News for week 44.2013.

There is a lot of excitement building up around Mastercoin and some important milestones have been set since last week’s blog.  But we have a lot of hard work cut out for us.  The developers are working hard on the next code contest and always looking for more folks to join the effort. Take some of your  spare time to check out the tutorial (see bottom) for conducting exchange transactions.

We now finally have a price graph of the MSC/BTC trades that have occurred, the Board has decided to engage a PR firm, we have a new addition to the Mastercoin repo’s on Github, there is a bounty open for building an MSC faucet, and a new proposal for enabling the limiting of spending of MSC on addressed that have been identified to have this feature enabled.  And if you are interested in the current economic distribution of Mastercoins here are the Top 50 MSC wallets.

Coding Contest Update: Distributed Exchange

Recall the applications being built for this 300 BTC contest announced last week:

1. Minimum one PC wallet (for both Linux and Windows) which can generate simple sends and the buy/sell messages required for the distributed exchange, using agree-upon multi-sig format
2. Minimum two websites parsing such messages, and the resulting balance transfers
3. Minimum one website showing BTC/MSC price charts derived from these messages

There is now an Order Book on Mastercoin-Explorer where sell and buy offers as well as transactions between MSC and BTC are presented.   Progress is being made on item #3, the price charts and initial code has been uploaded to GitHub (see Repo Updates).

1st  Exchange Using The Mastercoin Protocol

In a major milestone earlier this week one of the developers, Tachikoma, for the first time exchanged Test Mastercoins for Bitcoins.  If you are interested in seeing the transaction go check out the Order Book on Mastercoin-Explorer.

Now, technically, that exchange did not happen between two people with real Mastercoins, so it seems the window is still open for anyone to be a part of the first two-person trade of MSC and BTC.  Exciting stuff, right?!  But, you might be a little hesitant to try this out with real MSC and large amounts of BTC (not recommended at this time as development is in progress). So, we have put together a step-by-step tutorial for how to test this new functionality for yourself and help our developers move the project forward.  Scroll to the bottom for the tutorial.

Protocol & Proposals

We have a proposal for Mastercoin Limited Accounts which would feature limiting the rate at which a particular address can send Mastercoins.

MSC Faucet Bounty

Don’t have any Mastercoins but want to get some?  We need your help.  The Mastercoin Foundation Board approved a bounty of up to $850 to build a Mastercoin faucet.  If you have experience with some of the existing open source faucet software out there you may find this an interesting project and will get surely be appreciated by the many faucet users.

Check for details on the bitcointalk thread.

Social Media & PR

Market Update

MSC Price Chart as of 02-NOV-2013 :

(X-axis: time; Y-axis: Price of 1 MSC in BTC)

Note that trading is manual at this time, a list of contacts is in the Order Book spreadsheet.

Tutorial: Test MSC – BTC Distributed Exchange Transactions

Start the tutorial…

Please post your questions or issues on the main development thread on bitcointalk.