Hi,

does anybody know if there's some progress on Escrow-Backed User Currencies? Invictus seems to have something already.

Is this feature still a part of attention in Master protocol development?

If you want to talk about investment, you are using the wrong word. That should be "years".

As for celebrating a Bortday the Mastercoin, I expect more words from the Foundation. Who cares about the number of FB members.

Now some irrational emotion driven rants from an early investor (and PoW of a dumb user), if anyone cares:

1. Price is down.

2. Price is down like hell, closing pre-IPO. That hurts.

3. Price is down. I'm checking the blog: some nice activity and anouncements of Mastercore and Omniwallet for the first of August. Good, price creeps up just a tiny bit.

4. First of Aug. No announcement, really?

5. Second of Aug. Price is down, like pre-IPO. Of course, what do you expect. People start to ask, finally mastercore 0.0.6 (seems a bit of a way to go up, like two more years to reach 0.7?) But I'm just a dumb user, who knows what these developers are thinking). But wait, no Windows version? Really? The anouncement means nothing to me. Price is down.

6. Oh, Ron signs off. Good. Started to hate this guy. Nothing personal, it's just money lost. And lots of it. So I cannot force myself to believe he did something good for the Mastercoin, even if he tried - price is still down. Creeps up a bit after Rons resignation though.

7. Omniwallet looks quite good, changelog is moving up every day. But wait, it works only on Chrome, and I don't use it. Probably my fault, who knows those developers... And what does the "next milestone 0.16" mean anyway? Is it going to be usable finally? Can I finally tell my friend, a stock daytrader, who lost a fortune with MtGox, that he can finally store some mastercoins on his PC? Maybe he would buy some. Not yet?

8. Price is down. I check the Mastercoin dev forums. It used to be more activity a few months ago. Where is J.R. anyway? I hope his baby is alright. Besides that, should I also start to hate this guy too? He sold bunch of MSC in what seems to be a hurry, to get a full-time on the project. And to me the "full-time" somehow means some community noticeable activity every few days. Especially, especially, when things are down. An anouncement of "buying the MSC back", doesn't look that good with all this history, ask your marketing consultant. Some words on Mastercoin birthday would be nice. J.R, you were a pioneer starting all this 2.0 a year ago, push it up, people may like that.

9. I still check the bitcointalk Mastercoin thread mostly. To me, besides the trolls and a couple of dumbasses, it's the best health indicator on the project. And now I can't get rid of a feeling Foundation only starts to answer only when people ask for updates. Last month was so quiet everywhere. Is it because of summer?

10. Price is down. This is important. Because there are alternatives. And that's why the price is down. Admit that and contemplate on it. It was the soviets, who used to deny all the nasty things.

11. Besides all that, I still believe in the project. Could be because I like the people who started it. I even buy the optimism of the Foundation, though I sometimes hate these half-assed cheerful blog announcements.

From the maidsafe-dev talk a few minutes ago:

nick.lambert    
08:07
Hi Mark, just waiting for the block to become valid, might take another 10 mins or so.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Nick Lambert
www.maidsafe.net
Twitter: @maidsafe
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
maidsafe.net Limited is a limited liability company incorporated in Scotland with number SC297540. VAT Registered 889 0608 77. Registered Office: 72 Templehill, Troon, KA10 6BE.
Telephone Scotland: +44 1292 317 311

I've successfully received dozens of orders since December. Some of them quite expensive. Right now I'm unpacking my last shipment.
It seems that previously they had some problems of managing the amount of customers. So few human errors, may take time etc, but they are always helpful and things are resolved at the end.

Made me very happy.

P.S. For the people who order $20 of things and then expect amazon-like speed - get real, it's still a small company of Bitcoin enthusiasts, they do orders by hand and face obstacles on the way. If you think it's easy - start your own service, there's a demand.

I too think that early migration off the bitcointalk was a mistake. Of course you took a long time to set up the new forums, but let's face it - they are rather empty.

Guys, come back to reality. That's for J.R. and Ron The price is climbing down, and it's simply because people are not getting your message these days.
The success for this project in the beginning was the community, that's how developers and new ideas came. Not through remote bounties, virtual offices and shiny tools.

So would you please over-communicate. With less channels.

Hi Roman,

I have to take a read on the specifications to decode it.
Is there anything specific you have to solve here?

Cheers

That's some great news! We were thinking that you already abandoned us here on bitcointalk

Actually, I think that communication channels were bit diluted recently, and community has to be constantly informed on progress. Otherwise it's just money, without real people.

Hi Roman,

what we see here, is a Class B (multisig) Mastercoin transaction (https://masterchest.info/files/mscappendix_draft.pdf)
https://masterchain.info/simplesend.html?tx=f4ff244d1595b340e5634dde6b077ee99e6657c411e1f6701a9967e5bc850a57¤cy=MSC

Let's say some Bitcoin address already has MSC or TMSC and wants to send some of them to another Bitcoin address. He does that by encoding a Mastercoin transaction into the Bitcoin blockchain. The way to encode it, is to generate a very small Bitcoin transaction with some data Mastercoin data embedded, which says: "move n amount to MSC/TMSC from source to destination". Bitcoin network simply sees this as some bitcoins moving, it doesn't notice the embedded data.

Mastercoin parsers however look for these special transactions on the blockchain. An easy way to identify them, is to watch for bitcoins moving to the Exodus address (you can see it as one of the outputs: 1EXoDusjGwvnjZUyKkxZ4UHEf77z6A5S4P). Once a parser sees the transaction, it checks if it really fits the Mastercoin specification and marks MSC/TMSC as transfered. Everyone can write a parser and trace the transactions.


So what happened here is that the source has generated a transaction with several outputs:

17rExRiMaJGgHPVuYjHL21mEhfzbRPRkui -->
--> 1CKPYQPiVKMBEHqWco9sNNLNeTCjGSxfrn  (MSC receiver)
--> 1EXoDusjGwvnjZUyKkxZ4UHEf77z6A5S4P (a marker for a parser to identify a Mastercoin transaction)
--> 16FcCqZk5XF4sDkcFGQ5twbt7S3E8GdsHh (encoded control data: how many MSC has been sent, type of transaction, is it MSC or TMSC, etc. It's not a "real" Bitcoin address!)
--> 17rExRiMaJGgHPVuYjHL21mEhfzbRPRkui (change received back to source)
The amount of bitcoins transfered is pretty much irrelevant, as long as it fits the Mastercoin spec.

There's small problem with this situation is that we use a "fake" Bitcoin address to store the transaction data. This means it receives some bitcoins that cannot be spent (there's no private key for data address), and this dust will have to be forever stored in blockchain. Here we see a Class B transaction, which avoids that by creating a multisig transaction type, in which bitcoin dust can be redeemed by sender. Either Class A or Class B transactions are valid, just Class B is a bit more complicated (and cleaner).

What boils down to: to transfer mastercoins you have to create a special Bitcoin transaction with "fake" addresses and encode tx data on it. The tx is then frozen in the Bitcoin blockchain, and a Mastercoin parser can always trace the path of mastercoins by looking for a marker, which is the Exodus address.


I hope this clears a bit. If you wish more details you can find them in specifications, or you can ask again

So it's like... quiet. Nobody cares anymore?

My orders started to move. I guess it was just a holiday period.
Sometimes these guys may be slow and erratic, but definitely not scammers.

yes yes!

Bitcoins paid for "crap" at overstock.com and sold in the market will balance out the price rise from bullish news

I wouldn't say it's a scam yet, I think they are simply overloaded with orders during December. There are several BTC's of mine pending there for a few weeks, I'm giving these guys some more time.
I think they are doing great service for community, just the system might be a bit uprepared for such demand and customer service. So far I was very happy with my successful orders, and I believe they will push up soon.

What can I say - Bitstamp is solid.
I've requested a bit larger SEPA withdrawal yesterday night. Was expecting several days for them to confirm, but bam, it's already done today EOB. Always less than one day. Cannot give enough credit to these people, big respect.

And in the meantime in Gox'land: they've forced triggered my verification, simply because I've logged from my office IP from different region. I cannot even move my BTC untill verification is completed, what's already taking two weeks. Once this is done - I will run away from Gox like hell.

Bloody wedding, huh? I'll buy some for future generations in the meantime.

LOL Google translate:
""Notice" clearly the nature of Bitcoin that Bitcoin is not issued by the monetary authorities, such as not having sex with mandatory legal tender currency property, not the true meaning of money."

I think it's evolution, not just for the noobs. Unless you look at it as commodity, not money. When my friends ask me how much have I paid for something in BTC, answering something like 0.055 sounds geeky, but that doesn't serve a purpose.

bitcoinity just switched to mBTC by default - awesome!

Thanks on taking the initiative to prick the bubble. I feel some sense of relief for now.