The Official Mastercoin Foundation, Master Protocol & Mastercoin Thread

[marcelus]

Can i ask why, it even goes from

Bitcoin -> MSC -> Safe coin

Why is MSC the intermediary

Why doesn't it just go

Bitcoin -> Safe coin


i must be missing something here

I'm not aware of any ways to currently issue your own currency on top of bitcoin. There are ways of colouring coins, yes, but not issuing new tokens. Mastercoin permits this.

CounterParty? https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=395761.0

I mean on bitcoin not on another metacoin. That's the conversation we were having, see above.

[1715419553]

1715419553

[marcelus]

Any comment on how sidechains will make Mastercoin redundant?

Why so? There's nothing to stop Mastercoin becoming a sidechain itself. It has a nice set of tools and a DEx, many will find useful. The solution to all its flaws, which I've seen you point out over and over again, is to move to its own merge-mined chain. It can perform as a perfectly good platform for projects. Sidechains make bitcoin brilliant at money but a lot of projects simply want a nice platform to build on and will not want to concern themselves with cryptography and hardware. Mastercoin offers this. Maidsafe chose to build on it didn't they? 

[dacoinminster]

As I understand it, sidechains need miner cooperation. This is their biggest vulnerability versus systems like ours, which can operate just fine when miners are ambivalent or even hostile to your project.

Another way to put it: miners have to opt-in to sidechains, but there's no effective way to opt-out of mining Mastercoin transactions without running a full Mastercoin node.

So you make a new side-chain, then you have to start making the rounds to the mining pools, trying to get them to put your bit of custom code into their client, and then continue to keep that code through every bitcoin upgrade. This is one of those things that sounds good on paper (it's technically sound), but turns out to be a logistical nightmare.

[marcelus]

As I understand it, sidechains need miner cooperation. This is their biggest vulnerability versus systems like ours, which can operate just fine when miners are ambivalent or even hostile to your project.

Another way to put it: miners have to opt-in to sidechains, but there's no effective way to opt-out of mining Mastercoin transactions without running a full Mastercoin node.

So you make a new side-chain, then you have to start making the rounds to the mining pools, trying to get them to put your bit of custom code into their client, and then continue to keep that code through every bitcoin upgrade. This is one of those things that sounds good on paper (it's technically sound), but turns out to be a logistical nightmare.

Point taken but a logistical nightmare that might be worth having. Trustlessness is everything.

[dacoinminster]

Point taken but a logistical nightmare that might be worth having. Trustlessness is everything.

I can't think of any way in which side-chains improve "trustlessness". You have to trust the mining pools to run your code, and since you'll never get 100% of them, you are by definition more centralized (and slower) than somebody who uses all bitcoin miners.

Can you elaborate?

[TraderTimm]

As I understand it, sidechains need miner cooperation. This is their biggest vulnerability versus systems like ours, which can operate just fine when miners are ambivalent or even hostile to your project.

Another way to put it: miners have to opt-in to sidechains, but there's no effective way to opt-out of mining Mastercoin transactions without running a full Mastercoin node.

So you make a new side-chain, then you have to start making the rounds to the mining pools, trying to get them to put your bit of custom code into their client, and then continue to keep that code through every bitcoin upgrade. This is one of those things that sounds good on paper (it's technically sound), but turns out to be a logistical nightmare.

Thank you for confirming what I suspected. You never thought your idea would succeed unless people were forced to carry your data. Its all very clear now what mastercoin is all about.

[dacoinminster]

Thank you for confirming what I suspected. You never thought your idea would succeed unless people were forced to carry your data. Its all very clear now what mastercoin is all about.

It didn't seem wise to give miners the keys to turn off Mastercoin if I didn't absolutely have to.

Yes, robustness against censorship was definitely a design goal. I hope I have been upfront about that from the beginning.

[marcelus]

Point taken but a logistical nightmare that might be worth having. Trustlessness is everything.

I can't think of any way in which side-chains improve "trustlessness". You have to trust the mining pools to run your code, and since you'll never get 100% of them, you are by definition more centralized (and slower) than somebody who uses all bitcoin miners.

Can you elaborate?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but as it currently stands, mastercoin transactions are meaningless to bitcoin miners. We must trust the couple of Master Protocol implementations there are to tell us what is what. When mining pools run code, there are thousands of miners that can verify this code is being run, and if it is, mastercoin transactions are distributively verified by these same miners as opposed to a couple of trusted sources. To me the latter system appears more trustworthy. I like the goals of the Master Protocol and am invested. I'm not trying to bash it, just attempting to ascertain if there's a better way. 

[hl5460]

I weiboed (chinese twitter) the IPO news of Maidsafe and got 42,000 views in 36 hours.

http://weibo.com/3552119670/AF3tX6roj


And another thread got 555 views.
http://bbs.btcman.com/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=17558&extra=page%3D1

[niner]

Dev update regarding safecoin etc.:

http://blog.mastercoin.org/2014/04/11/dev-update-13-first-user-currencies-scheduled/#more-677

[dexX7]

Dev update regarding safecoin etc.:

http://blog.mastercoin.org/2014/04/11/dev-update-13-first-user-currencies-scheduled/#more-677

Awesome!

By the way, did the foundation found a web dev in the meantime for Omniwallet?

[TraderTimm]

Thank you for confirming what I suspected. You never thought your idea would succeed unless people were forced to carry your data. Its all very clear now what mastercoin is all about.

It didn't seem wise to give miners the keys to turn off Mastercoin if I didn't absolutely have to.

Yes, robustness against censorship was definitely a design goal. I hope I have been upfront about that from the beginning.

Nice re-framing of the argument, trying to pass it off as "censorship" when it is really you exploiting a resource because you have the ability, not the actual right to do so.

Just like other professional disciplines, programmers need to learn ethics - as it is obvious in this application that was a distant concern.

[dexX7]

Nice re-framing of the argument, trying to pass it off as "censorship" when it is really you exploiting a resource because you have the ability, not the actual right to do so.

Could you please elaborate on what this statement is based?

I think your premise is flawed and using the phrasings "exploiting" and "no right to" is blatantly rude in my opinion. This is similar to "I don't like TraderTimm spending some coins and therefore I claim it's abuse of the blockchain and he has no right to do so".

As far as I can see Mastercoin acts proactive by using redeemable multi signature outputs to lower the impact on the UTXO whereby more than 65 % are already redeemed based on the data I fetched earlier to evaluate the impact of metacoins. I'm currently working on a simple website which will allow users to lookup unspent outputs of any address to push this number even higher. The whole concept of the distributed exchange is furthermore designed in a way to please miners as much as possible: to combat disruption of the market by users who accept orders but don't pay (which makes the orders unavailable until this accept order times out), a special fee is required which goes directly to the miners to make it expensive to behave malicious. On top: many Mastercoin transactions were sent with a somewhat-higher-than-usual fee to offer an additional appeal to mine MSC transactions.

I would love to hear your feedback and I'd appreciate, if you could name the issues you are seeing, so potential flaws - if there are indeed any - can be optimized.

[crazy_rabbit]

Hey guys I just wanted to say I finally got masterchest wallet alpha running on my computer- SNAP it looks good. Great job guys! It seriously looks sooo good!

[atengzt]

Hey guys I just wanted to say I finally got masterchest wallet alpha running on my computer- SNAP it looks good. Great job guys! It seriously looks sooo good!

Windows or linux?

[crazy_rabbit]

Hey guys I just wanted to say I finally got masterchest wallet alpha running on my computer- SNAP it looks good. Great job guys! It seriously looks sooo good!

Windows or linux?

Windows. :-)

[dacoinminster]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but as it currently stands, mastercoin transactions are meaningless to bitcoin miners. We must trust the couple of Master Protocol implementations there are to tell us what is what. When mining pools run code, there are thousands of miners that can verify this code is being run, and if it is, mastercoin transactions are distributively verified by these same miners as opposed to a couple of trusted sources. To me the latter system appears more trustworthy. I like the goals of the Master Protocol and am invested. I'm not trying to bash it, just attempting to ascertain if there's a better way.  

So, our parsing code runs on thousands of computers, not just a couple. If miners were time-stamping a side-chain, they would run the exact same code. The only measureable difference I can see would be how much easier it would be for someone with a lot of mining power to attack the side-chain between checkpoints on the main chain. Sure, we could make our side-chain run some kind of ASIC-resistant algorithm for its hashing, but that doesn't help a lot.

Sidechains are great if everybody likes you and nobody wishes to attack you or double-spend you, but that's not the world any of these projects live in, unfortunately.

I don't want to create something vulnerable to a double-spend attack by anybody with access to a botnet. I have to wonder if maybe some people with botnets are hyping sidechains. That would be one explanation why something so insecure would get so much promotion . . .

I'm at the Toronto conference, and people keep coming up and asking me about side-chains, and I keep having to explain why they are vulnerable. Clearly somebody is very effective at getting people interested in this.

[crazy_rabbit]

Side note: no confirm email ever comes through for mastercointalk signups. Not sure who to mention that too.  :-)

[dacoinminster]

Side note: no confirm email ever comes through for mastercointalk signups. Not sure who to mention that too.  :-)

Thanks, we'll look into it ASAP:
http://mastercointalk.org/index.php?topic=345.0

No worry.  That forum is a disaster and not used by anyone.  Even the hardcore Masterminds won't participate.  Be happy your confirmation didn't come - now you aren't a member of that empty shell.

Yeah, we have some custom logic that makes our forum look empty to certain people.

[TraderTimm]

Nice re-framing of the argument, trying to pass it off as "censorship" when it is really you exploiting a resource because you have the ability, not the actual right to do so.

Could you please elaborate on what this statement is based?

I think your premise is flawed and using the phrasings "exploiting" and "no right to" is blatantly rude in my opinion. This is similar to "I don't like TraderTimm spending some coins and therefore I claim it's abuse of the blockchain and he has no right to do so".

(snipped)

I don't expect anything I say to change MSC's course. The development of MSC has reached a point where refactoring is viewed as untenable, to say the least. I'm just standing on the beach, as the hurricane of ill-conceived intentions blusters ashore, hoping that this forum server and google-indexed searches will show the markers of where things went wrong at the beginning. A lighthouse perched on the edge of the cliffs of greed, warning those that contemplate taking the same course.

My statement about exploitation is based on this:

MSC is equivalent to someone discovering that a particular email client can be used to forward unsolicited email from a user's ISP to anyone else, using a specially crafted email. Sure, they could filter out your "trigger" messages that allow them to do so, but you are the one exploiting them and tasking them with the burden of correcting your abuse.

The rest is just semantics. The ethics behind deciding to throw this load on to the backs of the miners is the problem. I don't give a toss if they can filter it out - THEY SHOULDN'T HAVE TO BE FORCED TO CORRECT YOUR DESIGN ASSUMPTIONS OF A SHARED RESOURCE.

This, simply, is wrong.