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

[xnova]

If I may, I do think the intent was to release a working protocol and to encourage people to use it -and Not to create something where someone who was watching the forums more intently, or was tipped off as an insider for example, could get in to merely multiply their money at the expense of others.

I am aware that most people browsing alt-currency forums may very well be people looking to "make money out of thin air" if you will, on account of being early investors in something (having missed the early investment into bitcoin per say), without much caring as to what something does, or whether it offers any kind of potential benefit to others, or mankind at large. While this approach may in fact make a select number of people rich, nevertheless I think it is ultimately detrimental to the acceptance and development of digital monetization and finance in the broader sense.

I understand what you are saying but disagree.  I'm not looking for a quick 100,000% profit; just a smart investment in a good vehicle.  But, what is the incentive for me to invest right now as opposed to 3 weeks from now?  1,470 XCP instead of 1,000? 

As days and weeks pass, theoretically the risk will go down exponentially.  Why should the reward remain largely the same?

Are you discounting the reward of just the building and using counterparty.
If your endeavor can make use of it, having a few weeks head start on that can be worth more than +50%

50% seemed like a good balance to us. Other similar projects had used 40%, for instance, and we wanted to find a mix that rewarded early adopters (and people that got counterpartyd running/working and were helping us out through the alpha/beta process), while avoiding a situation of having excessive early rewards that would unfairly benefit any "project insiders" or "highly technical opportunists" over those of the general community, as well as hopefully eliminating any kind of "instamine"/"scam" type feeling to this.

[pmabdsf]

Are you discounting the reward of just the building and using counterparty.
If your endeavor can make use of it, having a few weeks head start on that can be worth more than +50%

50% seemed like a good balance to us. Other similar projects had used 40%, for instance, and we wanted to find a mix that rewarded early adopters (and people that got counterpartyd running/working and were helping us out through the alpha/beta process), while avoiding a situation of having excessive early rewards that would unfairly benefit any "project insiders" or "highly technical opportunists" over those of the general community, as well as hopefully eliminating any kind of "instamine"/"scam" type feeling to this.

Could you please elaborate on what uses I could have for this during these few weeks?  Maybe I don't fully understand the project.  Honestly 50% (45% now) of a bonus is not worth the risk and time value of money for me to invest now rather than 25 days later; but if there is some value in having these earlier I'd be happy to "buy" in.

Edit: and I just want to make clear I'm not asking to be convinced or sold on this idea; I like the project and I know you have nothing to gain by getting me in.  Just trying to understand and make a smart financial decision.

[xnova]

Are you discounting the reward of just the building and using counterparty.
If your endeavor can make use of it, having a few weeks head start on that can be worth more than +50%

50% seemed like a good balance to us. Other similar projects had used 40%, for instance, and we wanted to find a mix that rewarded early adopters (and people that got counterpartyd running/working and were helping us out through the alpha/beta process), while avoiding a situation of having excessive early rewards that would unfairly benefit any "project insiders" or "highly technical opportunists" over those of the general community, as well as hopefully eliminating any kind of "instamine"/"scam" type feeling to this.

Could you please elaborate on what uses I could have for this during these few weeks?  Maybe I don't fully understand the project.  Honestly 50% (45% now) of a bonus is not worth the risk and time value of money for me to invest now rather than 25 days later; but if there is some value in having these earlier I'd be happy to "buy" in.

Edit: and I just want to make clear I'm not asking to be convinced or sold on this idea; I like the project and I know you have nothing to gain by getting me in.  Just trying to understand and make a smart financial decision.

I totally understand what you're saying. The value in getting involved now is I think more technical than purely financial. Our current focus is on establishing the base technology footprint and vetting it through the community (giving input, finding bugs, etc). For those that are willing to spend the time (in getting counterpartyd up and running, etc) and take the risk of investing earlier, the 50% max bonus was to motivate them. They also benefit from being first to adopt this technology, which they can then (hopefully) start to build neat applications on, and be first to market/introduce these apps.

In your case, if you would rather wait until the end of the period to invest (either to mitigate the risk as much as possible, which makes sense, or, because you think you can make more money than the benefit of the 50% you would receive here in that time), then that's no problem.

At the end of the day, we want each person to make the investment decisions they are personally comfortable with. Thanks for your interest and your support of the project.

[pmabdsf]

Thanks for the positive reply and not getting upset at my financial perspective on this.  Trust me, if I had the technical skills I would love to help in the development and roll-out of this project.  Unfortunately, I've been blessed with financial skills and not technical.  In that light, if I can offer anything to the project please do let me know.  Otherwise I'll be watching closely over the rest of this period and hopefully buying in at the end.

[BldSwtTrs]

Assuming that I have follow the step of Installing for Windows there : http://counterpartyd-build.readthedocs.org/en/latest/BuildingFromSource.html
Then what exactly should I do to running it?

In the first post you say :

Assuming that you are running Bitcoind locally, run the following command in the downloaded project directory, replacing 'PASSWORD' with RPC password used by Bitcoind:
   ./counterpartyd.py --testnet --rpc-password=PASSWORD server
   For more information, e.g. about how to use a configuration file with counterpartyd, see the README.

And here (http://counterpartyd-build.readthedocs.org/en/latest/BuildingFromSource.html) you say :

After installing, open a command window and run counterpartyd in the foreground via:

cd C:\counterpartyd_build
C:\Python33\python.exe run.py --log-file=-
You can then run any of counterpartyd’s other functions, like the examples listed here.

To run the counterpartyd testsuite:

cd C:\counterpartyd_build
run.py tests

[xnova]

Assuming that I have follow the step of Installing for Windows there : http://counterpartyd-build.readthedocs.org/en/latest/BuildingFromSource.html
Then what exactly should I do to running it?

In the first post you say :

Assuming that you are running Bitcoind locally, run the following command in the downloaded project directory, replacing 'PASSWORD' with RPC password used by Bitcoind:
   ./counterpartyd.py --testnet --rpc-password=PASSWORD server
   For more information, e.g. about how to use a configuration file with counterpartyd, see the README.

And here (http://counterpartyd-build.readthedocs.org/en/latest/BuildingFromSource.html) you say :

After installing, open a command window and run counterpartyd in the foreground via:

cd C:\counterpartyd_build
C:\Python33\python.exe run.py --log-file=-
You can then run any of counterpartyd’s other functions, like the examples listed here.

To run the counterpartyd testsuite:

cd C:\counterpartyd_build
run.py tests

Yeah, if you use the build system, then you will run via the run.py script.... so, for instance, instead of running:

Code:

./counterpartyd.py --testnet --rpc-password=PASSWORD server

You would run:

Code:

C:\Python33\python.exe run.py --testnet server

(This assumes you have a counterpartyd.conf file setup with an rpc-password specified in it. If not, or if you want to specify your password explicitly, you can just do:

Code:

C:\Python33\python.exe run.py --testnet --rpc-password=PASSWORD server

The run.py script basically just runs counterpartyd.py in a dedicated python virtual environment, which has all the libraries at all the versions necessary (to keep things consistent), and is written to work on multiple platforms. So basically, you just use that run.py script, and pass in whatever args you need to (which are automatically passed to counterpartyd.py).

[porqupine]

The way the virtualEnv is created in windows seems to be kind of funky. For example I had to add Pythonpath for pretty table and appdirs in the counterparty.py as it did not want to find them.

Also what's the meaning of this code (under def setup_startup) for windows:

    runcmd("sudo cp -a %s/linux/init/counterpartyd.conf.template /etc/init/counterpartyd.conf" % paths['dist_path'])
        runcmd("sudo sed -r -i -e \"s/!RUN_AS_USER!/%s/g\" /etc/init/counterpartyd.conf" % run_as_user)

[xnova]

The way the virtualEnv is created in windows seems to be kind of funky. For example I had to add Pythonpath for pretty table and appdirs in the counterparty.py as it did not want to find them.

Also what's the meaning of this code (under def setup_startup) for windows:

    runcmd("sudo cp -a %s/linux/init/counterpartyd.conf.template /etc/init/counterpartyd.conf" % paths['dist_path'])
        runcmd("sudo sed -r -i -e \"s/!RUN_AS_USER!/%s/g\" /etc/init/counterpartyd.conf" % run_as_user)

You shouldn't have had to do that. If you just run setup.py on Windows, it should do everything from you. How are you trying to run counterpartyd.py (directly, or using the run.py script?) If using the build system, you should use run.py. If not, you'll have to install the deps manually, but you can run ./counterpartyd.py directly. I could change this in the future to install the python dependencies to the global python directory (instead of making its own virtualenv), but at that point I'm messing with people's python installs, which could conflict with other libraries, etc they may have installed, so I'd rather not do that.

The meaning of those lines you pasted is to take a template config file, and replace the string !RUN_AS_USER! with the actual username that the counterpartyd daemon will be run as (since we don't know that beforehand, and we need to supply that into in the upstart Linux script).

[xibeijan]

I don't think your PoB mining reward schedule offers an attractive investment opportunity.

There's only a linear decrease in reward, so early adopters are not rewarded very much at all.  Worse, the reward only decays down to 1000 XCP/BTC, so even in the latest stage a large-scale investor could obtain a huge sum of XCP.  At least it could have been a linear decrease down to zero.

Thus, I'm not sure, XCP makes a lot of sense for anyone to buy.  Seems like only big players can win here.

Here's a plot of the XCP reward for a 1 BTC investment.  The x-axis is the block number.

http://fooplot.com/#W3sidHlwZSI6MCwiZXEiOiIxMDAwKzUwMCooMjgzODEwLXgpLzU1MDAiLCJjb2xvciI6IiMwMDAwMDAifSx7InR5cGUiOjEwMDAsIndpbmRvdyI6WyIyNzcwNjYuMTUzODQ2MTUzOSIsIjI4MjU2Ni4xNTM4NDYxNTM5IiwiLTMzNjcuMjU0MzYwMDYzOTk5NyIsIjM1MDQuNjkzMzEzNTM2Il19XQ--

Not very inspiring... Maybe I got it wrong?

Anyway, that's just my thought on it.  Perhaps someone could explain how I'm wrong?  If not, then it's still not too late to decrease the reward for late-comers to make things more fair for those who have already invested.

+1
I was all on board with this when I started the lengthy process of getting ready to burn 1 BTC but after detailed research and thought, I came to the same conclusion.  Why not wait 20-25 days until things are easy, stable, and much more "evaluated" by the community and still get 1000 XCP at that point?

If I may, I do think the intent was to release a working protocol and to encourage people to use it -and Not to create something where someone who was watching the forums more intently, or was tipped off as an insider for example, could get in to merely multiply their money at the expense of others.

I am aware that most people browsing alt-currency forums may very well be people looking to "make money out of thin air" if you will, on account of being early investors in something (having missed the early investment into bitcoin per say), without much caring as to what something does, or whether it offers any kind of potential benefit to others, or mankind at large. While this approach may in fact make a select number of people rich, nevertheless I think it is ultimately detrimental to the acceptance and development of digital monetization and finance in the broader sense.

The financial component of a project is a critical component to its success.  How much XCP you allocate for developers and early adopters will impact how much free time (and will) these individuals have for contributing to the project.  People do not _only_ labor for things because they are cool or neato, though that is a large component of success in this realm.

Ideally you want a lot of stake holders, with a decent stake size, who will support the project and help drive it forward.

If these individuals are drowned out by huge late-comer investments from "dumb-money" (e.g., VCs and other large-scale late comers) then your community is essentially squashed because their stakes tend towards zero.

Thus, from a project success perspective, it seems quite important to incentivise/reward the founders, developers and early adopters over late comers.

To be fair, I see what you're trying to do by levelling the playing field over time, so that no one screams premine.  It's a nice idea and it could work, who knows.  However, I do not think it is a necessary risk to take with such a great project.  It is abundantly clear, based on the content of the code I have reviewed, the functionality already available and the description of your project, that your project does indeed have something behind it and is no a premise scam.

[panonym]

Good morning everyone *laugh

That's an interesting talk.
It is true that the 33.3% bonus decreasing over a month period is not that much.
Yet with it, it is easy to have in mind that the cost is 1BTC for 1000XCP, and that there is just a small reward for earlier one.
Without being totally disproportionate.
Of course I'd like more. Like many I am also here for the money.
But I'm mitigate.
Globally, I think the dev choice are quite good.
1 month is not that long, but much enough for everyone to think about it, sync, rescan, test, invest. 'take a week for many.
Nothing is perfect in life.
Mac user have to wait for software (but aren't mac intel based now? therefore ubuntu live CD working?)
Technical-comfortable guys can understand and do the necessary more quickly.
Struggling newbie like me have a really hard time, yet should have enough time to success.
Newcomer will have the possibility of simply sending money and get their XCP without any real work.
Which might not be the fairest either. As they get the same reward +still 10~20% bonus.

Well, now it's set.
The 1 month period is fixed. 82 BTC are already burned. It can no longer change.
As does the slight bonus reward.
The 1 BTC limit per address obviously doesn't prevent the early-bitcoiner to invest 100~500 BTC at the last moment, which might be less than 10% of their wealth for a few.
Which costed some less than buying 10 BTC at today USD price.
The concept of entity is flawed.
Without central authority & ID check it is hard to reach something more "even".
Yet at the same time I'm obviously glad there is not ID check nor anything centralized other that the dev hard work.

So, perfectible. But not that bad.
One solution could be to reward the early investor or the poster who obviously spent a lot of time for testing/burning/writing.
It could be done - for example - by letting the dev creating some asset that will provide a dividend on some long term bet system.
Then up to them to distribute them in an exponential way or an arbitrary way. Trying on best-try to reward the meritorious one*.
As a secondary bonus for those who didn't wait the last week to burn, and/or to those who explicitly used counterpartyd to burn, as originally required. [knowing it's very time consuming]

(*which is an arbitrary concept..)

Other reward system could be add on top of the XCP. If some have better ideas, express yourself.

edit: could also be a very tiny fee on XCP-themselves transfert, splitted in a lottery way between the one who burned during the first 2 weeks using the software. I don't know.

PS: txindex rescan reached block 267104 \o/ 'hopefull to burn today. Just a few hour more.

[cityglut]

I don't think your PoB mining reward schedule offers an attractive investment opportunity.

There's only a linear decrease in reward, so early adopters are not rewarded very much at all.  Worse, the reward only decays down to 1000 XCP/BTC, so even in the latest stage a large-scale investor could obtain a huge sum of XCP.  At least it could have been a linear decrease down to zero.

Thus, I'm not sure, XCP makes a lot of sense for anyone to buy.  Seems like only big players can win here.

Here's a plot of the XCP reward for a 1 BTC investment.  The x-axis is the block number.

http://fooplot.com/#W3sidHlwZSI6MCwiZXEiOiIxMDAwKzUwMCooMjgzODEwLXgpLzU1MDAiLCJjb2xvciI6IiMwMDAwMDAifSx7InR5cGUiOjEwMDAsIndpbmRvdyI6WyIyNzcwNjYuMTUzODQ2MTUzOSIsIjI4MjU2Ni4xNTM4NDYxNTM5IiwiLTMzNjcuMjU0MzYwMDYzOTk5NyIsIjM1MDQuNjkzMzEzNTM2Il19XQ--

Not very inspiring... Maybe I got it wrong?

Anyway, that's just my thought on it.  Perhaps someone could explain how I'm wrong?  If not, then it's still not too late to decrease the reward for late-comers to make things more fair for those who have already invested.

+1
I was all on board with this when I started the lengthy process of getting ready to burn 1 BTC but after detailed research and thought, I came to the same conclusion.  Why not wait 20-25 days until things are easy, stable, and much more "evaluated" by the community and still get 1000 XCP at that point?

If I may, I do think the intent was to release a working protocol and to encourage people to use it -and Not to create something where someone who was watching the forums more intently, or was tipped off as an insider for example, could get in to merely multiply their money at the expense of others.

I am aware that most people browsing alt-currency forums may very well be people looking to "make money out of thin air" if you will, on account of being early investors in something (having missed the early investment into bitcoin per say), without much caring as to what something does, or whether it offers any kind of potential benefit to others, or mankind at large. While this approach may in fact make a select number of people rich, nevertheless I think it is ultimately detrimental to the acceptance and development of digital monetization and finance in the broader sense.

The financial component of a project is a critical component to its success.  How much XCP you allocate for developers and early adopters will impact how much free time (and will) these individuals have for contributing to the project.  People do not _only_ labor for things because they are cool or neato, though that is a large component of success in this realm.

Ideally you want a lot of stake holders, with a decent stake size, who will support the project and help drive it forward.

If these individuals are drowned out by huge late-comer investments from "dumb-money" (e.g., VCs and other large-scale late comers) then your community is essentially squashed because their stakes tend towards zero.

Thus, from a project success perspective, it seems quite important to incentivise/reward the founders, developers and early adopters over late comers.

To be fair, I see what you're trying to do by levelling the playing field over time, so that no one screams premine.  It's a nice idea and it could work, who knows.  However, I do not think it is a necessary risk to take with such a great project.  It is abundantly clear, based on the content of the code I have reviewed, the functionality already available and the description of your project, that your project does indeed have something behind it and is no a premise scam.

What I can't understand is how you'll build a vibrant community if some large VCs or institutional investors come along on day 28 and inflate the currency supply 10x.

If the burn period were longer, then I would agree with you. However, since the burn period is only a month, the distinction between "late-comers" and "new-comers" is pretty slight.

Also, even though Counterparty is nearly feature-complete, we still run the risk of alienating later investors by rewarding early investors disproportionately. Indeed, I would say that the the more successful the project is in the long run, the more likely it is that people will accuse us of having premined in the future - even though XCP cannot be mined, at all.

The situation you depict regarding VCs and institutional investors is perhaps a concern, though I think not a great one. Usually institutional investors and VCs have to do long, strenuous research on a project before deciding whether to invest in it. Moreover, VCs and institutional investors tend to have much more modest investment goals than those involved in Bitcoin, so even if a few of them invest during the burn period, others will not be deterred from investing after the burn period, and early investors' XCP will still increase in value.

[panonym]

I just send you 14$ dev
To encourage your work.
Maybe not much, but still a little amount for me. 10x the first donation \o/
If 100 people do the same you're good

[cityglut]

I just send you 14$ dev
To encourage your work.
Maybe not much, but still a little amount for me. 10x the first donation \o/
If 100 people do the same you're good

Thanks very much for the donation. Don't worry about the size of the donation, we really appreciate the support.

[panonym]

Cityglut, do we have hidden devs by any chance? dark core member?
Just curious.
I thought PhantomPhreak & xnova were the only dev, but some message lead to confusion.

[cityglut]

Cityglut, do we have hidden devs by any chance? dark core member?
Just curious.
I thought PhantomPhreak & xnova were the only dev, but some message lead to confusion.

There are no hidden devs. I work with the xnova and PhantomPhreak but am not a dev, myself.

EDIT: I know your donation was directed at the devs, but they are quite busy with the project, and I did not want you to think your donation went unnoticed, so I took the liberty of thanking you on their behalf.

[panonym]

May I ask how you work?
doc? testing? hosting?

About your edit: no worries, thanks ^^
I did not give to get noticed, but to encourage their style which fits to the ideas I wish to support.
Yet it's nice to know it's appreciated.

Can you imagine a world where everyone often donate 1$ to support what they appreciate?
I'd love to see that in 10 years

[cityglut]

May I ask how you work?
doc? testing? hosting?

I have been an active tester, especially in the time leading up to Counterparty's release. I also try to reach out to the community on behalf of the Counterparty team.

[wizzardTim]

due to not having space on c:> drive, I created a VM in another drive with windows7 64bit to download qt. the blockchain will be downloaded in a few hours, and after that I will try the windows installer for the counteparty.
Should i modify anything after the installer? Should I add daemon=1 or not?

I will report any error.


Also, if i won't make it, and choose the blockchain.info path, will that be a problem for the future? I mean will it be difficult to send or get XCP?

[panonym]

wizzardTim, I think it's good that everyone try to use the software.
'coz the descentralized exchange and everything is based on it.
Even sending XCP require the soft for now. (assets too)
Might see an API allowing for XCP to be traded on centralized exchange BTC-e/cryptsy one day.
It would probably help with global popularity.
Yet it's really a new approach.

[reader31]

Good morning everyone *laugh

That's an interesting talk.
It is true that the 33.3% bonus decreasing over a month period is not that much.
Yet with it, it is easy to have in mind that the cost is 1BTC for 1000XCP, and that there is just a small reward for earlier one.
Without being totally disproportionate.
Of course I'd like more. Like many I am also here for the money.
But I'm mitigate.
Globally, I think the dev choice are quite good.
1 month is not that long, but much enough for everyone to think about it, sync, rescan, test, invest. 'take a week for many.
Nothing is perfect in life.
Mac user have to wait for software (but aren't mac intel based now? therefore ubuntu live CD working?)
Technical-comfortable guys can understand and do the necessary more quickly.
Struggling newbie like me have a really hard time, yet should have enough time to success.
Newcomer will have the possibility of simply sending money and get their XCP without any real work.
Which might not be the fairest either. As they get the same reward +still 10~20% bonus.

Well, now it's set.
The 1 month period is fixed. 82 BTC are already burned. It can no longer change.
As does the slight bonus reward.
The 1 BTC limit per address obviously doesn't prevent the early-bitcoiner to invest 100~500 BTC at the last moment, which might be less than 10% of their wealth for a few.
Which costed some less than buying 10 BTC at today USD price.
The concept of entity is flawed.
Without central authority & ID check it is hard to reach something more "even".
Yet at the same time I'm obviously glad there is not ID check nor anything centralized other that the dev hard work.

So, perfectible. But not that bad.
One solution could be to reward the early investor or the poster who obviously spent a lot of time for testing/burning/writing.
It could be done - for example - by letting the dev creating some asset that will provide a dividend on some long term bet system.
Then up to them to distribute them in an exponential way or an arbitrary way. Trying on best-try to reward the meritorious one*.
As a secondary bonus for those who didn't wait the last week to burn, and/or to those who explicitly used counterpartyd to burn, as originally required. [knowing it's very time consuming]

(*which is an arbitrary concept..)

Other reward system could be add on top of the XCP. If some have better ideas, express yourself.

edit: could also be a very tiny fee on XCP-themselves transfert, splitted in a lottery way between the one who burned during the first 2 weeks using the software. I don't know.

PS: txindex rescan reached block 267104 \o/ 'hopefull to burn today. Just a few hour more.

+1

I'm personally not so concerned about the decay rate rate of the reward over the first month, as it's such a short duration compared to the presumable life of this project anyways.

However I do strongly support your idea of building some sort of a reward system on top of XCP to reward contributors as that would send a strong signal to the community encouraging more people contribute...this would make a big difference to the long term success of the project.