Mastercoin issues and implications for Maidsafe funding

Correction, Masterxchange is not associated with Mastercoin and seems to be run and founded by decent bloke. He had the same thing done to himself really - got paid in msc to list msafe by mastercoin foundation, so bagholding himself. He has no confidence in mastercoin either. The more I read about the Mastercoin foundation the more concerned I become. They are supposed to be a non profit, yet the board members get paid around 6 grand per month each and their expenses are ridiculous - hence the quarter million per mth spending. I wouldn’t be surprised if they go broke within 12 mth - that’s unless somebody manages to pull a rabbit out of a hat sharpish.
Not trolling, I’ve read around a bit.

Good to know.

Would you mind adding some links to the articles you are referring to? I can google as well but it would be great to have them here.

Sure: Board member payments:

fund ledgers:

Transcript from Masterxchange chat box (darkemi is the username of founder and chat moderator)

DarkEmi42: I am a bit worried.
DarkEmi42: I really want MSC to rise and get better
DarkEmi42: but I am not 100% confident to say the least
DarkEmi42: I should probably not express my concern publicly oh well

xheers

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That’s not a ton of money though… aren’t there multimillionaire non-profit folks?

72K per yr is a very low salary actually considering you would have to pay for insurance and everything out of this…

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I would say its unusual for an organisation that size but make your own judgements, I am just presenting the information and make no claims. I’ve read this stuff and formed my own opinions which is what others should and will do whatever I say.I’m not trying to persuade anybody of anything.

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Here is a very informative appraisal of Mastercoin issues and current status. The lead dev of Mastercoin is soon to respond to it. This is a technical type document and it may be interesting for devs to make their own appraisal of the technical claims. It is a bit over my head as I’m a not a C++ developer, rather a B- decorator. Be interesting to get some opinions and I’ll update Mastercoin Devs reply. Its either serious issues or serious trolling and I haven’t a clue.At least we should find out from this whether mastercoin is at least technically likely to succeed or not, This could actually explain everything including price drop as potentially only the protocol has value, not the coins. Very interesting development.

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The ongoing Mastercoin decline I think, gives us an opportunity to educate ourselves on what to avoid doing in order to maximise the chances of Safenet’s success. I’m sure some valuable lessons have been learned already and this is a good thing, we are now a bit more streetwise I expect. By valuable, I mean we’ve gained something at an early point in our history (I believe this will be historic if successful) which is useful knowledge for the future. In furtherance of our education I would like to suggest a list of things to try and avoid doing in order to retain community/investor support and everything that flows naturally from that. I’ll just start us off a bit, so my list won’t be exhaustive and hopefully it will stimulate discussion:

• Always have good communication: regular updates, keep everybody informed, don’t condescend etc.
• Don’t appear to be frittering large sums of money away with little to show for it, such as ill thought out side-projects, huge expenses, expensive promotions, board payments etc.
• Always be open and honest, issue board minutes, transparency etc
• Involve the community in every decision of import, such as 6 grand a month board appointments etc and always have people whose position/reward can be 100% justified. Only essential skills such as business, economics….or decorating

I’m saying avoid giving the impression, not taking a position on current issues. Just the impression is all it takes.

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I also question the viability of Mastercoin’s present and future… to be blunt, after seeing how much the Mastercoin Foundation sponsors hackathons, etc. it seems as though the protocol is only supported because of the original BitAngels investments.
I would personally like to see the BitAngels take the Mastercoin protocol as a loss and move on.

I’m only skimming these posts but I think you are doing valuable work here @Al_Kafir and really appreciate it. When I first looked into Mastercoin there were some comments on Mastercointalk (?) that raised my eyebrows - someone from MC trying to placate people and say their first priority was to ensure that Mastercoin value would rise etc., while explaining there was no point in forcing its use in a particular case.

I wondered at the time how they were going to get the stuff to have value, and I’m still wondering.

The MaidSafe sale seems to have been the only reason so far people have had to buy the stuff, and we’ve seen how no-one is going to get messed up like that again.

I think we are learning a lot from them! :slight_smile:

P.S. Reading this and thinking about Mastercoin and other alcoins lead me to write this: Safecoin FAQ: What gives Safecoin value and differentiates it from altcoins?

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I hope somebody did that snapshot you mentioned happybeing. The following is interesting in light of recent dev criticisms:

Strictly a snapshot doesn’t need to be taken because the blockchain serves that function. So taking a snapshot would mean identifying a cutoff point on the blockchain, after which transactions would not be ignored.

looks like Mastercoin properly dying now, I can hear the death rattle, pretty worthless now. It looks like its actually the Devs selling out now too - price regularly drops each time they receive them and can’t see it coming back from here as heading below original ipo price…mastercoin ipo price I mean. Their community has totally lost any faith/trust in the team, the impression being that funds used to furnish lavish lifestyle and squandered on crap projects, none of which work.

On a better note, there are calls for Mastercoin foundation to return the 2000 btc they have left to the Maidsafe team, who it is pretty universally agreed were scammed by the foundation. It appears that the devs themselves are pissed off with the foundation and further calls that they should just help Maidsafe. The one good thing about this situation is that the Maidsafe teams talent, integrity and honesty is widely recognised amongst the cryto-community and the feeling is one of support and anger at Mastercoin foundation. Keep up the good work guys, it shows and is recognised and please be wary of wolves dressed in sheep’s clothing in the future.

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I think they need to focus on platform exclusives and automation. Automatic trading features and smart contracts will be in demand. They need scripting and should not wait for Ethereum to do it.

The more they wait the less utility Mastercoin will have for users and the less valuable individual coins will be. They also need to charge until a time when the competition catches up. When you’re a gaming company for example you charge for your exclusive titles and for use of your platform.

Now if it becomes competitive then you lower the price. It makes no sense to start out with low prices if demand is high for your product. Mastercoins should not be free and if the token is to have value it has to be consumed.

Face it, the reason Mastercoins are so cheap is because theres too many of them and not enough uses for them.

Mastercore and Omniwallet are in development. They claim release is going to be in August. I think the wallets will be just fine.

I also think Mastercoin is a good design. But I think they need to focus on monetizing early on to fund development. I also think it’s about utility and exclusive content. The Mastercoin developers should be thinking about what they can do exclusively for Mastercoin holders.

If I can do all that they can do on Counterparty then what do I need their tokens for? So they have to have exclusive assets and other content that I want so that I’ll need some of their tokens. If everything on their platform is free then they are like the video game company that tries to offer every game for free when all the market is charging a price.

There is no reason to offer everything for free. The freemium model only works when you sell privacy or use advertisements. Mastercoin doesn’t have people’s privacy to sell and they aren’t advertising anything so the freemium model doesn’t work for a decentralized autonomous corporation.

Freemium doesn’t work for SAFE Network either. It might work to bootstrap it so it has enough users but once we all have Safecoins you can’t go and say “oops, we’ve decided that Safecoins wont be used and it’s all worthless”.

Instead there has to be apps which accept and run only on Safecoin. Why? Because it funds the development of the apps as well as the use of those apps. If you can do stuff on the Master protocol which is exclusive then it should have high fees. Once other protocols copy it then you reduce the fee in competition with those others.

Starting out with no fee means you can’t bargain to add fees later. Competition will not have a problem copying or forking your idea and charging no fees for that. Exclusive utility must have fees.

Oh…they’ve definitely done this…lol

Why post this with no explanation? I ain’t watching a 20 min vid to find out.

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The video is from Dan Larimer about the importance on focusing on making sure the decentralized autonomous corporation is profitable from the initial stages of it’s design.

Bitshares X was designed to be profitable form it’s inception. This is necessary because if it isn’t profitable it cannot sustain and grow. The goal of a decentralized autonomous institution isn’t all that different from centralized. They both must sustain and grow.

Evolution is basically what he is describing. Mastercoin has to adapt it’s economic structure before it’s novelty wears off. It has to continuously add value and utility in exchange for it’s tokens.

Those tokens would then come to represent the value and utility which is exclusive to Mastercoin. The move to try to go for freemium is similar to the non-profit model. It’s not sustainable to do it as a non-profit unless it’s a government which can tax people. Mastercoin is not a government so it cannot live off taxes (transaction fees) as it already lives on Bitcoin. Also transaction fees aren’t enough to support the continued growth, development and sustainability of the Mastercoin ecosystem.