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

[Voodah]

Thanks for both of your answers. I'll be burning a few mBTC later at home.

I suggest however you measure your words. There are a lot of fanatics out there ready to chew on competition.

You say these two things for example, which mainly concern trust issues, without real consideration and little objectivity:

As far as JR is concerned, everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but I personally wouldn't feel assured in any way by someone sending 1000 BTC to an address for which he had the private key.

You wouldn't feel assured about a man who used his real account (doxed btw) who put 1k BTC into his idea, so as to be forced to have it move forward or face losing his fortune.

Yet you ask us to feel assured about three guys who come out of nowhere using sock accounts and no money backing the project (other than your personal expenditures)??

Do you realize how bad that sounds?

EDIT: From the beginning Mastercoin has been centralized and has relied on a trust system, and in Counterparty we are trying to limit centralization and maximize trustlessness in every way possible.

This is true so far, but we still have to trust in you guys, three absolute unknowns. Still, Mastercoin is actively considering going fully decentralized, which would make this point even and no longer valid.


I repeat, I like the concept and will be burning some later, so rest assured, this is not a flame. Just a word of caution on how you conduct yourselves.

[cityglut]

Thanks for both of your answers. I'll be burning a few mBTC later at home.

I suggest however you measure your words. There are a lot of fanatics out there ready to chew on competition.

You say these two things for example, which mainly concern trust issues, without real consideration and little objectivity:

As far as JR is concerned, everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but I personally wouldn't feel assured in any way by someone sending 1000 BTC to an address for which he had the private key.

You wouldn't feel assured about a man who used his real account (doxed btw) who put 1k BTC into his idea, so as to be forced to have it move forward or face losing his fortune.

Yet you ask us to feel assured about three guys who come out of nowhere using sock accounts and no money backing the project (other than your personal expenditures)??

Do you realize how bad that sounds?

EDIT: From the beginning Mastercoin has been centralized and has relied on a trust system, and in Counterparty we are trying to limit centralization and maximize trustlessness in every way possible.

This is true so far, but we still have to trust in you guys, three absolute unknowns. Still, Mastercoin is actively considering going fully decentralized, which would make this point even and no longer valid.


I repeat, I like the concept and will be burning some later, so rest assured, this is not a flame. Just a word of caution on how you conduct yourselves.

Thank you for your responses, and I will take your advice in measuring my tone.

I am glad to hear you will be burning, and we appreciate your support.

I do want to emphasize though that, since the code is open-source and extant, and we do not benefit from your burns (which are sent to a provably unspendable address) we are trying to minimize the question of trust.

If you can think of any way in which we can further minimize trust and centralization, please let me know.

Also, I want to emphasize that what I write reflects only my own beliefs, not those of the rest of the team.

[utopianfuture]

Sound like something worth watching. Good luck.

[romerun]

have you thought of doing it over Peercoin blockchain as BTC is so precious that it would be much sad to see it burnt ? Ppc inflates 1% on POS minting (although it also destroys 0.01 transaction fee), so the burnt coins will hopefully be regenerated and we can keep our XCP.

[NewLiberty]

Interesting project.
Are you able to tell us why did you decided to make these new accounts to announce this?

[btc4ever]

$ ./start_counterpartyd.sh
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./counterpartyd.py", line 504, in <module>
    blocks.follow()
  File "/home/counterpartycoin/counterpartyd/lib/blocks.py", line 401, in follow
    source, destination, btc_amount, fee, data = get_tx_info(tx)
  File "/home/counterpartycoin/counterpartyd/lib/blocks.py", line 306, in get_tx_info
    for vout in tx['vout']:
TypeError: 'NoneType' object is not subscriptable

[btc4ever]

I worked around the last problem by placing this code before the problem line.

    if tx == None:
        return None, None, None, None, None

So now it chugs along for a minute or two and then I get:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./counterpartyd.py", line 504, in <module>
    blocks.follow()
  File "/home/counterpartycoin/counterpartyd/lib/blocks.py", line 404, in follow
    source, destination, btc_amount, fee, data = get_tx_info(tx)
  File "/home/counterpartycoin/counterpartyd/lib/blocks.py", line 323, in get_tx_info
    data = binascii.unhexlify(asm[1])
TypeError: 'str' does not support the buffer interface

I'm not sure this is ready for primetime yet.  Well, you did say it is alpha.

[Jaguar0625]

The Counterparty protocol has not yet been finalized! You may lose your money if it changes!
[/center]

This looks like an interesting project. Has the timeframe of the burn period been decided? Does this warning mean that we shouldn't burn real BTC yet?

[cityglut]

The Counterparty protocol has not yet been finalized! You may lose your money if it changes!
[/center]

This looks like an interesting project. Has the timeframe of the burn period been decided? Does this warning mean that we shouldn't burn real BTC yet?

The burn period goes from block 278310 to block 283810, or roughly a month. You can burn real BTC, but there are risks associated with doing so, which is why there is a 50% reward that is linearly decreasing over the course of the burn period.

[cityglut]

Interesting project.
Are you able to tell us why did you decided to make these new accounts to announce this?

We have all been very active on bitcointalk, but we created new accounts primarily for two reasons: First, the code is open-source, and we want dicussion to be about the project, as opposed to our past activity within Bitcoin. Also, some of the functions we provide are innovations, and as such their legal status is not yet clear. We imagine that similar considerations prompted Satoshi to remain anonymous, and we felt that he made the right decision, so we decided to follow his example.

[zerodrama]

FLUX built on Link built on any coin is looking to do this as well. Only for abstract trades and barter schemes as well.

We'll be glad to share ideas.

Relevant threads:
LINK:
http://forum.feathercoin.com/index.php/topic,5558.0.html
http://forum.feathercoin.com/index.php/topic,6518.0.html

FLUX:
http://forum.feathercoin.com/index.php/topic,6185.0.html
http://forum.feathercoin.com/index.php/topic,6407.0.html
http://forum.feathercoin.com/index.php/topic,6552.0.html

[panonym]

Finally proof of burn \o/

Gonna read all this more carefully

[xnova]

have you thought of doing it over Peercoin blockchain as BTC is so precious that it would be much sad to see it burnt ? Ppc inflates 1% on POS minting (although it also destroys 0.01 transaction fee), so the burnt coins will hopefully be regenerated and we can keep our XCP.

We have been exploring taking the concept of Counterparty out to additional blockchains. From a technical standpoint, Counterparty uses the OP_RETURN feature of Bitcoin to store its data (full support for which will be included in Bitcoin v0.9, which will most likely be out and deployed across the major mining pools in about a month to two based on Gavin's estimates).

The advantage of this is that it's a very clean way of encoding the data: Counterparty transactions can be easily pruned from the blockchain. The disadvantage is that any altcoin looking to implement Counterparty support would need to have this feature (or, fork and extend the Counterparty protocol to use a slightly different encoding method, such as multisig or something similar to Mastercoin's Class A transactions).

Currently, Peercoin is moving to 0.8.4 code I believe. Once SunnyKing syncs up to 0.9, this may be possible (however, there may still need to be some adjustment made to deal with the stake blocks that Peercoin has).

This all being said, we are interested in speaking to altcoin developers (and especially ones that can work with the OP_RETURN featureset) as this develops. Counterparty becomes stronger as its standards are deployed across multiple blockchains.

[xnova]

$ ./start_counterpartyd.sh
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./counterpartyd.py", line 504, in <module>
    blocks.follow()
  File "/home/counterpartycoin/counterpartyd/lib/blocks.py", line 401, in follow
    source, destination, btc_amount, fee, data = get_tx_info(tx)
  File "/home/counterpartycoin/counterpartyd/lib/blocks.py", line 306, in get_tx_info
    for vout in tx['vout']:
TypeError: 'NoneType' object is not subscriptable

I ran into this as well, I have opened up a bug ticket with a root cause analysis. PhantomPhreak will hopefully be able to get it addressed tomorrow: https://github.com/PhantomPhreak/counterpartyd/issues/4

EDIT: This is actually because you do not have "txindex=1" specified in your bitcoin.conf file.

To fix, add that to your bitcoin.conf, then startup bitcoind manually using "bitcoind --txindex=1 --reindex=1" (along with a --datadir directive if using a non-default data directory location). Once bitcoind is done reindexing, you can kill bitcoind and restart bitcoin-qt or whatever normally.

[xnova]

Running setup.py on ubuntu, get this error:

Setting up sqlite3 (3.7.13-1) ...
Processing triggers for libc-bin ...
ldconfig deferred processing now taking place
sudo: pip3: command not found
2014-01-02 16:46:30,314|ERROR: Command failed: 'sudo pip3 install appdirs==1.2.0'

$ sudo pip-3.2 install appdirs==1.2.0
Requirement already satisfied (use --upgrade to upgrade): appdirs==1.2.0 in /usr/local/lib/python3.2/dist-packages
Cleaning up...

$ ./counterpartyd.py
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./counterpartyd.py", line 17, in <module>
    import dateutil.parser
ImportError: No module named dateutil.parser

$ sudo pip-3.2 install dateutil
Downloading/unpacking dateutil
  Real name of requirement dateutil is dateutil
  Could not find any downloads that satisfy the requirement dateutil
No distributions at all found for dateutil

so setup.py fails on pip3 appdirs, counterpartyd complains about missing dateutil, and I'm not sure how to install dateutil.

Hmm. I think that dateutil is called python-dateutil in pip.

btc4ever, let me know the Ubuntu version and I'll see if I can reproduce the problem, as I am maintaining the build system.

I developed on Ubuntu 13.10, but I want this to be able to run on 12.04 LTS, 12.10, 13.04 and 13.10. Support for other Linux versions can be added as well (I take pull requests!

[killerstorm]

EDIT: From the beginning Mastercoin has been centralized and has relied on a trust system, and in Counterparty we are trying to limit centralization and maximize trustlessness in every way possible.

Only Mastercoin funding is centralized, protocol itself isn't centralized.

[cryptrol]

Will I run into problems if I have bitcoind built with a newer leveldb ( > 4.8 )  ?

[PhantomPhreak]

Only Mastercoin funding is centralized, protocol itself isn't centralized.

This isn't the place to discuss Mastercoin, but it may be worth pointing out an important difference here between Mastercoin's protocol and Counterparty's: every Mastercoin transaction has to have a small output to the Exodus Address (to which at least J.R. holds the private key). Counterparty has no such limitation.

EDIT: typo

[PhantomPhreak]

Will I run into problems if I have bitcoind built with a newer leveldb ( > 4.8 )  ?

I can't think of why you would, but counterpartyd probably has not been tested with such a configuration before.

[PhantomPhreak]

I just pushed a commit to the repo. that should fix the TypeError: 'NoneType' object is not subscriptable bug mentioned above. Cheers.