcoin for every speculation suggested....

And the Q on smart assets. Definitely demands some attention.

[Loozik]

Dacoinmaster,

Would it be possible to create a short video (and post it on YT) that would explain in simple English what your project is about? My gut feeling is telling me it is something big, but I can't conceptualize it. Pictures would be welcome explaining how e.g. this decentralized exchange would work. Seeing a picture will help understand your project more than words. Pictures stay in brain for a longer time.

The reason I ask for this that I am neither a good speaker of English (which is a minor problem), but I am also a non-techie (which is a bigger problem).

Let me give you an example of a non-techie level: when you speak that Mastercoin protocol is a higher level protocol built upon Bitcoin protocol and you give the example of http built upon tcp/ip, then I neither have a clue of tcp/ip is nor have knowledge what http is (except for I use http everyday - but I have no clue what it is - it is too abstract).

Thanks

[Ola]

Dacoinmaster,

Would it be possible to create a short video (and post it on YT) that would explain in simple English what your project is about? My gut feeling is telling me it is something big, but I can't conceptualize it. Pictures would be welcome explaining how e.g. this decentralized exchange would work. Seeing a picture will help understand your project more than words. Pictures stay in brain for a longer time.

The reason I ask for this that I am neither a good speaker of English (which is a minor problem), but I am also a non-techie (which is a bigger problem).

Let me give you an example of a non-techie level: when you speak that Mastercoin protocol is a higher level protocol built upon Bitcoin protocol and you give the example of http built upon tcp/ip, then I neither have a clue of tcp/ip is nor have knowledge what http is (except for I use http everyday - but I have no clue what it is - it is too abstract).

Thanks

I already proposed this...I guess Its not the priority right now. Non techies and outsiders looking in would just have to guess what the project is about...

[ASICSRUS]

"... I don't think anyone is taking it seriously.."

cryptsy/BigVern does he added it to the exchange ~ first to file !!!=) +fwiw~>i for one am an investor in MST (Mastercoin) !!!   eZ^

[dacoinminster]

I agree that with the shutdown of BTCT it would be perfect timing for Mastercoin to come up with a smart propery feature. Share issuers are actively looking for new ways to do their business, e.g. the issuer of RSM is reaching out here on Google groups.

Also, I want to bring attention to this posting about colored coins / smart property.
The OP killerstorm about Mastercoin:

To progress faster, we need more developers.

But not just more developers, we need developers who can participate in design of protocols and architecture, who have opinion on various design considerations, and who can make decisions on their own.

Even though we do have several developers now (working in their free time, i.e. after the day job, on weekends, etc), but only I'm responsible for all planning, design architecture, etc. So it is the bottleneck: when I'm not making a progress, project isn't making a progress.

So in the light of btct.co announcement, it is a pressing issue now. It might be a good opportunity for issuers to switch to colored coins, but software isn't ready yet, and if we won't increase development speed, it will be too late.

There are many competing projects, for example, Bitshare, Freimarkets, Mastercoin.

But with colored coins we had almost-working software back in January of 2013, and design was reviewed by many people, so it might be the best thing to deploy quickly.

Also colored coins is one of few projects which allows trading in Bitcoins directly, with no reliance on 3rd parties.

The only other one I'm aware of is Mastercoin, but Mastercoin's design is often criticized as being immature.

I think that this topic should be priority #1 right now – because Mastercoin could solve a burning problem.
J.R., would it be possible to fund a special developer force to work on this?

This begs the question, isn't the intention for this project to find independent leadership? J.R., you've made it clear that Mastercoin takes a priority below many other things in your life. Shouldn't the big hustle be in finding a project manager so there can be effective structure and direction brought to the development? I realize this is partly the purpose of the coding contest, but are any other steps being taken to find talent?

I've been discussing this with the board regularly. We're not sure if we'll be able to negotiate for and find the right full-time hire, but we ARE committed to spending more project money to spur development forward at the maximum possible pace.

I expect that once the coding contest is finished on 10/15, we will immediately launch another contest. The next one will probably have a bigger prize, and will be awarded once we reach the next major project milestone rather than on a specific date. Distribution rules will be similar to the current contest (rewarding wide participation and collaboration), as that incentive structure seems to be working really well (although most contestants seem to be motivated more by working on something awesome than getting paid).

Now that we know how we will be storing data in the block chain for advanced features, the next major milestone is distributed exchange. Once we have that exchange running between bitcoin and MasterCoin, we'll have a foundation upon which to create and trade smart properties for IPOs and and other property.

I'll be handing out a LOT of money over the next few months. I'm hoping that the project milestones will fall at a rate of about one per month. You can see the list of milestones here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=265488.msg2841329#msg2841329

If I'm right about one milestone per month, our community will be issuing and trading MasterCoin-derived properties like company IPOs by the end of the year. It could happen considerably sooner - it all depends on how much time our coders can commit to new feature development.

I agree that smart property has the potential to be the first "killer app" for MasterCoin, and implementing it could cause MasterCoin prices to explode upwards.

[dacoinminster]

Dacoinmaster,

Would it be possible to create a short video (and post it on YT) that would explain in simple English what your project is about? My gut feeling is telling me it is something big, but I can't conceptualize it. Pictures would be welcome explaining how e.g. this decentralized exchange would work. Seeing a picture will help understand your project more than words. Pictures stay in brain for a longer time.

The reason I ask for this that I am neither a good speaker of English (which is a minor problem), but I am also a non-techie (which is a bigger problem).

Let me give you an example of a non-techie level: when you speak that Mastercoin protocol is a higher level protocol built upon Bitcoin protocol and you give the example of http built upon tcp/ip, then I neither have a clue of tcp/ip is nor have knowledge what http is (except for I use http everyday - but I have no clue what it is - it is too abstract).

Thanks

It is possible to understand the potential of this project without understanding the technology, but you DO have to have a pretty good grasp of how markets work to understand the explosive potential of MasterCoin. You also need to be able to understand the limitations of bitcoin as it is today.

Putting on my marketing hat for a moment:

Somebody with a background in trading stocks and other assets will immediately grasp how groundbreaking it is to have distributed, unregulated exchange between assets, and the ability to pseudo-anonymously (as anonymous as bitcoin can get) place bets on real-world assets. There is an UNBELIEVABLE amount of money waiting for something like this, and only ~600k MasterCoins.

If, on top of all that, the escrow-backed currencies work as I expect, the real-world applications for distributed currencies with stable values would make MasterCoins yet another order of magnitude more valuable.

The difficulty of understanding the potential of MasterCoin is not a limitation of technical understanding, but a limitation of understanding how markets work (and how freakishly big they are), and a limitation of imagination.

Our ~600k MasterCoins are worth about 12000 BTC at current prices (about $1.5M). MasterCoins don't have a huge market cap right now because there are also a lot of risks. A TON of very real risks from numerous sources (potential competitors, technical risks, security risks, etc). However, I believe we are on track so far to overcome those risks.

Can anybody else add to that marketing pitch?

[ASICSRUS]

Dacoinmaster,

Would it be possible to create a short video (and post it on YT) that would explain in simple English what your project is about? My gut feeling is telling me it is something big, but I can't conceptualize it. Pictures would be welcome explaining how e.g. this decentralized exchange would work. Seeing a picture will help understand your project more than words. Pictures stay in brain for a longer time.

The reason I ask for this that I am neither a good speaker of English (which is a minor problem), but I am also a non-techie (which is a bigger problem).

Let me give you an example of a non-techie level: when you speak that Mastercoin protocol is a higher level protocol built upon Bitcoin protocol and you give the example of http built upon tcp/ip, then I neither have a clue of tcp/ip is nor have knowledge what http is (except for I use http everyday - but I have no clue what it is - it is too abstract).

Thanks

It is possible to understand the potential of this project without understanding the technology, but you DO have to have a pretty good grasp of how markets work to understand the explosive potential of MasterCoin. You also need to be able to understand the limitations of bitcoin as it is today.

Putting on my marketing hat for a moment:

Somebody with a background in trading stocks and other assets will immediately grasp how groundbreaking it is to have distributed, unregulated exchange between assets, and the ability to pseudo-anonymously (as anonymous as bitcoin can get) place bets on real-world assets. There is an UNBELIEVABLE amount of money waiting for something like this, and only ~600k MasterCoins.

If, on top of all that, the escrow-backed currencies work as I expect, the real-world applications for distributed currencies with stable values would make MasterCoins yet another order of magnitude more valuable.

The difficulty of understanding the potential of MasterCoin is not a limitation of technical understanding, but a limitation of understanding how markets work (and how freakishly big they are), and a limitation of imagination.

Our ~600k MasterCoins are worth about 12000 BTC at current prices (about $1.5M). MasterCoins don't have a huge market cap right now because there are also a lot of risks. A TON of very real risks from numerous sources (potential competitors, technical risks, security risks, etc). However, I believe we are on track so far to overcome those risks.

Can anybody else add to that marketing pitch?

my team watching closely and yes WE will regulate per established pinkie/OTC standards!  weeeeeeee

[dacoinminster]

You guys might find this post I made in the colored coins mailing list about thin clients interesting:

I haven't been following these threads closely enough, but this one caught my eye.

Meni is absolutely correct about MasterCoin transactions - they can be created by anyone, even people who don't own MasterCoins. That's why mastercoin-explorer.com and masterchest.info both have a valid/invalid flag on every transaction. (I didn't specify that they do that - they came up with that on their own).

My expectation (mentioned on the MasterCoin project thread today) is that MasterCoin will support creating IPOs and other property, as well as the distributed trading of such property by the end of the year. It appears that we are moving toward a model where transactions are created (and value is stored) on user PCs, and the state of the network is displayed on various websites which have the whole block chain and interpret it according to MasterCoin transaction rules. This separation is needed due to the long-term inability of MasterCoin to do full-featured thin clients, which Alex has mentioned in several places. Our "thin clients" will probably follow that same model, but with tighter integration with available web services.

However, MasterCoin can never do a trust-free thin client like colored coins can. The best we can hope for is having multiple websites giving us the state of the network so we hopefully don't have to trust one website completely.

[dacoinminster]

Please note: I will be completely offline (and not even reachable by phone) tomorrow through Sunday. I'm online for a few more hours today, so if you need something from me, make sure you PM me soon. Otherwise, I'll be back online Monday. I look forward to seeing what you guys come up with over the weekend!

While I'm gone, I'm relying on you guys to answer each others questions, as you have done in the past

[dacoinminster]

In a conversation with the board, I was asked how companies who IPO using MasterCoin can pay dividends. My response:

You are right that many people will use the smart property to create IPOs and pay dividends. I haven't explicitly put dividends into the spec, although it would be trivial to do so. Someone owning a lot of MasterCoins could then publish a message like "I hearby pay 500 MasterCoins to be distributed to all holders of currency ID XYZ" (which could be a user issued stock). The protocol would then recognize those MasterCoins as distributed among the owners of that stock.

I'll mention this dividends idea on the project thread.

Expect to see such a "pay everyone holding currency X" message in the next rev of the spec!