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

[ripper234]

This is something I can help out with, keep me updated on what needs to be documented and on the contest. I will contribute to this when/if I get the chance to.

Updates will go over the Trello ticket.

Will keep watch and pitch in some hours once I get this rid of this flu.

I hope you feel better soon!



I wanted to let everyone know we now have an official Masercoin Opportunities Thread
Bounties and job openings will be posted there, to make it easier for people looking to contribute.

I'll also quote by publishing one new position and one new bounty:

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.

I would like to use this chance to announce a new position and a new bounty:

Security Auditor
https://trello.com/c/FDNNdZ5H/24-security-auditor

We are looking for someone to become Mastercoin's official security auditor.
This person needs to come with the highest credentials possible.

He will own the task of auditing the spec, various clients and infrastructure components.
He will also be responsible for setting up various bounties for detecting security related bugs.

Price Charts website AKA Mastercoincharts
https://trello.com/c/MmaWrEZu/25-mastercoincharts-price-charts

Mastercoin already has some price history, and soon we'll have the distributed exchange and a real price history.

This bounty goes to developing this site. Note that the site will need to support multiple currency pairs and other asset types ... you should start with BTC/MSC at first.

[Tachikoma]

Price Charts website AKA Mastercoincharts
https://trello.com/c/MmaWrEZu/25-mastercoincharts-price-charts

Mastercoin already has some price history, and soon we'll have the distributed exchange and a real price history.

This bounty goes to developing this site. Note that the site will need to support multiple currency pairs and other asset types ... you should start with BTC/MSC at first.

FYI, this is already coded up, but not online yet on mastercoin-explorer. There is nothing really interesting to see yet so I haven't put it online. As soon as we have some transactions going on I will make them visible.

[zbx]

It can only be decoded by trying to decode the transaction as a Mastercoin transaction. If you would have to do it for every known multisig it would drastically decrease the ease you can identify Mastercoin transactions with.

Is it harder to identify a transaction as having a particular string in a multi-sig output than as having a particular string in a regular tx_out? What if MSC transactions were identifiable by the fact that the first public key in their multi-sig output was, except for the last byte, all zeros?

[Tachikoma]

Then it wouldn't be a valid ECDSA point.

[zbx]

Then it wouldn't be a valid ECDSA point.

I thought that it was decided that any arbitrary 33-byte number can, by manipulation of the last byte, be made into a valid ECDSA point.

In any case, the public key would just have to be both obviously unspendable and still a valid ECDSA point. It could be, for instance, the point on the curve in question which, when in compressed form, has the lowest numerical value. (This is just another example.)

[jawnzer]

Rough idea:

COPY(my_address, my_priv_key, copied_address)

From this moment onward, every operation done by copied_address is copied by my address, in proportion to our funds. Meaning if copied_address holds X MSC and my_address holds Y MSC, and copied_address now places a market offer to sell Z MSC, then my_address will sell Z*Y/X MSC.

This of course needs more details to account for multiple currencies and assets stored on the same address.

https://trello.com/c/MX0ZymMD/20-soec-for-events-feeds

Just thought I would post a little explanation about this feature.

Example:

Alice has 1000 MSC.
Bob has 100 MSC. Bob thinks Alice is a smart trader, and tells the decentralized Mastercoin system to just copy Alice.

Now, Alice sells 100 MSC using a market order. Immediately after this, Bob will automatically sell 10 MSC (10% of Alice's action). Let's assume for 1 BTC = 10 MSC

So now: Alice has 900 MSC and 10 BTC
Bob has 90 MSC and 1 BTC

Note that Bob was in vacation in Thailand and wasn't near his computer.

Now, let's say 1 BTC is worth 20 MSC, and Alice thinks it's a great buying opportunity. She spends 2 BTC to buy 40 MSC. Bob automatically copies this purchase.

Alice has now 940 MSC, and 8 BTC
Bob has 94 MSC and 0.8 BTC

Of course, in real life there is slippage. Bob will always get a slightly worse deal than Alice.

[rbdrbd]

Ron,

I read that the bitcoin from the Exodus address will be split among the MSC foundation member's wallets. That sounds like a good idea in general, however, do you guys have a list of specific security precautions each member is taking with these wallets? I.e. will each member be using an offline machine with Armory, or it be a totally cold wallet, etc? Maybe I missed where this is mentioned.

I will be experimenting with using Armory in offline mode to sign MSC simple send transactions, based on some tips from Tachikoma. I'll be documenting this and hopefully we can post it into the wiki or FAQ.

[Tachikoma]

Split, that could mean they are using x-out-of-y multisig.

[ripper234]

Ron,

I read that the bitcoin from the Exodus address will be split among the MSC foundation member's wallets. That sounds like a good idea in general, however, do you guys have a list of specific security precautions each member is taking with these wallets? I.e. will each member be using an offline machine with Armory, or it be a totally cold wallet, etc? Maybe I missed where this is mentioned.

I will be experimenting with using Armory in offline mode to sign MSC simple send transactions, based on some tips from Tachikoma. I'll be documenting this and hopefully we can post it into the wiki or FAQ.

We talked security among ourselves.
We haven't decided yet to make our specific security practices public.
I know this isn't the spirit of open source, but we're talking specific people here that may be at risk of mugging or legal risk.
This is why I'm ok with us being a bit secretive about our current practices.

I'll give you the long term vision.
We want to destroy ourselves.
We want every protocol itself to hold all the bitcoins.
Everything will be open, and there will be no central points whatsoever.

We're going from a centralized Willett --> Foundation --> More pen foundation --> No foundation.

[ripper234]

Split, that could mean they are using x-out-of-y multisig.

I've never done a multisig address in my life.
We're going to get there, but we need tooling, documentation and testing of multisig.

Current plan is to use the SX tools for that.
Vitalik Buterin, author of SX, is also on the team, which should help a lot with that.

Current urgent plan - split up funds manually without multisig. We'll move to multisig when we feel we're ready for that.
The trigger for the urgency is the huge spike in bitcoin prices.

[Tachikoma]

The main problem right now is that for some reason the reference client will only accept x-out-of-y where y is smaller then four. I'm guessing there are more  foundation members then three so right now that's not even an option. I really hope they lessen the restrictions on these type of transactions in the near future.

[dacoinminster]

OK - Ron has gotten about a billion balls rolling all at once, and I can't keep up.

What I can do, and did, was get most of the changes I promised ready for version 1.2 of the spec. It's a giant pull request, but I agree that future pull requests should be smaller: https://github.com/mastercoin-MSC/spec/pull/3

This version of the spec, which I labeled 1.2, has dividend payments, CFD betting, spending rate-limits for savings wallets, and distributed e-commerce. Many people will probably use the latter feature as a distributed silk road, but I used selling contraband Bibles as my example

I haven't done proof-of-stake voting yet, although that should be easy. I decided against a kickstarter feature, since someone who can be trusted to run a kickstarter can also be trusted to give the money back if the target isn't raised.

[ripper234]

OK - Ron has gotten about a billion balls rolling all at once, and I can't keep up.

Welcome back!

[ripper234]

FYI here is the full 1.2 spec on J.R's repository:

https://github.com/dacoinminster/spec

[dacoinminster]

New proposed expenditure: $1099 to Stas, the guy in charge of our Hebrew blog. Ron knows him well, so we are giving him $1000 in discretionary funds to pay him for various IT tasks he is doing for us. The other $99 is paying for the blog registration.

He wants MSC, so I'll get him some on the buyer/seller thread.

This expenditure has been approved by the board.

[ripper234]

New proposed expenditure: $1099 to Stas, the guy in charge of our Hebrew blog. Ron knows him well, so we are giving him $1000 in discretionary funds to pay him for various IT tasks he is doing for us. The other $99 is paying for the blog registration.

He wants MSC, so I'll get him some on the buyer/seller thread.

This expenditure has been approved by the board.

We need either budget.mastercoin.org or a dedicated thread for this.

https://trello.com/c/wtFdcTtl/15-build-a-budget-website

[Tachikoma]

New proposed expenditure: $1099 to Stas, the guy in charge of our Hebrew blog. Ron knows him well, so we are giving him $1000 in discretionary funds to pay him for various IT tasks he is doing for us. The other $99 is paying for the blog registration.

He wants MSC, so I'll get him some on the buyer/seller thread.

This expenditure has been approved by the board.

We need either budget.mastercoin.org or a dedicated thread for this.

https://trello.com/c/wtFdcTtl/15-build-a-budget-website

What's wrong with the Google Docs? If you can make a spec for what's needed for the website I can ask around with some developer friends if they are interested. I would do it myself but I already have a todo list that only increases in size...

[rbdrbd]

Ron,

I read that the bitcoin from the Exodus address will be split among the MSC foundation member's wallets. That sounds like a good idea in general, however, do you guys have a list of specific security precautions each member is taking with these wallets? I.e. will each member be using an offline machine with Armory, or it be a totally cold wallet, etc? Maybe I missed where this is mentioned.

I will be experimenting with using Armory in offline mode to sign MSC simple send transactions, based on some tips from Tachikoma. I'll be documenting this and hopefully we can post it into the wiki or FAQ.

We talked security among ourselves.
We haven't decided yet to make our specific security practices public.
I know this isn't the spirit of open source, but we're talking specific people here that may be at risk of mugging or legal risk.
This is why I'm ok with us being a bit secretive about our current practices.

I'll give you the long term vision.
We want to destroy ourselves.
We want every protocol itself to hold all the bitcoins.
Everything will be open, and there will be no central points whatsoever.

We're going from a centralized Willett --> Foundation --> More pen foundation --> No foundation.

That last part sounds good and I understand your reasons for the first part. I was just thinking, given that we aren't there yet, and with Willett's note that someone attempted to clickbait him a few days ago, it would be a shame to lose a big chunk of a big chunk of money. Something where a quick sane standard  (i.e. for anyone holding foundation money must either use armory offline wallet, or keep it as a totally cold/paper wallet) would go a long way. You could be open about the general technique(s) you were using at that kind of a high level to secure the funds among the foundation members (or whoever) to give confidence to the community, without having to go into details about who, what, where, etc.

Just seen too many stories of people losing tons of BTC to thieves in the last few months... would hate to see that happen here. That's all.

[W2014]

A few questions regarding the Mastercoin funds:

1) Has any thought been given to selling a small % of BTC for USD to lock in some of the gains we've made in the development funds and hedge against the risk BTC crashes? For example, let's say we have a huge run up next week and 1 BTC = $500. Or if BTC reaches $1000 in the next several months? In the latter example, would it make sense to sell 1000 BTC and put $1 million USD in the Mastercoin Foundations' bank account. I don't believe the board should engage in trading the funds on a regular basis at all, but a "one off" sale of some small % of BTC for fiat as a hedge might be something worthy of discussion.

2) Similarly, has any thought been given to paying bounties denominated in anything other than BTC or in some sort of hybrid that hedges the payment such as a combination of BTC/MSC/USD? Or is that too confusing? It seems to make sense to reward the developers with some MCS, to increase their incentive to work.

3) If the funds are being distributed amongst board members what precautions/considerations are being made for/against (i) a rogue board member misappropriating funds, (ii)  death or incapacity of a board member and (iii) security of funds? In the case of (i) is it possible to require two or more board members to access fund in storage? In the case of (ii) it is important that more than one person has access to the private keys (private keys should be in safety deposit boxes or some other secure place accessible by the board in case a board member dies).

4) In the case of BTC, will all of the public addresses holding the funds be published so that MSC holders can periodically view the balance of funds?

5) Has any thought been given to appointing a Treasurer of the Mastercoin Foundation funds, to oversee all of the above, and report to the board and MSC holders? This person should be separate from both JR and RG imo.

  

[TKeenan]

1) Has any thought been given to selling a small % of BTC for USD to lock in some of the gains we've made in the development funds and hedge against the risk BTC crashes?

Lock in gains!?  lol that is funny.  You don't 'lock in gains' - you lock out future value.  Don't do this idiot move.  Only take this step on the day you no longer believe in bitcoin's future.  Right now, I'd have to say we are all a bit bullish on bTC