A request for whoever maintains the wiki, can we have a full wiki with all the technical details in one place? I know there is a whitepaper but shouldn't all of that be on the wiki along with updates to the specification? It is changing too fast and is becoming hard to keep up with where Mastercoin is now or is going.
Better organized documentation will make it easier to write code for this project.
@dacoinminster
dillpicklechips mentioned that a potential threat to Mastercoin is that a bunch of alt clones could be made which offer free Mastercoins, piggybacking off the infrastructure and development of the original Mastercoin in an attempt to drive the value of Mastercoins down to 0. Is this attack feasible and can anything be done to prevent it if it is?
My understanding of the Mastercoin protocol is that initial value has to be in the Mastercoins in order for the escrow to work.
Better organized documentation will make it easier to write code for this project.
@dacoinminster
dillpicklechips mentioned that a potential threat to Mastercoin is that a bunch of alt clones could be made which offer free Mastercoins, piggybacking off the infrastructure and development of the original Mastercoin in an attempt to drive the value of Mastercoins down to 0. Is this attack feasible and can anything be done to prevent it if it is?
My understanding of the Mastercoin protocol is that initial value has to be in the Mastercoins in order for the escrow to work.
MasterCoin is very vulnerable to copycats technically, but much less vulnerable socially. There is nothing to prevent somebody from forking our code and doing their own thing. However, in order to be successful they would have to offer something that MasterCoin does not offer. As soon as they did that, MasterCoin would almost certainly add that feature too.
Potential investors will have to decide for themselves how likely a copycat is to be successful. The thought experiments involved in such scenarios are almost entirely social, not technical, and are heavily influenced by network effects (the reason it is so darn hard to unseat eBay as the king of auctions, even though making an auction website is fairly trivial).
edit: And yes, you need something of value stored in escrow for the escrow-backed currencies to work. You couldn't use a "free" currency for this.
