I have 2 things on my mind...and I think these points need to be address quickly to speed up development and foster outside development.
1) I think its high time that 2 developers, or at least Tachikoma is hired or contracted full time for at least a period of 2 years... this is a minimal relative cost of doing business considering the potential fast turn around of the initiative, due to having someone work on the project full time. At this point Tachikoma who blazes the trail, mostly leading developments and improvement shouldn't be scrounging around working to pay bills. His focus should be on developing and testing so we can have something dependable in no time: Success in anything depends on FOCUS, and right now our main devs have jobs on the side trying to pay bills. We should take a page from the bitcoin foundation and emulate the hiring of Gavin Adresen.
"Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work at hand. The sun's rays do not burn until brought to a focus."
2) Is there a plan to develop something higher level to interface programmatically with mastercoin? an api maybe, although I couldn't fathom how it will work to do :
simple sends
confirmations
betting etc..
I also thinking of designing mastercoin into my system but do not know where to start, especially if this will be addressed later.
If you are in favor of one or two of these points please echo this post.
Echoing!
+1
This is what I raised up in my post as well.
This project *absolutely* needs multiple full time developers. Mastercoin foundation needs to make that happen ASAP. At my business, I can hire 3 developers to work full time for me (as well as around 13 other assorted full time engineers) and we pull in less each year than the mastercoin foundation has sitting around. Not sure why this can't be done with Mastercoin as well. Run it like a business. Priority number 1.
Once we have a solid mastercoin API library that can work across multiple languages (optimally do basic parsing in C, then use swig, etc to take out to Python, Perl, Ruby, etc) then the skill bar level is DRASTICALLY lowered. At that point, you can get generic webdevs and generaic devs that have a good mid-level understanding of bitcoin/mastercoin to do the work. The ruby, etc library is good, but we need it available for a wide variety of langs, without a bunch of implementations that all have their own ideas how the blocks should be parsed (we get the problems we are seeing today). This should be priority number 2. Pay for a *reference* C implementation and bindings to other languages can be easily made. Any new standard that comes out in the business world (e.g. audio codecs, etc), they implement a standard reference implementation, and vendors follow suit with their implementations, comparing their test vector results to that. Otherwise you have a mess. Why doesn't mastercoin follow this best practice that has worked so well for the standards industry?