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

[nakaone]

This is an interesting concept but I don't expect widespread adoption of XCP.

First of all, its use is very limited. I don't think it will win over a single professional trader ever. In this time and age of HFT (high frequency trading) in most markets, especially the very liquid ones, where latencies are counted by the microseconds, the pace of 1 block per 10 minutes is not really going to cut it. This alone already rules out liquid markets like FX, MM, rates equities and commodities, where 99.999% of the trades are. Low Lack liquidity in XCP will translate to huge spreads and slippage from hell, making it unprofitable to trade through XCP, which in turn hurts liquidity. You can't break that vicious circle unless you can compete with the lightning speed and market depth at the exchanges. Unfortunately I don't see that ever happening. And oh, the exchange fees in these very liquid markets are negligible, especially for high volumes, so no advantage for XCP there either.

Mind you I'm not dismissing XCP, it's fantastic technology and it will have many novel applications. But I just don't think it's going to have the same level of impact as bitcoin, which was truly a paradigm shift.

I hope I'm proven wrong though!  

Blockchain-based technologies in general, whether BTC, MSC, XCP or Ethereum, will not be used for HFT. The scalability is simply not there for that. OpenTransactions servers, on the other hand, are excellent for HFT. Blockchains are for higher-value transactions and settlement.

Thanks for your input Vitalik. Speaking from the Wall Street perspective, not all exchanges out there are even suitable for high frequency trading (witness the recent rise of electronic exchanges - ARCA, BATS, etc). Not all participants are interested in "low-quality" liquidity so to speak, as provided by most high-frequency exchanges (which was one of the indirect causes of the infamous 2010 Flash Crash). Not all assets need to be traded on a real-time basis (real estate [which has many analogies with BTC], bonds, and mutual funds for instance). It's not also widely appreciated that official settlement for stock trades occurs not instantaneously, but 3 days (the T+3 rule). In contrast, 1 hour (6 confirmations) is widely acknowledged to be a reasonable settlement time for even the largest BTC trades.

The blockchain more closely resembles, say, the housing market or the contracts/swaps derivatives markets, which don't operate in any way similar to HFT even though they handle trillions of dollars in notional value. So the notion that non-highly liquid markets can't be valuable is absurd.

It makes an outrageous amount of sense for Asicminer to start using Counterparty.

The CEO of Asicminer, friedcat, currently keeps track of which bitcoin addresses own the 400,000 dividend-receiving shares with an excel spreadsheet.

He has to manually update this spreadsheet every time someone wants to transfer ownership of a share.

It usually takes days to transfer ownership of shares, 10 minutes would be a massive improvment.

Asicminer on Counterparty would be an epic combo.


Come join the discussion in the Asicminer thread and help bring Counterparty to friedcat's attention!

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=99497.msg4907871#msg4907871

o.O so what happens if that excel spreadsheet is lost?

ASICMINER listing on Counterparty could be its Netscape moment 

I'm sure he has many backups.  The current method of transferring shares of Asicminer is to create a thread in the auction section, like this one: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=439392.0

Then private message and/or email friedcat so he can change the addresses on the spreadsheet.

Many times people also use an escrow provider (such as John K.) to escrow the transfers.


This is a ridiculously inefficient, slow, manual process of transferring ownership of Asicminer shares.

If you're not familiar with Bitcoin securities, Asicminer is the most prominent of them all.

Before the end of burning I wrote a pm to cityglut that we should concentrate marketing especially in our early days to miners, they are also mostly technically competent, so they can use counterparty immediately.

unluckily I do not have contact to any miners - do you guys have?

[delulo]

I remember to have read somewhere (must have been somewhere within this topic because I cant find it in the OP) that people are responsible themselves to do x (don't remember what that term was; maybe "activate", "import"?)  with their XCP when y (some kind of launch?) is announced.

You see that I dont have much of a clue anymore what I read there  Just dont wanna miss anything.
Bottomline question: Can I just hold my XCP (burned with blockchain.info wallet) for ever/month and do nothing without having to worry about anything?

don't worry, be happy
that works
no problem to wait for GUI that I can see

Ok thanks for those clarifications!

[l8orre]

 

Hey Guys,

I seem to have an issue with the proper jsonrpc lib ...
   
I am using Ubuntu - are there any other linuc users here?


 I still have to find out which jsonrpc counterpartyd is using, because my python3 has apparently a wrong one ... ...



azure@boxfish:~/workbench/counterparty/counterpartyd$ python3 counterpartyd.py
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "counterpartyd.py", line 22, in <module>
    from lib import (config, api, zeromq, util, exceptions, bitcoin, blocks)
  File "/home/azure/workbench/counterparty/counterpartyd/lib/api.py", line 16, in <module>
    from jsonrpc import JSONRPCResponseManager, dispatcher
ImportError: cannot import name JSONRPCResponseManager
azure@boxfish:~/workbench/counterparty/counterpartyd$


any hints would be appreciated   

[SyRenity]

There is a latest price snapshot for the DEX exchange available on the main page. Once there is sufficient data, I will look into a price historical chart. However, given that we have more than 100 assets listed I will only work on the BTC/XCP charts on the dex

I am slowly making my way through the order page to clean it up a bit. I've already added some filters. If you have any suggestions please feel free to post it here..

Awesome - first world-wide real Dex pricing!

Can you add it to API? We will include it in our ticker then.

[SyRenity]

unluckily I do not have contact to any miners - do you guys have?

I'm holding some AM shares (not sure though if enough for friedcat to listen to me ), and can get ourselves introduced to bitfury, to jasinlee (fibonacci.io scrypt asics - who actually doing IPO these days!) and to local ASIC maker (who might be interested to do IPO).

Can we prepare any specific "official" proposal for them?

[led_lcd]

I am slowly making my way through the order page to clean it up a bit. I've already added some filters. If you have any suggestions please feel free to post it here..

Thanks! The filter to see just XCP/BTC is really nice. Would it be possible to add sort order based on column? For example, sort by lowest to highest exchange rate?

[nippou]

Hey everyone,

Take a look at this thread

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=436951

They want to develop an 'satoshi themed' adventure game and use a  crowdfunding model giving the participants equity in the project. Currently they use Bitcoin addresses to track donations but really Counterparty would be a perfect solution for them. (issuing asset, paying dividends, and being traded from day 1 on a decentralised exchange).

This a perfect use case for the XCP and Counterparty protocol - I've already mentioned Counterparty in the thread but feel free to give them some more love.

Imagine a 'case study'  that could come out of this and great exposure for the game developers and XCP.

Give them some love and help me convince them to go Counterparty

UPDATE: the game is already trending on reddit http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1x2fl4/a_first_for_bitcoin_a_video_game_with_bitcoin_at/ and getting exposure so this could be a big win for both sides (game developers + counterparty).

[520Bit]

I have not yet contacted them. Unless I am mistaken, since they registered the subreddits, they will always be moderators, and hence the conflict of interest cannot be completely removed.

Going forward, the best thing to do is be very active on the subreddit registered by the Counterparty team, to, at least minimize the ambiguity as to which subreddit is "the Counterparty subreddit".

Yes, I have published the Chinese tutorial of how to install counterpartyd client hand by hand in the counterparty team's subreddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/counterparty_xcp. Let's be active there.

[BusmasterDMA]

I created an order then sent bitcoins after seeing an order-match ID, however the order seems to have expired anyway.  I received no XCP from this trade according to Blockscan.

http://blockscan.com/order.aspx?q=3251

The expiration was set to 15, however the bitcoins were sent within 4 blocks.  

Can anyone assist?

[PhantomPhreak]

Is there a way to transfer XCP from multiple addresses in a wallet to another address in just one single transaction?

Let's say I have 10 addresses containing XCP and I want to consolidate all of them in one single address. Do I have to create 10 send transactions or is there a way to do this with just a single transaction?

No, there is not.

[PhantomPhreak]

Issue:
XCP not returned from escrow after cancellation of Order

http://blockscan.com/address.aspx?q=17PgVzRSSSjc2aN8Lyp1x9QayKzPzY2pKj

a) I placed a sell order for 250 XCP order
b) the order was matched by the engine, but the buyer did not make any payment yet.
c) I cancelled the order
d) I did not receive back the XCP from escrow

The Balance should be: 1432-400-200-200=632
Instead it is 382 XCP and 250 from Escrow is missing.

I know there was similar issue not sure what the resolution for that was. (I am on the latest build).

I see the correct sum, with all of the correct components, in the latest version of the develop branch. (And I see the correct sum in Blockscan.com, too, for that matter.)

[rotalumis]

I have not yet contacted them. Unless I am mistaken, since they registered the subreddits, they will always be moderators, and hence the conflict of interest cannot be completely removed.

Going forward, the best thing to do is be very active on the subreddit registered by the Counterparty team, to, at least minimize the ambiguity as to which subreddit is "the Counterparty subreddit".

It is possible to request subreddits when they are abandoned. The core rule to determine that seems quite stringent, though maybe there could be some admin discretion involved in the final decision.

Subreddits aren't considered "abandoned" if any mod has been active anywhere on reddit in the past 60 days. Keep in mind that "activity" isn't limited to posting and commenting.

Requests are made here: http://www.reddit.com/r/redditrequest  See the sidebar for more info.

[PhantomPhreak]

I created an order then sent bitcoins after seeing an order-match ID, however the order seems to have expired anyway.  I received no XCP from this trade according to Blockscan.

http://blockscan.com/order.aspx?q=3251

The expiration was set to 15, however the bitcoins were sent within 4 blocks.  

Can anyone assist?

What branch are you using?

[PhantomPhreak]

Issue:
XCP not returned from escrow after cancellation of Order

http://blockscan.com/address.aspx?q=17PgVzRSSSjc2aN8Lyp1x9QayKzPzY2pKj

a) I placed a sell order for 250 XCP order
b) the order was matched by the engine, but the buyer did not make any payment yet.
c) I cancelled the order
d) I did not receive back the XCP from escrow

The Balance should be: 1432-400-200-200=632
Instead it is 382 XCP and 250 from Escrow is missing.

I know there was similar issue not sure what the resolution for that was. (I am on the latest build).

I see the correct sum, with all of the correct components, in the latest version of the develop branch. (And I see the correct sum in Blockscan.com, too, for that matter.)

Is it a good idea to allow the seller to cancel a matched but unpaid order?

What if the seller cancels and the buyer sends payment in the same block? Depending on the ordering of the timestamps would the buyer lose his coins if the btcpay is later than the cancel? Or does counterpartyd parse the entire block, pick up the btcpay, and ignore the earlier cancel?

One cannot cancel an order match, and all transactions are parsed by the order of blocks and their order within a block.

[rotalumis]

And here's a HEADS UP for an unanswered question on Counterparty in the Alternate currencies section -- a great opportunity to engage some more folks. We need a few people setting up Google Alerts for Counterparty / XCP etc, on bitcointalk and maybe elsewhere.

I'm very interested in the new Counterparty technology given the successful burn period of XCP.  I've been reading everything I can find on it, and I understand how it's an information layer built on top the BTC protocol, and can be used for betting and issuing "shares", etc.  However I'm still foggy on a lot of details and I can't seem to find a clear, dummies style explanation of the tech.  Could someone help an idiot like me with some basic questions?

One thing I don't understand is how the value of an individual unit of XCP is determined.  I know right now it's trading at a certain amount relative to BTC based on scarcity since the burn period is over.  Down the road will it trade on utility (i.e. I need one intact unit of XCP to issue shares in my company) or will the value be determined by the assets that it backs?

[romerun]

unluckily I do not have contact to any miners - do you guys have?

I'm holding some AM shares (not sure though if enough for friedcat to listen to me ), and can get ourselves introduced to bitfury, to jasinlee (fibonacci.io scrypt asics - who actually doing IPO these days!) and to local ASIC maker (who might be interested to do IPO).

Can we prepare any specific "official" proposal for them?

How would it work? Say, an ASIC company X want to raise 1000BTC, say the current XCP/BTC is 0.005, they will issue their asset worth of 200000 XCP which is about 8% of the entire currency. Say, they successfully raise 200k XCP, now they want to convert to BTC to get fiat, oh the market is too shallow, and end up getting only 100BTC for 200k XCP.

XCP was born a few days ago, we don't have a fraction chance to get those big companies onboard, they will just laugh at our swamp attempt. We should focus on tiny IPOs until XCP is mature, like weed / mushroom, not to mention bugs.

[BusmasterDMA]

I created an order then sent bitcoins after seeing an order-match ID, however the order seems to have expired anyway.  I received no XCP from this trade according to Blockscan.

http://blockscan.com/order.aspx?q=3251

The expiration was set to 15, however the bitcoins were sent within 4 blocks.  

Can anyone assist?

What branch are you using?

I used git to clone what I believe is the master branch.  Prior to this trade yesterday I updated due to the bug with block 284193.

[halfcab123]

mhhh.. baby. Look at that market cap 2648755.9218 ($13,079,556.74) 

[halfcab123]

Is there an API url to directly get the last DEX order match? I am going to put in a request to get added on coinmarketcap.com 

[panonym]

Allowing trading on the decentralized exchange without the need to instal bitcoind nor counterpartyd.
Seems nobody cared to even comment on my proposal of alternative trading gateway access.

I guess it will be just the DEX & GoogleDoc for now.
Until masterxchange, dgex or whoever else include XCP for easy trading (without install).

If missed it & interested, here is the link to my proposal.

Fast summary:
- "easy" manual order match, manual btcpay from outside [see the last/edit part]
- neat 1time send BTC = get XCP [need more work, see long first part]

I'll check my PM daily, but I will no longer diligently read every each post.
Busy AFK.

All the best to XCP & the community.