Dear Masterminds

 Mastercoin is gaining support,we’ve been working with variety of innovators, and experts who want to create amazing projects.

The challenge is real exciting. The protocol is new, and just now the community realizes that the Master Protocol is an amazing fertile ground for opportunities and innovations. 

There are lots of great projects and today I would like to introduce the API Network- API Network Coin (XAP).

The API Network provides the solution to create a fully decentralized and tokenized API network.This platform will allow API providers and users to meet in a fully open sourced platform, using the lessons learned from Bitcoin.

The goal of API Network is to take all the APIs out in the world,and provide a universal mechanism for querying them.

APICoin (XAP) will provide a transparent and distributed way to compensate developers and service providers for their effort with the coin XAP.

The team behind the API Network include members who work or have worked at DApps Fund, Bitangels, MasterCoin Foundation,Yahoo,Booz Allen,Hamilton,GE Capital, etc., – Thank you team!

Did you know that there are 4 central issues with today’s providers of API calls?

1. Number of API calls a developer can make to their system.

2. Limited Price Competition: Today, there isn’t any price competition for the API calls developers want to make and the central service takes a margin on top of its costs, so the price the developer (and his or her users) pay for convenience is a higher price per API call.

3. Limited Customization: Centralized platforms do not offer tailor made API solutions, leaving developers with limited options.

4. Limited Transparency: Closed Sourced platforms lead to under developed platforms that give the developer less functionality.

 Thus, API Network is actually the solution to create a fully decentralized and tokenized API network platform that will allow API providers and users to meet in a fully open sourced platform, using the lessons learned from Bitcoin.

If you want to know more about the API Network project, please visit:

http://www.apinetwork.co/

http://www.buyxap.com/

We are extremely fortunate to provide a platform for innovative projects. 

Great things are happening to the Master Protocol

Point of contact for companies and organizations who want to issue a token (Judith Jakubovics) Judith (-at-) Mastercoin.org and on Skype: Judith.Jakubovics

Hello, Masterminds!

As each week comes to a close, I like to see all the various pieces of the Mastercoin project pointed in the same direction, and this week was no disappointment. The team released a new Omniwallet milestone release and continues forward towards our next Master Core release.

We’re extremely fortunate to have an internal integration team for Master Core: Omniwallet is a great use case for what web wallets and exchanges need from Master Core in terms of functionality and visibility. The collaboration between the teams has helped refine our priorities and schedule, and with additional feedback from 3rd-party integrators, our targets for each Master Core milestone becomes more clear.

This week our focus has been on several fronts: the new database backend for Omniwallet, OmniEngine, the RPC layer of Master Core, the persistence engine behind Master Core, the MetaDEx internals, the Master Core UI, and a new asset issuance type.

For Omni’s database, we’ve been parsing and importing blockchain data and are creating the queries to pull the data. Having the blockchain data accessible in this fashion will enable some impressive visualization and information tools (such as an enhanced block explorer) as well increasing responsiveness.

The RPC layer of Master Core continues to get additions, guided by Omni, exchanges and requests from experienced traders. The MetaDEx RPC template is a work in progress.

On persistence, we’ve made progress exposing some of the state values from internal parsing operations so that users can get more atomic data. We’ve also worked to more elegantly handle blockchain reorgs and orphans here.

The Master Core UI continues to progress, with work on the Balances screen and updated iconography. Our target for the next release will include the ability to see token balances and to send transactions for any Master Protocol token.

Of note, we have updated the Master Protocol spec to include a new asset issuance type which can have tokens perpetually created and destroyed by the issuer as necessary. Asset-backed issuers will find this extremely useful to maintain a token count on par with the assets they are using to back the tokens. Now that this pull request has been merged we can start development of this extremely useful feature.

Next week, we’ll be coming up with the first milestone-based bounties and defining our target features for the next Master Core beta release.

Questions? Ask me anything! Want to get involved? Get in touch!

The more masterminds the better!

Craig Sellars

CTO, Mastercoin Foundation

craig (at) mastercoin.org

Masterminds,

The past year we have learned a lot of lessons on how to develop a decentralized protocol, how to engage core developers and how to offer bounties to encourage development of an open source project. Below I’ve outlined those lessons so that the whole decentralized community can benefit from them and that the MSC community specifically knows the direction the Foundation is headed with its bounty system.

TL;DR Lessons:

1. Empower the developers most heavily involved in the development of the platform.

2. Sponsor developers most involved, to be able to work full time on the clients.

3. Organize developers into teams with daily standup meetings, so that they are in constant communication.

4. Designate a single reference implementation for each use case (eg. designating “MasterCore” as the downloadable client and “OmniWallet” as the web wallet) and focus a single team dedicated to each implementation.

5. Set up specific bounties, narrowly defined, and with short timelines of two weeks or less.

6. Have those most involved in development define the specific bounties and judge their value.

MSC History:
At first, the Foundation started with a very loose approach of offering very generalized bounties for what ever developers came up with when it came to creating wallets, clients and building features listed in the protocol.

Over time it became clear that those contributing the most useful code were those focusing their time and efforts on the MSC platform and fully aware of the context and progress of development. The Foundation began sponsoring full time developers as part of its “Role Based Bounty” program. This program expanded over time from a few developers to its current size of 12 full time developers being sponsored.

At the same time generalized bounties continued to allow independent developers to contribute code and be rewarded at the end of each month, based on rankings from the other developers.

However this process has become tougher over time as the teams grew and developers had less visibility into projects outside of their team and even less insight into independent efforts. Also, without clearly defined bounties, the independent efforts of developers were uncoordinated, fragmented and difficult to integrate into the features of the clients.

Bounties Moving Forward:

1. The Foundation will no longer be engaging developers on a part time basis. Engaging team members full time has proven to be much more effective, as this enabled team members to be fully in sync, and drive the pace of feature development forward.

2. Starting September 1st, the Foundation will be phasing out generalized bounties and instead only listing specified, narrowly defined, and short term bounties, which will be judged by the developers most involved in that area of development. These bounties will be posted and shared with the community and serve as the open door, for new developers to prove their skills and the community to provide input on the direction of the MSC platform.

I’m confident in our team and I believe these reforms to the MSC Foundation’s bounty system, will empower their development efforts going forward.

Best Regards,

David A. Johnston

Chairman of the Board of the MSC Foundation

David (at) Mastercoin.org

 

Shannon Code here: During my AmA I was asked about monitoring an address so they could log incoming deposits into a database. I researched a bit, asked the core developers here on the development team and came up with a pretty elegant solution.

Continuing with the integration demonstration here: http://mastercoin.io/mastercore-integration-nodejs/ I’ll demonstrate how this can be done.

This example is of course a simplistic version, there is very little error handling and only the simplest “mvp” Minimum Viable Product has been demonstrated. I handled it this way to make things easier to follow along with.

Lets get started:

First off lets clone the example files so you can follow along:

> git clone https://github.com/genecyber/Mastercore-Node-App.git

This should get you a copy of the files needed. I (being a .Net developer) am writing this app in node, but I’m using the visual studio node tools for VS2013, I have included the project files in the event that you would like to also use Visual Studio.

You will need to install the dependencies. npm is used to install the dependencies.

If using Visual Studio

 

If using bash

Modify your copy of config.js to reflect the information needed to connect to your Mastercore instance.

Start the application

> node server.js

or if in Visual Studio click the play button

 

You should now be able to access the application via your web-browser.

You can also check out my live version here: http://162.242.208.46:3000/

 

Diving In

First things first, bitcoind has the walletnotify flag built right in, I’m illustrating how to harness this capability. I found a great resource via this post

Wallet notify works by telling bitcoind you want to execute some command locally whenever a wallet event happens. Incoming tx, confirmations, outgoing tx, etc.

~/.bitcoin/bitcoin.conf

walletnotify=~/.bitcoin/notify.sh %s

This excerpt is from my bitcoin conf file and simply says run notify.sh and append any parameters. In this case it will be a transaction id.

My Notify.sh simply runs curl on my notify endpoint to persist the transaction

So looking back at the node app we can visit the /notify url to monitor transactions: http://162.242.208.46:3000/notify/ You will notice an address we want to monitor. Sending any transactions to this address should now create records in our database.

Testing it out

Nothing in the database:

 

Make a deposit

Now we have a transaction id stored in our database!

 

How’d That happen?

I’ll dive into the node just a bit now to show how that works behind the scenes.

Here we now include the sqlite3 library

 

Here are our routes for handling the /notify view and the /notify/:txid/ endpoint

I hope this helps answer how to monitor an address using Mastercore.

Shannon Code
Mastercoin Developer Evangelist & Head of Security

Dear Masterminds,

Open communication with the community is the primary way for the Master Protocol to grow, engage and empower the community.

Did you know that  6 projects already launched on the Master Protocol? 

Would you like to be updated? Please see here

The latest update –  August 18, 2014 – CoinProze launched.

CoinProz is utilizing a new method of valuing their token called Proof of Action: By distributing much of their coin offering to users who participate in their crypto based social network they are encouraging a strong interactive community. With Quality bonuses, Spam Protection and other features not utilized. They are also pairing a percentage of their coin with their mining pool, allowing them to offer a “Merge-Mine” for any coin, altcoin or meta-coin that exists. –  www.coinproz.com/default.html

Thank you CoinProz and the CoinProz team.

Great things are happening to the Master Protocol

Point of contact for companies and organizations who want to issue a token (Judith Jakubovics) Judith (-at-) Mastercoin.org and on Skype: Judith.Jakubovics

 

 

 

 

 

 

Greetings Masterminds,

My name is Faiz, and I am one of the developers on the Mastercoin Project. For the next 24 hours I’ll be hosting an AMA on the r/Mastercoin subreddit where anyone can ask me questions about integrating the project software, general high-level software discussion, and any technical concerns you all might have had. Come drop by!

my AMA, Saturday, August 23th

A developer on the Mastercoin project has many responsibilities; it is our responsibility to maintain application up-time, ensure stability in the software we release, prevent catastrophic failure across/on any of our supported platforms, and deliver a visionary product on a timely schedule.

I work with several other developers in concert, and will field questions to them as necessary to get the answers you need. Appropriate questions include: “How do I run this thing?” “When will you support feature X?” “What’s the best way to accomplish task Y?” and “Does it Z?”.

If you’ve got technical input, ideas on where to take the code, or are just seeking more information, drop me a line at the AMA today or faiz@mastercoin.org

See you there!

Hello, Masterminds!

This summer has been a whirlwind for the development team at the Mastercoin Foundation. We’ve made a monumental shift from disparate systems that all demonstrated the value of the concept – towards a single reference implementation that is being integrated into cryptocurrency projects and businesses around the world.

We’ve learned a lot – not only about how to manage or coordinate decentralized teams of geniuses with varying talents across many time zones (try it sometime), how to incentivize and reward the work that’s being accomplished (on a fixed budget), how to deal with the haters (who sometimes actually demonstrate extremely helpful lessons), but also why we’re doing what we’re doing, where we see this technology going, and what it is exactly that we’re building.

Mastercoin is an idea – an idea that says when we can rely upon an unmodifiable history structure of transactions, we can facilitate interactions and transactions between individuals in a way where outcomes are guaranteed based upon the conditions that we can invent. It’s a platform that allows you to dictate business logic, and have all participants interpret the end result the same way.

We’ve been working with a variety of innovators and experts who want to create amazing new decentralized systems, from the very beginning of their idea, through gaining the support of the community, to acting on their ideas, and towards seeing the realization of their concepts in practice.

Asset-backed tokens. Reward-backed tokens. Reputation-backed tokens. Idea-backed tokens.

All while gutting the old way of doing things and starting fresh. And then re-integrating it, of course…

So what are we building? An infrastructure for innovators.

The past few weeks have brought us the first public release of Master Core beta for integrators and continued improvement in Omniwallet.

Omniwallet is already relying on Master Core, while Omni gets a better database back-end and updated UI as well.

We’ve built an automated test environment, and are now working on adding more test plans.

We found big number precision issues that have been unaddressed within Bitcoin Core (alt-coins with lots of tokens: you’ve got a problem), and we’ve addressed it within Master Core.

We’ve been speaking with subject matter experts on exchange functionality, and are building in what they need for the MetaDEx.

We’ve got new features such as ongoing issuance and smart property administration already queued up, and the draft UI of Master Core is coming together.

There’s a lot going on, and we’re firing on all cylinders. We are always looking for contributors and partners, so if you’ve got an idea and want to discuss it, please reach out.

The more masterminds, the better!

Craig Sellars

CTO, Mastercoin Foundation

Craig (at) mastercoin.org

Masterminds,

In my first post on the 5th of August when I took over the role of Chairman, I set out three immediate priorities for the MSC Foundation.

1. Establish a Clear Road Map: http://goo.gl/rl5Zvp

2. Open Communications: http://blog.mastercoin.org/2014/08/06/opening-up-communication-and-amas-starting-today/

3. Streamlining of spending and partnerships.

On each of these topics I’d like to offer a quick update and invite the community to continue actively engaging as they have done so the last few weeks on how to improve the MSC Protocol, the Foundation, our community, and the open source software.

Road Map:

Firstly on the Road Map, I want to thank everyone for the helpful comments and input on the direction of the Foundation and its priorities. You can find the most updated version of the Foundation’s Road Map at: http://goo.gl/rl5Zvp

As for the milestones for the August and September period I’m happy to report the team has completed 10 out of the 17 items on the list and the others are in progress. Completed items include; partnering with industry expert on best practices for order book of decentralized exchange, engaging our best developers and increasing the bandwidth of the MasterCore team with more testers, announcing points of contact for MasterCore, OmniWallet, and so forth.

Open Communication:

Secondly, on “Open Communications” in addition to making regular posts on the blog, being available on Reddit, and the forums, Shannon Code is working to weave together all the different channels of the MSC community so that users can see updates on progress, developer discussion, and so forth easily without having to log into a proprietary program such as Skype and find a invite based chat room. http://blog.mastercoin.org/2014/08/06/opening-up-communication-and-amas-starting-today/

Shannon will be posting soon about his efforts on this front to open up all of the communications.

Streamlining Spending and Partnering:

Thirdly, on Spending I’ve been reaching out to the community to get input on how to improve the Role Based Bounty and general bounty system that has been in place since the beginning of the Foundation’s work. One point of consensus is to move from a generalized bounty system which is currently paid on a monthly basis, to that of a deliverable based bounty system, where the milestones are clearly defined, prioritized, and set at the beginning of each month and paid out at the end of each month. This way the priorities of the community for the development of the MSC open source software clients will come first in focusing contributing developers time and energy.

As for “Partnering”, serious new projects with the potential of engaging new demographics and users have announced they will be developing on top of the MSC platform including the recent post about the Merchant Coin project.

Conclusion:

All in all, I believe we have the right team members working with the Foundation to encourage the development of the MSC protocol and make its open source clients the standard for reliability for major projects who have large user bases and will transact significant value on top of the protocol. I’ll continue doing everything in my power to encourage the continued development of an engaged and authentic community of users and developers extending the capabilities of the bitcoin blockchain to include smart property, decentralized exchange and much more.

Sincerely,

David A. Johnston

Chairman of the MSC Board

David (at) Mastercoin.org