well, my frustration stems from the fact that this doesn't seem to be a thing that anyone can answer. I assume SOMEONE can, but nobody on the mastercoin subreddit or in the general bitcointalk forum can.
it seems as if the currency aspect of the technology is limiting the flow of objective information, with the speculative nature of the currency unit hampering technical discussion
but, as someone that has considered buying mastercoin, I want to be able to do my own objective analysis of mastercoin's future demand, and so far this requires me to understand how many mastercoin people will actually need to do anything
Bingo. I'm guessing 90% of the people here don't understand or don't know how mastercoin will actually work. I have yet to receive a response from someone knowledgeable:
What can 1MSC do that .1 MSC cannot? What does an MSC (the kind selling at .17 BTC) actually DO? Is it SHARES in the mastercoin protocol corporation?Are MSC going to be used to launch 3rd layer applications? And if so, how many will be needed for each particular application?
I asked precisely the same question several days back. The answer is that there's no difference between 1 MSC and .1 MSC in terms of functionality.
That is why the iXcoin "Smart Currency" implementation ties a user defined coin back to an actual IXC amount. So say you create 1,000,000 shares of a corporation. If each share consumes 1/1,000 of an IXC, then you need to purchase 1,000 IXC to release your shares through the IXC network. Mastercoin does not have this behavior, iXcoin and colored coins do have this behavior.