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Meet Ups and More Mastercoin Bounties

Dominik Zynis, , , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

Week 47.2013

Big things are happening and we need your help.  But before we get into that we have a video of Ron Gross, Mastercoin Foundation’s Executive Director, speaking about Mastercoin at the Mastercoin Israel meet up which took place earlier this week.

 

Now that you had a chance to watch that video and know all about Mastercoin, you’re ready to kick down some bounties!

Earlier today we kicked-off the first Documentation Contest with a $5000 Bounty.  We also have a few other bounties open as well as several job opportunities.  And if you have some great ideas we also now how a process for proposing bounties as well.  If you need some more ideas check out the slides form Ron’s presentation.

Mastercoin Slides

If you are into the 300 BTC Distributed Exchange Code Contest taking place right now we have a list of all the GitHub repo’s which have been updated.  Head over to the development thread on Bitcointalk.org to see how you can help in development or testing.

We now have local chapters in New York, Israel, UK and China. Thank you to those who made this possible.

Active Bounties

Check the Bounty spreadsheet for links to these opportunities.  If you decide to take on a bounty and recommend a bounty give some thoughts the responsibilities of what it means to being a feature owner.

Bounty Name Bounty Size Currency
Spend from Multisig 1500 USD
Localization of at least one client 500 USD
Document a rough plan to migrating off the Bitcoin blockchain into a new altchain (possibly merged mined) 300 USD
Economic research – why does MSC have value? 500 USD
First peer reviewed academic paper about Mastercoin 1000 USD
Get an existing nonprofit organization to accept Mastercoin 200 USD
Build a budget website 1000 USD
Write spec for voting on Bounties 250 USD
Write a white paper for BitAngels on how to use the Mastercoin Smart Property / User Currencies to list a BitAngelscoin 1000 USD

Have some great ideas?  Voice yourself.  And see our Bounty Process.

Open Positions

See the Open Positions List on Trello.

Currently looking for:

Security Auditor
Chief Financial Officer
Executive Assistant
Social Media Analyst
Project Manager

Protocol & Proposals

The Mastercoin Protocol v1.2 master repository on GitHub

Proposal for Standardizing the Distribution Rate of Dev MSC via the MSC Protocol

Code Repositories

Below are the repo’s on GitHub which have been updated recently.  Click on the link for more details.

Mastercoin-tools

Mastercoin-charts-app

Mastercoin-teampage

Mastercoin-wallet

Mastercoin-faucet

Mastercoin-ruby

Mastercoin-explorer

If you are interested in project statistics head over to Ohloh.net

Market

MSC Price Chart as of 22-NOV-2013 :

chart_1 (3)

(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.

Community

The Mastercoin community is expanding rapidly, here are some of the sites where you can find us and join in the conversation:

/REDDIT

BITCOINTALK.ORG

MASTERCOIN CHINESE BLOG

FB GROUP

FOUNDATION ON FB

GITHUB

GOOGLE+

MASTERCOIN ISRAEL BLOG

LINKEDIN

QUORA

Events

Ron Gross, Executive Director, Mastercoin Foundation will be speaking at Inside Bitcoin taking place in Las Vegas December 11-13.

Local Chapters

We now have local chapters in New York, Israel, UK and China.  Thanks to all who made this possible:

Israel – founded by Ofer Rotem, Stas Oskin and Amnon Gilboa.
China – founded by Red Li and Zhen Li.
UK – founded by Eric Benz.
New York – founded by Jeffrey Parries.

Interested in starting your own local chapter here are the instructions.

Mastercoin Foundation

Smart Property Lead

We are excited to announce a new addition to the team: Taariq Lewis recently took on the Smart Property Lead position.

Financials

Mastercoin Fund Ledger (MSC) 10071.6150979
Exodus MSC 563162.35762218 End of Exodus 9/1/2013
Dev MSC 56316.235762218 Years since Exodus 0.22569854646742
Total MSC 619478.593384398 Available Dev MSC 8155.66935554026
Mastercoin Primary Fund Ledger (BTC)
Beginning Balance 4740.6200979
Overall Balance 4436.2910979

Source: Fund Ledger

Meet Ups and More Mastercoin Bounties

The Heat is On! Bitcoin Economy Decentralization More Important Than Ever.

Dominik Zynis, , , 1 Comment

Just when we thought things were going smooth we heard about another piece of news that will send shock waves through the Bitcoin community. BitFunder, rather than just closing its doors to US residents, is shutting down permanently. And, let us not forget, yet another wallet service and its users became the latest victim of virtual bank robbers.

The Mastercoin protocol, which uses the Bitcoin network, for specialized transactions such as stock transfers, will fill the void.  This is great news for Bitcoin owners, because each time a Mastercoin transaction occurs Bitcoin Miners get paid.  The Bitcoin network is providing value added services were previously financial benefits went to site owners rather than Bitcoin network operators.

For a quick recap on this subject check out this video:

So, what does all that mean for Mastercoin and all of the work we are doing on distributed BTC-MSC exchange and smart properties?

It means the stakes just got a lot higher. The good news is that the evolutionary cycles created by market forces are pulling  for more decentralization.

In this week’s update we will focus primarily on the progress in the Distributed Exchange Code Contest, and developments in the Mastercoin Protocol and related proposals.  The post may be a bit more technically oriented than others, but the goal is to ensure that anyone working on developing is aware of all of the changes that have taken place.

If you are looking for a review of the technical structure of Mastercoin and how it relates to and utilizes Bitcoin then Vitalik Buterin of Bitcoin Magazine  kindly wrote this great article published earlier this week: Mastercoin: A Second-Generation Protocol on the Bitcoin Blockchain.  If you have not got your hands on any MSC yet, please help test the MSC faucet; report any issues to the bitcointalk forum. All you need is a Bitcoin address (from bitcoin-QT or blockchain.info).

And lastly, if you are in the Tel-Aviv area (or perhaps want to escape from cold northern latitudes), Ron Gross, one of Mastercoin Foundation’s board members, is organizing the second Mastercoin meet up in Israel.

New Mastercoin Job Postings

Smart Property Lead

Produce a Video for the homepage

 Website for Mastercoin Foundation Budget

Mastercoin Protocol & Proposals

The protocol master is on GitHub. Below are the current changes that have been made with a brief description.

Proposal: Proof of Stake Voting

Proof of Stake is meant to provide a voting mechanism for stakeholders in Mastercoin and in particular currencies and smart properties developed utilizing the protocol.  Please provide input.

Below is the proposed spec change enabling voting for v 1.2:

  • Mastercoin websites will have a “voting” section for each currency and smart property.
    • Owning a currency or property allows you to vote on issues related to how that currency or property should be run.
  • The voting section will list issues which are available to vote on, as well as feature requests, in descending order of popularity, and the current vote tally for each
  • Mastercoin messages needed for voting are:
    • Create new issue (title and what the options are, such as YES/NO or A/B/C/D)
    • Vote on issue (address X votes NO on currency Y issue Z)
      • Weight of vote is proportional to the amount of currency or property owned by that address (proof of stake)
    • Create a new feature request (title and description)
    • Vote on feature (address X supports feature Z on currency Y) – also weighted by ownership
      • A single address may only support one feature, and may only vote in one direction, however . . .
      • A user may split their vote by using multiple addresses
  • When some or all property is transferred out of an address which has voted, the votes of the transferred property are invalidated (this allows the owner of the new address to vote again)
  • Votes are advisory votes only, and are enforced by social contract, rather than by the protocol itself

Social Media and Press

Meetups

Mastercoin meet up in Israel

Please let us know if you would like to sponsor a meet up anywhere else.

Press & Blogs

Mastercoin: A Second-Generation Protocol on the Bitcoin Blockchain

Bitfunder Closing + Mastercoin / Colored Coins + Blockchain.info Theft

Ron Gross Joins Mastercoin: So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish

Websites

MyMastercoins A new explorer site from Bitoy

Market Update

MSC Price Chart as of 09-NOV-2013 :

chart_1

(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.

Mastercoin Foundation

Financials

Current Balance: 4439.9910979 BTC

More details available at the Mastercoin Fund Ledger.  There is also now a new website at mastercoinfoundation.org

—-

News for week 45.2013

The Heat is On! Bitcoin Economy Decentralization More Important Than Ever.

Making History With Distributed Exchange

Dominik Zynis, , , , 5 Comments

News for the week 43.2013.

Last week we discussed the fantastic results of the 1st code contest. Throughout this week a few key exciting events took place.

J.R. Willet, the person behind the Mastercoin protocol, announced the 2nd code contest which aimed at enabling distributed exchange transactions between two currencies (BTC <-> MSC); this ambitious contest is giving away 300 BTC and will need support not just from those who will be developing the wallet and website applications, but support from those who are willing to test the developed applications. So, take a look and get involved. Your contributions will be rewarded.

We also saw an important decision take place with the Bitcoin code base.  According to Gavin Andresen a Bitcoin pull request which allows for the association of up to 80 bytes of arbitrary data in a transaction will make it into Bitcoin’s 0.9 major release; this will enable Class C Mastercoin transactions (more information below).

Lastly, earlier this week the Mastercoin Foundation Board had its first meeting. Scroll down to see the minutes.

Mastercoin Websites

Looking for a MSC transaction or address? Check out some of the websites that were created for the last code contest:

Mastercoin Explorer

Masterchest

Mastercoin Giveaway

If you did not get your hands on some Mastercoins a couple months ago, the giveaway is back up and running.  Help promote Mastercoin. Go get some coins!

Announcing the 300 BTC Coding Contest: Distributed Exchange

A few days ago J.R. Willet announced the next coding contest centered on building the distributed exchange and Smart Property capabilities of the Mastercoin protocol layer (see the latest protocol specification) which uses the Bitcoin network for data communications, storage and transactional security. With the completion of this contest we all will be able to buy and sell Mastercoins for Bitcoins, and soon other Smart Properties, by utilizing Bitcoin’s distributed peer-to-peer network as the exchange host.

We’re making history here! Join the effort as there are many roles (developers, code review, testing, bug reporting) that need to be filled and share in the 300 BTC prize.

Here is a brief on the contest requirements which can be met as part of a group effort and by using already open sourced code. Jump in by joining the development discussion thread on bitcointalk.

Acceptance criteria:

  • 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.
  • Minimum two websites parsing such messages, and the resulting balance transfers
  • Minimum one website showing BTC/MSC price charts derived from these messages
  • Minimum 10 days of real-world usage with no major problems
  • High bar for usability.

Repo Updates

If you are looking to contribute to the next contest or want to try out a Mastercoin wallet have a look at the MSC repositories on GitHub.

mastercoin-tools update

    • parse multisig_long and disable multisig_simple
    • change send multisig to compressed+obfuscated pubkey format
    • change to obfuscation using sender address
    • give change address in BIP11 as uncompressed pubkey

Market Update

25-OCT-2013:

Market Depth: BID 8,641 MSC || ASK 3,336

BID MSC 275 * 0.0800 BTC || ASK MSC 100 MSC * 0.1000 BTC

Note that trading is manual at this time. Offers are available at Maxmint’s Mastercoin Order Book

Protocol & Proposals

Bitcoin 0.9 & Mastercoin Transaction Classes

Earlier this week Gavin Andresen published Core Development Update #5 for Bitcoin outlining some of the source changes which will be making it into Bitcoin’s 0.9 major release. A key decision announced in this update will have a positive impact for Mastercoin development because it approves the merge of Bitcoin Pull request #2738 that allows for the association of up to 80 bytes of arbitrary data transactions.

Basically, this merge gives Mastercoin developers another way to encode Mastercoin data into the blockchain.  Thus, we have three transaction classes available (many thanks Tachikoma for summarizing what this means). If you would like a more in-depth explanation of Class A & B transaction types Zathras has created an appendix document to the MSC protocol specification entitled “Storing Mastercoin data in the blockchain” https://masterchest.info/files/mscappendix_draft.pdf which details the transaction rules for these two types.

Class A

Hiding the data in an Bitcoin address. The downside to this method is that these addresses can never be spent since no private key exists and bloat the Bitcoin blockchain.

Class B

Multi-signature transactions. By supplying a public key to be used when spending the output we thus ensuring every output created is spendable.

Class C

Add 80 bytes of arbitrary data to each transaction.  A way to encode data in the most benign way since outputs are ‘Provably Prune-able’ and can safely be ignored when parsing the blockchain.

Mastercoin Transaction Example

If you are wondering how a Mastercoin transaction is encoded in the blockchain Zathras has prepared this graphic explaining how a simple send transaction appears along with Class B obfuscation:

Mastercoin Foundation

The Mastercoin Foundation is now a Silver Member of the Bitcoin Foundation.

Financials

Current Balance: 4521.9910979 BTC

More details available at the Mastercoin Fund Ledger

Board Meeting Minutes

Earlier this week the first Board Meeting of the Mastercoin Foundation took place. The board meeting agenda is available online. Outlined are the items discussed and the results.

  • Are our meeting minutes public?

We decided that the meetings are public.

  • How to engage in Press Relations?

We haven’t decided on that, waiting to hear a marketing plan from Social Circle.

  • Update on blog, social channels

Updated the board about our blog. We do also plan to review our Twitter & Facebook channels.

  • We need a roadmap. Revive our Trello board? We need someone to be in charge of the roadmap / project management, whatever the medium.

No Trello for now.

  • Do we start paying all bounties as 50%/50% BTC/MSC ?

It was decided that bounties are paid in whatever currency the developers/bounty collectors wish.

  • Share the news of Nxt

Updated the board briefly about the Nxt alt currency

  • Protocol specification

J.R. – Goal – get next revision of the spec into github.

Have something exciting to talk about?

Use this form to tell us what you are working on related to Mastercoin. We will include it in the next weekly update.

Making History With Distributed Exchange