Topic: MasterCoin: New Protocol Layer Starting From “The Exodus Address” - page 85. (Read 448462 times)

Some criticism:
"One of "mastercoin"'s problems is you can never have thin clients/SPV clients, etc. Each client has to be able to process and index the entire 8GB bitcoin blockchain in order to not be fooled or double-spent. Another issue is that mastercoin is centrally controlled by one party, all issued by one public key they call the "exodus address". There are quite a few technical issues with the whole approach mastercoin takes and it doesn't look to be feasible.

A more workable solution is presented by Freimarkets http://freico.in/docs/freimarkets-v0.0.1.pdf by long-time rippler Jorge Timon and Mark Friedenbach. Freimarkets will allow transitive "ripple" transactions, but it will be a fork from the bitcoin blockchain.

For a practical colored-coin implementation that uses the bitcoin blockchain (any solution that does so must make certain sacrifices) but does not suffer the defects of mastercoin, see the "bitcoinx" project that Alex Mizrahi leads at http://www.bitcoinx.org/. BitcoinX also does not support ripple-style transactions."

"Mastercoin is built as a layer on top of Bitcoin, so it doesn't have any specific transactions. Instead the upper level information is tucked into invalid inputs and outputs.
Since it's riding Bitcoin, it has all the drawbacks of Bitcoin: creepy slow, limited bandwidth due to fixed block size, arbitrary high transaction fee, centralized with two or three ASIC makers holding most of the network power including two Chinese companies...
And as a truly parasitic relationship it is going to harm a lot Bitcoin by spamming the blockchain and sucking all the bandwidth which will lead to further adjustments of the fees which will harm Mastercoin in turn...
The absolute most stupid thing is that Mastercoin allows anyone to mint custom currencies. This is going to be a mega spam party...

Mastercoin was built on top of Bitcoin because DaCoinMinster saw how alt coins are victim of ideological exclusion in the community and how Bitcoiners are inflexible fanatics. It's going to be a good learning for them.
We all know that Bitcoin needs small transactions to move off-chain if we don't want shit to hit the fan in the near future when adoption rate takes off. But instead of that Mastercoin brings more in-chain bloat at a whole new scale.

Mastercoin's success will be Bitcoin's Nemesis."

You can't use test Bitcoins, sadly. I've lobbied to get an official Exodus on testnet but so far it has not happened yet.

i thought we can use testnet bitcoins for this right? or am i wrong? (sorry if I am out of loop just have not looked at it yet)

sounds like we need to buy test mastercoins with real bitcoins?

A "thought leader" can frame people's perception upon reading a piece towards a desired constructive outcome.
http://venturebeat.com/2013/10/18/bitcoins-road-from-perdition-what-will-hurt-and-help-the-controversial-digital-currency/

FWIR, this article directs the reader (in this case, the entrepreneurial audience of VentureBeat) towards problems/market voids that should see development and investment. A technical entrepreneur might read this and say, "Hey, I never was aware of this problem before, maybe I should start working on that!"

What the hell is a 'thought leader'?  How does one distinguish a 'proven thought leader' from an 'unproven thought leader'?  This is exactly the sort of crap that annoys me to no end.  "If you are disrupting an existing industry by applying new Bitcoin technology..."  'disrupting' - the coolest overused buzzword of the year.  This crap is all warm-fuzzy-gooey hype.  It won't help attract brains.  Brains don't respond to that sort of nonsense.  Brains filter those silly cool buzzwords right out.  

However, as Terpin appears indeed to be close to bitcoin - and has a track record of similar hype projects, I guess he is well positioned to generate some good will.  I like the notion that in 3 months if the board does not consider the result productive they can bail.  Further, as JR has been won over by this proposal...  I, as the project's biggest PR skeptic would concede to this arrangement being approved.  If there is to be a committee to review the results - I'd like to be appointed to it.  Someone with a bit of critical eye should carefully consider what kind of response this activity is generating.  

Awesome idea. People do need to realise though that these Selling/Purchase offers might be invalidated if we need to change the spec a bit. So when testing always use tiny amounts of Bitcoins as selling value since if you do a 'real' trade your Bitcoins won't be returned to you.

I hope to find some time this weekend to implement Purchase/Selling offers into my Wallet software. This should make the whole process much easier.

hey Tachikoma,

I am thinking to make this into a tutorial and put it in the next weekly update, so that you get some more exposure and people test this out.

I would suggest that you add in a feedback or bug/issue button somewhere that goes to your github repo so that if people try this out and have problems they can note it in there.

i am going to try this out tomorrow myself, you might hear from me if I get stuck

This was exactly my attitude when this PR firm was first suggested. However, I have several seasoned entrepreneurs on my board who intervened and convinced me that this sort of marketing early on could be critical to attracting the brains and money that will make the difference between success and failure. I'm an engineer at heart, and tend to view marketing very skeptically, but others who have learned this lesson the hard way have helped me balance out my perspective.

I'm actually really excited about this PR firm, now that I have seen their proposal. We're about to sign up Michael Terpin's firm SocialRadius for a three-month effort (month-to-month after that). He's offering us a steep discount because he believes in the MasterCoin concept, and is taking payment in BTC/MSC (50/50 split). Michael is a proven thought leader in the bitcoin space (https://www.google.com/search?q=%22michael+terpin%22+bitcoin), and I can't imagine a better firm to represent us.

The cost will be $6k/month. After three months, you guys can let me know whether you think it was money well spent

I've already emphasized the point you've made before to the board that I do not want patting-ourselves-on-the-back self-congratulatory sort of PR but moreso to engineer a framing that would attract human investment ie developers so that we could accelerate the goal of "make[ing] the system highly functional"

I hate PR firms and the notion of hyping this thing up.  Let's just make the damn thing work really well.  That will bring more users than 50 PR firms.  Why spend 'a LOT' of money telling people about how great this is.  Why not just let them find out on their own accord.  This is accomplished for free the day we make the system highly functional.  Putting pretty paint on it won't get us to the finish line any faster.  Forget the PR and the hype.  We don't need that.  We need to focus on a kick-ass solution that just works.  The rest will take care of itself. 

Yesss /.
I very likely would not be here today were it not for my joy of reading slashdot and learning from those guys 6-8 years ago. If MSC can best the skepticism gauntlet at slashdot, we could attract some real brilliance from that network

...and we all run around bragging about 'decentralized' - lol good one!

Here is a suggestion, can JR do an interview with Slashdot?
That is the best possible PR. Give an interview with Slashdot and discuss what Mastercoin means, what it can be developed into, and the contest. That will bring attention.

After Slashdot then go with MIT technology review, Wired and ArsTechnia. Try to do it in that order and over the course of just a few days. Then allow the Mastercoin community to take it viral.

JR is actually very good at marketing and PR.

Regarding msc tx rewards.

While it may seem like a neat idea and great way to promote, I think the effects are unpredictable.  

#1. There are a lot of people against anything that is not pure bitcoin.

#2.  This would force people into a situation where they have to think about downloading an MSC wallet without being given free choice. Some people especially those in #1 might not appreciate it so much.

I don't think it would work well that way. Ultimately people are going to start buying Mastercoins and at that point there will be businesses set up to distributed Mastercoins to the masses. There are reward Mastercoins for development but since miners don't really contribute to the security of Mastercoin but to the security of Bitcoin it makes no sense to continuously reward them beyond the Bitcoin transactions.

If you want Mastercoins you'll get them and it will become easier as Mastercoins become more useful to get them.

The problem with trying to distribute Mastercoins through the mining channels is that it doesn't make much sense. For Bitcoin it made sense because Bitcoin miners create security in Bitcoin. Bitcoin miners don't really help to protect Mastercoin from being forked so it offers no security for Mastercoin from any sort of attack.

Mastercoin would be better protected if the focus were on giving incentives to issuers and on convincing people to actually buy Mastercoins. Early on you need to give them away so people know it's useful to have but once you convince people it's useful then you have to transition to a business model. For example AOL would offer 30 days of free Internet access to anyone but then after you realize how useful the Internet is you would have to pay.

For Bitcoins because new Bitcoins are constantly being generated and because Bitcoin is strictly a unit of account it makes sense to distribute newly generated coins to miners who can push it through the ecosystem. Mastercoins aren't inflationary at all, there aren't any newly generated coins to give out and there is no security benefit either so basically to give coins out to miners you have to tax someone else.

In my opinion miners should be paid in Bitcoins and if they want Mastercoins they should buy them directly or buy a voucher/product/service which can be redeemed for Mastercoins.

When I voted for PR funding, I did so under emphasized intention that PR's focus will be to first spread awareness of the Mastercoin effort in the tech community with the primary goal of attracting more talented developers to this project and its contests, who might never ever hear about Mastercoin otherwise.  Attracting more brains to come up with various scenarios and tackling these novel problems sooner might be one of the best investments Mastercoin can do for itself with the development coins it has been trusted with.

Actually a really interesting way to reward miners & increase distribution.  The problem is longevity.  To make miners notice I would say the reward needs to be at least a few MSC and even at a single MSC the entire Exodus fund would be dry by around 50K rewarded blocks (there are ~52K blocks a year, though not all of them would contain Mastercoin transactions of course).

Definitely interesting, though not sustainable long term - could be used for short term distribution though.

The Mastercoins that are being vested on the Exodus address could in theory be used as an extra reward for Miners. We could even build it into the protocol if we wanted to. However, for now I would prefer focussing on supporting more Mastercoin messages.

Rewarding miners with msc fees would be a good way to distribute coins to the masses.

The board could also do a giveaway this way, putting a transaction with a large msc fee in every block, for a period of time. Maybe a few days. A giveaway using this method would only be worth it if the mining pools agreed to distribute the coins.

Just make the definition of a Mastercoin be that Coinbase txout scriptPubKeys are assigned them whenever Mastercoin transactions in the blocks they mine exist. There's no need to require miners to do anything explicit, and a definition like this works even with miners on p2pool and hashers on Eligius.