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

[Luckybit]

3. To "globalize" an asset, for each block a proof-of-stake calculation is run for addresses controlled by a running instance of counterpartyd (against some random function derived from BTC block hash, for instance). A "globalize" command can be called by the user to denote the asset to "submit" to the PoS function. (I'm no good at the maths, so looking to existing PoS implementations to figure out how to do this). If no asset is selected to globalize, the client automatically chooses the "first" one (in lexicographical order, for instance).

The whole idea is good, though this might imho cause that an asset lower in priority, will be never globalized. We need to think of some way to compensate for that.

As I mentioned, allowing users to "pool" their "asset-globalizing" power to support projects that otherwise wouldn't hit the markets. Not in the NXT sense of "send all your money to me so I can mine PoS blocks", but something that better fits the "trust, but be trustless" model of XCP. And without requiring a centralized pool.

Suggestion: now would be an opportune time to get that 'dev' branch of the github set up to test ideas such as these. Alterations to assets are definitely not ready for prime-time yet.

Practical use case: credit token scheme

If we really want to see Counterparty blow up in usage and in utility, one of the best uses for it is to issue credit tokens. A credit token is basically a coupon which anyone can issue which represents a promise that they will redeem the credit coupon for their goods or services by a specific date.

The idea is everyone will start issuing these credit coupons and due to the expiration date there can be no hoarding. Everyone would be able to trade these credit coupons to get anything they could ever need.

In my opinion any kind of issuance should allow for an expiration date. If I issue a token then it must be redeemed by the expiration date or it is invalidated.

The main problem I see with Counterparty, Mastercoin or any of these is that we are all expected to buy XCP or Mastercoins but then there seems to be no fee structure in place. What can we spend our XCP for in the XCP ecosystem? If that isn't figured out then XCP really has no value until we know what the prices will be in the system.

Fees are fine. I want to know the fees so I can know how much XCP I will need to buy or burn. Not knowing the fees means we might not even need 1 XCP to do all of our transactions. In my opinion the fees should be high enough to make people keep buying XCP but low enough that anyone who really wants to do certain things can do what they want to do.

If it turns out that 1 XCP is all we will ever need then that is clearly too cheap. If 100 or 1000 XCP is all we will ever need it's still probably too cheap but that would depend on the total amount of XCP. So before we can say whether or not a fee is expensive or not we have to know how many XCP will ever exist. With Mastercoin we know how much Mastercoin will ever exist and still don't know the fee structure.

If we talk about demand then I think credit tokens will be in major demand. If fees are too high or too low the market can decide if we put in the ability for people to vote or speculate on the price of fees. So you could actually build a speculation or prediction market to discover the prices of the fees in a similar way to how Forex discovers the prices of different currencies.

So how much should issuing a credit token cost? Use Proof of Stake voting to allow the network to collectively determine or use the market to allow the network to speculate on the fee prices prior to there being any prices.

So to speculate we could set it up as a bet like:

"The fee for issuing credit tokens in XCP will be over 50 XCP?"
     Yes? No?

Or more generalized

"The fee for issuing an asset in Counterparty will be over 1 XCP?"
 Yes? No?


Everyone would then bet XCP that it will either be over 50 or under 50. Or they'd bet it would be over or under 1 XCP. One side has to be right. The winning side profits so no one would want to be on the losing side.
 
Price discovery is going to be critical and if developers don't know what the fees should be then why not build it in so the network/market can decide either by a client based vote or a decentralized betting market?

If we wanted to we could start betting on what we think it will be right now. Speculation is probably going to be one of the main uses of Counterparty along with betting. So should a decentralized bet even have a fee? My opinion is the fee should be set by whoever sets up the bet. So some bets can have fees bigger than others and let the free market determine if people are willing to part with XCP.

[1714759828]

1714759828

[1714759828]

1714759828

[1714759828]

1714759828

[1714759828]

1714759828

[Luckybit]

Also, I think there should be a significant fee for asset issuances, otherwise we'll get spammed with "parked" assets from people who just want to reserve nice names.

The problem with having fees for asset issuances is finding a way to keep them floating. Any fixed fee we would pick now would be too high, and then too low, if Counterparty scales as I hope it does.  If anyone has a suggestion for a fee schedule that will scale well, I'd love to hear it.

The current system does allow for the transference of asset ownership, so valuable names may indeed be sold for their market value when appropriate.

I think speculation is the solution to that problem. Channel speculation so that the fee always rests in perfect equilibrium with the market. The speculation will find the equilibrium point.

You could use a sort of distributed betting mechanism to allow players to predict what they expect the fees to be (guess the price of the fee for x?). So if Alice predicts the fee should be over 20 XCP and Bob predicts it should be under 20 XCP they should both bet and put their XCP on the line. The fee should be high enough that neither of them will want to be wrong. One of them will have to be right. So you can actually use speculation to find the price.

Bitshares is going to use speculation to determine the price of bitUSD. The price of Bitshares is determined by speculation via Protoshares. To determine the price for issuing an asset we have to speculate. Speculation will produce a price discovery where the market will decide the maximum amount it's willing to pay to issue an asset. That maximum amount should be the current fee. This would mean the fee would have to be dynamically adjusted in such a way that it adapts to speculation somehow.

One way I can think of to do this is to somehow have a decentralized data feed which is based on the outcome from betting/speculation. That data feed becomes the XCP fee price chart or XCP fee price index. Once the market or the network has made it's decision (consensus) the fees should be set for that hour, or that day.

I don't have it completely figured out though. I may have figured out that speculation can do it in theory but I don't have a detailed practical explanation for how to do it. I just believe that is ultimately how the problem will be solved and the direction you should take.

[jimhsu]

That sounds like a good strategy; however, I'd be concerned about the possibility of collusion. What if a significant minority of stakeholders decide that a certain fee level (high or low) is desirable (for whatever reason) and bet accordingly?

[Luckybit]

That sounds like a good strategy; however, I'd be concerned about the possibility of collusion. What if a significant minority of stakeholders decide that a certain fee level (high or low) is desirable (for whatever reason) and bet accordingly?

Couldn't that happen in any prediction market? But if they lose then they get punished so they would have to be very well organized. I'm not saying I have the most detailed or well thought out solution because I didn't put in a lot of time thinking about this but I do believe this is the direction which will lead to the solution.

So now that I've put the idea out there some people who do have the time to think about this can solve this problem. The sooner we start speculating on the fee price structure the quicker the market will determine what the fees ought to be. I do know you can't have zero fees. Free just isn't going to work for any of us who own shares in XCP, Mastercoin or anything else.

[cityglut]

About the future value of XCP: could you just realize that nobody has a clue, please.
Anybody saying that he know is just trolling. Up or Down, same same.

Indeed an instant x100 is very unlikely.
We may even suffer a relative lost during the first week/month after-burn.
Yet MSC is valued at 60 million.
XCP despite it's alpha-stage and few bug has already more presently working functionality than it's concurrent.

Both may succeed, both may crash, one may succeed better than the other.
But if MSC is valued at 60 millions, theoretically there is nothing preventing XCP to reach 30/60/120 millions.

Just don't expect such valuation too fast.
It could happen in 4~6 month, it could happen in 1 month, or it could never happen.
Just as BTC itself could lose most of it's value if a really amazing innovation appear in 6 month.

I personally plan to hold my XCP a few month, and will not sell them at loses.
If I must way 6 month for that, then 6 month it will be.
Middle term I hope a very nice ROI, but it's gambling.

Are we done?
If a troller come trying to lower XCP credibility without quality argument, just ignore him.
Don't feed the troll.
Everyone can think for him/herself.
If you guys can't resist talking about that, open a dedicated topic for speculation.
Most here are not interested in the "tiny war" between metacoin.
Let's keep focusing on XCP testing and improvement in all field.

Obvious reminder:
Don't invest more than you can afford to lose.

Hope everyone who have invest to making fast money have also remember make small donations for XCP project...

Developers: PhantomPhreak, xnova (Bitcointalk usernames)
BTC and XCP donations: 12J1YFvsWHDCU5HNAWNLNy1Q9nZo8Q4Xgs

If donate to quoted post, remember look address is right from first orginal post

This is the best advice you can give someone to secure thier investment. If you're the type of person who can sink 10+ BTC into this project you should be willing to give a few BTC to allow development to speed up, otherwise you might not get the x100 gains you're hoping for.

Also, I think there should be a significant fee for asset issuances, otherwise we'll get spammed with "parked" assets from people who just want to reserve nice names.

The problem with having fees for asset issuances is finding a way to keep them floating. Any fixed fee we would pick now would be too high, and then too low, if Counterparty scales as I hope it does.  If anyone has a suggestion for a fee schedule that will scale well, I'd love to hear it.

The current system does allow for the transference of asset ownership, so valuable names may indeed be sold for their market value when appropriate.

If we use a fee then you have to do some really trivial up front fee and then have a renewal fee after the expiration date which is a bit larger than the up front fee. If there are no fees at all you will have spam and hoarding. If there is no expiration date at all you end up with the same problems. We will have to find a creative solution.

If the asset is valuable at all then they should have the means to pay the fee. Honestly though this is a difficult problem and I see no way around it. There must be a fee to assign value to any object. So if a name is of value then it must have a cost associated to reflect it's value. Anything in the system must have a way of assigning value to it so how exactly else would you do it if not by a fee?

If I issue GOLD or CHASEUSD or any other attractive sounding asset, users will still need to do their due diligence in order to figure out whether the asset I have issued is worthwhile, and such due diligence would need to be done outside of the protocol itself. The 'market' should not be primarily thought of as the place where one discovers assets one would like to buy, but rather the place where one goes to purchase an asset one has read or heard about elsewhere. Since users can search for specific assets they are interested in purchasing, I don't think preventing spam should be a top priority.

[cityglut]

3. To "globalize" an asset, for each block a proof-of-stake calculation is run for addresses controlled by a running instance of counterpartyd (against some random function derived from BTC block hash, for instance). A "globalize" command can be called by the user to denote the asset to "submit" to the PoS function. (I'm no good at the maths, so looking to existing PoS implementations to figure out how to do this). If no asset is selected to globalize, the client automatically chooses the "first" one (in lexicographical order, for instance).

The whole idea is good, though this might imho cause that an asset lower in priority, will be never globalized. We need to think of some way to compensate for that.

As I mentioned, allowing users to "pool" their "asset-globalizing" power to support projects that otherwise wouldn't hit the markets. Not in the NXT sense of "send all your money to me so I can mine PoS blocks", but something that better fits the "trust, but be trustless" model of XCP. And without requiring a centralized pool.

Suggestion: now would be an opportune time to get that 'dev' branch of the github set up to test ideas such as these. Alterations to assets are definitely not ready for prime-time yet.

Practical use case: credit token scheme

If we really want to see Counterparty blow up in usage and in utility, one of the best uses for it is to issue credit tokens. A credit token is basically a coupon which anyone can issue which represents a promise that they will redeem the credit coupon for their goods or services by a specific date.

The idea is everyone will start issuing these credit coupons and due to the expiration date there can be no hoarding. Everyone would be able to trade these credit coupons to get anything they could ever need.

In my opinion any kind of issuance should allow for an expiration date. If I issue a token then it must be redeemed by the expiration date or it is invalidated.

The main problem I see with Counterparty, Mastercoin or any of these is that we are all expected to buy XCP or Mastercoins but then there seems to be no fee structure in place. What can we spend our XCP for in the XCP ecosystem? If that isn't figured out then XCP really has no value until we know what the prices will be in the system.

Fees are fine. I want to know the fees so I can know how much XCP I will need to buy or burn. Not knowing the fees means we might not even need 1 XCP to do all of our transactions. In my opinion the fees should be high enough to make people keep buying XCP but low enough that anyone who really wants to do certain things can do what they want to do.

If it turns out that 1 XCP is all we will ever need then that is clearly too cheap. If 100 or 1000 XCP is all we will ever need it's still probably too cheap but that would depend on the total amount of XCP. So before we can say whether or not a fee is expensive or not we have to know how many XCP will ever exist. With Mastercoin we know how much Mastercoin will ever exist and still don't know the fee structure.

If we talk about demand then I think credit tokens will be in major demand. If fees are too high or too low the market can decide if we put in the ability for people to vote or speculate on the price of fees. So you could actually build a speculation or prediction market to discover the prices of the fees in a similar way to how Forex discovers the prices of different currencies.

So how much should issuing a credit token cost? Use Proof of Stake voting to allow the network to collectively determine or use the market to allow the network to speculate on the fee prices prior to there being any prices.

So to speculate we could set it up as a bet like:

"The fee for issuing credit tokens in XCP will be over 50 XCP?"
     Yes? No?

Or more generalized

"The fee for issuing an asset in Counterparty will be over 1 XCP?"
 Yes? No?


Everyone would then bet XCP that it will either be over 50 or under 50. Or they'd bet it would be over or under 1 XCP. One side has to be right. The winning side profits so no one would want to be on the losing side.
 
Price discovery is going to be critical and if developers don't know what the fees should be then why not build it in so the network/market can decide either by a client based vote or a decentralized betting market?

If we wanted to we could start betting on what we think it will be right now. Speculation is probably going to be one of the main uses of Counterparty along with betting. So should a decentralized bet even have a fee? My opinion is the fee should be set by whoever sets up the bet. So some bets can have fees bigger than others and let the free market determine if people are willing to part with XCP.

XCP must be used for dividends, bets and paying fees for making bets on feeds.

Fees for betting on broadcasts are determined by the feed-operator, and if someone wants to bet on a feed, he has to match the fee given by the operator.

[Aleksk]

I would like to get hold of few XCP but I'm on a Mac. Anyone that could help?

[maxmint]

I would like to get hold of few XCP but I'm on a Mac. Anyone that could help?

I provide an "escrow burning" service and burn BTC on behalf of others. Please read the details here:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1GY1pNSLo8PUW8cSb9WJC8OdQOdrZ510pGEXTBIvq3i0

[nakaone]

I can keep my xcp in my blockchain.info to any time in the future if I do not want to use them?

[SyRenity]

Yet MSC is valued at 60 million.
XCP despite it's alpha-stage and few bug has already more presently working functionality than it's concurrent.

Both may succeed, both may crash, one may succeed better than the other.
But if MSC is valued at 60 millions, theoretically there is nothing preventing XCP to reach 30/60/120 millions.

Just don't expect such valuation too fast.
It could happen in 4~6 month, it could happen in 1 month, or it could never happen.
Just as BTC itself could lose most of it's value if a really amazing innovation appear in 6 month.

I personally plan to hold my XCP a few month, and will not sell them at loses.
If I must way 6 month for that, then 6 month it will be.
Middle term I hope a very nice ROI, but it's gambling.

Hope everyone who have invest to making fast money have also remember make small donations for XCP project...

Developers: PhantomPhreak, xnova (Bitcointalk usernames)
BTC and XCP donations: 12J1YFvsWHDCU5HNAWNLNy1Q9nZo8Q4Xgs

+1 to above.

Also please don't forget to donate to the developers. Without their efforts, there wouldn't be XCP, nor it has much chances to grow further.

Remember, there is no 5M$ fund like MSC, no wealthy early investors like NXT who can sponsor the R&D, so this is a truly community project.

[Luckybit]

XCP must be used for dividends, bets and paying fees for making bets on feeds.

Fees for betting on broadcasts are determined by the feed-operator, and if someone wants to bet on a feed, he has to match the fee given by the operator.

And with this information we can now speculate and somewhat predict what kind of price ranges these fees might be. I honestly think the betting function could be one of the killer apps because people like to speculate and there will be tons of feeds. That alone will probably support XCP.

For assets it's harder. You are right we have to do due diligence to avoid scams. For assets such as credits which can be redeemed it's important to deal with reputable businesses. Someone like Maxmint for example has a good reputation as being trusted to do escrows. He has done escrows for me and many others and has a perfect reputation. Someone like Maxmint could issue a Maxmint credit token for his escrow services and I would buy some of those tokens with the knowledge that in the next 6 months I'll probably want to use his escrow services. If I change my mind then I can trade his token for the token of someone else who is trusted and offers a service.

It's still possible to get scammed even like this, but if the tokens are reasonably cheap it's not that much of a risk to buy a small portion.

I would like to get hold of few XCP but I'm on a Mac. Anyone that could help?

I provide an "escrow burning" service and burn BTC on behalf of others. Please read the details here:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1GY1pNSLo8PUW8cSb9WJC8OdQOdrZ510pGEXTBIvq3i0

I just endorsed your escrow service. It's fairly easy to burn XCP and I figured it out but I still give you some business because it's good for the ecosystem of us all.

[PhantomPhreak]

Announcement: The develop branch of counterparty now specifies that 5 XCP is destroyed in all future asset issuances (after block 281235 281236). If we decide to make this official, the fixed amount will be temporary, and should be determined by a distributed, proof-of-stake voting system as soon as possible.

[jimhsu]

That should at least decrease asset-squatting until a more complete solution can be found.

Oh look, I invented a new word.

[SyRenity]

Announcement: The develop branch of counterparty now specifies that 5 XCP is destroyed in all future asset issuances (after block 281235). If we decide to make this official, the fixed amount will be temporary, and should be determined by a distributed, proof-of-stake voting system as soon as possible.

Awesome!

Any way to clean up all the already squatted assets?

[jimhsu]

Several potential ways:

1. Make all of them local and provide a way to globalize them (my suggestion)
2. Give them a finite lifespan that causes them to expire now/some time in the future (luckybit's suggestion)
3. Invalidate all of them and start over (the brute force solution) - personally I don't recommend this
4. Don't do anything (it's only 5 XCP...)
5. Retroactively charge 5 XCP (really don't recommend this)

The workable solutions I bolded.

Any others?

[SyRenity]

A thought I had about the future danger of BTC miners blocking the XCP transactions - what if we provide XCP as miners fee?
The fee might be relational to what BTC currently takes (0.0001) vs XCP total volume, 0.00001 for example.

Provided XCP raises in value, this will motivate miners to allow it through their systems and get paid for that, in addition to regular BTC fee.

[SyRenity]

Several potential ways:

1. Make all of them local and provide a way to globalize them (my suggestion)
2. Give them a finite lifespan that causes them to expire now/some time in the future (luckybit's suggestion)
3. Invalidate all of them and start over (the brute force solution) - personally I don't recommend this
4. Don't do anything (it's only 5 XCP...)
5. Retroactively charge 5 XCP (really don't recommend this)

The workable solutions I bolded.

Any others?

Perhaps a mix of 1 and 2 can be a good idea, both creating assets locally and pushing/paying when needed, and allowing fair chance others to re-register the asset in future.

[panonym]

Create a finite lifespan for asset appear to be an horrible idea to me...
Imagine if your BTC suddenly disappeared.
Or that you spend a lot of time for promotion, succeed to have an awesome dividend system to many client and suddenly all your client holding disappear.
I can hardly imagine something better to destroy your business.

[SyRenity]

Create a finite lifespan for asset appear to be an horrible idea to me...
Imagine if your BTC suddenly disappeared.
Or that you spend a lot of time for promotion, succeed to have an awesome dividend system to many client and suddenly all your client holding disappear.
I can hardly imagine something better to destroy your business.

Then perhaps requiring an upkeep fee, as one does with the domains, say X XCP per month?
Eventually the squater will find it uneconomical to hold all these assets for nothing.

[panonym]

I'm still waiting to see that.
1 time command/transmission, y$ set to be send in 2~48 time (automatically), over t time.

I have a pubkey with x.
I wish x/12 to be send to someone else every month (nb equi block).

edit: doing it manually every month will be a real pain + forget = business destroyed