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

[Luckybit]

Let me get this straight, JR won't quit his job unless he's worth $100M,  . After btc rally last week I guess many of us here are already millionaires, real jobs are getting less and less relevant, we should be doing this for passion.

Yeah right man lol. I wish I were one of these millionaires. I'm sure some people here have 1000 Bitcoins and good on them if they do. When 100 Mastercoins are worth 1000 Bitcoins a Mastercoin will be at 10:1 to the Bitcoin and even then I don't think most people would sell their Mastercoins.

Mastercoins are worth millions each and to sell them now would be in the most simple terms excruciatingly stupid.

[prophetx]

Let me get this straight, JR won't quit his job unless he's worth $100M,  . After btc rally last week I guess many of us here are already millionaires, real jobs are getting less and less relevant, we should be doing this for passion.

Yeah right man lol. I wish I were one of these millionaires. I'm sure some people here have 1000 Bitcoins and good on them if they do. When 100 Mastercoins are worth 1000 Bitcoins a Mastercoin will be at 10:1 to the Bitcoin and even then I don't think most people would sell their Mastercoins.

Mastercoins are worth millions each and to sell them now would be in the most simple terms excruciatingly stupid.

If you all need something to put that passion to work, head over to the Documentation Trello board

https://trello.com/b/5lolIlqc/documentation-contest-1

[ripper234]

ripper234 will this be a no brainer if at least 10 people echo this? I hope to everything we believe in Tachikoma does not think otherwise.

We do have such plans ourselves. David is forming a more detailed plan, and J.R is reaching out to all the developers to determine their availability and focus.

I fully agree that we should be able to fund development in a more orderly fashion.

I personally think this should be higher on our priorities than standardizing the way Dev MSCs are spent.
The former is a specific task - hire a few developers.
The latter is a higher order problem, and I would take some convincing before I'm satisfied with a solution there.

David & J.R - to your attention.

[ripper234]

Warning - long post ahead.

I was wondering if/how/when it would be possible to implement a currency on a private website. Something like "Gold", which can be transferred between users of the site as well as outside, is safe, and leaves no worries for the developers. Can MSC do this yet?

The spec supports it via Smart Property.
None of the existing tools or libraries have implemented it yet though.

This feature lead for this is Taariq Lewis (you can find him on bitcointalk), feel free to discuss your specific needs with him.

Great presentation Ron. Well articulated my friend. I'll post the recording once it is uploaded.

https://plus.google.com/u/0/events/cosfuleudovf9bbitllefb93874

I enjoyed it as well. I was a bit sad though that none of the slides mentioned anything developed by me or the other developers. We all worked very hard to make Mastercoin more then an idea, to create something tangible. People who watched the presentation might have the idea that there is nothing yet.

Sorry Tachikoma and everyone, my sincere apologies

I has 1.5 days to build it (while doing a million other things), and you're right that a slide or a few showing the various existing tools would have been most appropriate. I'll definitely include it the next time I give a talk about Mastercoin.

Well then if takichoma wants an awesome offer, give takichoma an awesome offer ! we really need people like him working on this full time

+1

David and J.R. - I'm counting on you for this!
David in particular has WAY more experience than me ... I am not ashamed to admit that I never hired anyone in my life. I'm super thrilled to have been offered the role of Executive Director, but I rely on David to give Takichoma and others terrific "can't refuse" offers.

I vote for 4 dedicated developers with a project manager or scrum master-like entity to get this organized into a focused effort and interface between the devs and yourself, while you focus your efforts on overall strategy  and this is very important. Maybe you too should consider taking up a similar offer to work on this full time too?...This type of minimal business organization will definitely increase the efficiency of the full time staff several multitudes over. Also I think the main developers should get the awesome offers they are asking for...that is how you get awesome talent to leave and join new companies and we definitely want the best...what happens if tachikoma and others gets a promotion at his job with more responsibilities?

+1 here.
FYI we have a standing job offer for a Project Manager for some time now.
I would like this PM to coordinate Dev work, and publish a "daily status" blog post on a dedicated statusblog.mastercoin.org blog.

There are real-world financial burdens (mortgage, bills etc) that have to be paid.  My full time earnings are in fiat - and that's a critical factor.

We can pay you in MSC, BTC, USD, "MSC-based USD", or whatever you prefer (FYI we recently acquired a bank account that can hold good old-fashioned paper dollars). You can choose your preferred means of payment depending on your needs and risk aversion (note that we will pay under market salary because we assume you hold or get paid in MSC).

Would the Mastercoin Foundation be willing to pay developers in fiat?

Yes, see above.

Let me get this straight, JR won't quit his job unless he's worth $100M,  . After btc rally last week I guess many of us here are already millionaires, real jobs are getting less and less relevant, we should be doing this for passion.

Yeah. Everybody can set their own financial goals and preferences. We want people to be in this for the passion, while also having their desired level of comfort and financial stability. The end result - the sum of money (in whatever currency) we award should always be less than market value e.g. as a contractor, and for some people that might not be suitable - and that's perfectly fine.

I want everyone working on this project to know they are getting paid a nice (although not Google/Facebook style) salaries, while having the option to stock up on MSC and becomes true owners of their creation.

Let me get this straight, JR won't quit his job unless he's worth $100M,  . After btc rally last week I guess many of us here are already millionaires, real jobs are getting less and less relevant, we should be doing this for passion.

My wife doesn't care one fig about internet money which isn't in our bank account. That's the real hurdle. The other half of the problem is I don't want to sell MSC at today's prices.

I think I have found the ideal solution though, which I just posted in David's thread about project money this morning:

I think perhaps it is time to convert more of our BTC to MSC. I'd rather have MSC in a rainy day fund than BTC anyway. As you say, giving away BTC attacts people more interested in BTC, and I'd rather the foundation hold MSC than BTC.

Here's my crazy proposal:

1) Keep only the 1000 BTC we've already moved into offline wallets
2) Use the remainder of our BTC to purchase MSC over the next few months on the distributed exchange
3) Pay all future bounties exclusively in MSC
4) Keep half of our MSC money for a rainy day and/or future distributed bounty system
5) If our rainy day fund becomes excessive, we can always vote to lower the ratio later

I realize that this would potentially make all of our existing investors absurdly wealthy, but, well, the stated purpose of the Mastercoin Foundation is to serve the holders of Mastercoins, and I'm having a hard time seeing this course of action as anything but a huge positive for them, as long as we do it transparently and over a long enough period of time that nobody who wants to sell to us is left out.

Also, MSC prices would probably go up to the point where I'd sell 1% and quit my job to work on MSC, which I hope would also be in the best interests of our investors.

If you guys think that's a good idea, please go there and help me convince the board that:


1) It's not market manipulation, it's a stock buy-back over a long period of time, with complete transparency
2) It doesn't make MSC more centralized, because we'll be giving this money away in bounties rather quickly

Thanks!

I don't think this is right (see my reply there).

1. You can always choose to convert BTC/MSC into fiat or realestate. It is your choice that is holding back your full time Mastercoin dedication, nothing more. Note I am not passing judgement here.
2. I think your cryptocurrency risk profile is insane, and that you should liquidate that 1% of your MSC quite early, and work on liquidating some crypto to other assets for stability (what if some Quantum Computer steals all of our crypto?)
3. I would very much love for you to get more involved with the project, but I wouldn't use that as an excuse to do what I believe would be a risky financial decision on our part (converting a lot of BTC to MSC). Certainly this would have to be discussed, rediscussed, and reviewed by financial professional / risk analyzers before I would feel comfortable with this plan. I would hope that you decide to follow #1 and #2 above sooner than that, but it's your personal decision to make.

I would still *strongly* consider at least one of these devs working on the "mastercoind" concept I outlined earlier (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=265488.msg3666117#msg3666117) for the reasons I listed earlier (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=265488.msg3667049#msg3667049). It just makes sense and will move this project along SO much quicker, especially in regards to enabling non-core devs to build products and tools around mastercoin....I mean, just think of what bitcoin would be like without bitcoind???

And...this probably goes without saying, but don't get too glib that Mastercoin will maintain this current front-runner position. That's the classic downfall of every front-runner...complacency. A healthy dose of paranoia is always good

Indeed. I am constantly looking for ways to speed up.
The mastercoind proposal might be a solid one, but I'm not the one developing this, I think a discussion among the current developers would be useful to decide whether and how much to push this. Can you start a dedicated thread and send it to info@mastercoin.org ?

How about posting some of the jobs/bounties on some of the websites in this link?

http://bitcoinexaminer.org/looking-to-work-and-get-paid-in-bitcoin-here-are-six-websites-that-can-help-you/

I noticed several jobs developing for Ripple Labs, Inc. and Coinbase at Coinality:

http://coinality.com/

https://coinality.com/jobs/

Can you help us by doing this yourself?

I will email our PR company directly and ask them whether they can help advertising our specific jobs / bounties and not just the project in general.

[rbdrbd]

I would still *strongly* consider at least one of these devs working on the "mastercoind" concept I outlined earlier (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=265488.msg3666117#msg3666117) for the reasons I listed earlier (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=265488.msg3667049#msg3667049). It just makes sense and will move this project along SO much quicker, especially in regards to enabling non-core devs to build products and tools around mastercoin....I mean, just think of what bitcoin would be like without bitcoind???

And...this probably goes without saying, but don't get too glib that Mastercoin will maintain this current front-runner position. That's the classic downfall of every front-runner...complacency. A healthy dose of paranoia is always good

Indeed. I am constantly looking for ways to speed up.
The mastercoind proposal might be a solid one, but I'm not the one developing this, I think a discussion among the current developers would be useful to decide whether and how much to push this. Can you start a dedicated thread and send it to info@mastercoin.org ?

Sure thing, do you want me to send the thread text to info@mastercoin.org, or start a thread on bitcointalk and send the link to info@mastercoin.org?

[ripper234]

Sure thing, do you want me to send the thread text to info@mastercoin.org, or start a thread on bitcointalk and send the link to info@mastercoin.org?

The latter - thanks!

[ripper234]

FYI, we were just approached by someone for the open Project Manager position.
I am posting here for transparency's sake.

I believe this person is qualified for the job, and pending board approval would love to hire him to try and make some sense into this chaos. However I still want to be fair to everyone else (and I want to get the best candidates), and give you a chance to apply if relevant.

[JohnnyBTCSeed]

Might I suggest the lowest unit be called a Willett

[/quote]

So what is the lowest unit of an MSC going to be called? We should give that lowest unit a name and price all Mastercoins in those units on all exchanges which follow the standard. The lowest unit for Bitcoin is a satoshi but the Bitcoin exchanges are making a huge mistake by pricing everything like 1.0 -> 0.0000001 when they should just say it's 100,000,000 satoshi. So if a whole Mastercoin is 100,000,000 units then we need to be selling in the hundreds of millions of units of Mastercoin for psychological purposes.

That is my suggestion and I hope people understand the importance this change could have.

[/quote]

[ripper234]

Might I suggest the lowest unit be called a Willett

+1

Awesome!

(Although is should be a lowercase "willett" when used in a sentence ("You owe me 5 willetts").

[rbdrbd]

Sure thing, do you want me to send the thread text to info@mastercoin.org, or start a thread on bitcointalk and send the link to info@mastercoin.org?

The latter - thanks!

Done, thread is at https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=344229.0

[rbdrbd]

Might I suggest the lowest unit be called a Willett

+1

Awesome!

(Although is should be a lowercase "willett" when used in a sentence ("You owe me 5 willetts").

LOL

[murraypaul]

Let me get this straight, JR won't quit his job unless he's worth $100M,  . After btc rally last week I guess many of us here are already millionaires, real jobs are getting less and less relevant, we should be doing this for passion.

My wife doesn't care one fig about internet money which isn't in our bank account. That's the real hurdle. The other half of the problem is I don't want to sell MSC at today's prices.

I think I have found the ideal solution though, which I just posted in David's thread about project money this morning:

I think perhaps it is time to convert more of our BTC to MSC. I'd rather have MSC in a rainy day fund than BTC anyway. As you say, giving away BTC attacts people more interested in BTC, and I'd rather the foundation hold MSC than BTC.

Here's my crazy proposal:

1) Keep only the 1000 BTC we've already moved into offline wallets
2) Use the remainder of our BTC to purchase MSC over the next few months on the distributed exchange
3) Pay all future bounties exclusively in MSC
4) Keep half of our MSC money for a rainy day and/or future distributed bounty system
5) If our rainy day fund becomes excessive, we can always vote to lower the ratio later

I realize that this would potentially make all of our existing investors absurdly wealthy, but, well, the stated purpose of the Mastercoin Foundation is to serve the holders of Mastercoins, and I'm having a hard time seeing this course of action as anything but a huge positive for them, as long as we do it transparently and over a long enough period of time that nobody who wants to sell to us is left out.

Also, MSC prices would probably go up to the point where I'd sell 1% and quit my job to work on MSC, which I hope would also be in the best interests of our investors.

If you guys think that's a good idea, please go there and help me convince the board that:


1) It's not market manipulation, it's a stock buy-back over a long period of time, with complete transparency
2) It doesn't make MSC more centralized, because we'll be giving this money away in bounties rather quickly

I think it gives the appearance of qute a large conflict of interest, when you hold such a large proportion of MSC, and so would be the primary beneficiary.

[littleblue]

Might I suggest the lowest unit be called a Willett

+1

Awesome!

(Although is should be a lowercase "willett" when used in a sentence ("You owe me 5 willetts").

LOL

  I need  some  willett，and  wish  1 willett=1btc   

[moltenmich]

Hey guys!

Posted this on reddit just awhile ago. Here is a dropbox folder with a bunch of logo/icon files that anyone can use for your Mastercoin projects. (Or whatever really)

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/x1u9un58o3zr86a/3skRymo5uq?lst

See ya!

[littleblue]

Hey guys!

Posted this on reddit just awhile ago. Here is a dropbox folder with a bunch of logo/icon files that anyone can use for your Mastercoin projects. (Or whatever really)

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/x1u9un58o3zr86a/3skRymo5uq?lst

See ya!

nice！

[ripper234]

I just had an interesting idea for Mastercoin Gateways.

You might be familiar with the concept of Ripple Gateways.
The primary function of a Ripple Gateway is accepting Fiat from customers, and "converting" it to "Fiat IOUs" which are then sent to clients.
You can come into this Gateway, wire it USD, and get USD IOUs in return.

Well, we can easily translate that idea into trust-less Mastercoin Gateways.

A Mastercoin Gateway would be a business or entity that accepts fiat and sends back the same fiat in the form of a CFD or backed currency.
I call it "trust-less" because once the deal is finished, you no longer need to have any trust or relation with the Gateweay, unlike Ripple Gateways which require the Gateway to keep functioning because it owes you money.

Real world Mastercoin exchanges could double as Gateways - regulation for these might vary, or might be the same, per state and regulatory environment.

[romerun]

Wow, ripple over btc networker

[Ola]

ripper234 will this be a no brainer if at least 10 people echo this? I hope to everything we believe in Tachikoma does not think otherwise.

We do have such plans ourselves. David is forming a more detailed plan, and J.R is reaching out to all the developers to determine their availability and focus.

I fully agree that we should be able to fund development in a more orderly fashion.

I personally think this should be higher on our priorities than standardizing the way Dev MSCs are spent.
The former is a specific task - hire a few developers.
The latter is a higher order problem, and I would take some convincing before I'm satisfied with a solution there.

David & J.R - to your attention.

^ This is good to hear, I am Glad that that you all are already talking about this.

Might I suggest the lowest unit be called a Willett

So what is the lowest unit of an MSC going to be called? We should give that lowest unit a name and price all Mastercoins in those units on all exchanges which follow the standard. The lowest unit for Bitcoin is a satoshi but the Bitcoin exchanges are making a huge mistake by pricing everything like 1.0 -> 0.0000001 when they should just say it's 100,000,000 satoshi. So if a whole Mastercoin is 100,000,000 units then we need to be selling in the hundreds of millions of units of Mastercoin for psychological purposes.

That is my suggestion and I hope people understand the importance this change could have.

+1 willet sounds good to me.

ripper234 has asked me to create a thread to investigate the creation of a “mastercoind” program to help lower the bar to entry for the mastercoin development community. This is an idea I put forward on bitcointalk earlier¹.

The Problem

The basic idea is that Mastercoin transaction processing even today is quite involved and is going to get much harder as new features continue to be added to the spec. Currently, we have multiple efforts at creating a parsing framework for the stack, which both must be able to parse the various types of Mastercoin transactions (Class A, B and in the future, C transactions), as well as be able to apply the rules of the spec -– which itself is still quite nebulous in places -- to these transactions.

In the words of killerstorm, "Different implementations might implement it in different ways, and getting it right is very, very tricky."² For proof of this today, we can look at the frequent regressions and incompatibilities we are witnessing between the various implementations (e.g. mastercoin-explorer, mymastercoins, masterchest). For example, there have been several times when I put an MSC-containing address into these three tools, and got two or three different balances reported back. This is absolutely no fault to the developers themselves, who have been doing an excellent and admirable job of building something in quite a short timeframe (working part-time, too). However, it does reflect both the current ambiguous nature of the spec in areas, as well as the base complexity of the Mastercoin concept itself.

This situation will only become orders of magnitude more complex as additional features are layered on, and I believe we need to be proactive now and come up with a way to head this off at the pass, or else we will pay for it painfully later, in dealing with regressions and confusion instead of blazing forward with innovating new feature implementations.

The Solution

To this end, I believe Mastercoin needs a “reference-client” implementation, which, similar to bitcoind, would take care of implementing the “guts” of the spec and take it out to a higher level interface which would focus on things that have actually happened, after all of the Bitcoin and Mastercoin parsing and rule validation have been taken into effect. The daemon would start up, stay resident, and as new bitcoin blocks were processed by bitcoind, would parse and interpret any Mastercoind-transactions and make them available to its clients via an asynchronous (callback-driven) streamed event API, or a request-based synchronous API.

Then, instead of having to write their own parser and spec interpretation logic from scratch, Mastercoin developers could simply hook into mastercoind by spending 10 minutes writing the code to connect to mastercoind, subscribe to events, and decode the JSON-based responses for what they were interested in. Psuedo-code for an example event feed may be similar to:
•   "address A sent address B 50 MSC"
•   "address C put out an offer for 50 MSC @ .50/ea. offer ID is 1234".
•   "address D bid on offer 1234 for 20 of the 50 MSC"
•   "address E created a smart property named 'foobar' with currency ID 4567"

The first example, taken out to the JSON text that mastercoind may actually return, would be:

Code:

{“operation”: “sendmsc”, “from”: “1CE8bBr1dYZRMnpmyYsFEoexa1YoPz2mfB”, “to”: “1EcpemQkcq9Dit7yF9hxEKZzGVkAScwDrP”, “transactionID”: “3f0bcd2930[…]”, “amount”: 50, “block”: 23849202, “when”: “20101117T09:42:00“}

Like bitcoind, the daemon could be made available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

The Benefits
The advantage of this approach is that instead of forcing each new potential Mastercoin developer to essentially write their own parsing and spec-interpretation logic, they could skip that and get started with the actual application they had in mind immediately. Suddenly the bar to Mastercoin development is drastically lowered, and participation by the majority of developers out there is now possible (where before, one would need to have domain-specific knowledge of Bitcoin and Mastercoin inner workings to participate – as most developers are not comfortable with bit twiddling and/or writing implementations to a spec).

This would bring Mastercoin development inline with Bitcoin development, where 90%+ of developers just hang-off of bitcoind and interact with it via its API interface. For the remaining 10% or less of devs that want or need to create their own parsing interface, they are totally free to do so, similar to how Bitcoin has the ‘sx’ toolset as an alternative to bitcoind.

Conclusion and Logistics

The result is an environment where the bar to new Mastercoin development is greatly lowered, and new developers can focus on writing applications that innovate and add value to the effort on day one, not after having to spend 3 months jumping through the hoops of hacking together their own block parsing and spec interpretation logic.

Mastercoind could be created and maintained by a 2 to 4 member development team employed by the foundation, and made available to the community. The community could then be leveraged (via bounties) to create solutions, most of which would be on top of mastercoind (however, alternative mastercoind implementations could still be created as well, as stated earlier). The result is a drastically larger and healthier ecosystem, with a drastically lowered bar to entry, and minimal reproduction of work.

Thanks for your consideration of this proposal. Please feel free to comment on any of these points, and I would be happy to answer any questions. And, if the community favors this, I would be willing to produce the skeleton for a 'mastercoind' in Python, which I can do in a 1 week period.

¹: The original postings where I proposed this:

• https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=265488.msg3666117#msg3666117
• https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=265488.msg3667049#msg3667049

²: See https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=265488.msg3665847#msg3665847

I think everybody that wants to build on top of the mastercoin protocol should go here and vote: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=344229

In my opinion this is 1 or 2 levels down in priority to hiring full time developers.

[rbdrbd]

Good news, mastercoind is under development, see my last post over at: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=344229.0

Goal is to make a fully functional version that can parse simple sends (Class A and B). From there it can be extended.

After I get the initial version out, hopefully others can hack on it to and improve it to handle DEx transactions, and more. Would love to see a full time dev maintaining this!

[amgil]

I just had an interesting idea for Mastercoin Gateways.

You might be familiar with the concept of Ripple Gateways.
The primary function of a Ripple Gateway is accepting Fiat from customers, and "converting" it to "Fiat IOUs" which are then sent to clients.
You can come into this Gateway, wire it USD, and get USD IOUs in return.

Well, we can easily translate that idea into trust-less Mastercoin Gateways.

A Mastercoin Gateway would be a business or entity that accepts fiat and sends back the same fiat in the form of a CFD or backed currency.
I call it "trust-less" because once the deal is finished, you no longer need to have any trust or relation with the Gateweay, unlike Ripple Gateways which require the Gateway to keep functioning because it owes you money.

Real world Mastercoin exchanges could double as Gateways - regulation for these might vary, or might be the same, per state and regulatory environment.

What about a network of Mastercoin super-nodes gateways, not for Fiat but for adjoining the currently Bitcoin situated Mastercoin protocol, with other crypto-currency block-chains? This would facilitate distributed any-coin <-> any-coin trades, as currently roughly implemented for BTC <-> MSC. With this type of gateway, Bitcoin can continue its main lead as a store of value, even if other alts eventually prove better as means of exchange.