Investigating the competition Part 1 🔎 Mask Network [TLDR: SCAM!]

I'm gonna say this again up front - I am a huuuge fan of steem, it's philosophy, and its dev team and I'm doing what I can to promote the platform wherever I can because I'm here for the long term.

In my opinon, Steem is revolutionary - I haven't felt this way about an idea since I found Bitcoin. The incentives and disincentives built into the system make for a fascinating experiment in economics, psychology and game theory.

However just like with bitcoin, once the concept is validated - everyone developer suddenly wants to make their own version. And again, just like bitcoin - the first mover advantage and network effects are very powerful.

I've been completely obsessed with steemit for over 2 months already , so I thought I should take some time to get some first hand experience with the other platforms.

I plan to do a series of posts tagged #ausbitundercover where I investigate some of our competitors, give my first impressions and try to find their best features - so we can adapt them for steemit.

This series is intended to discover other real world examples of interesting features we could add into steemits current system.

I'm prepared to go undercover for Steemit .

Along the way I'll also see how the systems handle minor abuse and dodgy tactics to get a better idea of the community in each. I have my own fairly complex moral and ethical code that I won't get into now, but it gives me room to find some pretty creative ways to mess with the competition along the way ;)

One of my last posts discussed How steemit can shut down its "competition" with some small modifications.

I showed an example of using json_metadata to enable a bittorrent layer for large media distribution, curation and discovery.

Please check it out if you haven't already!

Mask Network Overview

Announced: 01/12/2015
Total Coin Cap: 21 Million MASK
Developers Holding: 1 Million MASK

Logo: Eyes-wide-shut mask with freemasonry symbols for eyes.. Subtle

The sales pitch:

Sounds familiar so far .. Except they can't spell decentralized

The backend software

This comment from the lead developer stood out when asked if it was new software:

It's 100% new software. The web interface is written in PHP. The java web kernel is....java The web interface and the java kernel communicate each other through mysql. But Oracle or other relational databases can be also used. Java kernel is permanently connected to the p2p network and writes all changes to mysql. The web interface reads the data directly from db.

Eww. I've used PHP in the past, a lot - but it wouldn't be my first choice for a modern cryptocurrency wallet..

The scripting language

Users can also use the integrated MaskNetwork Scripting Language (MSL) to develop decentralized applications, also known as smart contracts, but the best way to learn more about MaskNetwork is to use one of the available web wallets

Here is a dice gambling apps MSL source code exfiltrated to cryptbin. The paste will autodelete itself in 3 months. It's a pretty basic language , nobody's making the next DAO with this.

The bugs and constant typos

After exploring the site for a while, I made a new account and clicked "edit profile" :

and was immediately filled with confidence..

A little more exploring found another path to a working profile editor, I'm trying to be fair especially since it advertises itself as beta software (but isn't everything these days ?)

Beta software: Close , or Close ?

Everything has a cost

Unfortunately while I was able to set my "address tag" to the super mature "mctesticleface" , it seems like every operation has a cost on this network, including renting "address names" and even editing your profile:

To make a profile you have to "rent" it for 0.0001 MSK per day.

These transaction costs apply to EVERYTHING. I can't vote, comment, follow users or make a new post or try any of the features without buying a bit of MSK.
By comparison in steem costs are almost non-existant , new users get initial funding from a sort of faucet instead of being forced to buy in.

Bare minimum buy in attempt

All of the currently available "web-nodes" (blockchain viewers like steemit.com) prominently shows the current cost of MSK and link to the same exchange "maskexchange".

$0.7653 per MSK right now..

So I pushed on and figured with these tiny fractional costs I'll put in a dollar and see what happens - maybe I'll make it back on a steemit post ..

Nope - the minimum transaction on maskexchange is 0.01 btc or about $8 Aussie dollars. Far less appealing .. I ignored my gut feeling and all of the red flags I'd seen so far and threw 8 bucks at them to see what happened. For science.

~6 hrs later, nothings happened

Exchange failure and lack of support

Support over "live chat" was contacted almost immediately, then again by email after 2 hours.. The transaction shows on the front page of the site, but nothing has happened since. Epic fail.

Digging further within masknetwork I found someone complaining about the same issue, and massive delays from support. Awesome.

If only I'd seen this post sooner.

Current Conclusion: SCAM

So I guess that little investigation was a failure so far, until I hear back from support or my payment gets processed I will be assuming that

masknetwork is a complete scam

If this gets processed and I didn't just throw 8 bucks into the ether , I'll give an update and continue the investigation I had originally planned. Without any credit on the site, it's pretty much useless.

At this stage even if its legit I have serious doubts that their business model will work when better free options are available.

Heres a bonus comment I spotted that may look familiar to those paying attention back when steemit got hacked ;)

Thanks for reading! Your votes help get me to steemfest
PS: Please see these other recent posts from myself and my partner Hive account@krystle