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Bitcoin News

A roundup of the top Bitcoin news from July 29 to August 4.

Monday, July 29

• Bank of Thailand Advises That Various Bitcoin Actvities Are Illegal

Tuesday, July 30

• Inside Bitcoins NYC Keynote: Is Bitcoin the New Financial Order?
• Finding Business Model Opportunities in Bitcoin – Inside Bitcoins NYC
• Building Bitcoin into the Core Architecture of the Web – Inside Bitcoins NYC
• Inside Bitcoins NYC Recap – Bitcoin Future is Bright, But Uncertain

Thursday, August 1

• MasterCoin Proposal to Make Bitcoin More Stable and Secure

Friday, August 2

• Coin Forest Wants to the Be the Groupon for Bitcoin

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Complete MasterCoin Specification Released

J.R. Willett, aka dacoinminster, is a Seattle-based software engineer and Bitcoin expert. Like many in the Bitcoin community, he sees a future where Bitcoin is adopted by the mainstream for a wide variety of purposes. To achieve that goal, Willett believes that there’s more work to be done around the Bitcoin protocol.

After 2 years of research and discovery, Willett has released a complete specification for building a protocol layer on top of Bitcoin, similar to how HTTP runs on top of TCP/IP. He calls the new protocol MasterCoin.

The coins of the new layer have
•   Additional security features 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

The name of the new protocol layer is “MasterCoin” and it is 100% message-based, meaning that it encodes all its protocol data as hidden messages in the block chain which have special meanings, such as placing a bet, or transferring MasterCoins to another address.

Once you own MasterCoins, you have the building blocks for creating GoldCoin, USDCoin, EuroCoin, and any other real-world asset. 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.

Here is the complete MasterCoin specification.

Willett is inviting early adopters to purchase MasterCoins by sending Bitcoins to the Exodus Address: 1EXoDusjGwvnjZUyKkxZ4UHEf77z6A5S4P. These funds will be used for development of software implementing the MasterCoin protocol.

For more information, read or join the discussion at bitcointalk and Reddit.

Below is a video of J.R. Willett speaking on a Bitcoin expert panel in May 2013.

CC image by zcopley

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