Interview with MastCoin Developer

A couple weeks ago I had an interview with the MastCoin developer, and he expressed some of his thoughts through the questions I had asked him. Here, we can see the interview:

Q: Who composes the MastCoin team?

Our team is an internationally diverse group of experienced professionals, which includes software developers, marketers, and members of the altcoin community. Many of our team have worked together before, but this is the first time we’ve launched a coin together.

Q: Why did you decide to develop an altcoin?

Our team members have been participating in the altcoin community in a wide variety of ways for a long time, but have often lamented the status-quo where many coins’ only purpose appears to be to enrich their developers. We wanted to show the community at large what a dedicated group could achieve, and to set a higher standard by which new altcoins should be judged.

What do you want to achieve through Mast?

We set out to change what people expect from altcoins. In our view, the most basic element of any coin should be the reliability and speed of transactions. The biggest innovation of Bitcoin was the decentralization of transactions with the blockchain; however, many coins seem to forget the importance of that.

Our primary goal with MastiffCoin is to provide a reliable blockchain and maintain a stable network for the coin. Hassle-free transactions are absolutely essential to any coin being able to achieve substantial adoption. Having working proof-of-stake (PoS) functionality means that MastCoin is setup to be around for a long time, as the network will remain secured through PoS.

Why did you choose MastCoin for the name?

There have been numerous coins launched recently that have had problems with forks, forced wallet updates, and broken proof-of-stake (PoS) functions. . It represents reliability, dependability, security, and safety.

Additionally, the DogeCoin community has been discussing what to do as their blockchain becomes vulnerable to attack as their network hashrate decreases, and we wanted to prove that proof-of-stake coins can be reliably done.

Why choose a fast PoW phase for the coin?

Proof-of-work (PoW) mining is very resource intensive. PoW and PoS both have the same purpose, which is to secure a blockchain and provide transaction verification. Our team’s opinion is that proof-of-work mining is useful for initial distribution of a coin, but expending resources on PoW mining over the long-term is wasteful when a viable alternative exists in using PoS.What is the purpose of the premine?

We implemented a small 1% premine for MastCoin to provide for maintenance and development of essential services for the coin, including seed nodes, web hosting, our official block explorer, and more. Premine funds are also being used for giveaways and promotion, to help spread awareness of the coin and grow the community. We are fully committed to transparency in accounting for premine usage and have posted details from all transactions on our Bitcointalk announcement thread.

Why did you choose the X11 algorithm for the coin?

The X11 algorithm is currently gaining in popularity as a less resource intensive option to the scrypt algorithm. We viewed using the X11 algorithm as part of showing that we’re a different breed of coin from others and were capable of utilizing a newer algorithm with PoW+PoS mining effectively.

Image Source: BitcoinTalk