I am VERY excited to announce that I now have a complete specification for building a protocol layer on top of bitcoin (like how HTTP runs on top of TCP/IP).
The coins of the new layer have
• Additional security antiestéticatures to make your money much harder to steal
• Built-in support for distributed betting (no need to trust a website to coordinate bets)
• Capability to hold a stable user-defined value, such as an ounce of gold or U.S. Dollar, with no need to trust a person promising to back up that value
This is a significant improvement over anything we've had before, including colored coins. This protocol has been my life's work for over two years now, and you can finally get a piece of it today!
The name of the new protocol layer is “MasterCoin” (a name I invented and published long before the alt-coin of the same name), and it is 100% message-based, meaning that it encodes all its protocol data as ****** messages in the block chain which have special meanings, such as placing a bet, or tras*ferring MasterCoins to another address.
Perhaps you have heard of the Genesis Block, from which the first bitcoins were created. MasterCoins have a similar starting point in the bitcoin block chain, called the “Exodus Address”. MasterCoins are created by sending bitcoins to the Exodus Address between now and September. (Once September hits anyone wishing to buy MasterCoins will have to purchase them from an early adopter.) Until then, each Bitcoin buys 100 MasterCoins (plus a bonus based on how early you buy). You then own MasterCoins, which can be controlled by the same address that bought them.
Once you own MasterCoins, you have the building blocks for creating GoldCoin, USDCoin, EuroCoin, and any other real-world asset you can imagine! These child currencies will then be “meta stable” (holding their values as long as they remain sufficiently backed by MasterCoins held in escrow). Their target values are maintained by protocol actions which control the available supply.
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