Topic: MasterCoin: New Protocol Layer Starting From “The Exodus Address” - page 164. (Read 448492 times)

JR, your identity is public right?  People doing scams tend to not make their identity public, otherwise the SEC will come after them.

This escrow fund concept looks flawed to me.  I'm trying to think of a specific example that would cause it to fail.

I'd like to see you address bytemaster his, on first impression, strong valid criticisms. Your response to just say 'I do different, thanks for your input' scares me away.

I'm sorry you have lost faith in the basic decency of most people.  You are right there is risk in sending him money, but people have the right to spend their money how they want.  Your concerns have been voiced (he left my quote of you), and you are derailing productive discussion.

Thanks!

It also helps to have self-moderated threads

Unfortunately, Reddit remains (mostly) a spiraling cesspool of ignorance.

Have you read anything?  He has clearly put quite a bit of work into this already.  You might be right, and thank you for voicing this possibility.  However, now that the naive have been warned, let's not derail this thread.

@dacoinminster: In order to succeed as an open source project leader, you will need to keep this in mind: http://youtu.be/ZSFDm3UYkeE

"The price of GoldCoins is decided by the balance of supply and demand. Since we
can’t control the demand for GoldCoins, we must control the supply."

You are right, I read your old paper.  I just reviewed your latest paper and it suffers the same problems:  oracles and trusted escrow agencies that attempt (and will fail) to control the price by controlling supply.

OK - because the concept of "GoldShares" are from the last version - I dumped that idea for something simpler in the specification.

I have followed your work on BitShares with great interest, but as you can see, I'm taking things in a different direction

Thanks for your thoughtful input.

Nope, the most recent paper.

I think perhaps you are replying based on the previous version of my paper?

Yes! A successful MasterCoin will give the regular bitcoin devs terrible migraines, as the block-chain explodes in size even faster. However, I've done my best to make sure that most transactions will be transfers of value, which is what bitcoin was designed to do.

I have debated whether or not to respond to this thread, but it seems like you are getting a lot of positive reviews so I am writing to provide some alternative opinions and explain how / why this system will not work.  I do this as a favor to you because I previously paid people on this forum over $1200 to show me where I went wrong with some of my early idea on how to create GoldCoins.  Reading and responding to your paper represents a significant investment of my time into your ideas and I am providing my feedback for free.

The #1 problem with your system is that it is not decentralized and therefore using the blockchain only increases costs while providing little benefit.   The number of times you mention relying on 'trusted' parties is entirely against the ethos of trust-free currency.   The mere possibility of a 'bank run' shows the shaky foundation.  Once you depend upon 'trust' and 'issuers' then you might as well use a system like egold... and we all know how that turned out.  For that matter, you could use Ripple!

I would like to address some major economic fallacies:

1) Depending upon a public oracle for pricing information is not economically valid means of facilitating trades in your GoldShares vs GoldCoins market because it fails to consider that GoldShares and GoldCoins are entirely different things in the economy and valued by individuals uniquely and independently from Gold even if the price is highly correlated.    

2) Assuming that controlling the supply instantly controls the price.   The FED has doubled the US money supply but prices still haven't factored this in.    Next, this GoldShare supply is regulated by an external feed from an entirely different market.   Note how different prices are between BitStamp and Gox and they are trading in very similar assets GoxBtc/GoxUSD  vs BitStampBtc/BitStampUSD.   Why can't BitStamp arbitrarily operate their exchange based on a Mt. Gox feed?   The reason is something fundamental:  all exchanges of value at all times must be based upon voluntary consent.   Historical price data (even just milliseconds old) is never a valid substitute for voluntary exchanges by people making an assessment of the value of the assets being traded.   Allowing a 3rd party to 'price fix' something via inflation/deflation is exactly what FIAT money is.

3) You have apparently failed to address all of the competing ideas in your white paper or participate in community discussions on how to create peer to peer exchanges and crypto-assets like GoldCoins.    If you had you could have saved yourself a lot of time.

Now that I have said all of this, I would encourage you to read the BitShares white paper and then come back here and explain where I have missed something because I believe that more minds dedicated to the problem will result in better solutions.  In summary, I have also created BitGold that can be traded against BitBTC and does everything your system attempts to do with the following differences:

1) No trusted oracles or external data feeds  
2) No trusted parties at all (entirely trust free)
3) Pays dividends
4) Enables trust-free put/call options against any BitAsset
5) Addresses scalability issues with Bitcoin.  




 

Is the encoding for this protocol going to have an adverse resource impact on the blockchain, and by extension, the time it takes new users to acquire the entire thing before being able to use the official bitcoin client?

Reference:
http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/1438/is-there-a-limit-to-how-much-extra-data-can-be-put-into-blocks-via-scripts

I think I understand the direction, but I'm wary of the net effect.

Can we use electrum or does it have to be the Bitcoin wallet with a blockchain?

10? The number of confirmations should be the same as any other bitcoin transactions, especially if sendmany is used.

So a mastercoin transaction will take 10 bitcoin confirmations?

Ripple killer?  This is way better than any alt-coin that is for sure.

Very true. Hopefully I can provide the features people are asking for fast enough to stay in front 

This is the type of thing that if it works, will be duplicated ad nauseum with many alt "Exodus" addresses. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. It will help take Bitcoin to the next level quickly.

Best question yet.

I have thought about this endlessly. You can't begin to imagine how many nights I laid awake thinking about this. My first proposal had a much more complicated method of providing stability, but I think I've boiled it down to the essence of what is needed.

I actually plan on running some experiments with unsustainable currencies (where the data stream the currency is based on just keeps publishing bigger numbers), just to see how long they last and how they die. I'm hoping that will help tune the parameters for real currencies.

Interesting.