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

[rbdrbd]

David: Regarding Who do we want as Board Members, I do agree with you in general on those points. However, I would say that the person must have some level of focus on Mastercoin. For instance, if Brock is so busy he has no time to ever engage the Mastercoin community or promote Mastercoin in his interactions with others, what difference does it make? In that case, Mastercoin board membership would just be another honary distinction to him, where it might have gone further with someone else.

I think the board composition should be a good mix of folks that are both connection and experience-heavy. I do see the value in what a board like this could do for Mastercoin, even though most of them would probably not have day-to-day involvement.

Regarding Vote Capping, I'm looking forward to your proposal. I think eventually this may not be an issue, but I see it as a potentially major issue in the foreseeable future (as JR, and the top 3 holders for that matter, are sitting on a LOT of Mastercoin). JR has also made it clear that he does not intend to sell for awhile. I think what would be best for the community would be working through a fair and reasonable proposal like you are putting together, where we can get JR onboard (and communicating that much), as well as the members of the community that have smaller balances but may be "hungrier" as LuckyBit stated. These folks can have a ton to contribute, if they think their voice matters and makes a difference.

Regarding your voting schedule, that seems alright to me, especially if things continue to move forward like this under the provisional board (meaning that we don't have a lot of lost time and motion until these elections).

Lastly, in respect to Tachikoma's mastercoind proposal, I am largely in agreement with that, pending a concern or two. I've posted my comment in his thread.

Thanks to everyone that's commented. I'm starting to really believe that we're getting Mastercoin on track to a bright future.

-Robby

[dacoinminster]

I'm about to make a couple payments from 1Exodus, including sending more BTC to secure storage:

200 BTC to 18S23kiGWkgVtsUuXMkvLohGxhVasujyMa
200 BTC to 1G6YQefEZEweatGsmVJFDRVSySYTzgXWg6
200 BTC to 1L2uRf8ShoDTZ67cU4Wq8VLJbFddvr5jWS
200 BTC to 1NccyJvcPhu3qhZ7LwFBbQygFsNGDjLdT4
200 BTC to 19jvwkkn9r27w479zAdLS51JXzPjVaR56A

Also, a payment to prophetx for his work on our blog:
0.24691358 to 1GFC6Kc1UiH8m48EPCFpK7j8Cs9hbyyF55

Ledger of all project expenditures is here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AtCyUJvk_IyNdGpVcnpBN2tOczFmbVRnck5TWjZuRFE#gid=0

Thanks!

[crazy_rabbit]

Hey guys,

I just had a interesting call with Ron so I thought I would chime in.

Ron made me a very interesting offer for the lead developer position, one that might actually be good enough for me to drop my day job. One of the things we discussed was the need for a reference implementation. I will be creating a topic in the coming days to specify my thoughts on this reference implementation and how it might differ from Robby's idea's.

I also sent in the following pull request, comments welcome. It should help clear up some earlier confusing and make the spec more clear. Please comment on the pull request and not in thread.

Tachikoma that's great news! I have seen your skills and Mastercoin could hit sky high with you!!

Great. I think it's time for me to buy more mastercoins. :-)

[jeroenn13]

Hey guys,

I just had a interesting call with Ron so I thought I would chime in.

Ron made me a very interesting offer for the lead developer position, one that might actually be good enough for me to drop my day job. One of the things we discussed was the need for a reference implementation. I will be creating a topic in the coming days to specify my thoughts on this reference implementation and how it might differ from Robby's idea's.

I also sent in the following pull request, comments welcome. It should help clear up some earlier confusing and make the spec more clear. Please comment on the pull request and not in thread.

Tachikoma that's great news! I have seen your skills and Mastercoin could hit sky high with you!!

Great. I think it's time for me to buy more mastercoins. :-)

This is good news, great to have Tachikoma in the team .

[littleblue]

I'm about to make a couple payments from 1Exodus, including sending more BTC to secure storage:

200 BTC to 18S23kiGWkgVtsUuXMkvLohGxhVasujyMa
200 BTC to 1G6YQefEZEweatGsmVJFDRVSySYTzgXWg6
200 BTC to 1L2uRf8ShoDTZ67cU4Wq8VLJbFddvr5jWS
200 BTC to 1NccyJvcPhu3qhZ7LwFBbQygFsNGDjLdT4
200 BTC to 19jvwkkn9r27w479zAdLS51JXzPjVaR56A

Also, a payment to prophetx for his work on our blog:
0.24691358 to 1GFC6Kc1UiH8m48EPCFpK7j8Cs9hbyyF55

Ledger of all project expenditures is here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AtCyUJvk_IyNdGpVcnpBN2tOczFmbVRnck5TWjZuRFE#gid=0

Thanks!

thanks for your great job!
i love J.R
i wish msc-wallet (it is easy ,and run windows or ios,it is .exe, like btc-wallet) come soon.

[GigaCoin]

This project is very interesting, i plan to get into it soon once i research the details.

Good job everyone on the master coin team!

[DGulari]

i love J.R

We all love J.R.  

Hey, wait a minute - who shot J.R.?  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_shot_J.R.%3F

[bitwhizz]

yes takichoma!!!

[NeonRonin]

Who do we want as Board Members

As for who we want as Board Members I hope everyone will consider my input on this given I've served on a number of Boards over the years.

The most important criteria for a Board member ought to be: Connections + Relationships they can bring to bare in order to benefit the Foundation's work and more broadly the whole Mastercoin Community. In a close second is the level of experience the candidate has in developing new technology projects in order to provide input and accountability.

Let me give you one simple example. I sat on the Board of a Biotech / Energy Startup. The most important member we attracted was the retired President of a major oil company. Because of her connections we made important in roads with a Fortune 100 strategic partner that ended up funding our renewable energy efforts. Without her I'm sure our startup would not have been taken seriously or would we have had the experience to know how to manage such a big customer / relationship.

That's what you want out of a board member. You want someone with relationships, connections, and experience to provide accountability and input to management who tackles things day to day.

Brock Pierce is the perfect example of this. The guy is basically the grandfather of virtual currency having been building and investing in startups in the space since the late 1990's / early 2000's. He is a super Angel in the Bitcoin space and travels around the world to jurisdictions such as Singapore, Hong Kong and others helping build companies in the Bitcoin space. While you are never going to get Brock to work full time on Mastercoin, his relationships, connections and input are invaluable to the Mastercoin effort having been there since the Exodus Address and actively been involved in Board discussions.

We want a clear separation between Board Members and the operational team. I agree with your comment about wanting to avoid conflicts of interest with those providing accountability and those receiving the funds for their efforts.

I'd recommend approaching a partner at a Big 4 firm (PwC, EY, KPMG, Deloitte).  They can provide insight to international accounting, tax laws, and have partners worldwide that have global insight and political connections.  (As a matter of full disclosure, I work for EY in the IT department and not on the business side)

Katten Muchin is the law firm that assisted the Winklevoss twins with their Bitcoin ETF and understand the US laws and regulations with Virtual Currency.  Maybe another worthwhile approach.

Linkedin also has http://nonprofits.linkedin.com/ that can be used for finding board members.

[k99]

can anyone help me to understand why on
https://masterchest.info/lookupadd.aspx?address=13sTmHYc2jcUPE4EwZnfULqUHwEHV1o8M6
the balance is 0 but the 2 transactions are visible and marked as valid?
is this just a bug in the https://masterchest.info or was there something wrong with the transaction?

[FTWbitcoinFTW]

Valid transaction have green color, not red !

Also, no trace for a transaction to load the sending address so maybe it's a fake transaction or a scam.
Which one is yours ?

[Tachikoma]

According to my implementation the address tried to create selling offers, but since they have no coins they were invalidated: http://mastercoin-explorer.com/addresses/17nCCJ5ge5et5oKfHEDeoWJhebR2GEjPDG

[jeroenn13]

Please add a sell order for 100 MSC @ .15 .14, thank you.

Wrong forum.

[bitexch]

There has recently been some question regarding when and under what conditions JR will start working on MSC full-time. As everyone may or may not remember, JR said that when the value of MSC is .7BTC/MSC, he will sell 1% of his MSC holdings, which, at the current vauation of BTC is over $1 million (in contrast to his earlier remark that it would take ~$600 ,000 for him to work on a BTC-related project full-time). In apparent contrast to this statement, some fellow board members (e.g. vokain and ripper) have assured us that JR is doing "all he can" to start working on MSC full-time. Now, on the contrary, JR himself has written that he is indeed waiting for MSC to go to .7BTC/MSC. JR goes on to say that there is "no uncertainty" here - a statement, with which I have to disagree, since I would hardly call waiting to secure +$1,000,000 "doing all one can"! vokain and ripper, how do you account for your own vagueness and essentially false assurances?

It also turns out that we have hired full-time devs (refer to link above), in spite of the fact that there was neither a vote nor a discussion among the community regarding these developers! This is so obviously a breach of Mastercoin's purported transparency that it's unclear how our board will justify itself. Indeed, it's unclear who had the authority to hire these developers since at least 6 of 7 board members must agree before $5-20 thousand are spent  - and one would think that at least *one* of the board members would have thought to get the community's input before voting to spend such a large sum.

Going forward such autocratic and careless behavior by the board is unacceptable, and I am surprised that the community has not taken greater issue with this.

[klee]

There has recently been some question regarding when and under what conditions JR will start working on MSC full-time. As everyone may or may not remember, JR said that when the value of MSC is .7BTC/MSC, he will sell 1% of his MSC holdings, which, at the current vauation of BTC is over $1 million (in contrast to his earlier remark that it would take ~$600 ,000 for him to work on a BTC-related project full-time). In apparent contrast to this statement, some fellow board members (e.g. vokain and ripper) have assured us that JR is doing "all he can" to start working on MSC full-time. Now, on the contrary, JR himself has written that he is indeed waiting for MSC to go to .7BTC/MSC. JR goes on to say that there is "no uncertainty" here - a statement, with which I have to disagree, since I would hardly call waiting to secure +$1,000,000 "doing all one can"! vokain and ripper, how do you account for your own vagueness and essentially false assurances?

It also turns out that we have hired full-time devs (refer to link above), in spite of the fact that there was neither a vote nor a discussion among the community regarding these developers! This is so obviously a breach of Mastercoin's purported transparency that it's unclear how our board will justify itself. Indeed, it's unclear who had the authority to hire these developers since at least 6 of 7 board members must agree before $5-20 thousand are spent  - and one would think that at least *one* of the board members would have thought to get the community's input before voting to spend such a large sum.

Going forward such autocratic and careless behavior by the board is unacceptable, and I am surprised that the community has not taken greater issue with this.

I really think by now you have a hidden agenda to ruin Mastercoin like a worm eating flesh from the inside - I will not pay attention to your efforts anymore.

Trojan Horse in Ignore mode.

[bitexch]

There has recently been some question regarding when and under what conditions JR will start working on MSC full-time. As everyone may or may not remember, JR said that when the value of MSC is .7BTC/MSC, he will sell 1% of his MSC holdings, which, at the current vauation of BTC is over $1 million (in contrast to his earlier remark that it would take ~$600 ,000 for him to work on a BTC-related project full-time). In apparent contrast to this statement, some fellow board members (e.g. vokain and ripper) have assured us that JR is doing "all he can" to start working on MSC full-time. Now, on the contrary, JR himself has written that he is indeed waiting for MSC to go to .7BTC/MSC. JR goes on to say that there is "no uncertainty" here - a statement, with which I have to disagree, since I would hardly call waiting to secure +$1,000,000 "doing all one can"! vokain and ripper, how do you account for your own vagueness and essentially false assurances?

It also turns out that we have hired full-time devs (refer to link above), in spite of the fact that there was neither a vote nor a discussion among the community regarding these developers! This is so obviously a breach of Mastercoin's purported transparency that it's unclear how our board will justify itself. Indeed, it's unclear who had the authority to hire these developers since at least 6 of 7 board members must agree before $5-20 thousand are spent  - and one would think that at least *one* of the board members would have thought to get the community's input before voting to spend such a large sum.

Going forward such autocratic and careless behavior by the board is unacceptable, and I am surprised that the community has not taken greater issue with this.

I really think by now you have a hidden agenda to ruin Mastercoin like a worm eating flesh from the inside - I will not pay attention to your efforts anymore.

Trojan Horse in Ignore mode.

NB: My "hidden agenda" consists of nothing more than pointing out what I think are problems with Mastercoin's management. I, too, am a Mastercoin investor.

[klee]

 

[dacoinminster]

http://blog.mastercoin.org/2013/12/06/first-full-time-scientistdeveloper-hired-peter-todd/

I am delighted to announce the hiring of our first full-time scientist/developer. Peter Todd is a heavy-hitter with a deep knowledge of the bitcoin network and a long track-record of doing great theoretical work on crypto-currencies. He initially had some very harsh words for the Mastercoin project, but like many of you, he forms his opinions based on data and logic, and is willing to change them when the data and logic change. I’m proud to say that after further review and seeing our progress to date he is now excited to be involved with this project.

Peter’s role will be largely research-oriented. We will look to him to find attack vectors and suggest changes to the spec as needed to avoid them. He will also be contributing code towards these same goals.

Peter will go wherever these attack vectors lead him, including recommending ways to jump to a different block chain if that ever becomes necessary. Everything Peter does will be open-source and completely available for others to learn from and use.

Peter is currently wrapping up other responsibilities, and hopes to start full-time on Mastercoin February 1st.

Note: I know you’ll all be glad to hear that our #1 priority is hiring developers for new features. However, those hires are in various stages of negotiation, or for various reasons can’t be announced yet. The hires that we can currently announce shouldn’t be taken as evidence that we are not working very hard on hiring feature-focused developers as soon as humanly possible. I hope we’ll be making several more announcements on this front soon.

[dacoinminster]

Regarding hiring without consulting the community, there is a reason that companies hire a CEO to make all the decisions, rather than having all stakeholders weigh in on every hire. We are giving Ron room as Executive Director to do his job, and even if he makes mistakes on the way (and he undoubtedly will) I vastly prefer that to decision-by-committee.

[bitexch]

Regarding hiring without consulting the community, there is a reason that companies hire a CEO to make all the decisions, rather than having all stakeholders weigh in on every hire. We are giving Ron room as Executive Director to do his job, and even if he makes mistakes on the way (and he undoubtedly will) I vastly prefer that to decision-by-committee.

You are actively ignoring the spending rules that the board imposed on itself: "The Executive Director has been authorized to spend $10,000 USD in project funds on a rolling basis". Though I suppose you could construe "rolling basis" in order to justify excessive unauthorized expenditures.

It is not really a matter of what *you* prefer; you are one investor, and if the rules for spending are going to be broken the community ought to be informed of it.

Lastly, since Ron was not elected by the community as Executive Director, giving him such free-reign is absurd.