How is this a comment from a bright individual you can reach out to? It's just another Luke Jr.
What we are against is extorting other participants of the bitcoin network into processing your transactions which were not in the original social contract of bitcoin, especially when clearly explained alternatives exist. That is frankly evil, although I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and chalk it up to ignorance. This time.
The Bitcoin core devs are focused and clearly care about the network. I think a lot of this *may* come from a fundamentally different viewpoint on what Bitcoin is. I.e. is it just a digital currency payment network, or is it a payment network as well as a platform for building higher-level crypto-financial applications, so to say. And if it is the latter, there is a secondary debate on how such data "should" be stored in the block chain.
With Mark's view above, it reminds me of Peter Todd's original responses to JR of Mastercoin when that came out. These were, to put it mildly, rather harsh. Since that point Peter's views have changed considerably and he has become a supporter and innovator in this space of "embedded consensus systems". Mark is also an innovator with "2.0"-type systems with his work on Freimarkets, but his views are obviously different than Peter's on multiple levels.
My view is that Counterparty is targeting a sector that, by capitalization values, dwarfs that which Bitcoin it targeting by many multiples. Bitcoin is already adding tremendous value to Counterparty, and in return, there is tremendous value that Counterparty can add to Bitcoin, through its building on the Bitcoin "stack", which offers an end-to-end solution for decentralized financial transactions, and is proven, secure, and reliable. In contrast, building our own DHT system, or running a side chain, or whatever else a) adds complexity, b) is not proven to be secure, c) is potentially centralized, or less decentralized than Bitcoin and d) does not add any advantages compared to how we are doing things today.
Even if Counterparty was not doing things this way, soon enough someone else will be, and then someone else, and then more people. It will become a game of whack-a-mole to the core devs, as building on Bitcoin entirely just makes sense, at least at this stage, as it is not just the simplest solution, but also the provably most robust one. And those two things are immensely important to a platform looking to carry billions of dollars of market movement on top of it (and on top of Bitcoin, as well). This is not about us being "lazy". It IS about us building on proven solutions, and avoiding potentially costly bugs and issues which can undermine any trust placed in a "Bitcoin-based" platform. We have to remember, this is totally new to the mainstream world. We *have* to make the best first impression possible, and a big part of that is building on top of the most rock-solid technology available and in-use *today*.
That all being said, if, in the future, an innovation were to come such as a side chain that was provably as secure as Bitcoin (through being in *actual use*, and not just a whitepaper or a post on the mailing list), possibly had shorter block times (if block based) and was better tuned towards storing this data, then we would strongly consider using that for embedding our transactions. But in that case, the question would arise of not simply just moving to that, if it had as much clout as Bitcoin and was not simply seen as a supplementary data storage side-chain.
Bitcoin has a potential here to embrace and "lock in" solutions like Counterparty, and fully integrate them into the BTC economy. We believe this opportunity dwarfs any burden imposed through an extra use of ~10-30 bytes per Counterparty transaction, for instance (i.e. through storing the full transaction in place of a hash). This includes the benefits we would bring both to miners, through paying tx fees on every transaction, as well as full node operators, through hopefully lending extra "future-proofed" market value to the BTC they are likely to hold.
Hopefully this response was helpful and constructive towards illustrating our views on this matter.
