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

[jimhsu]

Pay more, get more and everyone can buy. Is there any more fair way to distribute? Maybe you mean more even distributed?

I mean to avoid NXT situation, that moved a great concept into speculators hands.

This is very imperfect, but compare the taint percentages for NXT:

https://blockchain.info/taint/1BCN1ugdKdWd9pQ8Am9hMhtHZfmbXzxE8a

vs counterparty:

https://blockchain.info/taint/1CounterpartyXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXUWLpVr

Already we're seeing distribution to far more independent addresses, which speaks well to more hands. And the burn in period isn't even 1/2 done.

[SyRenity]

This is very imperfect, but compare the taint percentages for NXT:

https://blockchain.info/taint/1BCN1ugdKdWd9pQ8Am9hMhtHZfmbXzxE8a

vs counterparty:

https://blockchain.info/taint/1CounterpartyXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXUWLpVr

Already we're seeing distribution to far more independent addresses, which speaks well to more hands. And the burn in period isn't even 1/2 done.

Awesome, thanks for validating my feeling.
This will need to be featured in promotional materials (which probably will be needed once the burn is over).

I do wonder about top 10 addresses, these guys really created and moved so many accounts manually?

[BitThink]

NXT stopped fund raising adruptly much earlier than the closing date he announced and just collected 21 BTC. Counterparty closing date is hardcoded in the source code, and there're more than 600 BTC burnt in less than half of the duration. It can be safe to say, there're much more IPO investors of XCP than that of NXT.

From the speculating perspective, this will reduce the possibility of manipulation. So it's less possible to see the price of XCP shooting to 5000x in weeks like NXT.  Hopefully we can see the price grow slowly and steady following the adaption of the exchange.

[SyRenity]

NXT stopped fund raising adruptly much earlier than the closing date he announced and just collected 21 BTC. Counterparty closing date is hardcoded in the source code, and there're more than 600 BTC burnt in less than half of the duration. It can be safe to say, there're much more IPO investors of XCP than that of NXT.

From the speculating perspective, this will reduce the possibility of manipulation. So it's less possible to see the price of XCP shooting to 5000x in weeks like NXT.  Hopefully we can see the price grow slowly and steady following the adaption of the exchange.

I much prefer that personally, history shows that most people (other then get rich quick types) prefer gradual increase in value, without manipulated rapid contractions causing panic buys and sells (though I'm not sure how this applies to crypto, if at all).

[BitThink]

The US government, SEC.

[xnova]

A better argument against XCP, which also applies to cryptocoins in general, is that it won't ever find a large enough market.

As someone who lives in the US, I have yet to encounter a problem that bitcoin could solve for me. I don't want to buy illegal drugs. I don't want to throw money away slowly at 1% house edge by flipping coins. As of the beginning of this year SatoshiDICE and SilkRoad comprised something like 80% of the bitcoin economy. The other 20% was price speculation. Being able to buy regular stuff with bitcoins is a gimmick.

Now I am not saying bitcoin doesn't have its uses for people who live under corrupt regimes with very inflationary currencies. I'm sure it does. Money remittance is a pretty large market that bitcoin could solve, as we have seen from China's discovery of bitcoin. But that's just 1 special case.

Ethereum, XCP, MSC, and all the wonderful technology it offers like distributed exchange, financial derivatives, Turing-complete computation, etc. Will it really find a market? I personally think it's incredible that the technology exists and feel like I'm living in the future, but who will actually use these things? You can bet with very low edge already on betfair. If you want to trade financial instruments with low latency you can't beat a centralized exchange setup. People might use bitcoins to get around capital regulations or taxation, but do they really want to trade financial derivatives or compute things in a convoluted fashion? Will enough people even understand these features to be able to use them?

I hope I just lack imagination though...I hope other people smarter than me will create new markets with this technology.

Not to offend, but I get a dejavu from 2011 .

Let's see how deep it goes.

Just like 640KB should be enough for anyone. 

[SyRenity]

Question, will XCP rely on it's internal exchange, or it can benefit from a centralized external exchange?

[led_lcd]

Haha yeah like I said I hope I just lack imagination :-)

My bitcoin-qt finally synced \o/

Time to start betting on exotic crypto-financial derivatives!

I'll try and answer part of your question. Assuming that crypto currencies do establish themselves with some utility and adoption in the marketplace, then the next battleground will be for derivatives of crypto currencies.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_(finance)

Derivatives can be used in a variety of ways and the market is enormous:

1) Hedge against negative movements of an asset they hold.
2) Speculative trading - cf London Whale, where speculative trading was disguised as hedging.
3) Creation of complex instruments that are sold to other parties to a) hedge against difficult to calculate risks, b) make bets on the price movement of a set of assets.

To give a concrete example of a present day problem, a US retailer who accepts bitcoin has a risk exposure to the volatility of USD/BTC. They could choose to purchase a derivative to ensure they could sell their bitcoin at a later date at a fixed USD price (protect against the price of BTC crashing).

Similarly, the US retailer could use derivatives to protect against the price of bitcoin rising. Example: A customer purchases a television for 1 BTC. The retailer uses a payment processor such as bitpay to immediately convert the BTC to USD. In the future, the customer returns the television and wants a refund in BTC. The retailer could purchase a BTC derivative to give them the right to purchase BTC at a fixed price in the future.

Some reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign-exchange_option

[jimhsu]

Haha yeah like I said I hope I just lack imagination :-)

My bitcoin-qt finally synced \o/

Time to start betting on exotic crypto-financial derivatives!

I'll try and answer part of your question. Assuming that crypto currencies do establish themselves with some utility and adoption in the marketplace, then the next battleground will be for derivatives of crypto currencies.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_(finance)

Derivatives can be used in a variety of ways and the market is enormous:

1) Hedge against negative movements of an asset they hold.
2) Speculative trading - cf London Whale, where speculative trading was disguised as hedging.
3) Creation of complex instruments that are sold to other parties to a) hedge against difficult to calculate risks, b) make bets on the price movement of a set of assets.

To give a concrete example of a present day problem, a US retailer who accepts bitcoin has a risk exposure to the volatility of USD/BTC. They could choose to purchase a derivative to ensure they could sell their bitcoin at a later date at a fixed USD price (protect against the price of BTC crashing).

Similarly, the US retailer could use derivatives to protect against the price of bitcoin rising. Example: A customer purchases a television for 1 BTC. The retailer uses a payment processor such as bitpay to immediately convert the BTC to USD. In the future, the customer returns the television and wants a refund in BTC. The retailer could purchase a BTC derivative to give them the right to purchase BTC at a fixed price in the future.

Some reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign-exchange_option

MOST especially #1. Currency risk in fact is the number one thing hampering global adoption of cryptocurrencies, as alluded through numerous times in the US senate bitcoin hearings, the PBOC statements, other statements by the US government, even more statements from other foreign governments, and most of all merchants. (Again it goes back to trust, though -- who will run the derivatives exchange?)

The derivatives market in the US is worth approximately ... $600,000,000,000,000. That's right, 600 trillion. That was back in 2007-2008. Estimates for the global market in 2012 are in the quadrillions. Both hugely scary, and a huge opportunity for cryptocurrencies (if they combined can capture even 1% of that market...)

[jimhsu]

Are the devs broadcasting CoinDesk API prices? That's interesting, if a bit pricey for a broadcast service. How to use this to place a bet though?

Broadcast: 'CoinDesk BPI USD' = 856.5558 from 1Pcpxw6wJwXABhjCspe3CNf3gqSeh6eien
 at 2014-01-13T20:10:27-06:00 with a fee multiplier of 0.0010 (b844b81e...7580d4
f5)

Broadcast: 'CoinDesk BPI USD' = 855.2317 from 1CeQHd59TFKWQzsWYDXc9NDX2ooMSRpiqi
 at 2014-01-13T21:10:45-06:00 with a fee multiplier of 0.0010 (e0ab9cad...af90bc
6b)

[edok]

Can someone please explain in layman's terms how to invest in this coin? I'm not very technical but I'm interested in investing.

Also, just had a thought. What if OP is...http://victorstuff.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Joker-billionaire-burning-money-700x357.jpg

[edok]

To invest in XCP and Counterparty, switch Bitcoind/Bitcoin-Qt and counterpartyd over to mainnet simultaneously. Use the command-line switch -testnet=0 with Bitcoind or remove any 'testnet=1' from the Bitcoind configuration file temporarily; then do the same for counterpartyd by both not using the --testnet flag and (again, temporarily) removing 'testnet=1' from counterpartd.conf.

Make sure that Bitcoind and the counterparty server are running, and then run ./counterparty --rpc-password=PASSWORD burn --from=ADDRESS --quantity=QUANTITY, where 'PASSWORD' is the password used to access Bitcoind's RPC interface, 'ADDRESS' is an address in your Bitcoind wallet with sufficient bitcoins, and 'QUANTITY' is the quantity of BTC that you would like to burn.

No more than 1 BTC may ever be burned by any address, and the number of XCP received per BTC is between 1000 and 1500, with more XCP being rewarded the earlier in the burn period the burn takes place. The burn period is 5000 blocks, starting today, and the reward bonus decreases linearly with block index.

To see how many BTC you have burned, and how many XCP you have earned, run ./counterparty --rpc-password=PASSWORD address ADDRESS.

Of course, you can burn Test BTC on testnet to have XCP to play with there.

To get a rough idea of how many BTC have been burned so far, see https://blockchain.info/address/1CounterpartyXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXUWLpVr. Note that this page may show some false positives. You cannot just send bitcoins to that address with any client and expect to have them be properly burned. For more instructions on how to burn, e.g. with a Blockchain.info wallet, see Read The Docs.

So to invest I'm assuming I need to know at least half of the words in here...hmmm.

[led_lcd]

Can someone please explain in layman's terms how to invest in this coin? I'm not very technical but I'm interested in investing.

Also, just had a thought. What if OP is...http://victorstuff.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Joker-billionaire-burning-money-700x357.jpg

Try following the instructions here:

http://counterpartyd-build.readthedocs.org/en/latest/HowToBurn.html#blockchain-info-my-wallet

If it reassures you, many of us on the forum here has downloaded the software, installed it and have it running. It is real code that is working. Unfortunately, as you have mentioned it's fairly technical at this early stage to install.

However, if you were willing and have some patience and wish to independently verify that the software does work, try following this link:

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

[jimhsu]

Yes a lot of work needs to be done to make this more, well, usable. That's the price of early adoption.

[BitThink]

After following all the bitcoind configuration and counterpartyd installation instructions, I run bitcoin-qt and receive this error "You need to rebuild the database using -reindex to change -txindex". Then the program closes. How do I solve this issue?

run "bitcoin-qt --reindex" in a terminal and wait about 12 hours for it to finish.

[SyRenity]

Question, once we done burning, how exactly the founding developers will be motivated for keeping up with the work?

Will there be any bounties system set, and how it's going to be sponsored?

[BitThink]

Question, once we done burning, how exactly the founding developers will be motivated for keeping up with the work?

Will there be any bounties system set, and how it's going to be sponsored?

1) The founding developers have no access to the burnt bitcoins, so whether the burning finish or not does not affect their incentives. If they burnt some bitcoins (most likely they have burnt quite a lot), then they have the same incentives as our investors. Since they have spent a lot of time on it already, hopefully they will have more incentive.

Actually I think they will have more incentives than those who have access to exodus address, because the only way for the developers to be beneficial from this project is to make it a success. Those who have access to exodus address may feel they are rich enough and just enjoy the BTC they received.

The drawback is that they will have no enough money to hire more developers and provide bounties. One the other hand, the community is more willing to contribute to this project as long as they have invested on this project (either by burning some btc or buying some in the market). It's like open-source community project vs. private company project.

2) They've provide a donation address, but currently only 4 transactions and 0.046 BTC has been donated.
[qoute]
We are looking for community contributions of testing, bug reports, patches, and companion software (e.g. built around counterpartyd). We are also asking for donations of BTC and XCP to 12J1YFvsWHDCU5HNAWNLNy1Q9nZo8Q4Xgs, which funds will be used to issue bounties for the development of the project.
[/quote]
Note: don't trust the address in quote of others (including me) and always check the post #1 of this thread.  

[BitThink]

After following all the bitcoind configuration and counterpartyd installation instructions, I run bitcoin-qt and receive this error "You need to rebuild the database using -reindex to change -txindex". Then the program closes. How do I solve this issue?

run "bitcoin-qt --reindex" in a terminal and wait about 12 hours for it to finish.

Hmmm, 12 hours? With a modern cpu and ssd? Maybe I'll use another burn method.

Yes, it's a single-thread task, but ssd may helps. You have to do it anyway if you want to use the XCP, so I suggest doing it now. The difference between burning it now and 12 hours later is negligible.

[SyRenity]

The drawback is that they will have no enough money to hire more developers and provide bounties. The advantage is that the community is more willing to contribute to this project as long as they get some XCP. It's like open-source community project vs. private company project.

That my point exactly, where from these XCP's are going to be paid off?

If the developers are not allocating some development fund (and apparently they not), the only source for these XCP would be the community, which may actually prefer hoarding the coins, rather then donating them for the cause.

[scotjam]

BTW, even though there is no guarantee for so many things when it comes to XCP there is 724.8935 BTC burned already at the time of
this post. Can't belive it. If I or someone else asked for 0.01 BTC for free no one would send it. All you morons would just go over that
the same way you would go over a guy on a street asking for a change to buy food. Fuck you! I wish you lose all your money invested.

This is a bizarre attitude. By burning BTC, any investor in XCP is effectively making BTC scarce, and therefore is potentially making all other BTC worth a little bit more. If you don't believe XCP is worth anything, think of investing in it as a voluntary "tax" / "donation" to help out *all* other BTC investors, not a destruction of real value.

scotjam