On r/Bitcoin

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/21il7g/the_greatest_threat_to_bitcoin_could_very_well/

Perhaps it would only be implemented on certain chains that are expected to be secure and stick around for the long run, rather than able to have XCP on every random BTC/LTC clone. There could be 3 maybe. BTC for security, doge or litecoin for transaction speed and then maybe something else which allows relatively large data storage or something, idk. But really though, anything could happen to anyone or any coin at any time (fork, attacks, price crash, whatever). BTC is just the hardened veteran

Back when dev [retroactively] levied a 5 XCP fee against issuing assets (which fortunately had a side-effect of blocking our initial issuance of "AAAMPTSTOCK"), the "re-issuance for non-zero quantity" feature of your software was broken. Please fix this.

If you're an XCP true-believer who gets butthurt over criticism, stop reading NOW!


You're obviously correct looking at pricing and functionality of the XCP system over stated claims and goals due to a few CRITICAL problems:

1) Anyone who's tried to trade BTC in/out of the DEX natively at competitive rates has come to understand all too well, the BTC integration SUCKS:
The way the dev dropped the ball by implementing a few misguided solutions (First with the 10 block BTCpay time limit and second by making an offer to buy 100BTC worth of asset have a default of 1BTC cost(!?!) in burn fees (*JUST TO LIST THE OFFER!?!*)) which predictably had the foreseen effect to prevent any legitimate long-standing BTC offer from being placed (due to castrating the choice/power from the BTC giver order as predicted: https://forums.counterparty.co/index.php/topic,71.msg355.html#msg355 ).

2) Was there any explanation why the dev chose to leave residue of assets to hang around the order books after the relevant orders should have 100% matched and traded? http://www.blockscan.com/order_book.aspx
I want to sell 100 asset, existing order matched, only 99.9999995 asset transferred, and put remainder 0.0000005 back on order book. . . WTF!?!

3) Initial distribution was wider and thus MANY more sellers are available over other altcoins which have more centralized break-in periods / premining. More Sellers = lower price. The competitor coins have relatively few initial adopters/investors and don't suffer so much from this despite having massive holdings in total. i.e. competitor altcoins may have 5-10 x the value but only 10% or less total sellers so the price has little resistance against upward movement compared to XCP.
NOTE: This is a good thing for wider distribution but a bad thing for getting rich quick.

4) XCP is just not that useful and initial investors have taken notice: It's a difficult to use and it lacks much practical use for average users due in part to virtually no explanations for novice bitcoiners about how to use and the DEX just doesn't work very well (due to some of the explained problems here and elsewhere). https://forums.counterparty.co/index.php/topic,71
Hopefully the GUI, webwallet/trading and such will alleviate this to some extent.

5) Radical changes to protocol with little public discussion and a private deliberation process by dev.
When a 5 XCP fee was introduced [retroactively] for issuing assets, that was a good reason for buying XCP since asset creation would reward XCP holders and cause XCP demand inducing people to buy and hold, but since the dev lowered that cost recently (to help BTT and others who favor "asset spam" over stakeholder reward) it removed 90% of that 5xcp "per-asset issuance stakeholder reward" that we were receiving. Current stakeholders and future investors can foresee this and similar actions having a negative long-term pricing effect over the status quo and the market shows how stakeholders are voting with their shares on this type decision making process.
There was a rumor of the XCP-dev considering stakeholder feedback in the future, however we are obligated to trust past experiences rather than such vague rumors of a radical shift in their decision-making process.

6) When people see the changelog they're like "WTF? you call this a changelog?". Then they see the amount of "rapid development" taking place and then pushed to their computers with little to no discussion of how it will positively or negatively affect them/stakeholders and they realize this is not something "safe" to invest in. Of course they can refuse the updates and let the software stop working or force-run it using obsolete settings and risk losing coins.

7) Asset reissuances were broken and then never fixed when the 5xcp asset fee was retroactively put into place. Better know EXACTLY how many shares you want issued the first time, all future re-issuance attempts might appear to succeed, but the program won't register them. Fixing this is going to

The output to the Exodus address is another thing: there are several ways to tag and identify a meta-transaction, for example transactions can be created with an additional output to a specific address (Master protocol) or one could encode some magic bytes (XCP) within the data payload. Or one may use OP_RETURN with some magic bytes etc. etc. ...

But there is actually another reason: DOS protection. DOS is not yet an issue and may not be in the short term, but for the same reason that there is a DEX fee (XCP and MSC both use one) or a Bitcoin transaction fee in general, this is a filter against spam.

And what about smart contracts and smart properties?
Mastercoin guys spoke about theses a lot in the early days, but not anymore. Does that mean they have abandonned the idea?
I have not heard Counterparty guys speaking about smart contracts and smart properties, does that mean there is not plan to implement them even in the mid-long term?

About Counterparty vs Mastercoin, can some of you guys explain what is the difference between the scope of the two protocol?

Are they are trying to do the very same thing in a slightly different way, or is there an overlap but also some differences? For example will Mastercoin be able to do some stuff that Counterparty won't?

No one said anything about "starting from scratch".

I think that one of the key wins we have after these months is ... we finally got a development rythm going, and understand a lot better where we want to be in 1 week, 3 months, 6 months.

The development speed of the Omniwallet has been incredible, and we're going to pick up speed and consistency in the upcoming weeks. We are finally starting to enter a weekly scrum cycle, are focusing our development efforts into 2 wallets instead of 4, and have a clear idea of where we're headed.

True, it would have been nice to have better wallets at this point in time. However please remember it's a marathon, not a sprint, and we learned a ton from the last months ... and that the key product of a startup is validated learning (read 'validated learning' in The Lean Startup).

It looks like you can't actually create a wallet on masterchain.info, you can only enter the private key every time you want to buy MSC. Also, it looks like you can't store any MSC or BTC or masterchain.info, right?

Regarding hiring without consulting the community, there is a reason that companies hire a CEO to make all the decisions, rather than having all stakeholders weigh in on every hire. We are giving Ron room as Executive Director to do his job, and even if he makes mistakes on the way (and he undoubtedly will) I vastly prefer that to decision-by-committee.

Hi all,

New to mastercoin here, but is there any progress towards setting up an exchange for this stuff? I'm a developer who would be interested in building this as a project if there is enough demand for it.

As I understand it at least (and I may not be 100% correct), zbx was a candidate for Tech Lead. He had talked to Ron and Ron was down with him working through the dev hires.

I think now there's some organization taking form, which is why you are seeing more people. But I think there needs to be a clear organizational structure laid out to everyone, otherwise it just ends up looking like (and working like) a Chinese firedrill. The board's hiring strategy is still not clear to me, but to their credit, I sent them over an organizational diagram and we have been working through what the final structure will look like. Hopefully we can get something finalized shortly that will lend some clarity to everyone.

The problem is, essentially, to grow, roles need to be delegated. If I bring on someone to do thing X, then I still take care of thing X and don't tell them anything about the decisions I'm making, that can be a problem. I'd like to think that Ron had this conversation with you before he had the conversation with zbx (things have been moving quickly lately I guess).

Zbx mentioned he had a call with Ron and that's why he contacted me. I'm still confused now as to what his role exactly is going to be but perhaps he or Ron will shed some light on it

Guys,

I can say with some confidence that Ron is not watching bitcointalk threads, so if he needs to clear up questions about who is doing what, you'll need to email him directly, preferably use info (at) mastercoin (dot) org, since several people will see your questions who might want to weigh in.

He is taking the initiative in hiring devs, and he's having lots of conversations with lots of people. Things are bound to be chaotic while we get this all figured out.

Thanks!