Topic: BitShares and Mastercoin - a comparison (Read 17804 times)

People are still interested in what actually happened. What about NDA ? Is it still valid ?

BitUSD is implemented and ready to go.  It will be put through one last round of testing on our next test net and then integrated with BTS X by September.   

To speed & privacy I would like to add ease-of-use.... users will not have to see an address or public key unless they want to do advanced things. 

You are right,dont give a shit

you are welcome. here is their introduction to bitshares/protoshares thread https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=889.0

Thanks for the links!

That is true. But that is the same with Mastercoin. Bitshares as well as Mastercoin are not functional yet. If the whole mastercoin team suddenly vanishes it will also be worthless. Every coin/DAC is a stock in its services... In that respect they are the same. With Protoshares you also get a share in every further DAC/coin invictus puts out and they have a lot of more plans, see https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?board=9.0
Bitshares developement is further i would say but that is hard to guess. I also just read the bitsharers forum. See https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=1890.0;all

But again, it's more like a stock, right? If Invictus fails protoshares (and thus bitshares) won't be worth anything, right?

Protoshares (which you can buy atm) is stock in every DAC Invictus will release. Bitshares is the flagship DAC and PTS holders get 50% in this one. 

But bit shares is essentially stock in a company right? If Invictus fails, then protoshares and bitshares will be essentially worthless... Or am I missing something?

What is the total volume in these markets? Anywhere I can look this up?

Charles, i studied erp systems chronicles and come to paradoxical conclusion that Oracle Erp being more advanced system than SAP AG still could not win the market,
SAP have 199x era "engine" and very outdated architecture, but being first on market, SAP just made itself strong as brand and as solution for their customers (who just need system that suit their needs and often cannot understand difference among tech architectures).

No, I started project Invictus back in June of 2013 prior to any investments or people as a call to arms to resolve the fiat to Crypto problem:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.2423000

This is Invictus the movement and it is divorced from people and global in scope. My belief is that BitShares and DomainShares as independent blockchains are unnecessary once Ethereum is released and they can simply be deployed upon the Ethereum blockchain. This is why I say they are unnecessary in their current form. I don't look at things Bo as sum zero with winners or losers rather rising tides of what is good for the movement in general.

It makes no sense to me to see all the innovation done by mutually exclusive blockchains each competing for resources and attention. Rather build a single, beautiful and powerful foundation that is sufficiently abstract and modular to accommodate all innovation. Whatever social contracts you want to establish on top is the business of particulars and not of the protocol. This really works well for assurance launched proof of stake style subcurrencies like BitShares for example. This also works well for colored coins as the color kernels can be arbitrary and don't compete.

I really have no problem with the ecosystem Invictus has attracted and the people in it. I do have a problem with your CEO attacking my veracity, ignoring the innovations I brought to the company including the very idea of protoshares (IPOCoin) and the manner in which I was totally divested without any debate or a proper board resolution. These are not issues for the community to be involved in nor productive to rehash.

Great! Now I have your words on both sides.

Please hit me badly, and take me down first next time before...    

One day seems like one year in the math-based ecosystem these days.

Yes. Let us move forward instead of looking back.


 

I would love to work with the Invictus movement Bo and I will engage the people in your community very actively as many of them came specifically because of my initial involvement. I love bringing a set of diverse minds and setting an agenda of innovation back by the necessary resources. But a word of advice, please make a suggestion to your CEO not to attack my veracity. I never signed an NDA and you know this for a fact. You also know the equity distribution for a fact as you participated in the decision process. I am willing to let this matter drop if you are. I don't think anyone wants to fight. I think we want to make the cryptocurrency movement stronger and more versatile.

Why? How? When?  Good Luck for you!

Users will make final call !

I have one suggestion that let us work harder together to grow the industry first.

As I understand it, any DAC is free to divide up the assets as desired at inception. I suspect, though, that the suggested protoshare allocation is a smart way to get a giant band of loyal followers, on your side from the start. Angelshares fund accelerated development for DAC as needed, as I understand it each DAC may create their own Angelshares type system to kickstart development for their own DAC, not for Invictus.

What about colored coins?  They had a client out last I saw that didn't involve sending btc to an address to get generated "shares" like angelshares, but the assets were backed by actual bitcoin that weren't just donated to an address like Invictus. And the reality distortion actually seems stronger with bytemaster... I mean if I created a DAC what incentive do I have to give 10% to generated angelshares holders who donated to invictus and another 10% to protoshares holders?

Not knowing what happened behind the scene, it's sad to see this, it will hurt both sides. 

Just wish both of you and your projects successful.

I never signed an NDA Dan and I haven't lied once here. I've left this issue mostly alone and my integrity is not in question. You're the sole person who divested me and also received 100 percent of my shares. I don't need to bring you down Dan. I just need to finish what I asked the community to help me do in June.

I wish you well and hope for the best.

From what I've seen so far, you are the one people should be aware of. The ex-CEO didn't lower himself to ad hominem attacks against you like the one you've just performed in this post.

As I've stated previously, your pitch to developers seems dishonest as it basically contradicts what you're telling shareholders.

It wasn't solely my decision and integrity and honor is something you could learn from Mr. Li.  I am well aware of the lies you have been spreading since you left and would warn everyone that Charles is a salesman that tells everyone what they want to hear and has no compulsion with stretching the truth to absurd lengths or telling outright lies.   Fortunately for Charles, I will abide by the NDA when it comes to discussing what actually happened.  To the extent that he says anything other than that he resigned for personal reasons Charles is violating the NDA or spreading lies.  The reality distortion field is strong with this one.

Beware of this shark, he will be your friend one day and plan your destruction in secret the next.  He treats people as objects to be manipulated and used for his ends. While we were working together I always wondered why so many people disliked him and were against him.  Now I know.

Fortunately we survived the loss and have moved on. 

Invictus the movement lives on and will be present in the launch coming soon. A lot of time is being invested in clarity, effective marketing, architecture, proper legal structures and other such things. Once that has been set, expect a storm and you'll love the vision and roadmap. I promise that.

I don't have Mastercoin or Next, focus BTC..

Berlin 13-14th? For us poor Europeans..

Miami conference on the 24th.

Links except from http://vbuterin.com/ethereum.html ?

In invictus land they can. Li Xiaolai is a man of great integrity and honor. No this was solely Dan's decision and this isn't the forum to discuss it.

Ethereum and some other projects I'm working on are going to completely replace the need for keyhotee and bitshares.  It makes me sad that I can't do it with the company I helped fund, named and dearly loved, but that's business. I always remember that this isn't about people- it's about the goal of changing the way the financial world works.

We have a real chance of replacing banks, contracts, wall street, identity management and currencies with the technology satoshi started. It's up to all of us to finish it regardless of what project we happen to support.

I am quite curious about how you were pushed away since you are the co-founder, and co-founder cannot be just fired. Does it relate to the investors from China?

Sigh.. can somebody make a timeline of what's going on this whole bitshare thing ?


I don't know about that, I mined it the first day with core i5 laptop, did not get shit, so I went on firing up 5 cheap DO instances for 2 days, still got nothing, a friend fired up a few 32 cores ec2 spot instances got 4 blocks in the first day in a row then got nothing later until he stopped.

I'm not saying anything. I don't care about what Invictus does anymore. Dan Larimer made it clear what he felt my contributions to the company were and our future working relationship.

Anyone with a CPU could have mined PTS at the start. Unless somebody is checking bitcointalk on PIII.

I agree with most of the points, but asking for BTC at the start to distribute coins is basically asking money for some promises. Even now there are 2 threads asking for BTC to distribute new coins. At least with mining you can get and keep some and follow it to see how it goes. And yes, I am probably biased (its hard to keep an even viewpoint).

No, they hired the guy to build and release protoshares. After that he was free to do his own stuff; including releasing some supposedly optimised miner with a PTS fee.

That guy had released the original memorycoin earlier which went nowhere. In the PTS ANN thread on the first page you can see people asking why he is releasing another coin without supporting the first, and he replied he was paid for this project. I believe the memorycoin 2.0 incorporating 1% to PTS was an attempt to make it interesting (but it will probably fail again).

So what you're saying is that Invictus basically screwed their shareholders by only paying them 1% instead of the 20%(10 angels/10 protoshare owners) and got away with it by saying someone else launched this Memory Coin, when actually it was them all along?

Don't need one. I was the CEO of Invictus Innovations until October. I was pushed out of the company and totally divested in early October.

You may notice my name on the original whitepaper: http://static.squarespace.com/static/51df1ba4e4b08840dcfce197/t/5212ca63e4b0348bfd2276c6/1376963171729/BitShares%20White%20Paper%20(2).pdf

And also the references in the coindesk article http://www.coindesk.com/bitshares-p2p-trading-platform-to-offer-dividends-on-bitcoins/


That's what happens when you hire the guy who implemented it to build your own coin. I wish the invictus team well.

Link?


Mining is quite similar in terms of fairness to IPO based issuance.
Stronger players with larger funds = larger CPUs = larger EC2 farms can mine more.

It's a fundamental property of crypto-currencies that they are never democratic, but rather they reward those willing to put in large amounts of capital in whatever way (CPUs/ASICs/BTC/...)

I personally consider IPO based issuance to be fairer, because mining is a specialized field, while today everybody can have easy access to BTC (depending on their capital of course).

In his defense I also read/understood somewhere the MemoryCoin was released by you guys.
It surprised me to read above that it is not your project.

As a small miner myself (a mining PC besides my laptop), I am delighted about PTS distribution. I saw the ANN topic here (a day before I think), and then at the start I downloaded on both and started mining. I used only 1 thread on laptop (for safety) but if I knew how quick it will succeed I would have gone full pelt and destroyed my laptop

Anyways, I fail to see how mastercoin or nextcoin had a fairer distribution. Both asked for money at start, which for all we know may have been a scam (just wait an see a lot more donation based startups will crop up in the next few weeks). PTS on the other hand allowed me to mine on my own and then see if the project is good enough to continue.

I don't have Mastercoin or Next, coz I hardly have much BTC, and paying strangers over internet over promises was a big leap for me. If Invictus had a similar model I would have missed out on this too.

You forgot to mention the firing of their CEO


Didn't you guys contract the guy who created memorycoin to build protoshares?

MemoryCoin was not released by US nor was it based on scrypt...  given you don't have your facts straight I just have one thing to say.. 'wtf'?

I've found the Bitshare thing is quite wtf. They released cpu intensive protoshare coin, diff rose so damn quick that after a few days it's impossible to mine for small players, so coins are sieged by serious miners just like other coins, then a couple months later they released memory coin 2.0 that wtf benefits protoshare owners, a boring scrypt coin just to make protoshare more valuable, then they released anther wtf angelshare having the similar scheme as mastercoin exodus. Not totally that I missed the protoshare bus, but their coin distribution scheme seems to be way more evil than MSC's. Also I haven't heard they've done anything significant to the actual bitshare development.

What is the network effect exactly?
Nothing, initially, is obviously useful. It starts with a 0 market cap and the market learns of its usefulness over time.

If someone launches a useful DAC that indeed grows in usefulness and market cap over time, by the time anyone wants to fork it, it itself might have the network effect, and not PTS/AGS holders.

What interaction is planned between different DACs? Is there an actual software network connecting the different DACs, or are you referring to the social/marketing network?

Because if the DAC is open source and obviously useful, then PTS and AGS holders will fork it and compete.  Having a larger initial network effect may give PTS and AGS holders the advantage against the upstart.

First, I'd like to apologize for my from-the-hip "lame" reply. I didn't mean to use offensive language, this just came out as I was so surprised to learn of this social contract AKA monitization model. I obviously haven't read the ProtoShares contract well enough and the fault is mine ... it was just so counter-intuitive for me to learn this now (FYI I am a PTS holder myself and still I only ever imagined that the 10% ownership relates to projects launched by Invictus). I'm really excited to be working on similar concepts to you guys, and look forward to a continued productive and clean idea exchange without name calling.

There's something I'm not getting.

(http://invictus.io/funding-angelshares.php)

If a DAC is useful and solves a real world problem - why do you think the market will "punish it" if it doesn't donate to ProtoShares/AngelShares holders? 20% is quite a large amount of a DAC to just give up.

We are working on a Software License that will help enforce the consensus.
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=1708.0

http://invictus-innovations.com/social-concensus

We did not launch MemoryCoin so we did not break any promises.

One last post and I will leave you to your coin, but I wanted to let you all know that we are also doing a bounty campaign to build things out with an estimated $2 million worth of bounties to be started over the next 2 months.  Many bounties already in place.   You can visit our forums for information.  

We have a 10 PTS ($200) bounty for referring a C++ developer who wins one of our C++ bounties.  
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=1832.0

What I get from what you're saying is a bunch of conflicting information. It's a bit disingenuous to make one pitch to your potential developers and another one to your protoshares investors. I get it that one one hand you'd like people to buy your protoshares being incentivized by dividends and on the other hand you'd like to draw in developers and try do downplay the dividends as optional. You can't have it both ways though. On your forums you make the claim to your protoshares crowd that all DACs will most likely pay the social contract % and that that's most likely scenario/outcome. On the other hand you come here and say "well some guys only paid 1%" so you can get away with that though you don't mention the reputational damage from not meeting expectations and complying with your "social contract". You're not telling the full story but half-truths basically and not sure you're doing yourself any favors.

FYI: we have an entire sub-forum at bitsharestalk.org dedicated for discussing Mastercoin and related projects.  You all may like to stick with Bitcointalk, but may have more in common with our user community.    If you have any questions I am very responsive over there, but I only check this forum occasionally.

There is certainly room for us to work together.

This only applies to DACs that use code developed by Invictus or would like to be promoted by us.  Obviously we cannot enforce any particular behavior (See MemoryCoin 2.0 which did 1%).

However, if you build off of BitShares and related code, then paying 20% for using the codebase as a starting point for your DAC is very reasonable.   

Mastercoin solves a different problem.  Wish you all well and good luck in 2014!

Thanks

I will be putting some time soon to build a clearer roadmap for the project ... stay tuned.

You're welcome. Mastercoin is clearly the best option at this point. Can't wait for the Windows cold wallet to come out. This is one key ingredient that's missing.

Wow, seriously?
I did not know that. That's ... lame.
Thanks for sharing.

Invictus expects 3rd parties to also honor the so called "Social contract" (bad choice of name imo with socialist connotations).

This is info taken directly from their website:


So basically if these 3rd party DACs don't honor the "social contract" they won't be endorsed and supported and probably treated as outcast pariahs or regarded as lame and evil by the community as a result.

http://invictus-innovations.com/social-concensus/

Very true


Perhaps I'm missing something, but this is not the way I understand Protoshares.

My understanding is that Protoshares entitles its owner to 10% of any future project/DAC released by Invictus, but not 10% of any future project released by 3rd parties (how can it?). So I don't think this point of comparison is correct.

The big advantage of Mastercoin IMO is having one unified network to trade all these different assets ... as opposed to different blockchains with some ideas of implementing a decentralized exchange on them, but nothing concrete. Our decentralized exchange is in advanced testing and nearly complete, and I expect to have Smart Property traded on that network within a few months.

repost later

Internet bandwith and storage space keeps growing at an exponential rate. I remember the early days when PC which used to have only 20mb of hard drive and dial-up models limited to 9kbps bandwith. Now we have terrabytes of storage available for very low cost in any retail store and cheap fiber link connections. Perhaps a huge blockchain won't be such an issue, though people also consume much more data these days.

What I see happening in the case of Protoshares/Bitshares and their Autonomous Corporations, is that many of their potential clients would opt for the free alternative of Mastercoin, where they won't have this pressure of paying 20% off their IPO/earnings. I mean what incentive would I have as developer to pick them over Mastercoin?

Not many people put price on this, but the branding and name itself is much better in case of Mastercoin, while Protoshares/Bitshares is confusing and they seem to be very tech savvy oriented, which leaves out all the mainstream crowd. They seem to have very smart and creative people behind the project but seem to have a blind spot when it comes to the psychological side of things and that's probably the most important one, if you wanna get your message out there. Not all of the outside world is made of geeks and they really push the envelope of the geeky side. Took me quite some time to even figure out their Angel investment model. It's almost like they've went out of their way to make it complicated. Sure, every geek out there appreciates a mind bending puzzle but it kinda` undermines what they're trying to achieve.  

Thanks for the questions:

1. The final design of Mastercoin is not settled yet. Peter Todd is joining the Mastercoin Foundation as of Feb 1 to tackle these exact issues. One possibiliy is a merged mined alt chain or some other design. In any case, Bitcoin has the task of supporting a lot more load in the future, and there are some promising directions to changes in Bitcoin to allow this kind of load.

2. These are just two different models. Decentralized Applications / Decentralized Autonamous Communities/Corporatiosn don't have the pay dividends in order to be profitable. In fact, I see the dividend model as inferior ... the decision when and how to pay dividends is rather arbitrary. When the tokens that represent "shares" are valuable and liquid, there is no need IMO for dividends. Mastercoin will enable entities managed on Mastercoin (Smart Property / DA) to send dividends if they want, but that's quite up to the specific application/organization to decide.

3. As noted in #2, while Mastercoin itself doesn't use dividends, companies using Mastercoin to IPO will be able to use the dividends model if they choose. Our spec contains dividends since version 0.3.5 (November).

@Ron Gross


1. How would lots of stuff on top of bitcoin protocol, like social networking, work without clogging the blockchain which is already over few gigabytes in size?

2. Care to address the issue of dividends? Some make the claim Protoshares pays dividends while Mastercoin doesn't.

3. ProtoShares pay dividends by taking capital from say a "company" who does an IPO. That "company" will lose 20% in profits/IPO proceeds paid to Angels and Protoshare owners. A company starts with 80% of the raised capital and or will have to pay 20% of its profits. I assume companies trying to do an IPO using Mastercoin will get access to 100% of the capital and won't be forced to pay anything to Mastercoin owners. Is that correct?

But you can't invest

Colored coins is the potential dark horse in this race...in my mind at least...

I mined PTS and was an early adopter in MSC @0.01BTC - just for clarification.
On the other hand at least one of Mastercoin, Bitshares and Next will achieve at least parity with BTC imho...

200 PTS ( < 2BTC) is fine, but 200 MSC ( > 20 BTC) seems really a lot to invest.

From a speculator's point of view, obtain 2-3 hundred coins from both projects and wait...Sure win!

Small players can BUY PTS today just like they could buy Mastercoin.   Furthermore, there are 1000's of small players who have received PTS and anyone mining within the first 48 hours generated at least one block.    How many people currently own Mastercoin?

bytemaster think it's a success. curious how the market reacts when bitshares is released next year.

What makes you say Bitshares is more decentralized? What I've seen and read, I can't find anything that would back this up. The amount of PTS that was mined in a week surprised everyone and what I've learned it was/is mostly done by big players. There was only a few days when regular folks could find blocks by themselves.

I'm happy to be proven wrong, but so far I haven't seen anything that would back up the claim that PTS mining would have been better model for the little people who can't invest a lot up front versus Mastercoin's "Exodus August" model, where even small players had an equal possibility to invest.

I've been trying to understand the bitshares idea myself, and have a discussion going with bytemaster over here http://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=13.0

I started trying to summarize our conversation, but the explanation given to me so far of the version of bitassets (e.g. bitUSD, which it's hoped would track the USD/BTS exchange rate) that are only able to refer to their own price rather than an embedded price feed of USD/BTS is so incoherent, that I can't even give a hypothetical explanation of how it should be believed to work.  There really isn't much similarity with prediction markets, because prediction markets have terminal payouts for who is right and who is wrong.  In bitUSD's case:
(a) Such information would need to be derived from an embedded USD/BTS
(b) There is no terminal horizon for bitUSD
(c) There are no lump-sum paymets from holding bitUSD which scale linearly with respect to USD/BTS.

bytemaster seems to be willing to consider a version with an embedded USD/BTS feed.  However, in that case, merely dividend payments are proposed to scale with deviations from USD/BTS.  Compare this with CFDs where the value that changes hands exactly compensates for changes in the price of the underlying - e.g. of USD/BTS.

If they were going to embed price feeds, they would be better off using CFDs, or futures, i.e. established financial products, where cash flows compensate directly and linearly for price changes. The proposal without embedded price feeds makes no sense.  How could an asset track the price of another when none of the attributes that give it value are even able to reference that price?  It's not like there are arbitrage possibilities between bitUSD and USD/BTS, like there are with e.g. ETFs, because you can't redeem bitUSD for USD, nor for anything tied to the value of USD, because nothing in the blockchain even knows about the price of USD unless it were to be embedded.

See also

https://trello.com/c/6ZXtVWKz/21-spec-for-prediction-market-event-betting

Thanks, I guess the bold part of my text answers it all. I will be interesting to see Mastercoin take shape.

Personally I would never trust a trusted third parties price feed. Ive been an avid forex trader, so I know for sure that price is at best a subjective measurement of value that changes between brokers. LIBOR etc tells us that price feeds are used for manipulation and so forth and so on. Simply put, my opinion is that third party trusted feeds is a broken concept. The closest thing I think we got to a decentralized exchange is localbitcoins, litecoinlocal etc, and as many ATMs and online exchanges as possible. I want not one but several systems, before I think its decentralized.

BitShares idea of incorporating prediction markets is very interesting. I have not thought it through to Ive not decided whether I believe in it fully or not, but if it works then I would prefer it over trusted price feeds. As Ripper234 sayd, anything can be implemented on Mastercoin so well... if prediction markets is a good thing I would love to see it on Mastercoin.

 

What if the feed is a DAC or AI of some sort? It doesn't have to be human or centralized.

We are all building a layered system.

Bitcoin value is increasing.
Mastercoin and Protoshares value are "tied to Bitcoin value" in some broad sense.
Mastercoin maybe more so because it relies on it technically and increased Mastercoin value directly benefits Bitcoin.
However I think every cryptocurrency at this point benefits Bitcoin.

Both these projects are building systems that require MSC and PTS to operate.
You will need MSC (or something as valuable as MSC) to work with some of our features.
MSC can be very high, but it's very divisible, so you'll also be able to buy "MSC backed USD" even if 1 MSC = 100 BTC = 100,000,000 USD one day.

Ripper, I appreciate your fair comparison of the two contenders. Ive no stake in neither of them, but I am reading about them trying to figure things out. I have a question about Mastercoin: can the value of a single Mastercoin be so high that somebody that do not own any Mastercoins can not afford to buy assets tied to the Mastercoin?

If by "It" you mean Mastercoin then you are very wrong.

Mastercoin is an open platform. We are developing features blazingly fast.
If we think some form of another of completely trustless asset mechanism is feasible, we will implement it (remember, this was the original motivation for the project!)

Please don't make the mistake of thinking that Mastercoin is one particular feature or another. Mastercoin is a platform.
Whatever good things that our competitors do, we'll shameless copy for the betterment of the world and our users.

It will always be some blend of a set of centralised feeds, though. It could suffer from a similar problem that banks inflict on bitcoin exchanges who use their services - if all the feed providers somehow decide to stop serving data to mastercoin, there is a big problem.

Cheers, Paul.

Trusted, not necessarily centralized. Having to trust the price feed is an issue, but having to trust the market which can be manipulated is the issue Bitshares will have.

I don't really see an easy answer. I don't have complete faith in the market or in its participants.

This is interesting.
Who will win?

Good approach.

FYI we started discussing about producing a better video for our  homepage.

After spend pretty much time for online information digging.... i will step in like markm's way. Participating in BitShare first, and touch the Mastercoin later when feel it well.

No need for one on one info for me, work on what all the public gets to read.

I'll mine some protoshares and if bitshares or protoshares takes off maybe they will make me enough spare funds to make me think about buying some Mastercoins.

If I do buy in I'll be better off with the public reading stuff that is understandable than any personal explanations just for me would make me.

-MarkM-

markm, I invite you to skype with me a bit, I'll be happy to explain more.
It's a deep project and there's a lot to discuss, and I just don't have the time to explain it all / do this detailed ping pong on this thread.

We are working on improving our documentation and phrasing, working on our FAQ all the time, and just pushing things forward.

Please email me at [email protected] if you want to setup a skype call.

You can also keep asking questions here of course, just trying to save us both some time and I value you enough to want to dedicate some 1-on-1 time to answer your questions personally.

Thanks for actually indicating an exchange. I posted in some thread or other some time ago asking what exchange it is on when someone posted about it having some certain price or other, but so far I had not stumbled upon any response.

Personally I did stumble upon it a day or few before the deadline, decided it sounded worth checking out so I started the process of reading up on it but by the time the deadline hit what it was that was to be created still did not seem to have even been decided. Even reading the last few days it seems the process of working out what it is that Mastercoin is going to be still seems to not be quite figured out yet though various prototypes do at least seem now to be able to read each other's messages once they have seen them not figured them out quite right and been tweaked again, and I read today that what one person has been using for a protocol or standard or syntax or somesuch he does expect will actually end up in the specs when next the specs are released.

So It does seem much closer now to actually being a particular protocol or set of protocols one could by this point maybe dig into enough to try to figure out whether they seem well thought out.

But not only are the centralised data feeds a concern but also it now seems that possibly the whole pegged currencies based on data feeds might be going on the back burner? Whereas that was what I thought we were deciding whether to buy into during those days I did have before the deadline in which to decide whether they did sound like they would work. So if I had bought in I would now be having to worry that that stuff is maybe no longer what the project is even about?

So yeah it still seems too early yet to even know where this project is even heading. Contracts for difference now possibly, maybe?

-MarkM-

I'm busy over my heels working on Mastercoin. Mastercoin is poising itself to be the exchange that you could launch these kinds of projects on in the future. It's just not ready yet ... and I think we still need to refine our message ... there's a lot of good opinions about Mastercoin, but a lot of negativity as well, and it is my belief that at least some of the negativity arises from misunderstanding what Mastercoin really is about, its capabilities, or its vision. We're working on improving that


Mastercoin has plenty of different compatible features. CFDs weren't even a thing 1 week ago.
We can copy and adapt whatever technology or idea used by other projects, if they are superior to what we are using.

The benefit of doing all that on Mastercoin is that very quickly we'll all have a unified platform where all these different features co-exist ... we'll let the market decide whether CFDs, Escrow-based Backed Currencies, or BitShares style assets is the better solution. Have no doubt that the BitShares model can be implemented on top of Mastercoin if needed.

Mastercoin is a platform, it is not one feature or another.

'Stumble upon' - just like in school, I was doing my homework and you were smoking your bong.  Now the man who drives the trash truck hates me because my wife is pretty and my house is big.  


Calling JR sleazy for the Mastercoin launch is ridiculous.  What a freaking crybaby that you didn't participate until everyone else informed you about how important the project was.  You act as if JR concealed information in an obscure thread.  The opposite is true - he paid everyone to tweet about the project in every forum imaginable.  

Morons like you deserve to miss the boat - and miss it again is your fate.  You'll spend the rest of your life crying about how the others unfairly got ahead of you when instead you should be doing your homework.

Now wise up.  

MSC is at an insanely low price today.  Five years from now you can have 20 million dollars if you just make a modest investment in MSC today.  You are in this deal at a VERY early stage.  So get in it.  Get in it and stop crying about yesterday.  

Or, you could just sit there crying and bitching about how unfair everyone is.  And 5 years from now, you'll still be driving your trash truck telling your neighbors how you should'a-could'a bought MSC years ago.

Now crack open your piggy bank and get in there: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0ApGPLGUd5ZCzdHFxbnhHQjBDSDVKamY5UHlWdkNMNWc&usp=sharing#gid=0

...or, just keep bitchin' and blaming JR for cheating you out of your due.  Idiot.

There is one important point here which bytemaster touched on, but no one else seems to have picked up:

* mastercoin relies on a *centralised* price feed for its CFDs
* bitshares do not

Centralisation is something which bitcoin was designed to avoid at all costs, so this is a bit of a backward step for mastercoin.

The big question for me is whether the proposed technique for bitassets to track the 'actual' price of the asset they reflect will actually work. The white paper is somewhat lacking descriptively.

Cheers, Paul.

I don't see having to stumble upon a thread within an extremely limited window of time in order to get to buy some Mastercoins as elegant at all, on the contrary it seemed like the kind of rush rush hurry hurry you'll miss the deal if you don't buy right now hustle that hustlers and scammers like to use to get people off balance to get them to buy quick before really thinking about it or even getting to thoroughly investigate what it even is. By the time word got out that there was a new altcoin being launched but not in the altcoin part of the forums, it was too late to buy in. Its just like people who launch an alt on some obscure forum elsewhere, but you did it right here, clever trick but maybe just as sleazy since having a username on here meant you could as easily have put also an announcement in the altcoins section.

If there is no exchange yet for protoshares and you want to invest in protoshares maybe investing in a project aimed at creating / running an exchange for it would be a logical starting-point

If there is an exchange it is on then what is the problem, just put an offer on the exchange? Or would you not consider that an ivnestment into the coin/ecosystem?

-MarkM-

Another point of comparison - it was really easy for someone to invest in Mastercoin - just send bitcoins to 1Exodus.
With ProtoShares, it's currently rather difficult to obtain them.

If I decided I like ProtoShares and want to invest $100,000 in them ... there would be no easy way for me to do this.
Setup dedicated servers? Too technical
Try to find trustworthy people to buy their mined shares from? Too fragile.

The investment mechanism of Mastercoin (and after, Nxt) is really elegant in that is allows anyone to just convert btc into shares in the new project.

Thanks, you can send some protos my way at PbMprTDayAYEn5scpQStCqaisQqkxTfBbM

You must not have mined before have you?

See my Digital Ocean guide on the Altcoin forum.

We set the initial difficulty to require about 8 hours of solid CPU time to find a block.   Initial mining indicates that we are finding blocks on average every 30 seconds until the difficulty adjusts in a couple of hours which suggests that there are over 1000 computers mining on day one.... and I can tell you they are not mine    

Initial prices are around 0.01 BTC per PTS so that means mining will increase dramatically because it is very profitable at the moment.

This is a big plus for mastercoin. It would be hard to do large trades knowing that a 51% attack is easy to pull off. It will be interesting to see what kind of miner support they get.

The pricing works like a prediction market and the 'price' used for margin calls is when the highest unaccepted bid.  This means that the whole market agrees the price is above the bid and below the ask.  Attempts to manipulate this price by posting higher bids will be immediately accepted.   As a result I do not depend upon price feeds, but voluntary transactions every step of the way with the exception of margin calls that is.

I just found this video explaining BitShares.
I must say the video is much more effective at explaining what BitShare does than the whitepaper!

Essentially as far as I understand, here is my TL;DR:

• ProtoShares in a new alt currency, that will be used for the issuance of BitShares and various derived instruments. The details are here. It's uses a CPU-based hash algorithm called Momentum which is much more GPU/ASIC resistant. ProtoShares are mined over a period of a bit more than a year (from the chart I see about half are mined within three months, 90% something of the protoshares are mined within a year). This is an alternative, more decentralized / "fair" to create the protoshares than Mastercoin's 1 month issuance.
• BitShares use a new blockchain for time synchronization (5 minute blocks), while Mastercoin uses the same Bitcoin blockchain. Merged mining is not mentioned, not sure it's possible - so a large pool of honest miners will be needed to ensure there are no 51% attacks.
• BitShares functions like the Mastercoin CFD feature we're just discussing. It acts as a marketplace for interested parties to trade long/short positions with each other.
• Most of Mastercoin's planned currency features revolve around the concept of Price Feeds, where the feed is provided by an trusted 3rd party. There are some thoughts about removing the need for a 3rd party, but nothing concrete has been designed yet. BitShares suppose to not need 3rd parties at all, and claim just naming something "BitUSD" will drive the market to price it accordingly. I seem to be missing something here - I don't understand how the BitShares blockchain determines who wins the result of a long/short position on a given currency. If it relies completely on the market for this currency (actually, for CFDs), it sounds like someone can manipulate this market in order to corrupt a previously closed CFD. I am curious to hear from BitShares/Invictus about this point

Overall these two features - BitShares and Mastercoin CFDs - sound a lot like each other. I know that Mastercoin has a lot more planned, and Invictus seem to have a big agenda as well ... it would be interesting to see the two projects compete and complement one another over the next year/s.