I guess he gave up!
Um, yes-ish, but not quite in the way you probably mean. First of all, software development always takes ten times longer than you think, so I was making slow progress anyway. (And my life got complicated in various other ways that didn't help.) But now, something new has happened.
Peter R has proposed a new standard for launching alt-coins: "
Spin-offs: bootstrap your alt-coin with a bitcoin-blockchain-based initial coin distribution". I'm very impressed with this launch style, and I think it's the right way to launch Splash.
Unlike the proof-of-work way of minting XSP, though, I'm not claiming any special insight into the technical details of getting "Splash as a spin-off" done. (Even in the proof-of-work case, I wasn't really claiming
that stunning an insight anyway. Essentially just a syntax for XSP-birth transactions that mentions only work and not money [XSP amount]; which simplifies how they can be baked into the consensus, without having to pick and choose among them if there's lots of them, and yet without ever exceeding the desired XSP asymptotic total, no matter how many of them are floating around.) So, "Splash as a spin-off" would really better be done by other people who may like to give it a go, rather than by me.
With that in mind, it's grand announcement time!
I hereby relinquish the name "Splash", the slogan "Ripple without the pre-mine", and the currency abbreviation "XSP" to whoever is first to fork Ripple in spin-off style, i.e. starting with the Bitcoin UTXO-set - or, to be precise, the subset that translates into the rather impoverished Ripple address syntax (no multi-sig, no scripts, just single pubkeyhashes). - Or they could do it in Counterparty's style, with XSP minted by BTC being burned. Basically I relinquish to whoever is first to do a Ripple fork
without an allocation by software special-case fiat to the developers, or to any other special cases. (That even includes doing it in my originally intended way, namely, XSP birth by proof of work. As I say, I'm no longer so enamoured myself of that way of doing it, but it certainly qualifies as not privileging the developers or other special cases, so... if a team doing it that way is first, they can grab my names and slogans.
)
OK let's hope Splash in some recognisable form comes into existence! Let me summarize by putting it like this: I've given up my own personal involvement, but I haven't given up the dream.
