I suppose you're right yeah. When Satoshi Nakamoto invented bitcoin, he just intended people to buy and sell them on exchanges and not actually do anything else with them. All he had in mind were pump and dumps, weekend dips and bi-annual bubbles. He didn't actually intend them to be revolutionary for humanity at all. Best we forget about any other silly aspirations people may have.
And being condescending interblag forums will help save humanity and free us from enslavement from the big banks and then we can all sit in a circle and sing Kumbaya, amirite? You could explain why moving it to the altcoin forum is a bad idea rather than being a prick, but I suppose that would be too easy. And not involve a Moral High Horse +3/+3.
You should explore what a protocol like Mastercoin would mean to the market place in value if it can actually provide a trustless way of creating contracts, betting, distributed exchange, smart property signatures, etc.
2 minutes of poking around on Google netted me the following explanation of Mastercoin from Reddit: "The Mastercoin protocol layer mediates between the existing bitcoin protocol and users-generated currencies. It is intended to be a base upon which anyone can build their own currency."
At the risk of sounding obtuse, I don't see how this
doesn't relate directly to altchains; this allows users to build their own currencies based on the Bitcoin protocol, correct? Which would by definition make them alternative cryptocurrencies? Perhaps I have misunderstood and/or this description is inadequate.
EDit:
I think the reason people are dismissing it outright (and understandably so) is that it has the word "coin" in the name. That was a pretty poor marketing decision. With so many new altcoins coming out all the time, we can't be bothered to learn up on them all and what makes them slightly different than the last one, only to realize that it offers no functional advantages. As a result, we've been conditioned to pass right over thiscoin or thatcoin. Mastercoin isn't even a coin, in the sense that the other alts are, it's purpose and goals are entirely different.
Pretty much this. If MSC is a protocol and not a "proper" cryptocurrency, why put the word "coin" in its name at all?