Bitcoin Forum

I asked about this on the counterparty sub and didn't get a reply. Does anyone know what is going on with overstock and counterparty? I don't want to lose all the profits I have made with this coin!

http://youtu.be/wZuCXcQgHa8?t=30m14s

Sounds more like he'll still be working with the devs but that the Medici system won't be built on top of Counterparty itself more likely.

http://cointelegraph.com/news/113273/overstock-installs-btm-at-corporate-headquarters-offers-to-pay-employees-in-btc

The top half of this story is much good news: 2-way BTM in the lobby at Overstock HQ, employees can now be paid out in BTC (and this is so f**king important for crypto, I can't swear enough)

Bottom section of the piece seems to confirm that Medici will not be built on CounterParty, but that's not exactly a surprise. Given how Overstock operate, they were never going to fully outsource any important elements of the Medici system, it makes much more sense for them to build their own in-house system.
How this will affect CounterParty is an interesting question, given the general shittiness of the markets right now.
I reckon that XCP is still a good, solid project and this shouldn't be taken as a knock-back. 

Yeah, definitely. People getting paid in crypto is pretty much a necessary condition to any sort of real economy starting.

Not surprised considering it's build on 10 min block Bitcoin. Pretty much unusable for anything like that.

And yeah, XCP is a great project and probably the best thing Bitcoin has going for it outside of the obvious network effects and such.

I don't see why Bitcoin's 10 minute blocks would be a problem, since Byrne wants Medici to be a replacement for centralized clearing and the fraudulent and harmful practices it encourages (like naked short selling). Centralized clearing only happens like once every 24 hours, so every 10 minutes is massively faster than that.

Oh, I thought he wanted it to be more like a decentralised stock exchange or something.

Yes, that's what it is.

Yeah...PB wants an honest financial system, and he does not like high speed/high frequency trading, among other things.
So a blockchain-based exchange that explicitly doesn't alllow HFT (because all of the order processing happens on the blockchain, with 1-10 minute blocktimes) is probably what we are going to see from Medici and Overstock.
My prediction is that whatever system we see from Medici, it will be slow asset/stock trading, not instant.

So why not NXT?

More likely BitShares nearly all the tools are in place to make it possible.

http://bytemaster.bitshares.org/article/2015/01/09/Overstock-to-Crypto-Stock/

Good question.....NXT has everything in place right now, but 6-8 months ago (when we were pitching to Overstock) the AE was very new/just released.
It was probably also a lot easier to choose for a system based on BTC, which is at least something the Overstock board had a track record with.
Lastly, I always had the feeling that Overstock were more likely to launch a completely new system than to place their faith in a third party.

Because Bitcoin is most established. By the standards of ordinary CEOship, Mr. Byrne is really sticking his neck out. When you do something like that, and you're the top officer of a publicly-traded corporation, you hedge your risk by going with the biggest, oldest and most established platform.

But that's not bad news for Nxt: far from it. Whatever reforms Mr. Byrne wrangles out of Washington will also apply to Nxt AE. Even if he never shows any interest in Nxt, his regulatory-reform efforts make him the point man for the legality of the AE.

If I was a XCP holder I would be grabbing a pitchfork and go looking for Mr. Byrne. Not only they are not going to benefit Counterparty, they stole the developers - that is a sucker punch.


Would be a big coup, but I am not sold on Overstock - something seems off about them.

Any info about a Medici IPO?

I'm sue there will be. ;)

That sounds like a bit of an overstatement I think if we're talking about cost to mount a successful attack. It's more likely one order of magnitude or two at the very worst.

Without getting into a POS vs POW debate where a small army of NXT supporters show up to proclaim NXT has solved things whilst detractors show up to hotlink Poelstra pdf's.. I agree the "orders of magnitude" claim didn't come with any sort of citation and should really be removed, Not sure where those numbers were plucked from. Maybe saying that compared to bitcoin, nxt hasn't been equivalently battle-tested (at least in terms of the amount of eyes over it making peer-review during the last number of years, and relative $ invested in the infrastructure of each) would be a fairer and less subjective statement to make there.

Yeah, I agree.

I'm happy with ENs estimate.....this doesn't mean that the NXT tech is inherently insecure, but that Bitcoin has survived 5 times longer and has had that much more development time, and (due to the sheer size of the network) is exposed to more bad guys hunting vulnerabilities.
This is one of the main reasons why Bitcoin is gonna be around for a while yet, it's pretty solid.

And, yeah, we don't need a debate. NXT has been solid, stable and secure for a year so far.
Who knows what vulnerabilities may be discovered over the next year?

Moving back to PB/Overstock: I'm fairly sure that whatever comes out of Medici, it won't be Counterparty as we know it, but will be based on/inspired by XCP.

Because I suspect Patrick Byrne probably knows NXT can't really resolve this:
https://bitbucket.org/JeanLucPicard/nxt/issue/117/front-running-on-the-nxt-ae-by-trading

the only antidote to HFT is a good random number generator and distributed proof-of-work, and NXT doesn't have that.

Another PB interview....

http://cointelegraph.com/news/113281/patrick-byrne-medici-will-be-a-national-market-system-compliant-and-able-to-trade-everything

@hozer: good point. Don't think it really affected the OS decision, though. It's kind of a detail point, and I think OS made their choice based on much wider considerations.
I am going to find out what the current status of the front-running exploit is, just for teh lulz.