During initial development various community members were stepping up to make suggestions on how to build mastercoin. Jr willit made it clear he did not have time for development so others took over. From what i now know of pierce, he is a control freak and a shrewd business person. He immediately latched on to mastercoin and put himself at the top. Rbdrbd, aka robby, came up with mastercoind as a possible implementation. This was suggested to the now newly formed board. His ideas were rejected in favor of other implementations. Mastercoind then became counterpartyd and counterparty was born.
Whereas i initially thought it was some dispute that caused counterparty, now im not that sure. Given brocks past as told through the eyes of phinneus gage, it is entirely possible that pierce had a hand in the creation of counterparty as it kinda felt underhanded. Look at how brock ran den as an example, him and yantis were competitors initaly. For it is far better to be and be in control of your competitor then not be.
The bitcoin core devs never liked and or wanted 80 byte op return to function in the manner which counterparty and mastercoin proposed to use it. They most likely restricted its use, not pierce.
And finally, man i wouldn't touch pierce with a 10 foot pole even if someone was holding that pole. That pedo stuff is fucked up. Way way way to much info for it to be just circumstantial.
I thought Mastercoin uses a multi-sig method to transport its data versus the OP_RETURN method?
Do you have documentation that Mastercoin uses OP_RETURN? Found it:
The Master Protocol was originally specified to embed data in the block chain using fake bitcoin addresses (Class A), but we've since come up with a more blockchain friendly method which embeds data in a bitcoin multi-signature transaction (Class B). Once bitcoin miners start supporting the new OP_RETURN opcode as part of version 0.9 of the Bitcoin reference client, Master Protocol will be able to use that opcode to make the Master Protocol data completely prune-able (Class C)
Looks like MasterCoin currently is using multi-sig.
Counterparty I think is in the process of migrating to the mult-sig method.
However, multisig can only encode an additional 20 bytes. So with the cut of 80 bytes to 40 bytes, the multisig approach gets you only 60 bytes and not the full 80 bytes. Furthermore, you lose multisig capability.
I guess having to live with the 40 byte limit and using some kind of compression may be the only real alternative.