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

[vokain]

Michael is a proven thought leader in the bitcoin space

What the hell is a 'thought leader'?  How does one distinguish a 'proven thought leader' from an 'unproven thought leader'?  This is exactly the sort of crap that annoys me to no end.  "If you are disrupting an existing industry by applying new Bitcoin technology..."  'disrupting' - the coolest overused buzzword of the year.  This crap is all warm-fuzzy-gooey hype.  It won't help attract brains.  Brains don't respond to that sort of nonsense.  Brains filter those silly cool buzzwords right out.  

However, as Terpin appears indeed to be close to bitcoin - and has a track record of similar hype projects, I guess he is well positioned to generate some good will.  I like the notion that in 3 months if the board does consider the result productive they can bail.  Further, as JR has been won over by this proposal...  I, as the project's biggest PR skeptic would concede to this arrangement being approved.  If there is to be a committee to review the results - I'd like to be appointed to it.  Someone with a bit of critical eye should carefully consider what kind of response this activity is generating.  

A "thought leader" can frame people's perception upon reading a piece towards a desired constructive outcome.
http://venturebeat.com/2013/10/18/bitcoins-road-from-perdition-what-will-hurt-and-help-the-controversial-digital-currency/

FWIR, this article directs the reader (in this case, the entrepreneurial audience of VentureBeat) towards problems/market voids that should see development and investment. A technical entrepreneur might read this and say, "Hey, I never was aware of this problem before, maybe I should start working on that!"

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[prophetx]

I'm happy to report that the first distributed Mastercoin to Bitcoin transaction using the Mastercoin protocol has been done.

Congrats Tachikoma, this is just awesome! It's just incredible how fast this is evolving.
Is the "Create new Selling offer" tool on your site already functional for public use?

In theory, yes. I used this myself to create the transactions. It does require some knowledge of bitcoind/qt command-line though, I've written some instructions here if you want to give it a go. Also remember I'm only allowing test Mastercoin transactions. However the Bitcoin you are using to send the messages is always real so be careful you are not using high values for your offers if you decide to create one.

hey Tachikoma,

I am thinking to make this into a tutorial and put it in the next weekly update, so that you get some more exposure and people test this out.

I would suggest that you add in a feedback or bug/issue button somewhere that goes to your github repo so that if people try this out and have problems they can note it in there.

i am going to try this out tomorrow myself, you might hear from me if I get stuck

Awesome idea. People do need to realise though that these Selling/Purchase offers might be invalidated if we need to change the spec a bit. So when testing always use tiny amounts of Bitcoins as selling value since if you do a 'real' trade your Bitcoins won't be returned to you.

I hope to find some time this weekend to implement Purchase/Selling offers into my Wallet software. This should make the whole process much easier.

i thought we can use testnet bitcoins for this right? or am i wrong? (sorry if I am out of loop just have not looked at it yet)

sounds like we need to buy test mastercoins with real bitcoins?

[Tachikoma]

You can't use test Bitcoins, sadly. I've lobbied to get an official Exodus on testnet but so far it has not happened yet.

[mah87]

Some criticism:
"One of "mastercoin"'s problems is you can never have thin clients/SPV clients, etc. Each client has to be able to process and index the entire 8GB bitcoin blockchain in order to not be fooled or double-spent. Another issue is that mastercoin is centrally controlled by one party, all issued by one public key they call the "exodus address". There are quite a few technical issues with the whole approach mastercoin takes and it doesn't look to be feasible.

A more workable solution is presented by Freimarkets http://freico.in/docs/freimarkets-v0.0.1.pdf by long-time rippler Jorge Timon and Mark Friedenbach. Freimarkets will allow transitive "ripple" transactions, but it will be a fork from the bitcoin blockchain.

For a practical colored-coin implementation that uses the bitcoin blockchain (any solution that does so must make certain sacrifices) but does not suffer the defects of mastercoin, see the "bitcoinx" project that Alex Mizrahi leads at http://www.bitcoinx.org/. BitcoinX also does not support ripple-style transactions."

"Mastercoin is built as a layer on top of Bitcoin, so it doesn't have any specific transactions. Instead the upper level information is tucked into invalid inputs and outputs.
Since it's riding Bitcoin, it has all the drawbacks of Bitcoin: creepy slow, limited bandwidth due to fixed block size, arbitrary high transaction fee, centralized with two or three ASIC makers holding most of the network power including two Chinese companies...
And as a truly parasitic relationship it is going to harm a lot Bitcoin by spamming the blockchain and sucking all the bandwidth which will lead to further adjustments of the fees which will harm Mastercoin in turn...
The absolute most stupid thing is that Mastercoin allows anyone to mint custom currencies. This is going to be a mega spam party...

Mastercoin was built on top of Bitcoin because DaCoinMinster saw how alt coins are victim of ideological exclusion in the community and how Bitcoiners are inflexible fanatics. It's going to be a good learning for them.
We all know that Bitcoin needs small transactions to move off-chain if we don't want shit to hit the fan in the near future when adoption rate takes off. But instead of that Mastercoin brings more in-chain bloat at a whole new scale.

Mastercoin's success will be Bitcoin's Nemesis."

[murraypaul]

You can't use test Bitcoins, sadly. I've lobbied to get an official Exodus on testnet but so far it has not happened yet.

Can't you just create one?
Pick an address, and say that any Test Bitcoins sent to that get allocated Test Mastercoins, and go from there?
As long as one address is agreed by the different developers testing their software, and they all agree that those transactions do create test mastercoins, I don't see it needs any more official sanction than that?

[prophetx]

You can't use test Bitcoins, sadly. I've lobbied to get an official Exodus on testnet but so far it has not happened yet.

+1 

i'll upvote that one

[Tachikoma]

It's harder then it sounds. For one I want J.R. to be in control of of the private key for this address. Also we need a consensus about the way MSC on testnet are bought. Further more we will need to adjust our code to support both nets, testnet and realnet and also preferable host different versions of Mastercoin explorer for both nets.  

I rather spend time coding up new Mastercoin functions then work on a testnet version. It's fairly easy to create Selling Offers for a few cents so we can work around the problem.

[dacoinminster]

Another issue is that mastercoin is centrally controlled by one party, all issued by one public key they call the "exodus address".

MasterCoin is not centrally controlled. This is simply a misunderstanding of how MSC works.

Mastercoin was built on top of Bitcoin because DaCoinMinster saw how alt coins are victim of ideological exclusion in the community and how Bitcoiners are inflexible fanatics. It's going to be a good learning for them.
We all know that Bitcoin needs small transactions to move off-chain if we don't want shit to hit the fan in the near future when adoption rate takes off. But instead of that Mastercoin brings more in-chain bloat at a whole new scale.

Mastercoin's success will be Bitcoin's Nemesis."

This was from the Ripple forum. They are a little sore that bitcoin people don't like Ripple. The bias against alt coins IS part of the reason I chose to build on top of bitcoin. I also share that bias

Bitcoin should be able to scale as needed to handle a high volume of MSC transactions in the near term. If bitcoin can't scale in the long term, we'll have to migrate to another block chain. (yeah, it's possible)

[mah87]

Another issue is that mastercoin is centrally controlled by one party, all issued by one public key they call the "exodus address".

MasterCoin is not centrally controlled. This is simply a misunderstanding of how MSC works.

Mastercoin was built on top of Bitcoin because DaCoinMinster saw how alt coins are victim of ideological exclusion in the community and how Bitcoiners are inflexible fanatics. It's going to be a good learning for them.
We all know that Bitcoin needs small transactions to move off-chain if we don't want shit to hit the fan in the near future when adoption rate takes off. But instead of that Mastercoin brings more in-chain bloat at a whole new scale.

Mastercoin's success will be Bitcoin's Nemesis."

This was from the Ripple forum. They are a little sore that bitcoin people don't like Ripple. The bias against alt coins IS part of the reason I chose to build on top of bitcoin. I also share that bias

Bitcoin should be able to scale as needed to handle a high volume of MSC transactions in the near term. If bitcoin can't scale in the long term, we'll have to migrate to another block chain. (yeah, it's possible)

what do you think about ripple ? Do you think it's a competitor for mastercoin ?

[klee]

Another issue is that mastercoin is centrally controlled by one party, all issued by one public key they call the "exodus address".

MasterCoin is not centrally controlled. This is simply a misunderstanding of how MSC works.

Mastercoin was built on top of Bitcoin because DaCoinMinster saw how alt coins are victim of ideological exclusion in the community and how Bitcoiners are inflexible fanatics. It's going to be a good learning for them.
We all know that Bitcoin needs small transactions to move off-chain if we don't want shit to hit the fan in the near future when adoption rate takes off. But instead of that Mastercoin brings more in-chain bloat at a whole new scale.

Mastercoin's success will be Bitcoin's Nemesis."

This was from the Ripple forum. They are a little sore that bitcoin people don't like Ripple. The bias against alt coins IS part of the reason I chose to build on top of bitcoin. I also share that bias

Bitcoin should be able to scale as needed to handle a high volume of MSC transactions in the near term. If bitcoin can't scale in the long term, we'll have to migrate to another block chain. (yeah, it's possible)

Migrate? Wow, so much flexibility...

[prophetx]

You can't use test Bitcoins, sadly. I've lobbied to get an official Exodus on testnet but so far it has not happened yet.

another question, which is more helpful for you:

a)  make a new thread on the project dev forum for people to post their test exchange transactions and offers, and issues they encounter

or

b) have people post issues to https://github.com/maran/mastercoin-explorer/issues/new

[dacoinminster]

what do you think about ripple ? Do you think it's a competitor for mastercoin ?

I think that Ripple is a powerful idea that has been badly mismanaged, and yes, it competes with MSC. Their focus on Peter owes Paul owes Sam owes Jake debt chains causes their true killer features to get lost in the noise. Nobody cares about collapsing debt chains, but distributed exchange is incredibly important. Perhaps they have fixed this marketing snafu (I haven't checked lately).

I also disagree with their XRP distribution model, and I am doubtful about the case for long-term appreciation of that currency. (Trivia: the MasterCoin giveaway thread was funded with MSC purchased with BTC I got for selling XRP I received from an early Ripple giveaway)

Finally, I think their system is way too complex, not sufficiently decentralized, not sufficiently open source (this may have changed since last I looked), and not flexible enough for other cool things people want to do with distributed currencies.

Other than that, I love Ripple.

[dacoinminster]

Notice of proposed expenditure: 1BTC to prophetX at 1GFC6Kc1UiH8m48EPCFpK7j8Cs9hbyyF55 for his two blog posts so far

ProphetX, can you please publicly confirm this address?

Thanks!

[mah87]

what do you think about ripple ? Do you think it's a competitor for mastercoin ?

I think that Ripple is a powerful idea that has been badly mismanaged, and yes, it competes with MSC. Their focus on Peter owes Paul owes Sam owes Jake debt chains causes their true killer features to get lost in the noise. Nobody cares about collapsing debt chains, but distributed exchange is incredibly important. Perhaps they have fixed this marketing snafu (I haven't checked lately).

I also disagree with their XRP distribution model, and I am doubtful about the case for long-term appreciation of that currency. (Trivia: the MasterCoin giveaway thread was funded with MSC purchased with BTC I got for selling XRP I received from an early Ripple giveaway)

Finally, I think their system is way too complex, not sufficiently decentralized, not sufficiently open source (this may have changed since last I looked), and not flexible enough for other cool things people want to do with distributed currencies.

Other than that, I love Ripple.

You should check it again. Totally open-source since a month . I agree they are not good at communicating but their main aim is not bitcoin community but exchange platform like zipzap and future gateways. With more gateways and nodes the ripple network will be  distributed enough to be fair and honest.

New features are coming with "contracts". I don't think it's too complex, it can easily be integrated and someone could use a ripple wallet without even know about it. About flexibility I couldn't really tell I'm not competent enough to say.


XRP distribution model is particular but you don't need xrp to use ripple network (mm ok actually you need less than 1$ to fund a wallet...). About long-term appreciation I think it may appreciate if the network find more gateways and plateforms that use ripple. Otherwise it may also disappear (just like bitcoin or mastercoin actually since there's not real economy backing them).

[dacoinminster]

You should check it again. Totally open-source since a month . I agree they are not good at communicating but their main aim is not bitcoin community but exchange platform like zipzap and future gateways. With more gateways and nodes the ripple network will be  distributed enough to be fair and honest.

New features are coming with "contracts". I don't think it's too complex, it can easily be integrated and someone could use a ripple wallet without even know about it. About flexibility I couldn't really tell I'm not competent enough to say.


XRP distribution model is particular but you don't need xrp to use ripple network (mm ok actually you need less than 1$ to fund a wallet...). About long-term appreciation I think it may appreciate if the network find more gateways and plateforms that use ripple. Otherwise it may also disappear (just like bitcoin or mastercoin actually since there's not real economy backing them).

Interesting. I'll have to look into Ripple Contracts (to see if it's an idea MasterCoin should steal  )

[mah87]

You should check it again. Totally open-source since a month . I agree they are not good at communicating but their main aim is not bitcoin community but exchange platform like zipzap and future gateways. With more gateways and nodes the ripple network will be  distributed enough to be fair and honest.

New features are coming with "contracts". I don't think it's too complex, it can easily be integrated and someone could use a ripple wallet without even know about it. About flexibility I couldn't really tell I'm not competent enough to say.


XRP distribution model is particular but you don't need xrp to use ripple network (mm ok actually you need less than 1$ to fund a wallet...). About long-term appreciation I think it may appreciate if the network find more gateways and plateforms that use ripple. Otherwise it may also disappear (just like bitcoin or mastercoin actually since there's not real economy backing them).

Interesting. I'll have to look into Ripple Contracts (to see if it's an idea MasterCoin should steal   )

I'm a ripple fan but you should probably steal that =p

I think that if mastercoin succeed it will stay inside a kinda "closed" crypto-world while some more FIAT friendly system like ripple will rule the woOOOoOOOoooOOOOOooooold

[vokain]

You should check it again. Totally open-source since a month . I agree they are not good at communicating but their main aim is not bitcoin community but exchange platform like zipzap and future gateways. With more gateways and nodes the ripple network will be  distributed enough to be fair and honest.

New features are coming with "contracts". I don't think it's too complex, it can easily be integrated and someone could use a ripple wallet without even know about it. About flexibility I couldn't really tell I'm not competent enough to say.


XRP distribution model is particular but you don't need xrp to use ripple network (mm ok actually you need less than 1$ to fund a wallet...). About long-term appreciation I think it may appreciate if the network find more gateways and plateforms that use ripple. Otherwise it may also disappear (just like bitcoin or mastercoin actually since there's not real economy backing them).

Interesting. I'll have to look into Ripple Contracts (to see if it's an idea MasterCoin should steal   )

I'm a ripple fan but you should probably steal that =p

I think that if mastercoin succeed it will stay inside a kinda "closed" crypto-world while some more FIAT friendly system like ripple will rule the woOOOoOOOoooOOOOOooooold

at least, til crypto rules the woOOOoOOOoooOOOOOooooold!!

[dacoinminster]

Interesting. I'll have to look into Ripple Contracts (to see if it's an idea MasterCoin should steal   )

I'm a ripple fan but you should probably steal that =p

So. Ripple Contracts: https://ripple.com/wiki/Contracts

Specifically, here are the proposed contract types:

Here are some example use cases (bold ones are worked out):

    Subscriptions
    Time Release Escrow coins and then have them time release
    XRP Auction Auction for XRP that escrows all the bids
    Bonds (I don't think there isn't much reason for us to support these. They require the bond holder to trust the issuer so they might as well just work it out outside of our system.)
    Bond Auction
    Nickname exchange offer
    Kickstarter transaction only completes if it reaches a certain balance
    Escrow
    M of N accounts?
    Private box
    Multi-stage transaction
    Invoices (Someone remind me what the point of these are?)
    Auction

From that list, I think that native support in MasterCoin for kickstarters would be cool, and subscription support might be interesting to do at some point. When we do distributed e-commerce, we might want to add support for auctions too.

I might add something to the spec about this stuff at some point. I'm interested in any opinions from you guys if you see features on that list that we can't live without?

[prophetx]

Notice of proposed expenditure: 1BTC to prophetX at 1GFC6Kc1UiH8m48EPCFpK7j8Cs9hbyyF55 for his two blog posts so far

ProphetX, can you please publicly confirm this address?

Thanks!

yes please use this address, and thank you!

[Luckybit]

There will never be more MasterCoins, unless the MasterCoin protocol gets hard-forked. Potentially anybody could do such a hard fork, and if it happened, people would have to decide if they wanted to stay or to join the new fork.

So far the price of BTC has risen faster than we can spend it, so we actually have a lot more money now than when we started, even though we've spent quite a bit. Of course, that could always change if BTC crashes, as it has been known to do. Because of that possibility, I'm a tightwad on a lot of things. Just ask the board - we're currently discussing whether we should hire a very prestigious PR firm who is offering us a discount and offering to take payment in BTC/MSC because they are hugely into what we are doing. However, it's still a LOT of money, and I'm looking at cheaper alternatives before we commit.

I hate PR firms and the notion of hyping this thing up.  Let's just make the damn thing work really well.  That will bring more users than 50 PR firms.  Why spend 'a LOT' of money telling people about how great this is.  Why not just let them find out on their own accord.  This is accomplished for free the day we make the system highly functional.  Putting pretty paint on it won't get us to the finish line any faster.  Forget the PR and the hype.  We don't need that.  We need to focus on a kick-ass solution that just works.  The rest will take care of itself.  

I've already emphasized the point you've made before to the board that I do not want patting-ourselves-on-the-back self-congratulatory sort of PR but moreso to engineer a framing that would attract human investment ie developers so that we could accelerate the goal of "make[ing] the system highly functional"

The PR needs to focus on explaining the concepts to technical minds one concept at a time.
Start with the escrow, make a video explaining it, let JR give an interview on Slashdot and in the link have the video explaining the concept of the user currencies operating through the escrow.

But basically you have to explain something like this one concept at a time, through videos showing visual illustrations of the concept. That is how most of us learned about Bitcoin. The whitepaper and the video combined with interviews.

Finally the really technical stuff needs to be explained too, like what is the exodus address and what are type B transactions? What is a protocol layer? All that has to be explained to the technical types who want endless details via a wiki.

You should check it again. Totally open-source since a month . I agree they are not good at communicating but their main aim is not bitcoin community but exchange platform like zipzap and future gateways. With more gateways and nodes the ripple network will be  distributed enough to be fair and honest.

New features are coming with "contracts". I don't think it's too complex, it can easily be integrated and someone could use a ripple wallet without even know about it. About flexibility I couldn't really tell I'm not competent enough to say.


XRP distribution model is particular but you don't need xrp to use ripple network (mm ok actually you need less than 1$ to fund a wallet...). About long-term appreciation I think it may appreciate if the network find more gateways and plateforms that use ripple. Otherwise it may also disappear (just like bitcoin or mastercoin actually since there's not real economy backing them).

Interesting. I'll have to look into Ripple Contracts (to see if it's an idea MasterCoin should steal   )

https://ripple.com/wiki/Contracts#Example_Contracts

Smart contracts. It would make sense if Mastercoin has smart contract functionality. There are plenty of ideas on that such as mechanisms for time lock puzzles for use as a time release coin mechanism. I would guess this would be necessary to have expiration dates? Anyway I think it is something essential when the time comes so it should be on the to do list but to find out the different types of contracts which would be necessary perhaps we should set aside a thread just for brainstorming anything which isn't already on that list and then vote on the top contract ideas so that we have some quantification of the demand of the can't live without features. 

You should check it again. Totally open-source since a month . I agree they are not good at communicating but their main aim is not bitcoin community but exchange platform like zipzap and future gateways. With more gateways and nodes the ripple network will be  distributed enough to be fair and honest.

New features are coming with "contracts". I don't think it's too complex, it can easily be integrated and someone could use a ripple wallet without even know about it. About flexibility I couldn't really tell I'm not competent enough to say.


XRP distribution model is particular but you don't need xrp to use ripple network (mm ok actually you need less than 1$ to fund a wallet...). About long-term appreciation I think it may appreciate if the network find more gateways and plateforms that use ripple. Otherwise it may also disappear (just like bitcoin or mastercoin actually since there's not real economy backing them).

Interesting. I'll have to look into Ripple Contracts (to see if it's an idea MasterCoin should steal   )

I'm a ripple fan but you should probably steal that =p

I think that if mastercoin succeed it will stay inside a kinda "closed" crypto-world while some more FIAT friendly system like ripple will rule the woOOOoOOOoooOOOOOooooold

The exact opposite. For Mastercoin to succeed it has to free itself from the closed crypto world and become a FIAT friendly system. Mastercoin has to get value from the real world and not the virtual world.

If ripple has any use, it will be as a bridge to allow easier transport of Fiat value into Crypto. That's given a lot of if's. If it overcomes the stigma of adopting so many failing features of fiat, if it proves to be secure (It's code has NOT proven itself in any way as of yet), if it can become completely decentralized and trust free, if people will accept that there was a 100 Billion unit pre-mine and Ripple/Opencoin will be keeping most of them, If people don't just go to a BTC ATM (Which they will prefer to do, and we can expect a network of these can simplify the moving of value globally via BTC) or other simple and familiar system. If, if, if, if, if. And even if all those if's weren't, then the bridge will still burn when the value is mostly transported and it becomes redundant. This includes any outlying features. Especially if projects are building it fully integrated or more tightly bound to Bitcoin (Mastercoin, Coloured Coins, etc.). Why use two systems, esp considering all of these if's? With that said, competition and a diverse ecosystem is good. It keeps everyone sharp and innovating. So I wish Ripple all the best.

Mastercoin does not need Ripple to get fiat value and it does not need Bitcoin to get fiat value. The best way for Mastercoin to get fiat value is through direct transfer of fiat into Mastercoin. Anything else and it defies logic.

The Bitcoin ATM will be a good way for fiat value to get into Bitcoin and if that can work then it's probably open source and a patch can be released to allow it to transfer fiat into Mastercoin really easily. So the ATM machines are part of the solution certainly.

The other way is to just sell Mastercoin cards. These could be gift cards which contain Mastercoins. These could be sold just like prepaid credit cards too if necessary but they are in a user currency and backed by Mastercoins. So I don't think there will be any problem getting fiat value into Mastercoin once it's worth enough money to do so. Some business will form to do it just as we have gyft right now which is supporting Bitcoin.