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

[mtbitcoin]

Compare with MSC:
1) MSC has a complete document: the white paper, but has no codes (almost). XCP has codes, but no polished document yet.
2) MSC has more features, but stay in paper. XCP has less features, but code is (almost) ready.
3) MSC currently use a dummy address to encode the information, while XCP use OP_RETURN. OP_RETURN way is cleaner and has no harm to blockchain, but requires bitcoind 0.9.
4) The bitcoins buying the initial MSC are available to the foundation, but XCP has no access to the burn address.

The 4th difference is the most important. With bitcoins there, MSC could hire more people and provide more bounty. On the other hand, there will be less community contributions since people hate to work hard to help others being super rich. I think the extremely slow progress of MSC can partly explained by this.

Well summed up.

However, I believe MSC is also moving to the op_return route when this becomes available.

Community participation should be better with Counterparty considering that you have to literally burn BTC to receive XCP and there will not be issues of enriching the developer because no one has access to the burnt coins. This "sounds" less scammy. In addition we have an actual working code base from the start.

Also I expect the initial distribution of XCP to be slightly more balanced given the additional exposure of additional protocols running on top of bitcoin compared to a few months back

The downside though is without reservation of any bounties or incentives, moving forward it's highly likely that future  developements will need to be driven by the community

[PhantomPhreak]

Counterparty will use multi-sig outputs to encode data in the blockchain until Bitcoin 0.9 comes out.

That's a great news, so it means counterparty can be used before OP_RETURN is released? Does it mean you have known that 0.9 will not be out soon? Otherwise, it seems quite a lot of work to change OP_RETURN to multi-sig now.

Counterparty is fully functional right now. We didn't want to risk waiting a month or two for Bitcoin 0.9, and we now support both methods.

[BitThink]

Counterparty will use multi-sig outputs to encode data in the blockchain until Bitcoin 0.9 comes out.

That's a great news, so it means counterparty can be used before OP_RETURN is released? Does it mean you have known that 0.9 will not be out soon? Otherwise, it seems quite a lot of work to change OP_RETURN to multi-sig now.

Counterparty is fully functional right now. We didn't want to risk waiting a month or two for Bitcoin 0.9, and we now support both methods.

Great. Then it seems highly possible that Counterparty will be the first workable distributed exchange. Thanks a lot for your hard working! Cheers.

[BitThink]

Compare with MSC:
1) MSC has a complete document: the white paper, but has no codes (almost). XCP has codes, but no polished document yet.
2) MSC has more features, but stay in paper. XCP has less features, but code is (almost) ready.
3) MSC currently use a dummy address to encode the information, while XCP use OP_RETURN. OP_RETURN way is cleaner and has no harm to blockchain, but requires bitcoind 0.9.
4) The bitcoins buying the initial MSC are available to the foundation, but XCP has no access to the burn address.

The 4th difference is the most important. With bitcoins there, MSC could hire more people and provide more bounty. On the other hand, there will be less community contributions since people hate to work hard to help others being super rich. I think the extremely slow progress of MSC can partly explained by this.

Well summed up.

However, I believe MSC is also moving to the op_return route when this becomes available.

Community participation should be better with Counterparty considering that you have to literally burn BTC to receive XCP and there will not be issues of enriching the developer because no one has access to the burnt coins. This "sounds" less scammy. In addition we have an actual working code base from the start.

Also I expect the initial distribution of XCP to be slightly more balanced given the additional exposure of additional protocols running on top of bitcoin compared to a few months back

The downside though is without reservation of any bounties or incentives, moving forward it's highly likely that future  developements will need to be driven by the community

Totally agree.

When XCP exchange is out, maybe the XCP foundation could issue an asset inside the exchange to fund the development of XCP.

[mtbitcoin]

I have pulled the GIT and this appears to have solved the "bug" issue I reported earlier.

However, it does look like that database has changed a little and I will need to patch this later once the new database download is complete to get [blockscan] working again.

cheers

[PhantomPhreak]

Dont burn more before everything ok!!!

Theorically everything is still ok.
It's just that only the dev - or perhaps no one - can verify the latest burning.
Because of the new database creation time requirement, 'necessary due to the last modification in the code.

It's been hours now, and I'm still at block 278510, only.
...
I did the math: it mean up 240 block in 4 hours!
PhantomPhreak, is it that slow for you too?
It mean I will reach present block in 28h, 'so completely sync in ~31h =/

No, for me a complete counterpartyd database rebuild on mainnet takes maybe a half-hour, but I have an i5. What hardware are you running counterpartyd and Bitcoind on? Are they on the same machine?

The database rebuild and the bug that have caused blockscan.com and counterparty-explorer.com to fall behind (initially) are not related.

[allwelder]

I have an query about:how to determine the number of XCP per burn of BTC?
Assumption all exist BTC burned to XCP,what will happen to XCP and BTC?

[reader31]

Compare with MSC:
1) MSC has a complete document: the white paper, but has no codes (almost). XCP has codes, but no polished document yet.
2) MSC has more features, but stay in paper. XCP has less features, but code is (almost) ready.
3) MSC currently use a dummy address to encode the information, while XCP use OP_RETURN. OP_RETURN way is cleaner and has no harm to blockchain, but requires bitcoind 0.9.
4) The bitcoins buying the initial MSC are available to the foundation, but XCP has no access to the burn address.

The 4th difference is the most important. With bitcoins there, MSC could hire more people and provide more bounty. On the other hand, there will be less community contributions since people hate to work hard to help others being super rich. I think the extremely slow progress of MSC can partly explained by this.

Well summed up.

However, I believe MSC is also moving to the op_return route when this becomes available.

Community participation should be better with Counterparty considering that you have to literally burn BTC to receive XCP and there will not be issues of enriching the developer because no one has access to the burnt coins. This "sounds" less scammy. In addition we have an actual working code base from the start.

Also I expect the initial distribution of XCP to be slightly more balanced given the additional exposure of additional protocols running on top of bitcoin compared to a few months back

The downside though is without reservation of any bounties or incentives, moving forward it's highly likely that future  developements will need to be driven by the community

Totally agree.

When XCP exchange is out, maybe the XCP foundation could issue an asset inside the exchange to fund the development of XCP.

I'm all in for it I really want to see this project succeed just to raise the standard for ipos from "a send btc to my wallet" style to a more clean and fair model, which atomatically deincentives scammy ipos. Right now the altcoin ecosystem is ripe for scammers to exploit.

Once the ipo period ends, We can publish a road map for development going forward and the community can start contributing towards that each in their own way

[panonym]

No, for me a complete counterpartyd database rebuild on mainnet takes maybe a half-hour, but I have an i5. What hardware are you running counterpartyd and Bitcoind on? Are they on the same machine?

Oh... Lucky you.
I guess my new 120$ crappy hardware is really worth only that.
(yes : bitcoind, counterpartyd, litecoind : all running at the same time on the same hardware)

Code:

grep "model name" /proc/cpuinfo
model name	: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU     E4500  @ 2.20GHz
model name	: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU     E4500  @ 2.20GHz

Would you mind uploading ~/counterpartyd_build & ~/.config/counterpartyd ?

Need rest, 'night people

[xnova]

Compare with MSC:
1) MSC has a complete document: the white paper, but has no codes (almost). XCP has codes, but no polished document yet.
2) MSC has more features, but stay in paper. XCP has less features, but code is (almost) ready.
3) MSC currently use a dummy address to encode the information, while XCP use OP_RETURN. OP_RETURN way is cleaner and has no harm to blockchain, but requires bitcoind 0.9.
4) The bitcoins buying the initial MSC are available to the foundation, but XCP has no access to the burn address.

The 4th difference is the most important. With bitcoins there, MSC could hire more people and provide more bounty. On the other hand, there will be less community contributions since people hate to work hard to help others being super rich. I think the extremely slow progress of MSC can partly explained by this.

Well summed up.

However, I believe MSC is also moving to the op_return route when this becomes available.

Community participation should be better with Counterparty considering that you have to literally burn BTC to receive XCP and there will not be issues of enriching the developer because no one has access to the burnt coins. This "sounds" less scammy. In addition we have an actual working code base from the start.

Also I expect the initial distribution of XCP to be slightly more balanced given the additional exposure of additional protocols running on top of bitcoin compared to a few months back

The downside though is without reservation of any bounties or incentives, moving forward it's highly likely that future  developements will need to be driven by the community

A release regarding bounties will be upcoming. We are planning around that now. Our goal is to foster a full ecosystem around counterpartyd and related future core products, and bounties will play a large role in that.

[xnova]

No, for me a complete counterpartyd database rebuild on mainnet takes maybe a half-hour, but I have an i5. What hardware are you running counterpartyd and Bitcoind on? Are they on the same machine?

Oh... Lucky you.
I guess my new 120$ crappy hardware is really worth only that.
(yes : bitcoind, counterpartyd, litecoind : all running at the same time on the same hardware)

Code:

grep "model name" /proc/cpuinfo
model name	: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU     E4500  @ 2.20GHz
model name	: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU     E4500  @ 2.20GHz

Would you mind uploading ~/counterpartyd_build & ~/.config/counterpartyd ?

Need rest, 'night people

Agreed, the database rebuild should only take 20-30 minutes at most (that's around what it took for me). Try looking at your processes and make sure nothing is hogging the CPU or I/O.

[chinabreak123]

i still don't kown how to brun,anyone can write an whole step?

thanks much!

[xnova]

i still don't kown how to brun,anyone can write an whole step?

thanks much!

http://counterpartyd-build.readthedocs.org/en/latest/HowToBurn.html

[BitThink]

XCP is more like MSC than Nxt. Nxt is an altcoin having its own blockchain, but XCP is based on bitcoin blockchain just as MSC.

The benefit to have its own blockchain is the low level protocol can be designed from the scratch to make all high-level protocols easier to be implemented and parsing more efficient. On the other hand, the benefit of basing on bitcoin blockchain is there's already secure hashing rate and a lot of users are already using bitcoin. Moreover, implementation is easier since there's no need to worry about all those mining things.

BTW, one large advantage of Nxt is it's transparent forging (mining). According to what the dev said, it can help to make 51% attack almost impossible. I'm sure everyone agree that 51% attack is almost the pain of bitcoin and all its copycats.

Thanks. What about comparison to MSC?

If Mastercoin is the most apt comparison, you may want to review the questions stslimited has been raising about Mastercoin over the last few days in this (Mastercoin) thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=265488.2780.  It seems to me, at least at first glance, that his concerns may have some relevance to Counterparty as well.  

Questions like: what is the functional difference between 10 XCP or 1 XCP or .1 XCP?  How many XCP would someone actually need to use any aspects of this additional protocol layer?  What would require someone to spend XCP or go get more XCP from the open market?

Actually this is a very good question. For all us investors, especially those who want to see the price of XCP increase 10x or even 100x, to understand the demand of XCP is very important.

Let's check the feature of XCP one by one.
1) issue and order
If I am not wrong, any issue can be priced either in XCP or BTC. If an asset is priced in XCP, then the orders can be matched and finished immediately. For BTC priced orders, BTCPay message is need to finished the matched order. Therefore, it's possible people may prefer XCP priced issue to BTC priced issue due to instant transaction. If the XCP price is relatively stable, people may buy certain amount of XCP with BTC in beforehand, and then use XCP to buy assets instantly.

2) dividend
It seems the dividends have to be paid in XCP, unless the dividends are paid outside of the exchange. Therefore, the asset issuers most likely will buy XCP for distributing the dividends.

(Actually, I am not sure about this. If there're good 3rd party software support, it is equally easy for the issuers to pay the dividends in BTC, because they have all the investors BTC addresses. The exchange has to provide more convenience to attract more issuers to pay dividends in XCP instead.)

3) broadcast and bets.
It seems betting fee are all in XCP, so people need XCP to make a bet.

Therefore, to some extent XCP is like the token in a casino and BTC is like the money, but the supply of token in XCP exchange is limited. If there're more issuers,  more (bet) users, and more BTC go into the exchange, the value of token will increase, and the price of XCP is finally determined by how many users and how many funds will go into the exchange.

[led_lcd]

Counterparty is fully functional right now. We didn't want to risk waiting a month or two for Bitcoin 0.9, and we now support both methods.

Are there any updates on whether Eligius will be able to support OP_RETURN?

[xnova]

Counterparty is fully functional right now. We didn't want to risk waiting a month or two for Bitcoin 0.9, and we now support both methods.

Are there any updates on whether Eligius will be able to support OP_RETURN?

Whether wizkid057 (Eligius pool op) will allow txns utilizing OP_RETURN through Eligius (after burn, once all of our txns have no unspendable txouts) is unknown. However, it doesn't matter, as we also have support for multisig based transactions released today. As PhantomPhreak noted earlier (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=395761.msg4471853#msg4471853), all Counterparty functionality is now available on mainnet via counterpartyd's new support for multisig, meaning we don't *need* 0.9 to be released, or OP_RETURN pool support. However, once 0.9 is released and deployed across the major pools, we will switch to using OP_RETURN as the primary encoding method.

We encourage all of you to test the counterpartyd featureset on mainnet, to the extent that you feel comfortable (remember, there are likely still bugs, play with isolated wallets with small amounts of XCP/BTC, for maximum safety).

[BitThink]

Counterparty is fully functional right now. We didn't want to risk waiting a month or two for Bitcoin 0.9, and we now support both methods.

Are there any updates on whether Eligius will be able to support OP_RETURN?

Whether wizkid057 (Eligius pool op) will allow txns utilizing OP_RETURN through Eligius (after burn, once all of our txns have no unspendable txouts) is unknown. However, it doesn't matter, as we also have support for multisig based transactions released today. As PhantomPhreak noted earlier (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=395761.msg4471853#msg4471853), all Counterparty functionality is now available on mainnet via counterpartyd's new support for multisig, meaning we don't *need* 0.9 to be released, or OP_RETURN pool support. However, once 0.9 is released and deployed across the major pools, we will switch to using OP_RETURN as the primary encoding method.

Is there a plan to create a more user-friendly client with GUI?

I am thinking a lightweight web client supporting blockchain.info wallets will be really useful to attract average users.

[peer2peer360]

Also the proof of burn - trusted backed model will definitely add to the value of the coin. As I see it... in a world filled with ipo scams, trust is a rare commodity.

Sure, so obvious that I skipped it.
Creating a good probability that most will never sell for less than 1 BTC per 1000 XCP.
(And if you guys wanna make money like I do, avoid selling cheaper than 1 BTC per 100 XCP unless you really need moving funds.)

With the above figures given thats either miscalculated or short sightedness..

XCP being highly rare (after crowd-funding) Expect XCP To be 1 BTC= 10 XCP (soon)

XCP may have the opportunity to set the standards for decentralized, Peer2peer, trustless technology

giving the current state of things...

With the Belief that at some point there will be a XCP Foundation
to watch over the day-to-day operation of this project

there is a great amount potential in this project that seems so promising.

to Investors/Dev/XCP Community may 2014 be a prosperous year for you

[xnova]

Counterparty is fully functional right now. We didn't want to risk waiting a month or two for Bitcoin 0.9, and we now support both methods.

Are there any updates on whether Eligius will be able to support OP_RETURN?

Whether wizkid057 (Eligius pool op) will allow txns utilizing OP_RETURN through Eligius (after burn, once all of our txns have no unspendable txouts) is unknown. However, it doesn't matter, as we also have support for multisig based transactions released today. As PhantomPhreak noted earlier (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=395761.msg4471853#msg4471853), all Counterparty functionality is now available on mainnet via counterpartyd's new support for multisig, meaning we don't *need* 0.9 to be released, or OP_RETURN pool support. However, once 0.9 is released and deployed across the major pools, we will switch to using OP_RETURN as the primary encoding method.

Is there a plan to create a more user-friendly client with GUI?

I am thinking a lightweight web client supporting blockchain.info wallets will be really useful to attract average users.

Yes, one is planned. (At this point I cannot provide any more information beyond that.)

However, I'd like to reiterate that any member of the community interesting in building a wallet or anything else on top of counterpartyd should definitely feel free to do so. If you have development skills, don't just wait for us, feel free to put them to use!

[xnova]

With the Belief that at some point there will be a XCP Foundation
to watch over the day-to-day operation of this project

As the core Counterparty team, our goal is to construct and facilitate the use of the Counterparty protocol and reference implementation. Our idea is that through the merits of the technology, and their obvious usefulness, as well as future efforts to promote use (bounties, awareness campaigns, etc), the community and industry will naturally build upon them (much like water flows through the path of least resistance). Through this, we do not require a foundation or any centralized "top-down" organization of that nature, which can often get in the way as much as it can help.

That being said, having the support of active members of the community (e.g. BitThink and mtbitcoin for writing block explorers and several of you guys answering questions in the forums) is a HUGE part of what will make Counterparty successful. Thank you all for your support thus far.