[ANN][XCP] Counterparty - Pioneering Peer-to-Peer Finance - Official Thread

[getts]

There is no doubt that the developers behind Counterparty are exceptionally talented and the coding may provide incredible utility for accomplishing revolutionary tasks.  I was initially extremely attracted to this as a potential investment vehicle (Bryne's plans are impressive), especially since there is no mining and a cap of less than 3 million coins.

However, from an investment standpoint, I have a real problem with getting optimistic about the longer term valuations of Counterparty because  1) all of the code is open source and it can be duplicated & lacks proprietary value; 2) Bitcoin itself could end up adopting these features; 3) a big player like Google could bring yet another coin with all of these features (and much more) which could overtake the dominate role for this space; and 4) there are no guarantees that Bryne's dream of an alternate exchange will be the one that actually gets off the ground with all of the regulatory hurdles and track record of contrary political positioning that has been so unpopular with regulators and Wall St. The scum hate him with a passion.  As a result, these factors pose a long term threat to the viability of this coin ever reaching significant value. 

I would love to be proven wrong and, thus, provided with a good incentive to invest.  But I am afraid that what Counterparty has created for the free market is somewhat similar to what pharmaceutical drug companies would be up against if they ever attempted to patent naturally occurring, unaltered herbs and healing plants as cures for diseases.  There is nothing in place to protect the exclusivity or scarcity of this very impressive technology that has been released out into the wild.

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[deliciousowl]

There is no doubt that the developers behind Counterparty are exceptionally talented and the coding may provide incredible utility for accomplishing revolutionary tasks.  I was initially extremely attracted to this as a potential investment vehicle (Bryne's plans are impressive), especially since there is no mining and a cap of less than 3 million coins.

However, from an investment standpoint, I have a real problem with getting optimistic about the longer term valuations of Counterparty because  1) all of the code is open source and it can be duplicated & lacks proprietary value; 2) Bitcoin itself could end up adopting these features; 3) a big player like Google could bring yet another coin with all of these features (and much more) which could overtake the dominate role for this space; and 4) there are no guarantees that Bryne's dream of an alternate exchange will be the one that actually gets off the ground with all of the regulatory hurdles and track record of contrary political positioning that has been so unpopular with regulators and Wall St. The scum hate him with a passion.  As a result, these factors pose a long term threat to the viability of this coin ever reaching significant value.  

I would love to be proven wrong and, thus, provided with a good incentive to invest.  But I am afraid that what Counterparty has created for the free market is somewhat similar to what pharmaceutical drug companies would be up against if they ever attempted to patent naturally occurring, unaltered herbs and healing plants as cures for diseases.  There is nothing in place to protect the exclusivity or scarcity of this very impressive technology that has been released out into the wild.

Bitcoin itself cannot adopt the features, that's the point of XCP in the first place. They would have to convince users to use their new coin. One page before, there is a quote by Satoshi that advises against this being directly in the core.

 Also, how would you get people to switch to XCP clones? And worrying about Google? To be fully honest I think all of this is really far fetched. Bitcoin has a substantial adoption and investment by now, along with code and infrastructure. Why would everyone drop everything and suddenly change? Such events would take months to even start, you'd notice...

And last and most importantly not least, Etherscript (Serpent), which is the scripting language for smart contracts is turing complete. You can pretty much do anything...

[bassclef]

There is no doubt that the developers behind Counterparty are exceptionally talented and the coding may provide incredible utility for accomplishing revolutionary tasks.  I was initially extremely attracted to this as a potential investment vehicle (Bryne's plans are impressive), especially since there is no mining and a cap of less than 3 million coins.

However, from an investment standpoint, I have a real problem with getting optimistic about the longer term valuations of Counterparty because  1) all of the code is open source and it can be duplicated & lacks proprietary value; 2) Bitcoin itself could end up adopting these features; 3) a big player like Google could bring yet another coin with all of these features (and much more) which could overtake the dominate role for this space; and 4) there are no guarantees that Bryne's dream of an alternate exchange will be the one that actually gets off the ground with all of the regulatory hurdles and track record of contrary political positioning that has been so unpopular with regulators and Wall St. The scum hate him with a passion.  As a result, these factors pose a long term threat to the viability of this coin ever reaching significant value.  

I would love to be proven wrong and, thus, provided with a good incentive to invest.  But I am afraid that what Counterparty has created for the free market is somewhat similar to what pharmaceutical drug companies would be up against if they ever attempted to patent naturally occurring, unaltered herbs and healing plants as cures for diseases.  There is nothing in place to protect the exclusivity or scarcity of this very impressive technology that has been released out into the wild.

What you've laid out is a problem that all cryptocurrencies face because they are open source. I heard it a lot about Bitcoin last year. The banks hate it, they'll never let it thrive. Corporation X will come out with corporate coin. Country Y will come out with Countrycoin. But it hasn't happened yet. The reason is that large corporations are highly centralized, as are governments, and don't work well with the decentralized aspect of cryptocurrencies. No one could trust it implicitly and that defeats the purpose.

Back to your argument... It's a pretty reasonable one, that someone could come along and create a Bitcoin clone with a better marketing and dev team. But then why has Bitcoin not been replaced? There are faster coins with more features and coins with highly capable dev teams, yet most of them languish and eventually become worthless (or close to it).

It comes down to first mover advantage. With a technology that is adopted by such a small percentage of the population, and one that is so nascent and volatile, there just isn't the market for so many altcoins. Therefore, the first usually prevail. DOGE, NXT, NMC, LTC... they are still around because they were the first to offer something different but not necessarily the best. It's difficult to say exactly why certain coins prevail over others, but being the "first to market" is certainly one of the main reasons why they do. That and market liquidity, which follows adoption as traders flock to it.

XCP is the first sidechain. It doesn't use its own blockchain (rather, Bitcoin's) so there's no mining community to add volatility. And it has been chosen by Overstock for a multimillion dollar project, something unprecedented in an altcoin.

As always: high risk, high reward.

[thcmakaveli]

Missed out on the counterparty train. Watching closely though..

[jrmg]

Missed out on the counterparty train. Watching closely though..

Not yet, train is only in some of first stations. Still good time to buy in. This can be one of last really good train where you can jump. Don't wait next train that maybe never come...

[stereotype]

.......Don't wait next train that maybe never come...

[ElTomeko27]

Missed out on the counterparty train. Watching closely though..

Not yet, train is only in some of first stations. Still good time to buy in. This can be one of last really good train where you can jump. Don't wait next train that maybe never come...

Agree.I belive this train can take us even to 0.1 BTC area...

[sucksyd]

Missed out on the counterparty train. Watching closely though..

Not yet, train is only in some of first stations. Still good time to buy in. This can be one of last really good train where you can jump. Don't wait next train that maybe never come...

Agree.I belive this train can take us even to 0.1 BTC area...

xcp not only has a honest team but also a bunch of high skilled devs so it currently took the place of litecoin.

[TinEye]

There is no doubt that the developers behind Counterparty are exceptionally talented and the coding may provide incredible utility for accomplishing revolutionary tasks.  I was initially extremely attracted to this as a potential investment vehicle (Bryne's plans are impressive), especially since there is no mining and a cap of less than 3 million coins.

However, from an investment standpoint, I have a real problem with getting optimistic about the longer term valuations of Counterparty because  1) all of the code is open source and it can be duplicated & lacks proprietary value; 2) Bitcoin itself could end up adopting these features; 3) a big player like Google could bring yet another coin with all of these features (and much more) which could overtake the dominate role for this space; and 4) there are no guarantees that Bryne's dream of an alternate exchange will be the one that actually gets off the ground with all of the regulatory hurdles and track record of contrary political positioning that has been so unpopular with regulators and Wall St. The scum hate him with a passion.  As a result, these factors pose a long term threat to the viability of this coin ever reaching significant value. 

I would love to be proven wrong and, thus, provided with a good incentive to invest.  But I am afraid that what Counterparty has created for the free market is somewhat similar to what pharmaceutical drug companies would be up against if they ever attempted to patent naturally occurring, unaltered herbs and healing plants as cures for diseases.  There is nothing in place to protect the exclusivity or scarcity of this very impressive technology that has been released out into the wild.

So far Counterpart has shown to be extremely competent in finishing off projects. I would not worry about some other coming in, copying and trumping it.

Unfinished, slow projects are a bane in this field. Its no surprise that Counterparty are doing well.

[deliciousowl]

Missed out on the counterparty train. Watching closely though..

Really? Did you think that when Bitcoin was ~$8 too?

[nakaone]

There is no doubt that the developers behind Counterparty are exceptionally talented and the coding may provide incredible utility for accomplishing revolutionary tasks.  I was initially extremely attracted to this as a potential investment vehicle (Bryne's plans are impressive), especially since there is no mining and a cap of less than 3 million coins.

However, from an investment standpoint, I have a real problem with getting optimistic about the longer term valuations of Counterparty because  1) all of the code is open source and it can be duplicated & lacks proprietary value; 2) Bitcoin itself could end up adopting these features; 3) a big player like Google could bring yet another coin with all of these features (and much more) which could overtake the dominate role for this space; and 4) there are no guarantees that Bryne's dream of an alternate exchange will be the one that actually gets off the ground with all of the regulatory hurdles and track record of contrary political positioning that has been so unpopular with regulators and Wall St. The scum hate him with a passion.  As a result, these factors pose a long term threat to the viability of this coin ever reaching significant value. 

I would love to be proven wrong and, thus, provided with a good incentive to invest.  But I am afraid that what Counterparty has created for the free market is somewhat similar to what pharmaceutical drug companies would be up against if they ever attempted to patent naturally occurring, unaltered herbs and healing plants as cures for diseases.  There is nothing in place to protect the exclusivity or scarcity of this very impressive technology that has been released out into the wild.

So far Counterpart has shown to be extremely competent in finishing off projects. I would not worry about some other coming in, copying and trumping it.

Unfinished, slow projects are a bane in this field. Its no surprise that Counterparty are doing well.

additionally I doubt that a fork will spin-off at this point of time. the competitor was msc, I think they are done. dogeparty, clearinghouse etc. lack network effects, we have to see if ether manages to network - I at least got doubts.
the only really good point is point two but as far as I understood sidechains and especially reliability of sidechains will at least take another 12-18 months. take the position of people tranferring very high amounts of money - would you trust a non bulletproof system or would you choose the more secure one?

[Steffen17]

The team is very professionnal, there never have been leaks. Dev team won't leak and warn you before a X2 in price !
Look at Medici or Ethereum news, it was sudden, each time with the price X2.

Like many of us, I sold a few XCP @ 0.005 because of no news for weeks...

The growth is steady. There already should have been a drop in price if you use basic technical trading, so it is very likely that other big news are coming and/or demand from insider devs or Patrick Byrne's friends is very superior to offers.

[IamNotSure]

The team is very professionnal, there never have been leaks. Dev team won't leak and warn you before a X2 in price !
Look at Medici or Ethereum news, it was sudden, each time with the price X2.

Like many of us, I sold a few XCP @ 0.005 because of no news for weeks...

The growth is steady. There already should have been a drop in price if you use basic technical trading, so it is very likely that other big news are coming and/or demand from insider devs or Patrick Byrne's friends is very superior to offers.

If you look closely (maybe the posts were deleted) PP or Xnova were talking about some good news in the coming weeks. That was after the medici announce.

On the github you can follow development and see what are the future improvements. Since XCP team has always delivered, it's more a "when" than an "if". Ofc, the ethereum clone was a surprise (a good one) and who knows, there may be other good surprises along the way.

The thing is, you can see that the development has gained some momentum. On reddit, when the crowd was shouting "not on my blockchain" 10 month ago, they've now a lot of respect for PP and xnova posts.

[peled1986]

My favorite quote from Robby: “if people want to sell their XCP as soon as the web wallet comes out, they should go for it. I think it's kind of like stepping over a dollar to pick up a nickel though. ” - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=395761.msg5693350#msg5693350.

it took bitcoin ~5 years to become mainstream, my guess it will take counterparty ~3 years, or maybe less at this speed. keep up the great work.

this is also a great quote: "xcp is the most undervalued "coin" in the cryptosphere - true story
because counterparty is, regarding coding, quality and intellect of the developers the reference in the complete altcoin section." - nakaone, May 11, 2014.

[Djinou94]

Clearing House is it a good bet?
I heard that it's 30x faster than XCP 

[jrmg]

Clearing House is it a good bet?
I heard that it's 30x faster than XCP 

I think you can earn with XCP  more in long term than buying with same BTC/$ amount Clearing House. That is only faster blocks, development slower and more bugs in wallet etc. Also no any real deals yet promised like Counterparty have Overstock.com.

[GeminiSimba]

In talking about potential competition coming in, stealing ideas or code or coming out with similar products or even other competitors who may or may not have products with faster block times (like clearinghouse) I have only this to say:

A lot of my professional experience has been in business and marketing (business to business and corporate), in that world you come to learn some important facts very fast, namely it doesn't matter if your competitors have slightly better products or even slightly better deals. It comes down at the end of the day to how like-able you are. Assuming 5 people show up trying to sell a product, and all products are similar (even if 1 or 2 are slightly better or worse), the real determining factor in success will simply be if those who are pitching their product come off as better prepared, more understanding of peripheral technologies and companies within their sector and are people who the buyers of the product will get along with more and can imagine doing future business with rather than which product is "technically" a bit better.

I use that example to bring up something Patrick Byrne said about his choice on choosing Counterparty devs for Medici over the other projects which brought similar products (which may have been potentially slightly better or worse technically). His specific reason was that of all those in the 2.0 space offering cryptographic asset platforms, Counterparty devs had similar philosophy as Patrick, similar drive,  and he felt he could get along with them more and thus instantly saw a future of doing business with them.

This level of preparedness in the Bitcoin space as well as their ability to make sound and quick judgement calls that get shit done the right way the "FIRST" time is not something you can find easily even if you were to look at other platforms with similar technology...Also keep in mind that there are plenty of genius people who can spend years innovating, but you can't just look at the crypto-coin space from a computer science perspective, you also have to look at it from a business perspective, WHO will be the first to bring real and usable products to market?

This is why I have full faith that Counterparty will reign supreme in this 2.0 space, they have all the tools not just technically but also mentally and spiritually that will be needed to be the global leader in providing cryptographic asset creation and now smart contracts as well  

[Djinou94]

Clearing House is it a good bet?
I heard that it's 30x faster than XCP 

I think you can earn with XCP  more in long term than buying with same BTC/$ amount Clearing House. That is only faster blocks, development slower and more bugs in wallet etc. Also no any real deals yet promised like Counterparty have Overstock.com.

Ok and is it any chance for XCP to improve his speed? I think it´s the major problem

[Matt Y]

Bitcoin is what gives us the speed issues via its ten minute block time. It is vastly outside of the scope of the Counterparty project to try and change Bitcoin's block time.

[freedomfighter]

There are teams working on solutions to the block speed issue. I saw presentations nearly 10 months ago and heard of some other proposals. eventually this will be solved.