A Quantum Immortal

(Hebrew speakers might appreciate the wiki entry I prepared about MasterCoin)

The title of this post is a tribute to the first post on my blog promoting Bitcoin, written on March 27 2011 (Bitcoin was worth 80 cents then, compared to $106 today).

Of the various alt-coins (Bitcoin forks), I have only promoted Litecoin on this blog, on October 2011 – it was a chance for early adopters to join in on an attempt to make a “fairer, more decentralized Bitcoin”. Litecoins have started as being worth 0 BTC, and have slowly built up value, especially over the last 6 months. Currently 1 LTC = 0.025 BTC, which is more than I would have believed myself a year ago, and Litecoin’s market cap is already 5% of Bitcoin’s ~ $1,000,000,000.

Today, I’d like to expose you to a riskier, crazier investment, called MasterCoin.

MasterCoin isn’t exactly a Bitcoin fork, but rather it’s a system that is built on top of Bitcoin, that can accommodate many different currencies, betting, self-regulating currency issue, and more. It’s really beyond the scope of this post to explain MasterCoin, but I’ll just briefly summarize:

1. Dacoinminster AKA J.R. Willet has first written about MasterCoin a year and a half ago. The idea was very exciting, and inspired some other projects such as Colored Coins. At the time, there were a lot of missing details, and the project kind of went into hibernation.
2. Since then, other projects such as Colored Coins and Ripple tried to attack this problem of modeling real world currencies in a decentralized way. Each of these project takes a different approach to accomplish similar objectives, but both have attracted great interest from the Bitcoin community.
3. Yesterday, Dacoinminster finally was able to fix the apparent flaws in the first version of his paper (dubbed v0.5), and released version 1 on the protocol.
4. The source code that implements this protocol isn’t yet built. Dacoinminster will use funds collected from a fundraiser, kickstarter style, to fund the development.
5. People who fund the project (until August 31 2013) will receive in return a given amount of MasterCoins, already determined in the protocol.

The full details are available in the linked resources. I believe MasterCoin can be an important part of the growing Bitcoin ecosystem. Thus far, 29.6 BTC have been raised in the first few hours of the fundraiser (about $3000). I plan to invest some of my own.

• Anything I say here or anywhere else should not be considered investment advice or any other type of professional advice. I do not act in any way as a financial advisor and do not hold myself out to be such. Please consult a financial advisor before investing in MasterCoin (they will probably have a heart attack at the thought).
• See in particular the Risks document that Willet himself prepared.