Topic: MasterCoin: New Protocol Layer Starting From “The Exodus Address” - page 53. (Read 448462 times)

Which messages are allowed now?

New messages will be 'enabled' on a certain block. I don't think this will be a problem.

Ehm, I'm not so sure about safety of simple sends... Please check this example:

Suppose Alex wants to sell a physical gold bar for mastercoins. One day, buyer comes to his place, wants to buy gold. Sends Mastercoin simple send transaction to Alex's address. They wait for three confirmations. Transaction shows up in all Mastercoin explorers, shows Alex's balance correctly. Alex is super-suspicious, so he checks transaction chain, and finds that mastercoins he received are connected to exodus transaction through 3 simple sends. Alex knows that he can trust simple sends to work, so he believes it is OK and gives gold bar to buyer.

A month later, Mastercoin protocol is upgraded and Alex's balance is 0. HOW???

Well, it turns out that buyer was clever: he marked his transaction as savings (or sent any other currently-disabled Mastercoin transaction) before sending a simple send.

So at the time transaction was made, none of mastercoin explorers knew how to interpret mark-as-savings transactions, so they ignored it and assumed that simple send is correct. After protocol upgrade, mastercoin explorers now understood the old mark-as-savings transactions, and now it appears that simple send is invalid.

From what I see, it isn't enough to check whether mastercoins came to your account via a simple send, you have to:

1. inspect transaction history of each address mastercoins have traveled through before they got to you
2. identify all mastercoin transactions
3. if history has anything but simple spends (particularly, if it has transactions you cannot understand), you should reject the offer

Is there a tool which does this?

Or is there something in the spec which prevents re-interpretation of old transactions (i.e. so that ignored transactions won't ever be considered as meaningful)?

Mastercoin being in the Alt-Currency section will be good for awareness levels, but bad for development. I suggest splitting the two things- general mastercoin chit-chat here, and developmental talk somewhere else. You will only get lost here and bogged down by the nonesense here.

I answered some of them.  

By the way take a look at Bettermeans http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAlnMWlvw9g
It's the best project management software I've seen for incentivizing development, organizing and communicating. I advise that the Mastercoin foundation take a close look at it and consider implementing it in addition to Discourse which I also favor for similar reasons.

I'm building consensus. I can tell you that i think David and I are pretty close in our opinions even though we might have slow differences, and I had a great talk with Antony yesterday so I think he's on board.

J.R. is as usual the more reserved of the bunch.

I don't remember what other board members think about this ... a lot of them have been too quite IMHO due to their time constraints and schedules.

FYI - I haven't told this to most of the board yet - but I've starting negotiating bringing in an additional board member to help with the load! He suggested it and I fully support his nomination 1000%.

I won't reveal his identity right now, I think it's only fair we discuss this internally before I plaster his name all over bitcointalk. I already introduced him to David.


I expected more from theymos and bitcointalk moderator. We began an open dialog weeks ago to try to find a solution, and didn't expect this one sided action without any prior communication with us. Oh well.

Luckily I just started the effort dedicated to migrating us to Discourse.

I believe it's the best platform for us (I asked this on Quora just to be sure).

In the meantime - can someone with a bit of free time set us up with a Diaspora account?
I want to get us more official support, but let's start with something.

If you have any expenses setting this up, let us know.
Normally this would have been Aric Fadida's task as Head of IT, but I haven't heard from him in a few days (it's holidays and he has some family obligations right now), so I'm putting this out there.


I'm assuming the role of benevolent dictator for this specific task (not generally).
Bitcointalk isn't working. Not for me at least.
I can't keep up with the conversation, and that's bad.

I am planning to get this started on Discourse and compete for our community's attention.
If the Discourse forum picks up, I plan to spend my own attention over there rather than here.

Let the community decide where they want to be by action, not by voting in a poll


Bitcoin StackExchange is a general purpose StackExchange for crypto-currencies, by design. Mastercoin is on topic there.
I am btw the founder of Bitcoin StackExchange - I posted the original idea to start it a few years ago.

Currently it's not seeing a lot of MSC activity. Let's take over and change that - StackExchange is a great platform for Q&A, for many reasons.

Follow specific tags on Stack Exchange on Quora to suit your interests. I recommend go reading about "why StackExchange is good" before forming an opinion that it isn't. Bitcoin StackExchange isn't the first Q&A site I started on that platform, funnily enough I also founded and owned a "Stack Exchange 1.0" website called Draw3Cards. It is dead now due to lack of attention, but it was the best site in the world at the time to get answers on questions regarding Magic: the Gathering (not I am not related to Mt. Gox).

Quora is even better than Stack Exchange for many reasons that you can find on Google (and on Quora).

If you do not wish to sign up to these sites, you don't have to.
Still I would like to use these sites as a Q&A and support platform for Mastercoin.

If anyone is opposed to this, they're free to create a new dedicated thread somewhere to discuss this, or just not use these sites.

I follow Voluntaryism.


FYI we are building a decent homepage for mastercoin, it's just taking a bit of time just like everything else. However serving as a support forum is not one of the design goals for that site.

+1

The StackExchange link you provided is garbage.  It is just a general bitcoin Q&A which has little or nothing to do with MSC.  Further, it is a poorly organized system.  It is merely a long list.  Nobody will use it because you must read 50 questions before landing on a topic of interest.

Quora is also garbage.  The landing page invites one to 'sign up' for an account.  Do you think I've got time to sign up for another 'account'.  I click the back button of website which first ask me to 'sign up for an account' - faster than it takes for the page to load.  Pure junk.  This has nothing at all to do with MSC.  Why is it featured at the top of the MSC web page?  If you continue to pile worthless crap at the top of the page - you will destroy the usability of MSC.  Now you've wasted another 30 minutes of my concentration bandwidth.  I doubt I'll be visiting mastercoin.org again as I'll recall there is nothing but meaningless crap found there. 

Can't somebody prepare a decent website for Mastercoin?

FYI, I edited the homepage to make StackExchange and Quora our official support channels.

This is now at the top of our homepage:

I only heard the tragedy, did not see any progress.

I think the consensus was to stay here at bitcointalk.

It may still not be defined though.

So it looks like all Mastercoin threads have been moved to the Alternate cryptocurrencies board. This makes it much harder to find the Mastercoin topics than when they were on the Project Development board. At the same time it may introduce Mastercoin to a new audience so I guess it has a positive side to it. Are there plans to create our own forums for Mastercoin? mastercointalk.org 

+1000 Ron for restating your stance on this it is much appreciated, however is this going to be implemented immediately without any resistance? I know JR is on board I am not sure of the others. If not, do we deserve to know the board members that have opposing views to this??



vokain  You  have just heard it from the horse's mouth and yet you still continue to advocate your severely subjective tunnel vision on what you think devs want and what their incentives are..Devs have real life problems; rent, families, bills et.c they need to have a way to deal with these real life responsibilities. Devs want a salary that is going to deal with these problems at the same time they will be further incentivized / motivated by the bounty system, where they can save their mastercoin/bitcoin earnings for the long term. Most of these devs have family responsibilities similar to JR's situation. Also most of the developers who have developed software for mastercoin so far have proved that they are worth their salt. The same cannot be said for new developers and for them the bounty system might be more appropriate.

I don't think a developer is Going to jump out to demand a salary explicitly as this will seem very arrogant and entitled, but it is what they WANT! for full time commitment. This full time commitment is very important to the project speed...You are comparing your situation to the developers and not everyones situation is the same. It is pretty clear cut that mostly everyone supports a salary base for the devs. Its saddening to see such a project be hindered by a few people without the clear objective vision to discern what is the appropriate incentive to keep the projects engine running. This should not be political at all, it should be a no brainer. And I think this is what happens when when you put people without the managerial track record or business organization skills in positions of power like the mastercoin board and be able to determine its future/fate. Just because someone is a great dev doesn't mean that they are going to possess the inclination for good business/managerial skills necessary to make good decisions as a board member to increase efficiency of a project. Like I said before...We are dealing with centralized issues while trying to solve decentralized problems...I think Arguing that we do or don't need salaries is futile and it really should be a NO BRAINER!..Unless of course the reasoning is coming from a subjective point of view.

Has anyone mentioned the idea of using Mastercoin to keep track of internal balances of something like an exchange or webwallet? Without the users being aware of it? For example if coinbase were to keep track of it's internal balances of it's users by using colored coins or mastercoins. this could perhaps prevent someone maliciously altering the internal database, and perhaps in conjuction with proper security, prevent someone from running of with all the coins in in a wallet?

speaking of which, we really need to build a wallet that can be 'hot' but simultaneously can't just be emptied in it's entirety.

BTW I just wanted to let you guys know there are a lot of unanswered questions about Mastercoin on Quora.

If you have a bit of time, you can jump in and help answer them, and even get some bounty as part of the Documentation Contest.

It's 3:24 AM here and I'm trying to go to sleep, no time to elaborate right now. Perhaps someone else can continue my thoughts.

As with everything I say, this is just my thoughts. If the other board members / stake holders think J.R should be removed from the board, then it will happen. However knowing the board I am telling you this has zero chance of getting their support.

I am confident about some things, and when I am I just go about and call them as I see them.
This is not me ordering the board around, but rather me telling you what I think the result of any attempt to kick J.R will be. It's futile because we love him and want him onboard
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+1 for that.
J.R should adjust his weight Voting/stake wise, and should increase his availability, like I said. He is not arguing this. I am pushing hard to help make this a reality ASAP.


P.S.
Domink is also working like crazy and is very busy.
I think a lot has gone on these past few days in the forums, and it is important we capture this in a blog post.

Can we get a volunteer to summarize the last few days of posts in bitcointalk into a coherent blog post?
Please prepare the post as a Google Doc and send it to [email protected]

I think it's good to prepare a coherent summary, it will help many people see what's going on, including apparently the board members and Executive Director. I've been so insanely busy that i haven't had time to engage the community (I am working on hiring Dominik full time to cope with all the Communications work).

(1): Agreed, he should sell some MSC.

(2): You haven't provided an argument as to why he should "definitely remain" a board member. Putting that to the side though, I find it troubling that any fundamental policy decision is "so off the table that its in the barn with the dogs", and that some one board member feels he has the authority to say this without reservation. There are already concerns about centralization, and such comments don't help.

(3): I am not judging anyone, but simply stating that people shouldn't bear more responsibility than they can handle. However, I do like that you are taking initiative on this point.

Anyone who wishes to apply for Lead Dev positions should submit their resume and cover letter to [email protected]

As I mentioned elsewhere, I am currently trying to close 3 full time positions of people who are not Devs (ongoing effort). After I finish that I will work on closing positions for 2 lead devs. These devs can build their teams however way they want.

If you believe you are one of the top 2 devs working on Mastercoin, please let us know and we'll consider you for the role of lead dev. Thanks!

FYI as you noticed I don't have a lot of attention to bitcointalk right now. If you need my urgent attention on an important matter, please email me at [email protected] (but only if it's urgent and one of the others can't help you! help me help you).

Understand that if you email me too much on trivial or unimportant things, I will have less attention to focus on what I perceive are the project's greatest priorities (right now - strategic partnerships and hiring).

Since I'm developing for mastercoin as well, can I get added too? Is there a way for others who are interested in mastercoin development to be added as well?