Mastercoin Faucet: New Bounty ($500-$850)

[ripper234]

Hi all,

I discussed with the board and approved a small allocation of funds for a bounty for building a Mastercoin Faucet.
While this part of the ecosystem isn't strictly required, because soon everybody will be able to buy mastercoins directly off the distributed exchange, I still think that giving small amounts of mastercoins to new users is a cool additional service we can provide.

Bounty size: $500+$50 per authentication method beyond the first, from the ones listed below. You can start by implementing just a few authentication methods, but at least one premium authentication method has to be supported.

Acceptance criteria:

Create a webpage that sends a small amount of mastercoins to anyone that passes certains qualifications, in order to prevent abuse. Qualifications we can start with:

Premium authentication

• Anyone who's had a github account with either (at least 3 public repositories) or (stared one of the mastercoin github repositories listed here) and (account created before date Aug 1st 2013).
• Anyone with a reddit account with karma above 100.
• Anyone who had a bitcointalk account with activity score > 10, at least 10 posts, accounts created prior to Aug 1 2013. This one would be more difficult to implement given the lack of API, and so this feature is awarded $150 instead of $50.

Basic authentication
Anyone with a Google/Facebook account (amount given here should be smaller, this criteria might be easier to spam)

Security
The service should be "hard to hack". We will delay awarding the bounty until 30 days pass from the site's launch without a serious security incident.

Funding
The site will display available funds at time of access. The Mastercoin Foundation will award:

$0.5 worth of mastercoins for the first 1,000 people that authenticate via premium authentication.
$0.1 worth of mastercoins for the next 10,000 people, or to people that authenticate via basic authentication.

In other words, we will allocate a total of $1,500 for the faucet's visitors. The faucet will award visitors based on their chosen authentication method. When the $500 allocated to premium authentication runs out, these users will be served by the $1,000 pool dedicated to basic authentication.

The worth of each mastercoin in USD can be hardcoded at first (updated at least weekly).

Bonus $50 - find the value of MSC in USD by first finding the value of MSC-BTC via the distributed exchange, and then multiplying by the value of BTC-USD via bitstamp or another exchange.

The website should be open source, with the code hosted on github.

Maintenance
The site is expected to be maintained even beyond the 30-day "hack test" period.
We are not yet committed to additional funds as rewards beyond the initial $1,500 - we will consider this when the funds run out.

[Tachikoma]

Hosting is not cheap. Especially if you want to do it in a secure fashion. Secure hosting is needed since the server needs access to a private key with a sufficient Mastercoin balance. I also doubt that the people who will go for a 500 USD bounty are the same the people who know how to securely host and build their code. But I hope I'm proven wrong

[ripper234]

Well, security is relative.
This server won't hold large amount of funds at any time ... we can fuel it in $100-$200 increments.

I'm more concerned about people trying to game the authentication system.

[Tachikoma]

If that's the case I would also setup an IP filter, just in case. I know this would rule out a lot of University/Office/Proxy based users but it will also greatly reduce the abuse.

[NewLiberty]

Hosting is not cheap. Especially if you want to do it in a secure fashion. Secure hosting is needed since the server needs access to a private key with a sufficient Mastercoin balance. I also doubt that the people who will go for a 500 USD bounty are the same the people who know how to securely host and build their code. But I hope I'm proven wrong

My recommendation (since you almost asked)  Mastercoin dev team should pay for (and own) the server hosting accounts, as well as the SSL cert registrations, though perhaps let the bounty winner specify the environment.

[prophetx]

be careful with the bitcointalk accounts, it turned out that whoever hacked this site last month created a ton of bogus accounts in order to take advantage of the script that ran for the XRP giveaway

https://ripple.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3800&p=18691

[ripper234]

be careful with the bitcointalk accounts, it turned out that whoever hacked this site last month created a ton of bogus accounts in order to take advantage of the script that ran for the XRP giveaway

https://ripple.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3800&p=18691

I would like to confirm that my fears are now reality, every single one of the BitcoinTalk accounts in the Ripple Giveaway thread, which was new (registered few days ago) and only had 1-3 posts, is edited and is now registered before February 19, 2013, 18:45 UTC and is eligible for Ripple Giveaway. I hope that someone listened

Let's modify the criteria to require 10 posts per bitcointalk account, I assume that it's hard to make 10 bot posts and not get flagged.

This authentication method is optional, whoever implements this bounty - you can skip it for now if you want.

[ripper234]

OP updated.
I also updated the github auth method:

Anyone who's had a github account with either (at least 3 public repositories) or (stared one of the mastercoin github repositories listed here) and (account created before date Aug 1st 2013).

[ninjaboon]

Cool bounty, will inform the dev community in Kuala Lumpur.

[dexX7]

While Reddit, GitHub, Google and FB allow authentication via OAuth, this leaves bitcointalk.org alone. A possible solution is to generate one-time tokens which the user could put in his profile for a short time. The profile is easily scrapable, but I still see no simple way to fetch the user id solely based on an username.

Does each authentication offer a potential reward for the user or is he only allowed to redeem one?

[StarenseN]

following

[ripper234]

Cool bounty, will inform the dev community in Kuala Lumpur.

We feel that this feature is of low priority, given the distributed exchange and the many many bitcoin faucets.
This is why it receives a low bounty - it's nice to have but we can get along without it.

While Reddit, GitHub, Google and FB allow authentication via OAuth, this leaves bitcointalk.org alone. A possible solution is to generate one-time tokens which the user could put in his profile for a short time. The profile is easily scrapable, but I still see no simple way to fetch the user id solely based on an username.

Does each authentication offer a potential reward for the user or is he only allowed to redeem one?

Well, a user can obviously connect multiple authentication methods and then clear their cookies between them - I do not expect the site to try and guarantee each user only receives one reward.

[TKeenan]

We feel that this feature is of low priority,

Faucets are mere gimmicks.  Mastercoin doesn't need a gimmick to attract attention because the quality of the spec speaks for itself.  Why waste even one more second making a gimmick to attract freeloaders?  

This is a legitimate project - not a pump and dump scam.  Pump and dump scams love things like faucets.  Time to give up on this stupid effort and get back to contributing to the real function of the Mastercoin core.

[ripper234]

Gavin ran a faucet for Bitcoin for a long time ...

As I said, it's a low priority feature, so we won't concentrate a lot of effort into it, but if someone wants to pick this up and create the first Mastercoin faucet, he'll get a token reward for his effort.

We're focusing most of our energy on other projects, don't worry.

[prophetx]

We feel that this feature is of low priority,

Faucets are mere gimmicks.  Mastercoin doesn't need a gimmick to attract attention because the quality of the spec speaks for itself.  Why waste even one more second making a gimmick to attract freeloaders?  

This is a legitimate project - not a pump and dump scam.  Pump and dump scams love things like faucets.  Time to give up on this stupid effort and get back to contributing to the real function of the Mastercoin core.

That is a matter of opinion, and there are plenty of people who do not get it or learn by doing rather than reading a spec.  The give away portion is almost nothing, and I doubt anyone is going to go after it as a serious source of income.

Mastercoin is a new concept on top of a new concept and giving these away allows newbies to have some small incentive to play with it in order to learn how to use the various tools and software involved.  

For example, some people might want to try a few test transactions in order to be confident in the inner workings of mastercoin before they throw down serious btc. 

[TKeenan]

Mastercoin is a new concept on top of a new concept and giving these away allows newbies to have some small incentive to play with it in order to learn how to use the various tools and software involved.

Mastercoin cannot benefit from those kinds of people who are motivated by a few pennies to learn to use some tools and software.  We need to attract a different sort of thinker.  People who are attracted by faucets for free pennies are not the type of people who will materially effect the protocol in the long run.  Drop the faucet - it is dumb.

[prophetx]

Mastercoin is a new concept on top of a new concept and giving these away allows newbies to have some small incentive to play with it in order to learn how to use the various tools and software involved.

Mastercoin cannot benefit from those kinds of people who are motivated by a few pennies to learn to use some tools and software.  We need to attract a different sort of thinker.  People who are attracted by faucets for free pennies are not the type of people who will materially effect the protocol in the long run.  Drop the faucet - it is dumb.

People are motivated by not losing real money, that is why a faucet allows them to test a system and gain confidence that their money is not going into some black hole.

For example, just the other day when I was writing a tutorial I overlooked the transaction fee portion and had an unconfirmed tx that locked all of the funds in my wallet even though I was only spending about 1% of the total.  I had to spend 1 hour to download and set up pywallet  to clean up my wallet.dat and do a rescan.  Now, I am not a technical wizard, but certainly there are people out there who will use these technologies and do stupid things, it is better that they make errors with insignificant amounts rather than doing something with larger amounts.

[TKeenan]

it is better that they make errors with insignificant amounts rather than doing something with larger amounts.

They could accomplish the same thing by spending $.1 - ten cents - of their own money.  They don't need a faucet (free money) to experiment with small values in testing a system. 

[dexX7]

Hey,

I created a first test version of a Mastercoin faucet.

The actual payout module is not yet created. I want to create raw transactions and push them to blockchained.info (or similar).

4/5 authentication methods are implemented. The code is not complete and not optimized.



GitHub: https://github.com/dexX7/mastercoin-faucet

Website: http://faucet.bitwatch.co

Let me know, what you think.

[prophetx]

Hey,

I created a first test version of a Mastercoin faucet.

The actual payout module is not yet created. I want to create raw transactions and push them to blockchained.info (or similar).

4/5 authentication methods are implemented. The code is not complete and not optimized.



GitHub: https://github.com/dexX7/mastercoin-faucet

Website: http://faucet.bitwatch.co

Let me know, what you think.

looks good but i got this message when I tried out my bitcointalk profile:

Too bad. Sorry, prophetx...
You have 825 posts and 224 activity score, your profile was created on April 1, 2013.

And therefore you are not qualified for this reward, because you need an activity score above 10 as well as at least 10 posts and furthermore your account must be created before August 1, 2013.

I actually did not follow this part below, it was a bit unclear to me what I am supposed to do? clear out everything in my signature and just put a BTC address? or do I need to put in "mastercoin faucet" followed by my btc address?

Then you have to make sure that you entered a Bitcoin address in your profile. You need to sign a message with that address soon, so make sure you are the owner of this address. You can set an address under Profile - Forum Profile Information.

At last sign the message Mastercoin faucet with the address in your profile and copy the signature into the second box below and click submit.