Bitcoin Forum

found this online:
https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/counterparty-brings-ethereum-smart-contracts-to-the-bitcoin-blockchain/

When counterparty enables running smart contracts from your btc-adress then it defeats the whole purpose of the Ethereum network because:

-running xcp will be more convenient in particular for btc-users than actually running eth
-xcp and btc are likely better distributed than eth
-xcp provides higher security thanks to pow-hash in btc
-these contracts not only more convient to run, they are also cheaper to run AND hold because of much lower inflation and in xcp you don't have to pay that useless hash in eth that's actually just producing heat currently. So in xcp no additional hash needs to be payed.

XCP is significantly cheaper to run and more convenient to the bitcoin-user than ETH is.

Now can someone tell me again why anyone should use ETH instead of XCP? ETH lost its usecase and bullish outlook entirely thanks to this news.

All comments and opinions welcome but please keep it civil.

Disclaimer: i am not holding any ETH or XCP at the moment.

I'M ALL-IN ON COUNTERPARTY

Her is some more Ethereum FUD:

Well, in the meantime i just got myself some xcp, so the disclaimer isn't valid anymore  ;)

Coming on nicely and less risk than all that ipo-crap. Now let's see how rational this market really is. XCP should upgrade a lot and ETH should downgrade slowly at first and then faster and faster to shitcoin levels in no time. XCP could come out a top 10 coin in this. Good times.  ;D

Given the entry xcp offers to us there's a multitude of eth-profits possible here if everyone is on the train. Could go up 100 times (6 to 600 million) ... maybe ... if xcp-team does it right. We can dream :)

Yeah I also haven't bought any ETH because i have serious doubts of ETH resisting a post sidechains scenario... we will see. At near 15 dollars who knows if its near its ATH.

ROFL!!! Man I needed that laugh. :) seriously tho your dreaming

Whenever I hear the name Counterparty, Counterparty's Chris DeRose Calls Ethereum "100% Hype and No Substance" comes to mind. If anyone is interested in this, you can read the article on Cryptocoinsnews https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/chris-derose-ethereum-hype-no-substance

He's speaking of the POS blockchain, not the VM, which he has stated numerous times has value.

Cheers Matt Y, thank you for your comment. It would be great if you could elaborate on that. Do you personally see value in the Ethereum platform? What are its advantages to Counterparty? Disclaimer - I personally believe that Ethereum is a fraud.

Counterparty is interesting and if it can be cheaper and have more security then it could be a contender. 

well, i was a eth holder and since last drop above .03 i've sold all my eth and dont intend to get it back.
XCP might be a good "new investment" to eth place.

I also believe the potential of Counterparty - XCP. It is a much older platform and I'm pretty sure the developers have a lot of experience in the space, probably more than the guys from ethereum.

There's a lot of potential for the XCP platform so you better keep some XCP tokens cause they are very undervalued at this moment

I agree with you. It seems they've promised quite a bit and I don't see how they deliver. The main thing of interest is the EVM, which will be duplicated on Bitcoin.

What would this forum be without AnonyMint  ???

The technical weakness of CounterParty is that Bitcoin can't verify the CounterParty transactions, thus there is no record of the consensus about which CounterParty transactions are valid:

https://counterpartytalk.org/t/questions-about-counterparty-consensus-and-validation/688

http://counterparty.io/docs/faq/#how-do-smart-contracts-form-a-consensus

This presents some technically insoluble problems (they are fundamental and can never be fixed):

1. No one can determine if there was consensus about an external data feed after the fact. Some of the ramifications of this include that if someone hacks the sources of a data feed temporarily, then no one will be able to reach consensus about which set of transactions on the Bitcoin block chain are valid, except by creating a hardfork of the CounterParty chain and writing a new protocol which makes that decision. And this would need to be done every time one of these attacks occurs. So basically CounterParty will be toast if it supports external data feeds and becomes popular enough to be worth attacking. Edit: voting via signatures can substitute for external data feeds (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1505886.msg15150806#msg15150806), thus this issue may be solvable.

2. Double-spends in the same Bitcoin block can't be differentiated. Thus the only possible action is to ignore both (all) of them. Thus 0-confirmation transactions are absolutely impossible in CounterParty. Thus CounterParty will always be slow (10 min confirmations).

3. Ordering of transactions can't be enforced within a block, thus contracts can not be written which depend on such ordering. I haven't really thought about the impact this has yet. CounterParty doesn't seem to acknowledge this as one of the differences when running Ethereum scripts on CounterParty, so maybe they are not even aware of this flaw.

4. The Bitcoin block chain can't handle the increased scaling load to be a database server.

There are probably many other corner cases and problems. I haven't really thought about it too deeply.

Seems very kludgey and I would avoid it. Non-starter to build smart contracts on the Bitcoin block chain.

Counterparty was nice when it was in its heyday. Now its like an old soggy P&B sandwich. ETH will not be killed by XCP, or DGB or any other coin. It's here to stay.

updates help for soggy sandwitches i was told  ::)

How would you know how this will look after the next few updates?

XCP is not the only smart contract for bitcoin
rootstock and i think maidsafe


eth has a consortium of financial leaders backing it to produce a blockchain to change the current financial industry.

R3 consortium

bit of a difference

I explained a few posts above that XCP is a flawed (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1504601.msg15143765#msg15143765).

RootStock doesn't have that same flaw, because it is its own side-chain and can verify every transaction. But side-chains have other problems and I expect them to be a clusterfuck.

Selling out and celebrating a partnership with a banking consortium is an anathema to many of us here and is therefore not considered a positive.

Only to us oldtimers though. All the noobs think otherwise because they have no backbone.

Is it a good time to buy XCP?

Bitcoin has its own set of problems regarding scalability and blockchain bloat as well.  It is already reaching it's limit per block, shouldn't we be concerned about Counterparty inserting even more data in the blockchain?  It was already considered as spam by some people a couple of years ago, and that was before smart contracts.  What more now?

From a trading standpoint, no.  It's not trending, just stay in the sidelines for now. 

There was a mini pump that started on June 8, 2016 at Poloniex but a quick dump followed two days later.  This reminds me of my penny stocking days where marketers and spammers recommend a certain stock...  Some news after comes out, followed by a short pump, then a quick dump.

I guess they make money out of the scheme and works like a charm on the newbs a lot.

What would be a good price point to get in for XCP?

I cannot recommend any price point.  XCP has been trading on lowish volume that I wouldn't recommend people to trade or invest in it.  I could be wrong, but the first thing I look into in anything I trade is the volume and liquidity.  If it isn't high enough, I stay away.  That's one big reason why a lot of people around here become bagholders.  They buy in, then whoosh!  All the action is gone and they're left holding the bag.

You are spot on about bagholding  ;)

0 I wouldnt waste my time with XCP

XCP can pose a serious threat to ETH, but it will need a base coin whose blocks can scale in order to take on ETH.

Smart contracts this, turing complete that... I've been reading about Dao, Lisk, Waves, Ethereum, and Counterparty and all the magic that's supposed to be here, but so far, just a lot of articles and complicated scenarios in which things may work "in the future".  Still hopeful, but so far nothing concrete that works, is supported, and has people actually using it. Ethereum has a how-to on creating a contract but is over 8000 words and you need to be a developer to really understand it. I think we're getting close, but still a year or two away from a "next, next, finish" model from making either XCP or ETH adoptable. I'm placing a bet on all of them though, just in case.  8)

I say no as most of the bagholder have sold all their XCP in the news of counterparty enabling smart contracts on bitcoin blockchain. See
https://www.poloniex.com/exchange#btc_xcp -17% in last 24 hour. :o

as the premise of the thread goes, personally whilst I don't beleive XCP will rise in price 256 times over to match ethereums market cap as posited here,  I certainly don't believe it should be sitting below fedoracoin in the charts either.

As far as I'm aware CounterParty was the first to launch with the fair and equitable proof-of-burn strategy, the first launching the world's first decentralized exchange based on the bitcoin blockchain, the worlds first voting system on the bitcoin blockchain, the worlds first trustless games ON the blockchain and the world's first decentralized betting feed, cfd etc platform on the bitcoin blockchain ,  I think it's a valid project sitting in the shadows for a while with potential for upwards growth, and even from the perspective of a pure-bitcoin holder I think counterparty adds value to the bitcoin blockchain so I'm excited to watch it's progress.

Just want to mention some of the non smart contract related use cases for counterparty

Here's an example of the voting mechanism in practice: http://blockscan.com/vote/XCPELECTION for the CounterParty election. (The bitcoin foundation also previously used CounterParty for the first ever provably transparent bitcoin-based real time vote in their history)

Here's an example of the trustless gaming element: http://counterparty.io/news/introducing-fully-trustless-games-on-blockchain/

It's quite trivial to create a payment gateway accepting some sort of meta-token. This meta-token could act as a gift-card, a login badge, it could trigger some sort of external real world event like opening a door, it could represent something tangible like a silver coin, it could be a rare in game item. All of these digital tokens can be traded directly, p2p or via the protocols baked in decentralized exchange. Trading GOLDSWORD3 for WIZARDHAT or something might be slow but it's decentralized, purely p2p and we've never had anything like this before. You could own assets just like you own bitcoin, completely under your control, so nobody could gox them.  That's why I got excited about CounterParty, just like OB


@anonymint
I'm far from an expert don't pay much attention to the alt scene these days so take this comment with tablespoon of salt, but point 4...well come on, really?. I think we've moved beyond the 'spam' argument several years ago, anyways from a quick glance it seems in the last 24h counterparty transactions only made up 1.5% or so of total transactions. Moving on to point 3, smart contracting solutions obviously have their own severe inherent limitations; I'd expect contract writers to attempt to work within the constraints of the system so assuming they would test such cases in advance- surely not perfect but hardly a dealbreaker.

Point 1, you've addressed, as far as point 2 goes, Vitalik proposed a back of the napkin idea a while back.

 


source (https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2is4us/whats_wrong_with_counterparty/)

idk about the plausibility of that specifically. but regardless counterparty just like bitcoin will be slow but that doesn't mean there can't be workarounds, nothing to say some ideas from bitcoin proper can't be examined.. devs have said segwit support is coming to CounterParty soon for instance.

 Also I think nobody in their right mind should be designing or wanting a messaging app working via a smart contract or anything time sensitive anyway- the kind of high-latency project counterparty is a perfect fit for are things like Token Controlled Access (https://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/post/tcv), Betting, Verifiable transparent voting, Derivatives, Token based puzzles, batch trading, settlement etc. These are all applications that counterparty can serve some level of actual utility towards and that gives it it's own value proposition IMO, when many other alts haven't really formulated a plan beyond tweaking litecoin and imagining one day it'll be used to buy coffee with.

Anyway it is nice to hear your input Anonymint,  valid criticism there, although as always you do sound the death-knell

ok I will keep watching then.  ;)

Hi Shelby,

I've appreciated your posts here, especially as Anonymint in the Economics forum. To your points:


The first part is correct, but I would say the second is not, it's just different than PoW. As Counterparty works through embedded consensus, it essentially maintains its own ledger built off of Bitcoin transactions it scans that contain "valid" Counterparty data. By "valid", I mean data that is 1) a valid Bitcoin transaction that 2) has been validated against the consensus logic present in the Counterparty client. Consensus is established via nodes running the same consensus sensitive code. Thus, beyond identical, timestamped input data being provided (which Bitcoin accomplishes for us), the record of which transaction/ledger state is "valid" becomes a matter of establishing which consensus sensitive code is "valid". If nodes run different code, a fork can emerge, where the nodes' respective ledgers diverge.

So whereas with Bitcoin, "validity" is measured via the longest chain of proof-of-work (and by extension, which code is producing that chain), with Counterparty, it's measured on the specific code used, which produces transactions embedded within the longest Bitcoin chain. This is just how embedded consensus works. This may seem "light" when compared to other cryptocurrencies, but in reality I think "validity" of any Cryptocurrency ledger/protocol is ultimately determined by social consensus (e.g. witness Classic vs Core), it's just with PoW coins in particular, the technical forking dynamics are more explicit.

As it is, this model has worked well with Counterparty, and it has been functioning for over 2.5 years with almost 500K transactions on the network, and the embedded consensus approach offers benefits that allow us to adopt rapidly and add functionality with less consideration around the technical capabilities of the underlying ledger required than would be so if we had to add it more directly into the underlying ledger (e.g. Colored Coins).

As for your other points:

Not entirely sure what you mean here...A Counterparty broadcast message could be used to publish periodic data points from a data feed to the blockchain, which some kind of contract (e.g. EVM smart contracts, or otherwise, such as with the embedded binary options support in the protocol) can deterministically utilize to perform an operation. As for there being consensus about the actual data published by the feed, multisig could be utilized to require some level of consensus between multiple sources.


Counterparty today supports 0-confirmation transactions, but these transactions essentially shouldn't be trusted very much, due to the fact that they haven't been mined yet. The protocol builds the authoritative ledger off of mined transactions, validated in the order in which they are mined in a block. So 0-conf tx are not "absolutely impossible" in Counterparty, they are being done today. Similar to Bitcoin 0-conf transactions, one just cannot really trust them until they are mined.


As stated above, for any given block, Counterparty relies on the transaction ordering established by the miner that mined the block. So I would say that your point is valid when we are talking about examining unconfirmed operations, but if you consider if a contract were to look at a XCP balance of some address, for instance, it would essentially be depending on the ordering of transactions with >= 1 confirmation, which is fine.


I don't think blockchains were ever intended to be seen in the same way as a general purpose database server, with similar scalability. However, the implicit message is a valid one. As far as enhancing scalability, there are numerous options.

For instance, we are in the process of adding payment channels support, which should ultimately make use on Lightning Network possible. In addition, there is the option in the future of utilizing sidechains or some other mechanism, if it makes sense and has community support.

If Counterparty has proven anything, it's that it's a very flexible protocol with a pragmatic team at the helm. We are built on Bitcoin, but intend to investigate and potentially make use of any technical innovations to occur with it.

Aside from any technical facts, XCP just does not seem to have any network effects working for it. The contracts cannot hold/pay Bitcoin, so it just does not piggy back on any Bitcoin network effects.

XCP blockchain does in the neighborhood of 400 daily transactions.
Ethereum blockchain does in the neighborhood of 40,000 daily transactions.

Barring a black swan type event on the Ethereum network that compromises security there, I don't think there is much reason to use XCP.

Rootstock is a more interesting blockchain IMO, but I have pretty serious doubts about whether it will be able to really compete with Ethereum either. Its not decentralized at all, and it seems like it will be very clunky to use (granted, all the solutions including Ethereum are clunky to some extent, but we are talking degrees here). It also may be years before a fully functioning sidechain is up and running, and meanwhile Ethereum is continuing to strengthen its networking effects as a development platform.

50,000 assets created, 500,000 transactions.

Sure, there are a lot of assets there, but they are just not seeing much use.

Ethereum has done 5.7m transactions on its network in a much shorter time frame.

This is really intersting discussion , to go back to see the history.

ETH went to the main stream, and cause FUD by ICO purpose

XCP has not  adapt to a ICO peek stage. and just questioning why no one wanna implement it in XCP for ICO?

Seems all the FUD was out of place. As we can see right now, ethereum is still strong and with its price progress from 2016, it has a huge pump. For sure, those persons making doubt on ethereum at that time blame themselves now already.

Maybe I am wrong, but I disagree with you. Although Ethereum may have fallen behind. Although it has a lot of opponents, I don't think this is what you call XCP.

Just saying that alone does not mean that the coin would be able to kill off ethereum, honestly you just sound like every other person that has come here to brag about their stupid coin which in the end never gets anywhere and people end up making more losses than profit when they invest in the coin. Stop coming for eth and go work on your own coin

Its the firs time i heard about XCP. How can you talk about some kind of incomprehensible coin that it will kill the Ethereum. Ethereum is already a very strong coin with a large infrastructure. To overtake Ethereum you have to do a lot. Minimum you have to work 4 times faster than ETH