I'm all for it. But why make negative comments then retract them? It solidifies the fact that Ethereum could be the future and everyone wants a piece of it.
Well, if you know Bytemaster, you know that any comments he makes, good or bad, are with little thought to the political consequences.
Thus you will never find a negative comment for negativity's sake.
We've been trying to get him to altogether avoid saying anything "helpful" that might be perceived as negative about any other project. Unfortunately he is always itching to share his insights and opinions on everything. If we catch it in time, we have a specialized facility where we spray him with a cold fire hose until the urge passes.
Since he had something nice to say about Ethereum, he went ahead and said it.
This does not mean that we see the need for a scriptable blockchain as universal.
For public chains, scripting has the important advantage that anyone can add functionality without needing anyone else's permission.
For private chains, where you have complete control over upgrades, you can hard-fork in changes using any popular language you want without incurring a performance penalty. Thus, we would always recommend Graphene, or better yet its Plasma spinoff, for private chains. Since we see private chains as the larger growth industry, we are focusing some of our future investments there.
BitShares is an example of a public chain with most of the benefits of a private chain upgrade strategy. As long as its elected operators take a neutral stance about allowing
properly vetted updates to be included without hassle, there is no great flexibility gain for having scripting and there is a real-time performance penalty we want to avoid. So the rest of our future investments are still going into building applications on top of BitShares, since we remain confident they will be installed by its elected operators without issue.
Every type of smart contract that becomes popular can be implemented this way, so the only limitation is the ability to test unproven scripts on the production chain. That's probably not a generally good idea anyway, and not something we want to give up light speed for.
However, there is a portion of the still evolving BitShares community that doesn't like neutrality all that much and does seem to like to challenge every new addition based on their own personal policy preferences. You can see they are being directly addressed in the OP referenced
Bytemaster's Blog article - by holding up Ethereum as having the right attitude about platform neutrality.
If that non-neutral attitude were to ever become influential, then BitShares might need to adopt the Ethereum approach. We might adopt it anyway if someone wanted to fund a real-time version of it, just for smart contract cross-compatibility with Ethereum developers.
If we did decide to add scripting, then we certainly admire the work that has been done at Ethereum and would probably try to adopt as many of their standards as possible.
