Topic: Why I believe Mastercoin should be encoded on the bitcoin blockchain - page 2. (Read 4443 times)

The altchain part is not a bottleneck. It takes a few hours to make the alterations and launch. And yes, Gavin *has* said there is a strong possibility of making changes that will prevent embedding of arbitrary data. It's just not his focus yet, but it is very much on his radar.

If Mastercoin fees become a problem, we could always migrate away to a separate blockchain (and it's not 100% that they will be).
Right now this is the fastest route to push development forward.

We'd rather spend the $500k to implement features, not infrastructure that may-or-may-not be needed.

Still, when the time is right, various optimization features will warrant bounties of them own.
If a separate blockchain is deemed necessary because the Bitcoin blockchain is drowning in Mastercoin transactions, and this is really the way to keep Mastercoin fees at decent levels, then I'm sure a part of the 1Exodus funds could be allocated to investigating this option.


I hardly see Gavin or the core devs, or pool operators for that matter, trying to outright ban or slow down Mastercoin transactions, which are always above the dust level and pay all required miner fees.
Mastercoin can adapat if needed, but I don't think it will come to that. Gavin and the core devs will not want to play a game of cat-and-mouse with the Mastercoin protocol - they have far more important things to do. And I'll add that Mastercoin developers aren't just ignoring everything Bitcoin devs are saying - rather they are rather cooperative in finding better, more optimal ways to encode Mastercoin transactions. It is possible that a sort of merged-mined alt-chain will be deemed the optimal solution one far day in the future ... but for now it's certainly not the case.

The entire merged mined / timestamping service approach to Mastercoin should just be viewed as a possible future optimization, and as we know optimizations are best implemented at the correct time, and not before.

If the devs were able to do this - http://bitcoinmagazine.com/4465/bitcoin-developers-adding-0-007-minimum-transaction-output-size/ - they can ban Mastercoin transactions. Bitcoin's decentralization is just a myth. All big pool owners will do what Gavin and Co. will ask them to do.

Mastercoin is different from your typical merged-mined alt-coin: it does not rely on validation by miners, it only requires timestamping.

And so you can just use Bitcoin blockchain for timestamping and enjoy security of full Bitcoin hashrate.


Well, the difference is that fees will likely be order(s) of magnitude lower on the alt-chain. So there is an incentive to use it.

As for laziness, if Namecoin devs were able to implement merged-mining without any funding, and you cannot do that having $500k in the bank, why should people trust you?

So your entire reasoning is that, while merged mining is in fact a solution, you are too lazy to do it? You need a specialized client already, so why not mastercoin-qt. Sheesh. It takes almost zero effort to start an altchain, evidenced by the rash of them already.

Your argument is weak. Let's face it, Willet just wants to do it this way, there is no other reasoning other than, "I want to, I can, so I will".

There have been several well known bitcoiners that tried to convince J.R.Willet to move Mastercoin to an altchain, instead of using the bitcoin blockchain. Willet's opinion is that Mastercoin should stay on the blockchain, and I fully concur. Here is my reasoning:

It is easier to implement Mastercoin on the blockchain. The entire concept of mining "vanishes", or actually is satisfied by Bitcoin miners. This means the security of Mastercoin is on par with Bitcoin (up to potential bugs) ... there is no way to 51% attack it.

The same could be implemented using merged mining, but no matter how you look at it, merged mining is technically a more complicated solution, because it requires an entirely new blockchain one needs to reason about. You need to think about the hashrate of this separate blockchain and to encourage miners to merge-mine it, things that are just not needed when you directly encode things into the Bitcoin blockchain. As far as software development goes, I'm super lazy - I do not like to do something complicated if I can do something simple that serves the same purpose.

Now, it is true that this "burdens" the blockchain ... in the same way that Satoshi Dice does.
However, this burdening is something that Bitcoin users and developers will just have to live with. Nobody is the boss of Bitcoin, and any standard Bitcoin transaction (like Mastercoin transactions are) are legitimate transactions that Bitcoin simply has to learn to deal with. There is just no feasible way that I see that Bitcoin developers could ban such transactions (please enlighten me if I'm wrong).

Bitcoin is the future of finance, resistant to hacking, government censorship and regulation. Do you really want to base that future on asking other people to pretty please "not abuse it for you own purposes"? This is not the answer. Bitcoin has to be made scalable enough to meet its role as the one major, global, world currency.

Mastercoin developers have no intention of disrupting Bitcoin, and will gladly adapt to any friendly encoding that the brilliant minds of these forums will propose, as long as it doesn't harm Mastercoin (using non-standard transactions that are relayed more slowly is not an option at the moment). The Bitcoin blockchain must and will remain neutral, and if Willet hadn't come up with Mastercoin encoding, someone else would have created something similar sooner or later.