Michael is a proven thought leader in the bitcoin space
What the hell is a 'thought leader'? How does one distinguish a 'proven thought leader' from an 'unproven thought leader'? This is exactly the sort of crap that annoys me to no end. "If you are disrupting an existing industry by applying new Bitcoin technology..." 'disrupting' - the coolest overused buzzword of the year. This crap is all warm-fuzzy-gooey hype. It won't help attract brains. Brains don't respond to that sort of nonsense. Brains filter those silly cool buzzwords right out.
However, as Terpin appears indeed to be close to bitcoin - and has a track record of similar hype projects, I guess he is well positioned to generate some good will. I like the notion that in 3 months if the board does not consider the result productive they can bail. Further, as JR has been won over by this proposal... I, as the project's biggest PR skeptic would concede to this arrangement being approved. If there is to be a committee to review the results - I'd like to be appointed to it. Someone with a bit of critical eye should carefully consider what kind of response this activity is generating.
Max Keiser is a thought leader. A thought leader is someone a lot of people listen to and take advice from. It does make sense to invest in getting the support of thought leaders but it all depends on the price. $6000 a month is pretty darn steep and should produce results which are measurable.
Some criticism:
"One of "mastercoin"'s problems is you can never have thin clients/SPV clients, etc. Each client has to be able to process and index the entire 8GB bitcoin blockchain in order to not be fooled or double-spent. Another issue is that mastercoin is centrally controlled by one party, all issued by one public key they call the "exodus address". There are quite a few technical issues with the whole approach mastercoin takes and it doesn't look to be feasible.
A more workable solution is presented by Freimarkets
http://freico.in/docs/freimarkets-v0.0.1.pdf by long-time rippler Jorge Timon and Mark Friedenbach. Freimarkets will allow transitive "ripple" transactions, but it will be a fork from the bitcoin blockchain.
For a practical colored-coin implementation that uses the bitcoin blockchain (any solution that does so must make certain sacrifices) but does not suffer the defects of mastercoin, see the "bitcoinx" project that Alex Mizrahi leads at
http://www.bitcoinx.org/. BitcoinX also does not support ripple-style transactions."
"Mastercoin is built as a layer on top of Bitcoin, so it doesn't have any specific transactions. Instead the upper level information is tucked into invalid inputs and outputs.
Since it's riding Bitcoin, it has all the drawbacks of Bitcoin: creepy slow, limited bandwidth due to fixed block size, arbitrary high transaction fee, centralized with two or three ASIC makers holding most of the network power including two Chinese companies...
And as a truly parasitic relationship it is going to harm a lot Bitcoin by spamming the blockchain and sucking all the bandwidth which will lead to further adjustments of the fees which will harm Mastercoin in turn...
The absolute most stupid thing is that Mastercoin allows anyone to mint custom currencies. This is going to be a mega spam party...
Mastercoin was built on top of Bitcoin because DaCoinMinster saw how alt coins are victim of ideological exclusion in the community and how Bitcoiners are inflexible fanatics. It's going to be a good learning for them.
We all know that Bitcoin needs small transactions to move off-chain if we don't want shit to hit the fan in the near future when adoption rate takes off. But instead of that Mastercoin brings more in-chain bloat at a whole new scale.
Mastercoin's success will be Bitcoin's Nemesis."
This reads like complete propaganda. If the Colored Coin (or Ripple) posse has to resort to propaganda rather than to compete in the market place of ideas it now gives me a very negative impression.
If Colored Coin is really a better technology why would anyone say that the most liberating feature of Mastercoin is the "absolutely most stupid thing". The user currencies are really the best thing about Mastercoin because of the potential.
Also the idea that Mastercoin will spam the blockchain? Mastercoin users pay fees like everyone else so how is it spam? Also it adds far more value to the blockchain than perhaps anything else so I don't get it.
Maybe PR is more important than most people think. And this isn't the only propaganda out there, there are all the vague threats of jail time popping up from people who seem to be associated with Colored Coin as well. But why would the developers of Mastercoin be at any more risk than the developers of Colored Coin, Bitcoin or any encryption software? Encryption itself can be abused but that doesn't mean new algorithms shouldn't be invented out of fear of angering some entity.
The fact that people are afraid of Mastercoin to the point of spreading propaganda means that perhaps it's on the right track.