Topic: Why so much hype around mastercoin? - page 3. (Read 7395 times)

Obviously. The point I was trying to emphasize is that I haven't sold any.

meh, since you control the exodus address, you are in the better position than everyone else to put every coin into it.

For anyone who hasn't see the video where this actually plays out, I highly recommend it. Look at this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qdr_Z3hrqQ

Willet tells everyone: go do it.  I'll give you money.  But nobody did it.  So Willet did it himself.  Please watch this.  You'll learn that Willet and MSC have very honest roots and foundation.  Very cool.

I started the MasterCoin project, and I'm the biggest investor. I invested every last BTC I had in MasterCoin. Since then, I haven't sold one single MasterCoin. Not one. I know I'll have to eventually, but that will be very painful for me.

I remember a few months ago before I started this project, my dad was urging me to sell some of my BTC. I asked him: "If you had a bunch of houses, would you sell some of them for $100 each just because the world didn't yet understand the value of houses? Obviously not. Neither will I sell my BTC for $100 each."

Since 2011, I haven't sold a single bitcoin, except out of necessity to pay my expenses in acquiring MORE bitcoins. I was waiting, knowing that someday somebody would come unlock bitcoin's revolutionary power by building new features on top. I knew it would happen, and I wanted to invest in it. Finally, I got tired of waiting for somebody else to do it.

Now, after years of waiting, it's finally happening. I can watch it getting built right before my very eyes. Perhaps it will all fall apart or be quickly replaced by a clone, but I don't think so. MasterCoin is fighting for mindshare right now, and we're getting it. That's the real hurdle a competitor will have to clear - not a technical hurdle or a financial one, but a psychological one. The hurdle of an established, passionate, invested user base and team of developers.

In the meantime, while we build these houses, all the world can see is the blueprints and the muddy foundations which are just now poking out of an empty field. But I see the finished product that is coming, with families living inside and cars parked out front. With that image in my mind, I simply can't sell any of them for the price of an empty field. Not until I absolutely have to.

Boy, oh boy, Luckybit - you've sure got one happy keyboard.

following...

Because the clone will quickly become more expensive than BTC and be just a cheaper MSC. MSC2 will never be cheap because escrows are never supposed to be cheaper than the currencies they back. Gold isn't going to be cheaper than bank notes they back. What is so difficult to understand here?

When I say the price of MSC will settle around 3-4 BTC a piece it's under the assumption that there will be stiff competition which can include clones. If I assumed there would be no competition at all then it would settle at around 20-30 BTC a piece in my opinion. There is Bitshares, ColoredCoin and Hops all which can offer competition.

But if you make a clone and the clone were half the price of MSC then it would take twice as many clone coins to back a user currency as it would take Mastercoins but nothing else would change. The only thing that would change is the proportions. Instead of having to back Bitcoin 300% with 100 MSC, now it will take 200 clone coins.

It's impossible to back Bitcoin with blanks. It's impossible to back any currency with a blank, the math simply doesn't support it. So whatever ultimately is in the escrow must have more value (people say around *3 more value) than whatever is being issued or else there is no way to redeem. If you're backing some user currency with a completely worthless clone no one is going to trust that. If the clone is just half the price of MSC then you'll have to use twice as many to reach the same value which solves absolutely nothing. The cheaper it is the more you'll have to use to back the same stuff, so please take out your spreadsheets and do the math.

The main reason Mastercoin will be important which David Johnston alluded to is the fact that startups who want to offer a new service to the community will be able to benefit by issuing their own coin. Initially their coin will have to be backed by something with value while they build their capacity to redeem their coins. What I'm saying is that Mastercoin being valuable will be as essential as having a gold standard. If the startup doesn't perform so well then people can get their Mastercoins back and take value back from the escrow in response to their currency going down in value. If everything goes well then you'll be able to redeem with them by giving them their currency back in exchange for the service they offer.

So let's say for instance it's a VPN service and it's promising to protect your privacy and IP address. At the IPO anyone can buy some of their newly minted VPN credit coins with Mastercoins. Those Mastercoins are held in escrow while they build the VPN. When the VPN is built then you'll pay them in VPN credit coins, or you can trade those coins with anyone else who wants VPN service, or sell them for Bitcoins if the price goes up or down, or redeem them for Mastercoins. This gives the user a lot of flexibility which does not exist anywhere but in the Mastercoin protocol.

Here is something else, Colored Coin can be implemented on top of the Mastercoin protocol. So if ColoredCoin were truly superior then nothing stops the Mastercoin protocol from innovating with some Colored approach, but in any case the escrow is crucial to issuing new currencies. No one is going to trust a new currency which isn't backed by anything at all but the promises of the issuer to offer some goods or services at some future date. That just wont work out too well as we don't want to have to trust the issuer. If it's backed by Mastercoins held in escrow it solves our trust problem somewhat, we still have to believe the issuer will offer VPN service and that the VPN service will work but it's a different kind of risk you'll be taking.

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As a matter of fact, David Johnston (Bit Angels) is actively encouraging people to do exactly this.

The model he is proposing is that every new startup use the Mastercoin model as a type of crowd funding. In that scenario, every new service would sell a limited quantity of colored coins to fund development, then would only accept those colored coins as payment for their service instead of generic Bitcoins.
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Justus,

Thanks for the scout out : )

Though to be clear on a few points let me offer these thoughts.

1. Yes I am encouraging people to consider the model of monetizing their new services through a coin based approach. Your description is fairly accurate "new services would sell a limited quantity of coins to fund development, then would only accept those coins as payment for their service instead of generic Bitcoins".

2. I do not necessarily think "every new startup" is a fit for this type of monetization strategy. I'd say those with broad enough appeal and a service that has the potential to be a platform for many other services are good first candidates.

3. I'm not advocating that new services try and compete with Mastercoin as copy cats, but rather that they can issue these coins on top of the Mastercoin platform (as this is one of the features in the protocol).

Full disclosure: I own Mastercoins. Though I'm also a big fan of BitShares, Open Transactions, Colored Coins and other projects seeking to bring these new functions about in a decentralized way. In the end, competition is a positive force that will bring about the best for everyone and the market will ultimately decide which use cases are most compelling for these different technologies.

As for you Justus, I'm looking forward to the technology you are cooking up : ) Lets talk soon.

-DJohnston

I think you completely misunderstand the point.  Mastercoin isn't just a pump and dump scheme. It's about what it will enable. If you don't find value in a completely decentralized derivatives market, betting, stocks, futures, where any community can issue its own currency, then nothing I can say will convince you.

But if you do find value in these things then the protocol is immensely valuable because of what you'll be able to do which you couldn't do prior to it. There will be plenty of money to be made when you're free to invest or trade in what will seem like a virtually unlimited prediction market. The value will be there but the real question will be what will the people do with it?

0.1 BTC is really nothing compared to what the Mastercoin protocol may be worth.

because ppl who cashed-in are promoting it so that their investment won't be under water. I bought some, just in case, and let the good times roll.

What hype? 

Yes please read the thread. You'll learn a lot about Mastercoin and ColoredCoin.

Unlike DillPickleChips, I believe with over a 180 trillion dollar market cap for derivatives in the US alone there is plenty of room for both Mastercoin and ColoredCoin.

My reason for preferring Mastercoin is that it does not depend on Bitcoin being stable and isn't backed by Bitcoin, you don't have to worry about Bitcoin or even know what Bitcoin is. Mastercoin is high level enough and can be built in such a way that you don't have to directly interact with Bitcoin to play with it. Perhaps ColoredCoin will reach that state too but ColoredCoin has a lot less development funding, a lot less momentum, and my opinion is you should hedge your bets on this. Get some Mastercoins while they are "a steal" cheap and if you see a clone which is even better than buy the cloneCoin and you'll probably profit from them both as the market is big enough for many players.

Bitcoin has around a 2.5 billion dollar market cap. So to put this into perspective we are talking about a market cap in the trillions of dollars for Mastercoin, the clone, Bitshares and ColoredCoin. 100 Mastercoins could easily be worth over a million dollars and right now it's at a price of around 10 Bitcoins so that is a very cheap gamble. It has a similar amount of risk to buying Bitcoins at the current price and if you think it will go up to $1000 then perhaps buying it at $200 isn't much of a risk.

The good news is if you do buy Bitcoins and Mastercoins only you'll probably watch the price of both go up because they are in synergy, in symbiosis. Mastercoin is what will help drive the price of Bitcoin into the $100,000 range so that 10 Bitcoins is a million dollars. So when I say 100 Mastercoins is a million dollars I'm assuming the price of Mastercoins will stay exactly as it is right now forever at 0.1 BTC.

But if you want my true opinion, I believe it will be at least 3-4 BTC per Mastercoin even if there were half a dozen clones, Bitshares, etc. The reason is you have to consider the amount of marketshare Mastercoin will have when compared to the clones, to Bitshares, and to ColoredCoin. Even if it has a very small amount of market share in a 100+ trillion dollar market cap it's a ridiculous amount of money so I advise you to take out your spread sheet and do the math for yourself and if you decide to take the risk only risk what you can afford to lose.

To move beyond speculation, I have personally tested the decentralized Mastercoin exchange prototype and it was a smooth sail. The fact that it's only early November and the prototype is working indicates to me that a nice polished client can be available sometime in December. Mastercoin as far as I know is the first of the decentralized exchanges to be successfully tested but I hear rumors that ColoredCoin had something working in 2012.

References
Size of global derivatives market How can the derivatives market be worth more than the world's total financial assets?
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2008/10/596_trillion.html
The Global Derivatives Market
http://www.math.nyu.edu/faculty/avellane/global_derivatives_market.pdf

Brilliant response.

LOL. I'm always learning. I'm not too worried about what eventually wins but people saying that MSC is going to blow up in price is somewhat concerning. A lot of MSC people are making fantastic claims and it seems to boil down to "we have funding and we are first". Colored coins offers some technical advantages so I think it is fair to be restrained in the promises of wealth.

Ripple is a far superior payment system than Bitcoin.
Again, look at it's price!

Look, I have to sleep and English not my 1st language so I can't post like I want to.

But you have a digital technology here - the question is if Bitcoin is the new Myspace or the new Facebook.
The same applies to MSC too and probably to all digital networks.

There can be only one (real big).

If it is not MSC, then maybe it will be something similar - but you HAVE to have 1 as the big guy.

The first mover has a big advantage.

In any case, even if MSC (as a currency, if it's your point) is threatened, that's not a problem for me. Bitcoin will gain so much traction and mind blowing/genius features with all the futures projects even if copy-cat (GG then).

This is why I crowdfunded the Mastercoin Project, this is a win:win situation and a kind of hedging on bitcoins held.

2 days after !



2 weeks ago you didn't even know what colored coin are so please, try to understand a topic before to be so negative

The payment system (and tracking system) part is the part I think people will copy. If they do, the currency part of MSC will be threatened.

And MSC is a currency + many more things.

Bitcoin is a currency AND a payment system!