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

[wizzardTim]

Hi all,

is there a simple guide or how-to for mastercoin-advisor with bitcoin-qt?


I run the advisor, following this: http://wiki.mastercoin.org/index.php/FAQ#Mastercoin_Advisor

but the instructions are not for qt.


can someone help me?


EDIT: My bitcoin-qt wallet is empty. A friend wants to send me some MSC and then I want to send them somewhere else. Do I need any amount of BTC for this?

Yes.  Put .00018BTC plus miner fee on the address you will use to send MSC.  So if the minor fee is .0002 then you need a total of .00038 for example.  Your transaction will send: .00006 to ExodusAddress, .00006 to the receiving address, and another .00006 to some weird made up bitcoin address which carries information for the Mastercoin parsers.  The Mastercoin parsers will understand that address and use it to interpret what it is you want to send i.e. currency type, amount, et cetera.  You'll get that weird made up address by using MastercoinAdvisor.  Finally, .0002 will go to the miners for the bitcoin transaction fee.  So a total of .00038 is needed.  Of course, you could go with a miner fee of .0001 or .0005 or anything else you like.

Therefore, when bitcoin is worth $1000 like today, a single Mastercoin transaction will cost about 38 cents.  You can get by with a lower miner fee, but sometimes this causes uncomfortable delay.  I prefer to pay the 38 cents and get a faster result.

Don't fret about losing 38 cents - it isn't all lost!  6 cents will land on the address you are sending to and you can reuse that later.  6 cents will end up on the Exodus address and JR can sell that later to buy nice things for his wife.  However, like other things in life, not all news is good.  6 cents is lost forever and will never be recovered.  The .00006 BTC which goes to the 'made up' address will disappear forever into the bitcoin ether.  Soon, when Mastercoin adopts the new bitcoin protocol version .9, they may do away with that scheme and rely upon one which doesn't necessitate loss of any money.  It further has the advantage that the new scheme won't pollute the UTXO.  If you don't know what that is - don't worry.  It is not very important for most users.  Gavin has to worry about that.

Thank you very  much 

[prophetx]

Hi all,

is there a simple guide or how-to for mastercoin-advisor with bitcoin-qt?


I run the advisor, following this: http://wiki.mastercoin.org/index.php/FAQ#Mastercoin_Advisor

but the instructions are not for qt.


can someone help me?


EDIT: My bitcoin-qt wallet is empty. A friend wants to send me some MSC and then I want to send them somewhere else. Do I need any amount of BTC for this?

Yes.  Put .00018BTC plus miner fee on the address you will use to send MSC.  So if the minor fee is .0002 then you need a total of .00038 for example.  Your transaction will send: .00006 to ExodusAddress, .00006 to the receiving address, and another .00006 to some weird made up bitcoin address which carries information for the Mastercoin parsers.  The Mastercoin parsers will understand that address and use it to interpret what it is you want to send i.e. currency type, amount, et cetera.  You'll get that weird made up address by using MastercoinAdvisor.  Finally, .0002 will go to the miners for the bitcoin transaction fee.  So a total of .00038 is needed.  Of course, you could go with a miner fee of .0001 or .0005 or anything else you like.

Therefore, when bitcoin is worth $1000 like today, a single Mastercoin transaction will cost about 38 cents.  You can get by with a lower miner fee, but sometimes this causes uncomfortable delay.  I prefer to pay the 38 cents and get a faster result.

Don't fret about losing 38 cents - it isn't all lost!  6 cents will land on the address you are sending to and you can reuse that later.  6 cents will end up on the Exodus address and JR can sell that later to buy nice things for his wife.  However, like other things in life, not all news is good.  6 cents is lost forever and will never be recovered.  The .00006 BTC which goes to the 'made up' address will disappear forever into the bitcoin ether.  Soon, when Mastercoin adopts the new bitcoin protocol version .9, they may do away with that scheme and rely upon one which doesn't necessitate loss of any money.  It further has the advantage that the new scheme won't pollute the UTXO.  If you don't know what that is - don't worry.  It is not very important for most users.  Gavin has to worry about that.

Thank you very  much 

that is true for class A transactions, but i believe class b transactions do not  use the made up address as they use multisig

The Master Protocol was originally specified to embed data in the block chain using fake bitcoin addresses (Class A), but we've since come up with a more blockchain friendly method which embeds data in a bitcoin multi-signature transaction (Class B). Once bitcoin miners start supporting the new OP_RETURN opcode as part of version 0.9 of the Bitcoin reference client, Master Protocol will be able to use that opcode to make the Master Protocol data completely prune-able (Class C) see description here by Gavin Andresen here: https://bitcoinfoundation.org/blog/?p=290

Class C transactions are most preferred due to the Provably Prune-able Outputs avoiding issues of "bloat" and "pollution" of the block chain.

The technical details for both Class A and Class B transactions can be found in Appendix A.

https://github.com/mastercoin-MSC/spec#embedding-master-protocol-data-in-the-block-chain

[Patel]

great, since this is in line with my current understand and to avoid walking in even bigger circles, so lets continue with my original example

I want to buy 100 shares of ASICMiner at 5 btc/each , this is 500 btc in this example

I want to participate in a decentralized stock market where this company is denominated in bitcoin, listed in its bitcoin price, and trading in bitcoin

How many mastercoins will I need to participate in that 3rd layer application and facilitate the transaction?

How many mastercoin will the seller need to participate in that 3rd layer application and facilitate the transaction?

How many mastercoin will the issuer ASICMiner or ASICMiner-decentralized-Pass-Through need to have listed the security?

did I miss anyone that may need a balance of mastercoin? a market participant? a transaction fee? anything?

someone should be able to produce a finite number or equation for how much mastercoin that I or any of those market participants, or anyone ever, will need

You would need a Bitcoin pegged Mastercoin based virtual currency for that, which you could buy using Mastercoins. Let's call this pegged currency MasterBitCoins (pegged 1:1 to Bitcoin). You'd be required to buy these MasterBitCoins, pegged to the value of Bitcoin, in order to trade AsicMiner stock. This would mean in other words: convert fiat/crypto to MSC and then convert MSC to the desired amount of MasterBitCoins.

How many Mastercoins you would need depends on the value of Mastercoin at that given moment. In a year from now 1 MSC might buy 2 Bitcoins, who knows. Should MSC trade at 2BTC per 1MSC, you would need 250 MSC to buy 500 MasterBitCoins in order to buy 100 AsicMiner shares.

Not really sure about the other questions. Still trying to get more info myself.

Risk factor: A less convoluted protocol will come into existence obliterating the demand for Mastercoin

an alternate technology enables issuing securities, contracts, etc on decentralized exchanges without the need for any additional currencies.

stslimited's questions might have just killed mastercoin. i can't believe nobody asked them before

Can anyone from the Mastercoin Foundation clear this up? I would also like to know. I think FrictionlessCoin might have brought this up before but I am not sure if this was also his question. I don't think it was answered.

[SyRenity]

stslimited's questions might have just killed mastercoin. i can't believe nobody asked them before

Can anyone from the Mastercoin Foundation clear this up? I would also like to know. I think FrictionlessCoin might have brought this up before but I am not sure if this was also his question. I don't think it was answered.

+1, can anyone clarify this?

It appears that all benefits of MSC protocol can be achieved with a single number of MSC's, due to being highly divisible.

[jimhsu]

well, my frustration stems from the fact that this doesn't seem to be a thing that anyone can answer. I assume SOMEONE can, but nobody on the mastercoin subreddit or in the general bitcointalk forum can.

it seems as if the currency aspect of the technology is limiting the flow of objective information, with the speculative nature of the currency unit hampering technical discussion

but, as someone that has considered buying mastercoin, I want to be able to do my own objective analysis of mastercoin's future demand, and so far this requires me to understand how many mastercoin people will actually need to do anything

Bingo. I'm guessing 90% of the people here don't understand or don't know how mastercoin will actually work. I have yet to receive a response from someone knowledgeable:

What can 1MSC do that .1 MSC cannot? What does an MSC (the kind selling at .17 BTC) actually DO? Is it SHARES in the mastercoin protocol corporation?Are MSC going to be used to launch 3rd layer applications? And if so, how many will be needed for each particular application?

Crossposted from the XCP thread.

Perhaps I'm not understanding stslimited, but isn't that analogous to asking what is the functional difference between 1 BTC, 1 mBTC, 1 uBTC, and 1 satoshi? All of those monetary units can be used as a basic transfer of wealth (of which 99.99% of it is used for that purpose right now), to send messages, to denote proof of ownership (colored coins), etc. (the latter two are not the primary uses of BTC right now, but could be). Similarly with MSC and XCP, I expect similar analogies to apply -- a store of value, until a network can be built that utilizes the other functions of these coins. How many bitcoin do you need "to do anything"? What someone is willing to take for them in exchange for goods and services. 

Where I could understand is if stslimited considers MSC and XCP transactional currencies, rather than stores of value. And that is right to an extent; the non store-of-value features of these currencies has been a selling point, so to speak. However, in light of this view, I'd like to point to several posts highlighting the transactional currency status of BTC itself, which the community has (by now) embraced the store-of-value concept. Thus, I don't think at all that the transactional and store-of-value concepts should be segregated at all, at least when talking about these.

[TraderTimm]

It's not about hash-power, it's not that hard to make a merged-mined alt-chain which will have almost as much hash-power as Bitcoin itself.

J. R. Willett explicitly mentioned that it is important to build disastercoin on top of Bitcoin and let them interact.

Well, if Bitcoin allows one to use other people's resource, either it is flawed, or your understanding of what it is is flawed.

In any case, to make decentralized exchange useful, you need it to be integrated with a powerful cryptocurrency.

Let's consider an example: suppose Freimarkets got implemented overnight, and some startup offers its shares for sale through this system.

I want to invest $100k, so I buy $100k worth of freicoins... Ouch, it's not so simple: that many freicoins are simply not available on exchanges, and trying to buy them would move the price, a lot. So it isn't even funny.

Thus a barely functioning decentralized exchange which works with bitcoins is more useful than a perfect decentralized exchange which works only with some obscure alt-coin.

1.) Its always been about hashing power. The alt-coin method of establishing your own blockchain was discarded from the outset, because the lead dev was worried he wouldn't get profitable fast enough.

2.) Bitcoin can be abused like any other resource, and while its utility exceeds most cases of this abuse, it doesn't detract from the fact that the abuse occurs. Ignoring this is the usual M.O. for Disastercoin participants.

3.) You then make the contradictory case for an alt-chain's usefulness. If the principle is fundamentally useful, why wouldn't more miners support it and users participate? Having to hook into Bitcoin and co-opt hashing power just means that there's a real fear that any other way wouldn't yield any interest, so they shove it down the miners throats instead. (And users, by extension of full verification node resources.)

4.) You then setup a nice little straw man in the form of "all alt chains are obscure, therefore"... riiiiiight. The real issue here is this - The ONLY reason Disastercoin is co-opting Bitcoin is because they are afraid of it not succeeding otherwise. Of course they ignore the fact that failure, or "tail risk" still exists regardless of their implementation. Again - if the idea has ANY MERIT AT ALL, it would survive just fine as an alt-chain.

As for other competitors, why should I bother? The information is out there and available, just look for it.

[killerstorm]

1.) Its always been about hashing power. The alt-coin method of establishing your own blockchain was discarded from the outset, because the lead dev was worried he wouldn't get profitable fast enough.

Getting profitable fast enough is definitely not related to hashing power, there are more important reasons to do it on Bitcoin blockchain:

1. it needs to be on Bitcoin blockchain to make it possible to send bitcoins to exodus address
2. "simple send" can be done using a normal bitcoin client, this way you can make an illusion of working cryptocurrency (you can send coins!) spending only a couple of hours on making some basic script

2.) Bitcoin can be abused like any other resource

A robust cryptocurrency protocol is supposed to be resistant to all kinds of attacks.

As for other competitors, why should I bother? The information is out there and available, just look for it.

I'm well aware of competitors, in fact I am the lead developer of one of them. I just wanted to know which of them you had in mind. Invictus?

[killerstorm]

stslimited's questions might have just killed mastercoin. i can't believe nobody asked them before

You're pathetic, people: I described it in detail several pages ago: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=265488.msg4365991#msg4365991

[udecker]

stslimited's questions might have just killed mastercoin. i can't believe nobody asked them before

You're pathetic, people: I described it in detail several pages ago: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=265488.msg4365991#msg4365991

jimhsu also cross-posted a very good response above, as well.  Thank you both.

I'm well aware of competitors, in fact I am the lead developer of one of them.

I hope others here appreciate that killerstorm’s comments continue to improve the Mastercoin community and its ongoing implementation by keeping some of us sane (and keeping us humble), even though he is the primary developer of a “competitor.”  

We’re not going to keep improving as quickly as we are if we don’t all work together on making solid, robust concepts into solid, robust implementations.  (This also implies that any concepts that aren’t solid or robust need to be made into those that are.)

Competition breeds excellence, but only when competitors see the good things being done on the other side, and work to improve upon them.  Killerstorm understands this, and I, for one, appreciate it.

[TKeenan]

this way you can make an illusion of working cryptocurrency (you can send coins!) spending only a couple of hours on making some basic script

You are a profoundly annoying fucking piece of garbage shithead.  Go fuck yourself.  Why do you insist on trying to throw shit on Mastercoin at everyturn?  Doesn't your stupid project demand all of your time?  I guess you feel the only way you can get your project advanced by knocking Mastercoin further.

I'm well aware of competitors, in fact I am the lead developer of one of them.

This explains everything you write.  You think you are a competitor.  However, as your project is underfunded, underengineered and pathetic, you feel a need to come here and spread your endless FUD.  Eat shit douchbag.  Your points are worthless as your motivation for saying these things is clearly corrupt.  Besides, showing no understanding of what a cryptocurrency is.  

[killerstorm]

you feel a need to come here and spread your endless FUD.

LOL. If I wanted to "spread my endless FUD", i would have said things which are several orders of magnitude more harsh than what I wrote above.

I was simply discussing various design decision with this fellow (use of alt-chain vs. use of Bitcoin blockchain) and had to mention some facts...

I simply rephrased what J. R. WIllett said himself: he said that it is very important to keep Mastercoin simple to be able to implement it ASAP, and that rules out use of alt-chain/side-chain. (On the other hand, hashrate is nearly irrelevant here. That was the point of my message.)

As to calling it an "illusion of working cryptocurrency", well, it isn't a secret that Mastercoin wasn't functioning as a cryptocurrency for the first two-three months of its existence: there was a way to send coins, but no way to check that payment was made (aside from manual inspection).

[prophetx]

hi all, if you use or don't use the mastercoin forums (http://talk.mastercoin.org), can you vote on them, we want to see if people like or don't like them:

https://talk.mastercoin.org/index.php?p=/discussion/87/what-do-you-think-of-the-current-forum-s-user-interface?new=1

[wizzardTim]

Someone please tell me how to send mastercoins using the advisor with bitcoin-qt in windows? how I make 3 transactions at once?

[jeroenn13]

Someone please tell me how to send mastercoins using the advisor with bitcoin-qt in windows? how I make 3 transactions at once?

In Bitcoin QT- Click on "Add recipient"

[maxmint]

Someone please tell me how to send mastercoins using the advisor with bitcoin-qt in windows? how I make 3 transactions at once?

Do it like this: https://i.imgur.com/wif7mPs.png

[wizzardTim]

Thank you jeroenn13, maxmint.

Two more questions: I have 3 addresses in my qt wallet, each one of these having different amount of MSC.

1 ) If I choose to send from the first address, how is the advisor informed for the sending address (I guess it doesn't need to know which is the sending address, just the receiving..) and how do I choose the specific address?

2 ) Can you clarify to me what the first step in advisor mean ("send all funds in your wallet to the address which owns the mastercoins (the following sends must come from that address)")?


Thank you in advance  

[jeroenn13]

Thank you jeroenn13, maxmint.

Two more questions: I have 3 addresses in my qt wallet, each one of these having different amount of MSC.

1 ) If I choose to send from the first address, how is the advisor informed for the sending address (I guess it doesn't need to know which is the sending address, just the receiving..) and how do I choose the specific address?

2 ) Can you clarify to me what the first step in advisor mean ("send all funds in your wallet to the address which owns the mastercoins (the following sends must come from that address)")?


Thank you in advance  

The wallet you currently have (Bitcoin - QT) can have more addresses which have different amounts of BTC. If you want to send from 1 specific MSC address you have to send your total balance to the address you which to send from, so Bitcoin Qt will be forced to send from that specific address because it holds all the BTC.

[wizzardTim]

Thank you jeroenn13, maxmint.

Two more questions: I have 3 addresses in my qt wallet, each one of these having different amount of MSC.

1 ) If I choose to send from the first address, how is the advisor informed for the sending address (I guess it doesn't need to know which is the sending address, just the receiving..) and how do I choose the specific address?

2 ) Can you clarify to me what the first step in advisor mean ("send all funds in your wallet to the address which owns the mastercoins (the following sends must come from that address)")?


Thank you in advance  

The wallet you currently have (Bitcoin - QT) can have more addresses which have different amounts of BTC. If you want to send from 1 specific MSC address you have to send your total balance to the address you which to send from, so Bitcoin Qt will be forced to send from that specific address because it holds all the BTC.

Excellent. So I'll send all BTC to one of the specific addresses that hold the MSC that I want to send.

Hope I understood correctly. Thank you sincerelly, jeroenn13. 

[jeroenn13]

Thank you jeroenn13, maxmint.

Two more questions: I have 3 addresses in my qt wallet, each one of these having different amount of MSC.

1 ) If I choose to send from the first address, how is the advisor informed for the sending address (I guess it doesn't need to know which is the sending address, just the receiving..) and how do I choose the specific address?

2 ) Can you clarify to me what the first step in advisor mean ("send all funds in your wallet to the address which owns the mastercoins (the following sends must come from that address)")?


Thank you in advance  

The wallet you currently have (Bitcoin - QT) can have more addresses which have different amounts of BTC. If you want to send from 1 specific MSC address you have to send your total balance to the address you which to send from, so Bitcoin Qt will be forced to send from that specific address because it holds all the BTC.

Excellent. So I'll send all BTC to one of the specific addresses that hold the MSC that I want to send.

Hope I understood correctly. Thank you sincerelly, jeroenn13. 

Yes thats how you send MSC from a specific address in your wallet.

[prophetx]

Just a note here. I was asked by a reporter/writer about Mastercoins and one of the topics that came up was why would MSC have value.

I know this topic comes up occasionally and we all seem to forget so here goes again (answer by ripper234)

Me

Regarding value of MSC.  I know it needs to be used for escrow backed currencies.  But for smart properties and user currencies will there be direct trading between bitcoin and and these tokens?  Or is there some mastercoin fee that needs to be paid?  Or does the protocol only allow trading of smart properties and user currencies with mastercoins?

Ripper234

There is no direct MSC fee for trading right now (although we might change that in some way in the future ... the protocol is young). The key anchors for MSC value that I have found are:

A) MSC can be better secured than BTC
B) MSC can be used in CFD/user currencies
C) MSC is part of a direct trading ecosystem that also involves other assets not directly backed by MSC. It is the gateway to this system, and has the least friction interacting with the components of this system. To trade BTC <--> Smart Property you would need to get MSC first.