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

[hozer]

I wrote earlier about how difficult it was for me to buy an asset (JPJA) using Counterparty (via counterwallet.co).  First, it was very confusing just to figure out how to actually place an order, then it was confusing to figure out the quantity/price I was supposed to pay (it told me it could not automatically quote an exact price for me)

I had the same confusing experience. It seems to me that technically the exchange works well (at least when BTC is not involved) and all information is logically correct. But I believe confusion appears because the prices are displayed inversely to how we intuitively see them. If I for example want to buy SWARMPRE for XCP, the confusion starts on the second page.  Where it says "Buying XCP" I think it is more user friendly to write "Selling SWARMPRE" although these two statements are equivalent. And where the unit price "21.5 SWARMPRE/XCP" it would be better with "0.0465 XCP/SWARMPRE".

Where it says "Selling XCP" it should say "Buying SWARMPRE" at price 0.0462. Now you see that the highest buy offer is a little bit below the lowest ask (sales offer), just as we are used to from financial markets.

Since Counterparty enables barter, it will not always be obvious which asset is the currency, e.g. is it better to write 2 apples/orange or 0.5 orange/apple? For Counterwallet, however, I am of the opinion that in transactions involving XCP or BTC these should always be used as the currency.

YES on confusing

This is horribly confusing. Is there a way to do some sort of fractional notation? ^21.5/_5.0 ^SWARMPRE/_XCP

Absolutely NOT on assuming XCP or BTC is the currency, simply because while Bitcoin and XCP are possibly reasonable stores of value, they are both horrible units of account because of the fixed demand-inelastic supply. What is a reasonable (something)/BTC trade this year is probably going to be a horrible trade next year. If your goal is to confuse new users and encourage them to make bad trades, calling BTC/XCP currency is a great way to do it.

But if you actually want real value growth of the trade economy, it has to be a reference unit of account that has properties more like Hayek money with some better price stability properties.

[1714188519]

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[1714188519]

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[Matt Y]

Really great to see all this feedback. Awesome.

[fractastical]

Really great to see all this feedback. Awesome.

Agreed.

[baddw]

I also agree it would be much easier if their was a more automated way for a company to sell an asset to the public, like a Buy Now button. It doesn't need to be as simple as using a credit card, it could just be a counterwallet.co address to send a certain amount of BTC to, or programming that uses an API to automated multiple steps.

This is also a very good idea. We should be able to implement this pretty easily, I think. (Through the 'extended asset info' standard.)

Thanks everyone for the feedback, by the way. It's very helpful. We'll look into inverting the prices, too, in case that could help.

Yes.  Something like a "Pre-BTCPay" to go ahead and send the BTC at the same time that the buy order is placed, when there is a very good probability that it will match an existing sell order.  Maybe this should come with a warning (or only be able to do it when sending BTC directly to asset issuers) but the potential loss of security makes up for a big gain in functionality.  Especially in these early days when we are all sending .01BTC to buy random assets just for the hell of it and to try to get the economy going.

Of course, the flipside is that maybe it *should* be hard to buy assets in BTC in order to drive up XCP usage and value.

Or maybe some sort of BTC-to-XCP-to-Asset purchasing, where assets are required to be natively denominated in XCP but are automatically and indirectly priced in BTC through the DEX, when the buyer wishes to purchase in BTC?  And somebody(ies) with deep pockets and some good exchange bots acts as market maker in the BTC/XCP DEX?

[jrmg]

The statement of what you are buying was very clear, but I would guess that at least 50% of people (the general public, not the type of people on this forum) never even get to that point because it is too confusing.

Maybe bad idea, but how if make two different view for different users what can choose from settings? One like now and one where you can see order book what looks like normal exchanges list where you can choose asset and see all next prices and maybe also choose max price what want pay and make then order?

[dooglus]

I've been trying to learn about Counterparty.

I read https://github.com/CounterpartyXCP/Counterparty and found it seems to be quite a mess.

I don't know enough to fix most of the problems, so submitting a pull request doesn't seem ideal.

Where's a good place to point out the errors I found?

[Jpja]

Absolutely NOT on assuming XCP or BTC is the currency, simply because while Bitcoin and XCP are possibly reasonable stores of value, they are both horrible units of account because of the fixed demand-inelastic supply. What is a reasonable (something)/BTC trade this year is probably going to be a horrible trade next year. If your goal is to confuse new users and encourage them to make bad trades, calling BTC/XCP currency is a great way to do it.

I partially agree with you. I agree on that XCP and BTC are bad units of accounts. I'll also add that Counterparty is a platform where anyone can issue / invent a better currency, e.g. a trustworthy company can issue a counterparty-asset backed by the dollar. Then it's up to the free market (i.e. users of counterparty) to decide on their preferred choice of currency. At the moment XCP and BTC are the least worst, hence chosen by the market.

The problem with "inverse" prices, however, is merely a psychological one. In real life we buy a Snickers bar for price $2 at the supermarket, right? It's equally to correct to say that we sell dollars for price 0.5 Snicker at the supermarket... Next time you enter a store, tell the clerk you have some dollars you want to sell

In the Counterwallet I suggest just that when XCP or BTC are part of a trade, these will be assumed as currency (no change needed in Counterparty itself). There might be some more elegant way of dealing with the problem. E.g. by counting how many different token each token has been traded against. The higher count, the more likely it is to be the "currency". 

[romerun]

I've been trying to learn about Counterparty.

I read https://github.com/CounterpartyXCP/Counterparty and found it seems to be quite a mess.

I don't know enough to fix most of the problems, so submitting a pull request doesn't seem ideal.

Where's a good place to point out the errors I found?

Github I guess

[IamNotSure]

Hello,

I'm trying to sign & broadcast a transaction made with coinsweeper in counterwallet but I got this error message in the signed transaction box :

Cannot read property 'call' of undefined

Any clue of what I'm doing wrong ?

[mindtomatter]

What do you think of setting up a new type of order using XCP that essentially lets anyone do a "kickstarter" style threshold-or-everyone-is-refunded asset sale order?

" I'm buying x TOKEN for y, but only once amount z is bought at the same time."

Those orders would accumulate and then excute all at once, as soon as the goal is reached. Optionally you could put a date your order expires, which is a personal "end of campaign" threshold for each person.

and it would only be possible with an XCP based instrument, so bitcoin would be out and XCP is suddenly the crowdfunding token because it can be escrowed

That would take all the trust off platforms like swarm and coinpowers, and be one of the first real uses of escrowing on the blockchain, and a damn good use for XCP - Bitcoin is the currency, and XCP is the crowdfunding/cryptofinance platform built on top.

[fractastical]

What do you think of setting up a new type of order using XCP that essentially lets anyone do a "kickstarter" style threshold-or-everyone-is-refunded asset sale order?

...and it would only be possible with an XCP based instrument, so bitcoin would be out and XCP is suddenly the crowdfunding token because it can be escrowed
... and XCP is the crowdfunding/cryptofinance platform built on top.

I like the general idea but it doesn't solve the problem of having to convert to XCP first. If you had to do BTC -> XCP -> SWARM you've increased difficulty rather than decreased it (although for repeat participants it could be a very significant net benefit). Very much like the idea of programmable escrow regardless.

[xnova]

We are considering adding proof-of-stake voting to Counterparty. At a high level, how we see this working is where an issuer/owner of a given token could create a protocol-level 'referendum' event, which would most likely reference an external URL  (and could include a hash of that URL's content, to ensure consistency). The URL would point to a .json file with the referendum text, the voting end date, etc, as well as the possible choices (similar to how we do today with extended asset and feed info). Holders of the coin, via Counterwallet or similar, would then be able to vote on the referendum, and their vote would count in proportion to the amount of coin they hold out of the total amount created (or, in circulation). As these votes are done on-blockchain, they could then be easily tallied up, and there would be a clear audit trail for verifiability.

I'm thinking this feature would open Counterparty up to all sorts of interesting political applications, as well as faciliate organizational governance for companies that do crowdfunding on the platform.

Thoughts? If we can see enough interest in this feature, we can add it.

[xnova]

Absolutely NOT on assuming XCP or BTC is the currency, simply because while Bitcoin and XCP are possibly reasonable stores of value, they are both horrible units of account because of the fixed demand-inelastic supply. What is a reasonable (something)/BTC trade this year is probably going to be a horrible trade next year. If your goal is to confuse new users and encourage them to make bad trades, calling BTC/XCP currency is a great way to do it.

I partially agree with you. I agree on that XCP and BTC are bad units of accounts. I'll also add that Counterparty is a platform where anyone can issue / invent a better currency, e.g. a trustworthy company can issue a counterparty-asset backed by the dollar. Then it's up to the free market (i.e. users of counterparty) to decide on their preferred choice of currency. At the moment XCP and BTC are the least worst, hence chosen by the market.

The problem with "inverse" prices, however, is merely a psychological one. In real life we buy a Snickers bar for price $2 at the supermarket, right? It's equally to correct to say that we sell dollars for price 0.5 Snicker at the supermarket... Next time you enter a store, tell the clerk you have some dollars you want to sell

In the Counterwallet I suggest just that when XCP or BTC are part of a trade, these will be assumed as currency (no change needed in Counterparty itself). There might be some more elegant way of dealing with the problem. E.g. by counting how many different token each token has been traded against. The higher count, the more likely it is to be the "currency".  

Just to clear up confusion, Counterwallet uses Forex currency pair naming (see http://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/currencypair.asp). The rule system we employ with which currency is the base currency, and which is the quote, is as follows:

* If XCP is either one of the two assets, then XCP is the base currency
* Otherwise, if BTC is either one of the two assets, then BTC is the base currency
* Otherwise, the base currency is the currency whose name comes first, alphabetically

So we do have a system in place, but I can understand how this is still confusing to people (and to be honest, forex currency pair conventions are definitely counter-intuitive...I had the same issue with them as well). To me, it seems that the exact convention used in Bitcoin-space can be inconsistent. You have sites like BTC-e.com, which seem to use this same Forex convention, and then you have sites like Poloniex, which at one point months ago seemed to use the inverse, but now also seem to be on this same forex currency pair system. So, as far as the XCP/BTC type syntax, on second thought I'm not 100% sure where the confusion lies, as it's the same convention many/most of the BTC exchanges use.

However, regarding the buy/sell interface itself, I can understand people's objections, specifically that it's a) not what they're used to with regular BTC exchanges and b) that the interface can be confusing in some regards. As a response to this, I did put together some proposed tweaks to our trading interface that I'm thinking may help make the interface more user friendly (but I could be wrong, or may have missed something). User input is welcome. Please feel free to comment on the github issue here: https://github.com/CounterpartyXCP/counterwallet/issues/238

[mindtomatter]

What do you think of setting up a new type of order using XCP that essentially lets anyone do a "kickstarter" style threshold-or-everyone-is-refunded asset sale order?

...and it would only be possible with an XCP based instrument, so bitcoin would be out and XCP is suddenly the crowdfunding token because it can be escrowed
... and XCP is the crowdfunding/cryptofinance platform built on top.

I like the general idea but it doesn't solve the problem of having to convert to XCP first. If you had to do BTC -> XCP -> SWARM you've increased difficulty rather than decreased it (although for repeat participants it could be a very significant net benefit). Very much like the idea of programmable escrow regardless.

I'm not trying to solve the convert to XCP problem, that will be solved by centralized exchanges or even BTC -> XCP vending machines.

You can't do this with BTC in the same way, it's just not possible.  It is possible with XCP, and it is a very desirable feature, so I think just because XCP is difficult to acquire now doesn't mean we're not about to surpass those artificial barriers.

[fractastical]

You can't do this with BTC in the same way, it's just not possible.  It is possible with XCP, and it is a very desirable feature, so I think just because XCP is difficult to acquire now doesn't mean we're not about to surpass those artificial barriers.

Absolutely.

[TheGreatBulbulito]

Noob question,
Can someone please tell me what is the main difference between master coin and xcp ?

Is it like the same idea with 2 different teams?

[Matt Y]

Noob question,
Can someone please tell me what is the main difference between master coin and xcp ?

Is it like the same idea with 2 different teams?

In addition to the below, there are a number of differences that may or may not matter to you.

Counterparty was founded in January by a team of three founders. At this time Mastercoin had been around for about a year. When Counterparty launched, it launched with more features and functionality than Mastercoin has today. And that's with a team that's a fraction of the size of other projects and no millions in outside funding.

Counterparty never accepted funding. To me this is a benefit, although others may see it differently. The bottom line is that the founders of Counterparty took the same risk as everyone else by not taking money and that sits well with me. I think it also leaves a clearer path for Counterparty if the gov ere to ever go after appcoin "IPOs". What will be the outcome of projects that raised millions from unaccredited investors while promoting the "IPO" on all channels available? I'm not a lawyer, but I'm glad that that cloud does not loom over Counterparty.

The other main difference is that there is no fee to use Counterparty. When you make transactions on Mastercoin you pay a bit of Mastercoin to the Mastercoin foundation. The money they raise is used for the future promotion of mastercoin.

Counterparty is completely free to use and there is no foundation that taxes your transactions in order to continue paying salaries, bounties, and so on. Counterparty is so awesome that there is no need to charge users to promote the protocol. People will just want to use it. For example, I am launching a betting site soon (betxcp.com) that will offer commissions that are 90% lower than the traditional alternatives. Additionally, my model has significantly lower startup costs than a comparable model that does not use Counterparty.

Counterparty's Founders are successful business people or investors that do not require salaries to live on and the work they do for Counterparty, in contrast to Mastercoin, is done for free. They Created Counterparty because it needed to be done and it was the right thing to do. All that said, don't use Counterparty because the project is super ethical and the people involved in it are awesome. Use it because it's the best platform.

[TheGreatBulbulito]

Matt Y, thank you for the detailed answer.

I didn't know a third one exists (NXT).

Still learning 

[bitwhizz]

Loving Matty 's post 

[ShroomsKit_Disgrace]

I take the red cross in "Uses BTC Blockchain" of NXT as a HUGE ADVANTAGE.