Ripper, I appreciate your fair comparison of the two contenders. Ive no stake in neither of them, but I am reading about them trying to figure things out. I have a question about Mastercoin: can the value of a single Mastercoin be so high that somebody that do not own any Mastercoins can not afford to buy assets tied to the Mastercoin?
We are all building a layered system.
Bitcoin value is increasing.
Mastercoin and Protoshares value are "tied to Bitcoin value" in some broad sense.
Mastercoin maybe more so because it relies on it technically and increased Mastercoin value directly benefits Bitcoin.
However I think every cryptocurrency at this point benefits Bitcoin.
Both these projects are building systems that require MSC and PTS to operate.
You will need MSC (or something as valuable as MSC) to work with some of our features.
MSC can be very high, but it's very divisible, so you'll also be able to buy "MSC backed USD" even if 1 MSC = 100 BTC = 100,000,000 USD one day.Thanks, I guess the bold part of my text answers it all. I will be interesting to see Mastercoin take shape.
Personally I would never trust a trusted third parties price feed. Ive been an avid forex trader, so I know for sure that price is at best a subjective measurement of value that changes between brokers. LIBOR etc tells us that price feeds are used for manipulation and so forth and so on. Simply put, my opinion is that third party trusted feeds is a broken concept. The closest thing I think we got to a decentralized exchange is localbitcoins, litecoinlocal etc, and as many ATMs and online exchanges as possible. I want not one but several systems, before I think its decentralized.
BitShares idea of incorporating prediction markets is very interesting. I have not thought it through to Ive not decided whether I believe in it fully or not, but if it works then I would prefer it over trusted price feeds. As Ripper234 sayd, anything can be implemented on Mastercoin so well... if prediction markets is a good thing I would love to see it on Mastercoin.