Greetings my fellow Masterminds.

I’m delighted to announce as of February 6th I will be joining the Mastercoin Foundation full-time as Chief Architect. I’ve raised enough USD to quit my day-job, and I am looking forward to devoting every ounce of my professional energy to the success of the Master Protocol and the Mastercoins which use it. Like our Executive Director Ron Gross, I will not be taking any salary from the Mastercoin Foundation, but will be paying my own living expenses while devoting my time to making Mastercoins more useful and more valuable.

I have been criticized for buying over 28% of all Mastercoins when they were first released, making me the largest stakeholder and a “whale” in the Mastercoin market, and thus a major source of uncertainty. Today, I would like to remove that uncertainty. I hope to take Mastercoin to a market cap measured in many trillions of dollars, and by the time we get there, I want to hold a far smaller fraction of the total Mastercoins in existence. Here is how I plan to do that:

1. I will live off Mastercoin. This means my Mastercoins will become available on the open market as I pay my family’s living expenses. However, this won’t make much of a dent in my holdings, so:
2. Every time the market cap of Mastercoin doubles, I plan to diversify ~10% of my remaining Mastercoins into other assets, especially assets built on top of Mastercoin. If I diversify faster, I expect it will in the form of investments into great projects being built in the Mastercoin ecosystem. Note that I don’t plan to do my 10% per doubling in big chunks at price milestones (which could rock the boat), but rather as a continuous mathematical function.

It may interest you to know that I first put this diversification plan in writing when I first got involved with bitcoin in 2011 and began thinking about how to build on top of it. I knew it was ridiculous to extrapolate my tiny $200 investment so far in the future, but I had an eerie feeling that this day would come someday, despite the unanimous voice of my friends and family telling me I was crazy to believe in bitcoin and what might be built on it.

Perhaps I AM crazy, but one thing seems clear: the world’s monetary systems are starting a massive upheaval, and I want to be a part of it. Bitcoin and Mastercoin have already made a lot of ordinary geeks fabulously wealthy, and I believe we are just getting started. I invite any and all of you to join me on this amazing ride!

-J.R.

P.S. I hope if you do join me, you will also join me in using the money we make not for selfish gratification or wanton materialism, but for the betterment of our fellow man. I see myself as a temporary guardian of the funds under my care. I plan to guard them, grow them, and ultimately use most of them for some kind of philanthropy, as I have urged you all to do in the past.