We just had a breakthrough this morning, which I just can’t keep to myself. We have SOLVED the exchange rate issue which so publicly marred the Maidsafe crowd-sale!
Future crowd-sales will be able to accept BTC, MSC, MaidSafeCoins, and any other currency in our ecosystem they wish to accept, simultaneously!! Furthermore, the exchange rate for each currency will be update-able throughout the duration of the crowd-sale. This means if you are getting too much of a currency, you can lower the exchange rate to discourage it’s use, including lowering the rate to zero.
The most beautiful thing is, this requires no changes to the format of the crowd-sale in our protocol (TX51). Instead, we are changing the rules and interpretation of TX51 to allow this type of usage. Cancelling a crowd-sale will affect all currencies being collected.
We’ve been discussing different ideas to improve crowd-sales for weeks, but this one hit me out of the blue this morning, and everyone I talked to on the Master Protocol team is extremely excited about it, and I wanted to share our excitement with all of you.
In hindsight, it seems so obvious – this is the way it should have always worked. With that in mind I would like to take this opportunity to publicly apologize to the wonderful folks at Maidsafe. We really let you down by having such a primitive crowd-sale mechanism in the first iteration, and we’re really, REALLY sorry for the pain, financial distress, and critical press you received as a result. And thanks for not throwing us under the bus. Your positive words about us are a lot of what is drawing so many other projects to use Master Protocol.
The best amends I can offer is to make your large stake of Mastercoin a fantastic investment, I commit myself to doing so, in every way I can. You guys rock. Future crowd-sales will have a MUCH better experience due to the lessons learned from your being our guinea pig.
We’re always making improvements to our spec, but this was a breakthrough I just had to share. 🙂
Omni 
Indeed!
J.R, you have a nack of finding elegant solutions – this is how the crowdsale mechanism should have been specced and implemented all along … and none of us saw that 🙂
I join you in thanking and appologizing to MaidSafe – you were our alpha users testing out bleeding-edge software, and bleeding-edges can cut you sometimes. We appreciate your understanding and are committed to working full-speed on improving both the Master Protocol, for future crowdsales, and the value of MSC.
We knew it was all a new world and took the chance. It’s the fact you guys were so honest and helpful on the technical side that allowed us to save the day and overcome issues we did not think we could control. Now you can control those the next crowd sales will be so much smoother. I am glad we were strong enough and close enough to get through it. I am sure there will be more (and much smaller) issues along the way, but this is a major fix indeed.
Shout out to you J.R you proved to be capable honourable and totally upfront with us during the post sale analysis and that pays dividends. For further crowd sales I think you have a master plan now, a stable approach to mixed currencies, a great team that are available 24/7 dedicated managers and customer focussed individuals. All in all this should give people huge comfort going forward. Well done you folks, especially under such pressure and criticism. “It’s always darkest just before dawn”, good morning folks!
Why do I suspect that this may just make msc more tradeable! As new projects get some msc investments, they will be interested in trading it in more & exchanging according to their needs. Msc will go to to those who need it and believe in it the most with time. Keep up the good work…
Why do you? Why do you think those new projects will accept Mastercoin now they can accept Bitcoin alone?
To be honest, thewebalyst, I believe the more mastercoin gets to be used the more likely we may actually get something out of it in the long run. I think its a bad idea trying to close the gate on every useful coin that may contribute to mass usage of the Mastercoin solution. I would say let them accept whatever they want as long as they encourage usage of the platform in some shape or form.
There is bound to be some added solutions that can be built on top of mastercoin in the long run that we can then choose to charge for. My thought, give a decent base product that is workable for free and continue to innovate on Mastercoin offerings.
Great stuff ! well done!
Still, this doesn’t really explain the initial (naive / poor / stupid / conflict of interest) idea of:
1) pegging two freely tradable asset together (BTC, MSC) through a third, crowdsale assest (MSAFE) – which invites markets misallocation and bubbles and indirectly creates arbitrage opportunities
2) selecting the peg rate to be 200% of that actual rate – which directly invites arbitrage oportunities
3) deciding to make crowdsale in very illiquid asset (MSC) – which exposes crowdseller to a substantial risk of getting far less from the crowdsale then projected
I would really like to hear some basic reasoning behind this and not just appologies and claim that “we were not experienced enough”, “this was our first crowdsale”, “we didnt expect…”. It is nearly unthinkable that without conlicts of interest, experienced enterpreneurs behind BitAngels and Mastercoin Foundation could make such primitive mistakes of econ 101: Remember tha people around virtual currencies understand concepts of money, value creation, and free markets far better than polititians and central bankers who often do things like (1), (2) and (3) above and are criticised from us for doing these stuping things on a grand scale.