Proposal to Fork Mastercoin and Burn a portion of JR's immense stash.

[crazy_rabbit]

Mastercoin- the project that gave birth to the Bitcoin 2.0 Revolution, looks, by nearly any community judgements- to be dead.

For reasons too lengthy and depressing to mention, the project has managed to consistently snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Counterparty has now become the star of the Bitcoin 2.0 movement and rightly so. Had the Mastercoin foundation been a bit more farsighted and less greedy, perhaps it would have been Mastercoin building the future of Bitcoin 2.0 with Overstock, etc...

I have come to believe, as many others have, that the core problem at this point is that Mastercoin's founder, JR simply holds too many of the coins and has more then once wielded them to the great detriment of the market and the the project as a whole.

At this point Mastercoin's Foundation is essentially out of Money, having burned through what some say is nearly a million dollars, and most crucially having turn down out of pride the offer of counterparty's founders to collaborate.


As such I propose that if there is sufficient interest- we Fork Mastercoin with the purpose of either erasing the vast majority of JR's holdings, or selling them off with the intent of raising new funds for a new foundation or indeed to interest a new investor into the project.

Although Counterparty has clearly 'won' the 2.0 race when compared to Mastercoin, there still remains a future market of immense size to compete over. When Counterparties Medici project goes live, there will be a significant number of other individuals that will be interested in building a competitive product to Counterparty's Medici. I would say that this would be the opportunity for Mastercoin to shine, however no investor is going to commit to a project where essentially an enormous portion of the wealth would simply go to one person- no matter how brilliant and responsible for the project. The over concentration of coin wealth in JR's wallets has destroyed the community and essentially the project.

What is the communities response? The topic is self-moderated for obvious reasons, and as much as I have time for, I'll delete off topic comments quite vigorously.  This isn't a "Side chains/Etherum/Counterparty rulezzzzzz" thread. Please stay on topic- debating the pro's and con's of forking Mastercoin and starting over.

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[TinEye]

You lost all credibility with the Maidsafe IPO. Instead of trying to revive it, join Counterparty and help it get better, or start a different, innovative project.

When Mastercoin started I thought it was a good idea, but as you say the greed of the big holders destroyed it.

[crazy_rabbit]

You lost all credibility with the Maidsafe IPO. Instead of trying to revive it, join Counterparty and help it get better, or start a different, innovative project.

When Mastercoin started I thought it was a good idea, but as you say the greed of the big holders destroyed it.

I don't disagree, but for example- Maidsafe is still delineated with Mastercoin, and as a project- that one still seems to be very much alive. If Mastercoin is just abandoned, so would be the Maidsafe tokens. So in some sense, we need to keep it alive to some degree.

Perhaps it would be possible to transition all those tokens to the counter-party protocol? 

[TinEye]

Perhaps it would be possible to transition all those tokens to the counter-party protocol? 

I think a snapshot can be taken, and all the addresses which hold the Maidafe tokens will be awarded the equivalent over XCP. The issue would be the exchanges, I am not sure what exchange besides Masterxchange trades the Maidsafe coins. If there are few exchanges it becomes easier to make them honor it.

It need not even have to go with Counterparty but can also utilise other platforms like NXT or Bitshares. In that case the transition would quite complicated, and may even be unfeasible.

I would like to see a new project built on top of Bitcoin to provide something different than Counterparty. Mastercoin is too similar, too far behind, and poorly distributed to make sense to carry on.

[CryptoPiero]

I like to collaborate if any effort is to be taken.

[crazy_rabbit]

Perhaps it would be possible to transition all those tokens to the counter-party protocol?  

I think a snapshot can be taken, and all the addresses which hold the Maidafe tokens will be awarded the equivalent over XCP. The issue would be the exchanges, I am not sure what exchange besides Masterxchange trades the Maidsafe coins. If there are few exchanges it becomes easier to make them honor it.

It need not even have to go with Counterparty but can also utilise other platforms like NXT or Bitshares. In that case the transition would quite complicated, and may even be unfeasible.

I would like to see a new project built on top of Bitcoin to provide something different than Counterparty. Mastercoin is too similar, too far behind, and poorly distributed to make sense to carry on.

Well forking it would be intended to address the problem of poor distribution. I agree it's far, far, behind, but it's not totally out of the race. There's no reason to think that in the future Counterpary will be the only version (of it's type). It's easy to imagine a competitor company entering the space and wanting to create it's own "Medici" type of platform. In my opinion it's a last ditch, hail mary type of move. Sure it might be dead to most people, but there are still a few of us who would like to see it survive.

As for moving to Counterparty for Maidsafe, I don't see why it wouldn't be possible for them to do this. Indeed I would be surprised if they weren't already thinking about it.

[TinEye]

Keep in mind too that forking off and killing somebody's stash sets a very dangerous precedent. You all may end up being marked forever as the ones who opened this particular door.

I would strongly advise against it for the sake of the entire Crypto space.

[crazy_rabbit]

Keep in mind too that forking off and killing somebody's stash sets a very dangerous precedent. You all may end up being marked forever as the ones who opened this particular door.

I would strongly advise against it for the sake of the entire Crypto space.

Absolutely agree- although I'm tempted to think in this case we are faced with either a definitely dead project or a questionably dead project. We could fork it now because practically no one is using it. After all this time we only even have a Beta 0.0.8.2 that compiles only on linux. There are altcoins with joke names that are more prodigious.

Additionally- forking Mastercoin is very different then forking bitcoin. Mastercoin doesn't require anyone running a client in order for it to 'exist'. It's there in the blockchain. If only one person is happy to stay on the old Mastercoin their coins are just as secure as they always were. So it's not that we are forcibly withdrawing the hashpower of one blockchain to another, thus destroying the previous chain. We're simply choosing to recognize different tokens. Although the argument is worthwhile discussion. It really is not a nice precedent, but perhaps necessary.

[raskul]

Keep in mind too that forking off and killing somebody's stash sets a very dangerous precedent. You all may end up being marked forever as the ones who opened this particular door.

I would strongly advise against it for the sake of the entire Crypto space.

I'm of the mind that this is the most sensible advice.
Why instigate developing further, something which has already failed?

If the options are:

fork it and burn the stash
leave it and let that stash continue to have no value

i'd say the latter is the best option. Let it die.

[djm34]

Keep in mind too that forking off and killing somebody's stash sets a very dangerous precedent. You all may end up being marked forever as the ones who opened this particular door.

I would strongly advise against it for the sake of the entire Crypto space.

+1
and you will probably lose support from the exchange (however, I don't know anything about this kind of cryptocurrencies... so may-be in your case, since it is a lot more centralized...).
I and a few others attempted to fork talkcoin because the original dev was scamming the rest of us, the exchange didn't want to side with us as it was seen as an aggressive take over.
So you might just destroy the coin and end up with something nobody supports...

[crazy_rabbit]

Keep in mind too that forking off and killing somebody's stash sets a very dangerous precedent. You all may end up being marked forever as the ones who opened this particular door.

I would strongly advise against it for the sake of the entire Crypto space.

I'm of the mind that this is the most sensible advice.
Why instigate developing further, something which has already failed?

If the options are:

fork it and burn the stash
leave it and let that stash continue to have no value

i'd say the latter is the best option. Let it die.

We can't just let it die- MaidSafe is delineated with Mastercoin. That's a big multi-million dollar project, so we can't just let that die. BUT if nothing of value happens, it does endanger Maidsafe in that once an opportunity comes along to actually get out of Maidsafe because of lack of faith in Mastercoin, then people might abandon it in droves- which would be bad for an otherwise great project.

[crazy_rabbit]

Keep in mind too that forking off and killing somebody's stash sets a very dangerous precedent. You all may end up being marked forever as the ones who opened this particular door.

I would strongly advise against it for the sake of the entire Crypto space.

+1
and you will probably lose support from the exchange (however, I don't know anything about this kind of cryptocurrencies... so may-be in your case, since it is a lot more centralized...).
I and a few others attempted to fork talkcoin because the original dev was scamming the rest of us, the exchange didn't want to side with us as it was seen as an aggressive take over.
So you might just destroy the coin and end up with something nobody supports...

True, but I think few people would argue it could get too much worse than it already is. And possibly JR might see a compromise to rebuild the community.....maybe.....

[Cablez]

Are there any other high profile projects that would suffer from leaving things as is in addition to maidsafe?  The handling of mastercoin has been a lesson in what not to do but I don't know if forking to a mastercoin 2.0 is the right way especially since it appears now to be easy enough to port over to other protocols such as counterparty or etherium.

[TaunSew]

This seems more like desperation than a good idea.  I have seen many people holding bags asking for their dead coin to be revived and/or forked but it never works that way.

This was earlier in the year but I think the reason Mastercoin got a bad reputation was this big IPO and the fact that you would had made more money off Doge and NXT if you had bought those two in their first weeks.

[crazy_rabbit]

This seems more like desperation than a good idea.  I have seen many people holding bags asking for their dead coin to be revived and/or forked but it never works that way.

Desperation/good idea, probably a mix of both. Having been hanging out here since 2011 I've seen plenty of projects be revived + forked with good and bad results. It all depends on why and how you do it.

This was earlier in the year but I think the reason Mastercoin got a bad reputation was this big IPO and the fact that you would had made more money off Doge and NXT if you had bought those two in their first weeks.

Doge and NXT are separate things entirely and don't contribute anything of value back to Bitcoin. Mastercoin got involved to improve bitcoin, not create entirely new blockchains.

[jrmg]

I think best if Maidsafe give for shareholders possibility burn Maidsafe coins and get it back in Counterparty. I think can have Maidsafe in both platform  (different asset name in Counterparty)? Create same amount coins under Counterparty same time when users burn their mastercoin from address where they own privatekey and send Counterparty asset back.. (maybe manual process is only way, but if owners want that then i think it is best option) If over half of owners vote and move to Counterparty then you know what to do with own holdings... I own all msc, xcp and maidsafe and when following all projects its look like there is two parties who can be really happy together same time one continue making quiet dead Sry english hope can understand my point...  

[mishax1]

When you say forking do you mean to hand over the control of the project to an entirely different team ?

It's not that mastercoin is broken or something, their main problem as far as I can tell is really bad PR, and the fact that JR is bag holding and selling off his stash instead taking care of PR and building a strong community.

There were some bullshit projects published by Judith (which from what I see is the only voice mastercoin has to the public and she is just posting nonsense things like "ohh look another post by mastercoin i'm so exited".. ) , are any of them actually worth something ?  When it comes to mastercoin, I don't know if it's a new dead project or a multi-million ipo..

[mishax1]

I think best if Maidsafe give for shareholders possibility burn Maidsafe coins and get it back in Counterparty. I think can have Maidsafe in both platform  (different asset name in Counterparty)? Create same amount coins under Counterparty same time when users burn their mastercoin from address where they own privatekey and send Counterparty asset back.. (maybe manual process is only way, but if owners want that then i think it is best option) If over half of owners vote and move to Counterparty then you know what to do with own holdings... I own all msc, xcp and maidsafe and when following all projects its look like there is two parties who can be really happy together same time one continue making quiet dead Sry english hope can understand my point...  

Create some counterparty asset and burn msc for it ? Is that a joke ?   MSC's market cap is currently at 4500BTC   what would hold it's value over counterparty? (nothing..)

[jrmg]

I think best if Maidsafe give for shareholders possibility burn Maidsafe coins and get it back in Counterparty. I think can have Maidsafe in both platform  (different asset name in Counterparty)? Create same amount coins under Counterparty same time when users burn their mastercoin from address where they own privatekey and send Counterparty asset back.. (maybe manual process is only way, but if owners want that then i think it is best option) If over half of owners vote and move to Counterparty then you know what to do with own holdings... I own all msc, xcp and maidsafe and when following all projects its look like there is two parties who can be really happy together same time one continue making quiet dead Sry english hope can understand my point...  

Create some counterparty asset and burn msc for it ? Is that a joke ?   MSC's market cap is currently at 4500BTC   what would hold it's value over counterparty? (nothing..)

I mean burn Maidsafe coins and give same amount NewMaidsafe coins under counterparty.

[mishax1]

I think best if Maidsafe give for shareholders possibility burn Maidsafe coins and get it back in Counterparty. I think can have Maidsafe in both platform  (different asset name in Counterparty)? Create same amount coins under Counterparty same time when users burn their mastercoin from address where they own privatekey and send Counterparty asset back.. (maybe manual process is only way, but if owners want that then i think it is best option) If over half of owners vote and move to Counterparty then you know what to do with own holdings... I own all msc, xcp and maidsafe and when following all projects its look like there is two parties who can be really happy together same time one continue making quiet dead Sry english hope can understand my point...  

Create some counterparty asset and burn msc for it ? Is that a joke ?   MSC's market cap is currently at 4500BTC   what would hold it's value over counterparty? (nothing..)

I mean burn Maidsafe coins and give same amount NewMaidsafe coins under counterparty.

You are forgetting that Maidsafe has a decent amount of Mastercoins, I don't think they would just throw them away if they move to CP..