better buy up those Mastercoins before they run out then!
there are really two possibilities:
1) the Mastercoin people pulled one over on the VC by telling them that they have a technology that they don't(this much has been confirmed).
2) the Mastercoin people and the VC are pulling one over on us by pretending to have a technology in order to market these Mastercoins.
It's really not very difficult to profit from a scheme like this. Start with 1 million in capital and start the first round of selling Mastercoins. Lets say they are priced at $10 each. Distribute a few to people with blogs and they just start churning out senseless crap with as many important sounding hot topic buzzwords as possible. Suddenly the things are retailing for $15. You just made a half-million dollars. Slowly sell them off, a few months later- 'Mastercoin? never heard of it'. Have you read the 'whitepaper'? this is the next big thing in Bitcoin? lol.
Just a few weeks back they had supposedly put out a bounty for $50,000 to build a 'Distributed Exchange'. To my knowledge the bounty was supposedly paid, but not to anyone who actually invented a distributed exchange, instead it appeared to have been paid to some pseudonymous programmers who made some kind of wallet app for Mastercoin. Meanwhile Alex Mizrahi is talking to IBM rep on the BitcoinX list(just days afterwards) about the Distributed Exchange that Mastercoin has, that has never been defined, and a bounty was put out for it only a few weeks ago(the thing was conceived, accepted, and developed all in a few weeks? covertly?), and a rep from Bitangels publicly claimed that it doesn't exist! The IBM rep is then writing on his blog about how awesome Mastercoin is.
None of these things exist. None have been theoretically proven. It's just people pumping up a digital asset, running around and avoiding any hard questions. If this is your thing I bid you best of luck, amigo. I think I might be one of the few people who is actually watching this thing who is not in on it.
Personally, I believe in open source. Developing truly accessible open technologies pays you back more than any other engineering approach.
It does exist and I tested it. It's in the blockchain forever for anyone to observe. I exchanged a test Mastercoins for Bitcoins. I first purchased the test Mastercoins and once that was successful I sold the test Mastercoins back to the distributed exchange for a nominal profit all through the blockchain.
Here is the distributed order book:
http://mastercoin-explorer.com/order_booksIt all take place in the blockchain and it's as decentralized as Bitcoin. It's not an advanced exchange but what do you expect for an ambitious project such as this after only a month?
Developing truly accessible open technologies pays you back more than any other engineering approach.
oh yeah? Just go to Antibes and look a Linus Torvalds yacht parked next to Paul Allen's yacht and see if you can sustain that position. You are an idiot AND you don't know what you are talking about.
You'll see the exchange in action very soon. You'll be shitting bricks about it then.
As far as I can tell these bounties were never paid. The code repositories are full of padding code, autogenerated code, etc.
Im not opposed to making money with software. If you want people to pay you for your software, then you license it.
If you want to trick people into buying into your pump and dump scheme, you start strutting around claiming you have all these things you dont, that you need to invest or 'miss the train', etc. This stuff is just pathetic. At this point Im not really sure how much awareness the VC has of what's going on here.
Propaganda. The bounties have been paid and you can look at the blockchain. This is not how you win. You can win by producing some code.