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

[LOL]

(TL;TR:) There is no bloat and transactions are created in a way that dust outputs are spendable, but due to the general inability of Bitcoin clients to deal properly with multi signature outputs, the current Mastercoin wallets don't redeem them yet. This will change and thanks to posts like yours this may happen rather sooner than later.

I appreciate the response.

Masterchain.info doesn't compress the key; the Masterchest wallet does currently compress the public key - with the intention of saving space and creating smaller transactions. Zathras (Masterchest creator) recently mentioned he may drop the compression, because this may confuse the user. What do you think about this?

The "to sender" multisig output should be defined as one of the following in the mastercoin specification:

• Spendable by the address with a compressed public key and a private key in common with the sending address.
• Spendable by the address with an uncompressed public key and a private key in common with the sending address.
• Spendable by the sending address.
• Spendable by the address with a public key opposite that of the sending address (i.e. if sending address is compressed, uncompressed; if uncompressed, compressed), and a private key in common with the sending address.

It doesn't matter which, however it needs to specified and implemented. If the specification happens to make sense, user confusion should be reduced to a minimum. My vote is "Spendable by the sending address." It's a more difficult implementation, but it makes sense.

Compressed or uncompressed - both share the same private key and are both redeemable by the owner. In neither of those cases any coins will be lost, but ...

Share a private key, yes, however do not have same WIF private key, public key, or address. If some mastercoin outputs are spendable by a compressed address, and other outputs are spendable by the corresponding uncompressed address, then both should be represented in the wallet and identified as such.

The implication of a client automatically receiving/signing transactions for both the compressed and uncompressed versions of the key pair is that the mastercoin 'unit of identification' is a private key, and thus two key pairs. This isn't compatible with any other client that I'm aware of, can be a privacy leak, and security risk if one of the WIF private keys is compromised.

As mentioned, compressed or uncompressed doesn't really matter - both should be redeemable. I think the way to go in the future is to have an intelligent input selection that redeems some of that dust whenever there is some space left to the next fee level (currently 0.0001 BTC per 1 KB, up rounded).

I agree with intelligent input selection, however I'd not be inclined to use a wallet that treats two key pairs interchangeably, especially if both pairs were not represented and identified as such.

This will be addressed, that's for sure. At the same time I think this is something the user shouldn't care about, but rather a problem for the wallet to solve under the hood. What is your opinion about this? Would you prefer low-level control of inputs or maybe even a dedicated app to collect dust? Input on this is very welcome.

I agree, should be solved under the hood - provided that only one key pair from a given private key is used (unless of course the user imports the key pair of the other format, in which case they should still be treated as separate "entities"). Dust is a pain to deal with. The more obstacle there is to spending it the less likely it is to be spent.

With Bitcoin 0.9 OP_RETURN transactions will be considered as standard transactions, but very recently the allowed payload size was reduced to 40 byte (https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/3737). If this is final, the size won't be enough for all Mastercoin transaction types and I tend to favor the data encoding within multi signature outputs. - They are widely accepted, redeemable, don't consume much more size and also very important in my opinion: very, very long payloads are possible.

The depreciation of Class A transactions eliminates unspendable outputs. The implementation of Class B transactions is only marginally better, IMO, because the incentive to make multisig outputs spendable is not worth the time involved - especially for those less bitcoin/mastercoin savvy. I see Class B transactions as a great transition to Class C transactions - but if Class B transactions are not depreciated, and multisig output dust is not properly handled, the implementation of Class B transactions does little to address the intent behind eliminating unspendable outputs. Sure, it technically does not create unspendable outputs, however it's a cop out to say that Class B transactions address the concern of blockchain bloat due data storage. Others may disagree, but as far as I'm concerned if outputs of a transaction are not recognized, cannot be spent, or are otherwise not used in transactions when reasonable, they will not be spent and are subject to loss due to perceived lack of value or understanding.

J.R can comment his perspective on this. Here is mine:

We have a bit of a mixup here. On the one hand, I do believe that the "High bar for usability" goal has not been met, and doubt it will be met this month.
On the other hand, we moved to paying out monthly bounties in February, and .

I hope it is clear that the DEx bounties paid in Feb, and the March monthly bounty, count towards the 300 BTC bounty (out of which 150 BTC has been previously paid).
So after March I don't think that a lot of money will remain in the original 300 BTC money pool (J.R needs to reply with some numbers).
I expect the bulk of the money remaining from the DEx to be divided in March's monthly payout.

Perhaps if there is only a tiny amount left after that, we will decide to increase March's payout and pay out the full remainder of the 300 BTC bounty this month, in order to avoid the accounting/judging headache. We will wait for J.R's number regarding February's payout (due any day now), and see what makes sense.

Yup. February numbers are nearly ready. They are my top priority once I catch up on urgent emails.

edit: I think we are close on usability. If we spend the next couple weeks fixing things that make the various wallets hard to use and trade with, I don't see any barrier to finishing the payout at the end of March.

I do not think that it is by any means reasonable to think that a client is close to a "high bar for usability" if it doesn't recognize the outputs of a transaction it created, signed and broadcast, cannot spend unspent outputs which it is (cryptographically) capable, and creates multisig outputs that cannot be spent by a key pair in the wallet - let alone the fact that there are only native Windows clients, and those with other OSes must manually handle WIF private keys in order to use the web wallet.

I've been pretty jazzed about mastercoin, however recently it seems esoteric, loose, and out of touch with the user. I bought at exodus last year, I was one of the first to attempt decentralized trades back in mid November, and I was one of the first to succeed on the 15th. Yes, it's groundbreaking, and yes, trades can be made. But mastercoin doesn't have a specification that describes current implementation, the clients privilege Windows users, and the depth of understanding in bitcoin required to spend Class B outputs (i.e. not bloat the blockchain) is a great bar to entry.

[Herp]

Nobody comments on why Tachikoma and his friend went to Etherium just a month after he agreed to work full time for Mastercoin? Nobody cares who is working on the reference implementation of mastercoind now? Why people keeps believing or wishing but never really ask these kind of important questions? Trying to prove mastercoin is better than counterpary, Etherium, or whatever else does not help anything. We, the investors of MSC, should keep asking questions to JR, Ron about the current status and the real reason why the 2/3 of full time developers (they spent so much time in hiring them in the first space) leave.

It's dynamic new area and expect movements and shifts to occur, especially as everyone wants a bigger slice of the pie. Greed is a big component here.

Keep in mind that Charles Hoskinson from Ethereum was sacked by Protoshares due to some kind of disagreement and decided to start Ethereum. We don't know the details and what happened exactly. This is what he told me in a pm January 3rd before actually announcing Ethereum: According to his own words, Invictus fired him. So Ethereum project came to life after Charles got the boot from Invictus.

Ethereum got some initial hype and press time due to their hyped presence at the Miami convention and might have drew in few people. Suffice to say Vitalik tried to have his way with Mastercoin, by creating a scripting language but that proposition carried way too much risk to be considered. There is a reason why Bitcoin doesn't do script. This is one of the areas where Charles didn't see eye to eye with Protoshares team. Invictus (Protoshares) saw the downsides of a scripting language, which can be huge and can delay a successful implementation by years, yes YEARs. Why do you think Ethereum is set to launch Q4 only if all goes well? That's a big if. Ethereum wants to be some kind of Java and Java developers to this date keep patching it up to fix many security issues. Sure, might work with random stuff apps but it's a major pain when there are financial assets and sensitive data involved. Everyone should read this article http://blog.mastercoin.org/2014/02/04/should-the-master-protocol-do-scripting/

Tachikoma was working on Linux wallet. Not the most high priority item at this point.  

[marcelus]

And what about smart contracts and smart properties?
Mastercoin guys spoke about theses a lot in the early days, but not anymore. Does that mean they have abandonned the idea?
I have not heard Counterparty guys speaking about smart contracts and smart properties, does that mean there is not plan to implement them even in the mid-long term?

'Smart property' isn't really something that Mastercoin, or Counterparty, has anything to do with directly. The Mastercoin Project just loves throwing around such buzzwords. 'Smart property' is hardware (like a car) that might itself, for instance, parse Bitcoin, or Mastercoin, or Counterparty transactions, and behave differently depending on what it sees (e.g. unlock itself only for someone with a particular private key). The only real prerequisite technology at the protocol level is virtual assets, which Counterparty has totally working and Mastercoin hasn't even begun to implement.

A 'smart contract' is a more general idea, and really applies to any contract enforced by a protocol. Bitcoin, Mastercoin and Counterparty all have these to varying degrees. Counterparty undeniably has the most sophisticated and diverse smart contracts at the moment, though. The only smart contracts implemented in Mastercoin that I know of are those of its mostly-still-in-the-planning-stages distributed exchange.

You're using Mike Hearn's narrow definition of smart property. It has become a far more general term that encompasses deeds, titles and shares.

[dexX7]

The "to sender" multisig output should be defined as one of the following ...

This is how I'd formalize a class B transaction:

• has an pay-to-pubkeyhash-output to the Exodus address.
   
• has an "input reference" which is a public key within the input script sig whereby multiple inputs are allowed, if they all originate from the same public key. This allows parsing on an atomic level. The spec further allows to add different inputs and choses the one with the highest summed value. This comes for the cost of the need of fetching all input transactions in the worst case, but allows more freedom on the other hand.
   
• has valid Mastercoin transaction data encoded with the "input reference" within multi signature output(s). As far as I know the current implementations parse and identify data-packages in the following way: [don't care] [data package #1] (optional: data package #2).
  
  I'd generalize the choice of data-packages to something like "treat several outputs as a stream of potential data-packages and chain the longest sequences of MSC data-packages within transaction's output with ascending sequence numbers, starting from 01" (see an example here). No generalization is needed, if the data-package length is less than 61 byte which is currently the case for all accepted MSC transactions.
   
• has an "reference output" where the transaction requires such reference which is a pay-to-pubkeyhash-output not to the Exodus address, a data package or any form of the "input reference".
   
• all output values are >= dust threshold.
   

My wording is probably fishy.. but let me summarize how I think about this: as long as there is no ambigiousness (which shouldn't be the case) this explicitly allows to not include any form of sender's public key. This is of course not desired in most cases due to potential redemption, but I think the lack of the sender's public key shouldn't render the transaction as invalid to allow all forms of compression, faulty public keys and odd cases where the multi sig output may be redeemable by the user, but not by the "input reference" - without any further need of verification or checks. Keeping it a) as simple as possible while b) being as open and general as possible is what I would aim for to not create artificial limitations that may be hindering in the future.

Share a private key, yes, however do not have same WIF private key, public key, or address. If some mastercoin outputs are spendable by a compressed address, and other outputs are spendable by the corresponding uncompressed address, then both should be represented in the wallet and identified as such.

The implication of a client automatically receiving/signing transactions for both the compressed and uncompressed versions of the key pair is that the mastercoin 'unit of identification' is a private key, and thus two key pairs. This isn't compatible with any other client that I'm aware of, can be a privacy leak, and security risk if one of the WIF private keys is compromised.

I agree with intelligent input selection, however I'd not be inclined to use a wallet that treats two key pairs interchangeably, especially if both pairs were not represented and identified as such.

Agreed. Forced compression does probably more harm than good.

I see Class B transactions as a great transition to Class C transactions - but if Class B transactions are not depreciated, and multisig output dust is not properly handled, the implementation of Class B transactions does little to address the intent behind eliminating unspendable outputs. Sure, it technically does not create unspendable outputs, however it's a cop out to say that Class B transactions address the concern of blockchain bloat due data storage. Others may disagree, but as far as I'm concerned if outputs of a transaction are not recognized, cannot be spent, or are otherwise not used in transactions when reasonable, they will not be spent and are subject to loss due to perceived lack of value or understanding.

Well, I'd say those are two different issues. One is the actual encoding and the other one is the redemption of multi signature outputs. I agree that OP_RETURN data-packages would be nicer, but I currently don't see how 40 bytes could be enough to store the data.

I've been pretty jazzed about mastercoin, however recently it seems esoteric, loose, and out of touch with the user. I bought at exodus last year, I was one of the first to attempt decentralized trades back in mid November, and I was one of the first to succeed on the 15th. Yes, it's groundbreaking, and yes, trades can be made. But mastercoin doesn't have a specification that describes current implementation, the clients privilege Windows users, and the depth of understanding in bitcoin required to spend Class B outputs (i.e. not bloat the blockchain) is a great bar to entry.

Good thing then that you raised this point. I think this kind of feedback is crucial and should be very welcomed.

This all is pretty technical, so I suggest to continue in the dev thread maybe?

[donut]

And what about smart contracts and smart properties?
Mastercoin guys spoke about theses a lot in the early days, but not anymore. Does that mean they have abandonned the idea?
I have not heard Counterparty guys speaking about smart contracts and smart properties, does that mean there is not plan to implement them even in the mid-long term?

'Smart property' isn't really something that Mastercoin, or Counterparty, has anything to do with directly. The Mastercoin Project just loves throwing around such buzzwords. 'Smart property' is hardware (like a car) that might itself, for instance, parse Bitcoin, or Mastercoin, or Counterparty transactions, and behave differently depending on what it sees (e.g. unlock itself only for someone with a particular private key). The only real prerequisite technology at the protocol level is virtual assets, which Counterparty has totally working and Mastercoin hasn't even begun to implement.

A 'smart contract' is a more general idea, and really applies to any contract enforced by a protocol. Bitcoin, Mastercoin and Counterparty all have these to varying degrees. Counterparty undeniably has the most sophisticated and diverse smart contracts at the moment, though. The only smart contracts implemented in Mastercoin that I know of are those of its mostly-still-in-the-planning-stages distributed exchange.

You're using Mike Hearn's narrow definition of smart property. It has become a far more general term that encompasses deeds, titles and shares.

In that case "smart property" is a misnomer, as that implies that the property itself is somehow "smart", like "smartphone".

"Digital proof of ownership", perhaps.

[Herp]

Guys, take it to the dev thread please. Be nice! Don't bore the audience.

Just wanted to express some concern about those involved with Counterparty. There's too much Counterparty risk there. Get it? Counterparty risk? 

[Herp]

Check out this fresh interview with David Johnston

 https://soundcloud.com/mindtomatter/ltb-e92-playing-catchup#t=15:15

[bitwhizz]

@ Mastercoin

You need to create another count down,
such as for

the Metacoin distributed exchange,

or  smart property

or distributed e comerce (my favourite)  

[dacoinminster]

I think I could take a pretty good shot at guessing most of your portfolio allocations just based on comments in this thread

@ Mastercoin

You need to create another count down,
such as for

the Metacoin distributed exchange,

or  smart property

or distributed e comerce (my favourite)  

Yeah, we definitely should do a countdown to the Smart Property launch. That was fun!

[kdrop22]

I think I could take a pretty good shot at guessing most of your portfolio allocations just based on comments in this thread

@ Mastercoin

You need to create another count down,
such as for

the Metacoin distributed exchange,

or  smart property

or distributed e comerce (my favourite)  

Yeah, we definitely should do a countdown to the Smart Property launch. That was fun!

+1
Let's get another countdown to build the excitement.

[Herp]

I think I could take a pretty good shot at guessing most of your portfolio allocations just based on comments in this thread

@ Mastercoin

You need to create another count down,
such as for

the Metacoin distributed exchange,

or  smart property

or distributed e comerce (my favourite)  

Yeah, we definitely should do a countdown to the Smart Property launch. That was fun!

+1
Let's get another countdown to build the excitement.

You can also add a count down for that user friendly Omniwallet. Many people can't use current wallets due to difficulty requirements. Omniwallet should be a very important stepping stone that could bring lots of new users on-board. It definitely deserves a countdown of its own.

[NWO]

Counterparty vs. Mastercoin: I am invested in both, and I think the space is big enough that we don't have to pick sides. But calling Counterparty a "copycat" isn't a good criticism, since Mastercoin is open-source (which is very important!) and it's not really about who came up with the ideas first, but who is implementing them more quickly and effectively.

I agree it's very good that Mastercoin has institutional investors, but it's not only about how much money you have backing the project, it's also how many features you have, and Counterparty objectively has more features right now. Actually, you don't want the money to get too far ahead of the project, or else there will be a more drastic reaction if the project fails to make good on what it promises.

Calling Counterparty a "copycat" is calling it as it is. They've copied Mastercoin down to smallest details and Mastercoin's idea of using BTC blockchain.

I agree that space is big enough to allow for more competitors to emerge and competition is healthy.

Please name these specific features Counterparty has right now.

With Counterparty you can create assets, make bets and contracts for difference, and you can trade all assets, not only XCP and BTC, on the distributed exchange. According to Mastercoin's timeline, they only expect to have user-created assets by the end of Q2, and I don't know when they plan to have bets and contracts for difference implemented.

Congratulations to Counterparty for implementing those features so quickly but there is no denying that they are a copycat. As you said, this space is open source so it's all about getting there first and doing it well but JR is right when he says they're a copycat.

Either way, I think the time has passed to remain anonymous in this game. It was very understandable for Satoshi to do so being the first, but the cat is out of the bag now and govs know there's little point on putting pressure on anyone or any group of persons in an open source environment. If they don't like what's happening they will resort to other measures. Those that remain anonymous such as the NXT and XRP people, will find it difficult to compete with teams that can network and attract VC money like JR has already done and what appears like a large scale. This space is real industry now. Institutional money is ready. Projects need real names, real faces, these institutions can reach out to. I think this is an important point.  

Do you have the slightest idea of what you are talking about? Or are you just trying participate in something for the sake of increasing your post count?

RippleLabs is not anonymous and they have attracted funding.

Here's the team: https://www.ripplelabs.com/team/
Here's the VC money they have attracted: https://www.ripplelabs.com/investors/

[halfcab123]

I personally have zero BTC invested in Mastercoin, and several BTC invested in Counterparty. I'm not rich by any mention of the word, from what I've seen Counterparty appears to be ahead specifically where it counts, but I have nothing against Mastercoin. Who knows maybe I'm wrong. Have you seen the screenshots of the Counterparty Web Wallet ? Good God, it looks like it was crafted by someone with some serious skills. I've seen a few complaints about the usability of the Mastercoin web wallet. I would invest in Mastercoin at least a little, but the price seems high to get decent ROI; however I assume that would be moot point if the meat of Mastercoin plans come to fruition.

[Herp]

I personally have zero BTC invested in Mastercoin, and several BTC invested in Counterparty. I'm not rich by any mention of the word, from what I've seen Counterparty appears to be ahead specifically where it counts, but I have nothing against Mastercoin. Who knows maybe I'm wrong. Have you seen the screenshots of the Counterparty Web Wallet ? Good God, it looks like it was crafted by someone with some serious skills. I've seen a few complaints about the usability of the Mastercoin web wallet. I would invest in Mastercoin at least a little, but the price seems high to get decent ROI; however I assume that would be moot point if the meat of Mastercoin plans come to fruition.

You're confused. Complaints you've seen were about the off-line wallets like Masterchest and this online wallet https://masterchain.info/ People (myself included) were complaining about these two for not being user friendly enough.

However, you're praising Counterparty for their web wallet that no one got their hands on, screenshot only, while Mastercoin has a user friendly wallet called Omniwallet in alpha stage https://test.omniwallet.org/ which you can already try out.

[Patel]

I personally have zero BTC invested in Mastercoin, and several BTC invested in Counterparty. I'm not rich by any mention of the word, from what I've seen Counterparty appears to be ahead specifically where it counts, but I have nothing against Mastercoin. Who knows maybe I'm wrong. Have you seen the screenshots of the Counterparty Web Wallet ? Good God, it looks like it was crafted by someone with some serious skills. I've seen a few complaints about the usability of the Mastercoin web wallet. I would invest in Mastercoin at least a little, but the price seems high to get decent ROI; however I assume that would be moot point if the meat of Mastercoin plans come to fruition.

You're confused. Complaints you've seen were about the off-line wallets like Masterchest and this online wallet https://masterchain.info/ People (myself included) were complaining about these two for not being user friendly enough.

However, you're praising Counterparty for their web wallet that no one got their hands on, screenshot only, while Mastercoin has a user friendly wallet called Omniwallet in alpha stage https://test.omniwallet.org/ which you can already try out.

You can still use all features of Counterparty using the reference client. The wallet is just to improve user experience.

Is omniwallet a web wallet?

[johnybyo]

I personally have zero BTC invested in Mastercoin, and several BTC invested in Counterparty. I'm not rich by any mention of the word, from what I've seen Counterparty appears to be ahead specifically where it counts, but I have nothing against Mastercoin. Who knows maybe I'm wrong. Have you seen the screenshots of the Counterparty Web Wallet ? Good God, it looks like it was crafted by someone with some serious skills. I've seen a few complaints about the usability of the Mastercoin web wallet. I would invest in Mastercoin at least a little, but the price seems high to get decent ROI; however I assume that would be moot point if the meat of Mastercoin plans come to fruition.

You're confused. Complaints you've seen were about the off-line wallets like Masterchest and this online wallet https://masterchain.info/ People (myself included) were complaining about these two for not being user friendly enough.

However, you're praising Counterparty for their web wallet that no one got their hands on, screenshot only, while Mastercoin has a user friendly wallet called Omniwallet in alpha stage https://test.omniwallet.org/ which you can already try out.

Alpha stage test wallet(web?) vs almost ready independent web wallet. + 80% lastyear Q3-this year Q4 hype stage with some working functions vs almost ready working protocol.

[Herp]

Almost ready? When they've only released screenshots? Not sure I would call that almost ready.
An Alpha stage wallet you can actually use beats the hell out of screenshots.

Yeah, Omniwallet is a web wallet.

[bitwhizz]

@ Mastercoin

Price is tanking,

Investors/Mastercoin holders need confidence

Please try aspire confidence, in any way possible

Countdown/ revealing secret progress/ who knows,

Sooner than later

Thanks

[Herp]

@ Mastercoin

Price is tanking,

Investors need confidence

Please try aspire confidence of this project, in any way possible

Countdown/ revealing secret progress/ who knows,

Sooner than later

Thanks

The obvious advantages Mastercoin has are not clearly presented in a digestible format. The list of upcoming Dex is really impressive and will make Mastercoin the best 2.0 to be on. Most investors are not really aware. You have to skim the blog entries and piece a lot of information together to make sense of that.

The main .org website doesn't say any of this, in a clear cut sort of way. I'd say a new consolidated website is in order. One they have for the moment is still based on the pre-release stuff with some new additions but it doesn't present people the full picture.

This makes Mastercoin a very undervalued coin because for many people the presentation is important. Mastercoin suffers in this area.         The package sells the product, as they say.

Main website needs to be much more appealing. Now it looks like an academic website rather than one meant for actually living, breathing everyday users. Highest focal point of website should be smart property. When people click that they are sent to a mastercoin wiki page. Dedicated sections like white paper and such should be removed. No one cares about "whitepapers" and even knows wtf that is except some radical geeks which is not target audience. Keep stuff like "whitepaper" in consolidated wikis where casual users don't get to see this dorky pimpled face ugliness plastered all over the place. Mastercoin needs to be more like Apple and less like Microsoft in its presentation. At the moment looks more like NASA, so it's not even close to Microsoft.

If you have good cash reserve, which Counterparty and others don't have, make full use of it and don't use some crappy basement dweller web designer that does it cheap. Get some good talent to design the website, preferably someone with artistic inclinations with proven track record. You want polished and effective website that draws people in, not some geeky made crappy website like Counterparty has for example that looks like Github. Just commission a kick-ass website to blow the others out of the water. This should boost Mastercoin valuation like crazy and bring it closer to its real value.

[bitwhizz]

@ Mastercoin

Price is tanking,

Investors need confidence

Please try aspire confidence of this project, in any way possible

Countdown/ revealing secret progress/ who knows,

Sooner than later

Thanks

The obvious advantages Mastercoin has are not clearly presented in a digestible format. The list of upcoming Dex is really impressive and will make Mastercoin the best 2.0 to be on. Most investors are not really aware. You have to skim the blog entries and piece a lot of information together to make sense of that.

The main .org website doesn't say any of this, in a clear cut sort of way. I'd say a new consolidated website is in order. One they have for the moment is still based on the pre-release stuff with some new additions but it doesn't present people the full picture.

This makes Mastercoin a very undervalued coin because for many people the presentation is important. Mastercoin suffers in this area.         The package sells the product, as they say.

Main website needs to be much more appealing. Now it looks like an academic website rather than one meant for actually living, breathing everyday users. Highest focal point of website should be smart property. When people click that they are sent to a mastercoin wiki page. Dedicated sections like white paper and such should be removed. No one cares about "whitepapers" and even knows wtf that is except some radical geeks which is not target audience. Keep stuff like "whitepaper" in consolidated wikis where casual users don't get to see this dorky pimpled face ugliness plastered all over the place. Mastercoin needs to be more like Apple and less like Microsoft in its presentation. At the moment looks more like NASA, so it's not even close to Microsoft.

If you have good cash reserve, which Counterparty and others don't have, make full use of it and don't use some crappy basement dweller web designer that does it cheap. Get some good talent to design the website, preferably someone with artistic inclinations with proven track record. You want polished and effective website that draws people in, not some geeky made crappy website like Counterparty has for example that looks like Github. Just commission a kick-ass website to blow the others out of the water. This should boost Mastercoin valuation like crazy and bring it closer to its real value.

I am so glad this resulted from my comment

@Mastercoin, please take note and act on Herp analysis and improvement, he's on the ball here