Hey guys,
I got side-lined for two weeks because of holidays plus a nasty flu but I'm getting better so I wanted to share some things with you today.
First off after a lot of internal discussion we decided to depcrecate my ruby based Mastercoin implementation. We have a lot of talent in the Mastercoin foundation but in order to consolidate our efforts we had to get rid of an implementation. I volunteered to deprecate mine for the follwing reasons.
I started the ruby implementation when I read the Mastercoin whitepaper a few days into the Exodus fundraiser. I was intrigued and since there appeared to be nothing created yet I decided to build a website where you could enter your address and it would calculate the amount of Mastercoins during the fundraiser. This got a lot of attention and I kept adding more things on top based on the feedback I received. Fast forward a few weeks and I basically had the first Mastercoin implementation.
The problem however was that I had never intended for this website to be a Mastercoin implementation and not everything I build was done so in an optimal fashion looking back at it. The main logic was tied up in the Web-application, logic that should belong in a core library instead. When I got the job-offer from the Mastercoin foundation it seemed like the perfect time to rewrite my implementation and do it properly this time. By that time however it was clear we needed a reference client, one that could bring us into the future sadly ruby was not the ideal tool for this purpose. It is harder to create bundled applications with ruby and speed wise it is severely lacking. I decided to spend my remaining time working on the reference client instead and use all the knowledge I gained from creating the ruby version towards this client.
This means that starting today Mastercoin-ruby, Mastercoin-wallet and Mastercoin-explorer are deprecated. Luckily this won't have too large of an effect since the other developers are still working hard on their implementations, beautiful things are just around the corner.
The other thing I want to announce is that me and Jeffrey are going to start winding down our development on the Master Protocol to begin working on Ethereum in the beginning of March. We consider Ethereum to be the next evolution in cryptocurrency and believe it provides substantial innovations that make it much easier to enable social contracts in a decentralized manner. Ethereum does not compete with Mastercoin; it further enables Mastercoin as a new cryptocurrency platform, thus we plan on keeping close ties with the Mastercoin Foundation during its development.
I like to think my contributions kickstarted the Mastercoin Protocol project, it's up to the other developers now to take it to the next level. I'm still a big believer in (and holder of) Mastercoin, I have full faith in the current team and I can't wait to see what is going to be next for the project.
Thanks