Is Counterparty a rip off of MasterCoin?
It depends how you view it. Mastercoin certainly was first. Counterparty created the metacoin (XCP) by burning, Mastercoin by collecting the money to the foundation. Despite raising 5000 BTC in August, Mastercoin still doesn't have anythin else but BTC/MSC exchange working. Also I personally prefer some choices made in the
CP protocol specification compared to the
Mastecoin specification. For instance, Mastercoin specification in the feed requires some unnecessary specification terms (category, sub-category etc) where as in CP the description is pretty much left to the users to decide. The first mentioned approach gives me bad echoes of "central planning"...
That's my understanding. If so, then Brock must be pissed which is why maybe the 80-bytes was cut down to 40 bytes.
I think Brock is pissed, but 80 -> 40 thing was not definitely pleasing to him. See for instance the feed example in the Mastercoin spec: 57 bytes!