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

[Luckybit]

I hate to say this after the fact, but proof of burn is a really, really, really stupid, inefficient and unproductive concept.
There are much better ways to handle proof of stake.
That money could have fed a whole village in africa for a year.
I would much rather the devs got that 1,400 BTC than it just being destroyed pointlessly.

Of course, I've said this after the fact.

Yeah, it was a worthy experiment.  I can't imagine anyone else creating a proof of burn coin anytime soon, but thats not to say XCP can't be great, even if it's birth turns out to be an experiment that is never repeated.

Ironically, considering the atmosphere of the alt-scene at the time this was launched (ie. new IPO scams every day), XCP would probably have received a tiny fraction of the investment that it ended up getting.  So, in the end, proof of burn was necessary to get XCP to where it is at today.  So, silly to wonder what could have been accomplished with that 1400 BTC if it hadn't been burned, because if it hadn't been burned there wouldn't be anything close to 1400 BTC invested here.

Lost coins only make everyone else’s coins worth slightly more. Think of it as a donation to everyone.

Satoshi Nakamoto

The only result from burning that BTC is a slightly lower rate of inflation. It lessens the impact of mining inflation. So unless you think inflation is a good thing then burning coins is actually what deflation is all about. In deflation you destroy coins while in inflation you generate new ones. When you destroy the coins you decrease supply.

And please no guilt trips about African children. Bitcoin is divisible so no one is going to fall for that. If we burn a lot of Bitcoins it changes absolutely nothing when you can divide the remaining Bitcoins infinitely.

If 5000 Bitcoins get burned the value of those coins is dispersed to everyone. That is actually the most fair way to do it because the value does not leave Bitcoin. If we use the coins to buy some other coin the value leaves Bitcoin and goes into that other coin.

This is why Litecoin is going for $20, it's because people are spending Bitcoins to buy them. Imagine if people burned Bitcoins to get Litecoins? They would still get Litecoins but it would increase the buying power of Bitcoin while they transition.

[1714628251]

1714628251

[1714628251]

1714628251

[1714628251]

1714628251

[Luckybit]

I think it is a logical fallacy to assume that proof-of-burn is the only method of securing a permanent record of fair distribution.

Let me suggest this hypothetical:
I could contact a donation agent at the WWF or Red cross and say, "I want to donate somewhere between $100,000-$1,000,000 to your organization in the form of bitcoin. All you have to do is post an address on your website where you would like to receive the bitcoins."
They could post a news article on their website with the intended address, then a system could be set up to watch and distribute XCP based on the coins sent to that address, much in the same way we are doing now.

In this hypothetical situation, we know that I nor anyone but the charity controls the bitcoin address.

In another hypothetical:

A small amount could be shaved off the XCP amount before being dispensed to the recipients. I send 1 BTC to an address. I am awarded 1000 XCP minus 2-3% which is award to the dev accounts (I get 980, they get 20).

This would be an autodonation, but we know that they couldn't run off with my BTC, they would actually need to develop XCP into something valuable to profit from my BTC.

One of the largest problems with cryptocurrencies I find is that they are developed by programmers, not economists or necessarily freedom fighters. Most developers are focused on making the code work and not developing a fairer or more efficient system. If you're not a programmer, fat chance at getting anyone to listen to your great ideas or join your cause.

When we look back at all the electricity we've wasted on bitcoins PoW concept to "secure the blockchain" as you put it, I think we will be a little disappointed at how wasteful and naive we were.

I don't think proof of burn is attempting to address fair distribution. It is one means of addressing trust or lack of trust.

I do like the idea regarding donations. 'Proof of Donation' sounds pretty neat don't you think?

Autodonation is a nice idea but not much different to what people call 'pre-mining'.

I don't think it's a wise idea to donate more to the developers than you're prepared to lose should these anonymous developers pack their bags and leave. If you give them too much money they might have incentive to take the money and disappear.

A better idea is to start crowd funding bounties to extend Counterparty. It's open source and these aren't the only developers capable of developing it even if they are the lead developers.

[cityglut]

A practical question that I have:

Say we have an investor, who we want to allocate shares using XCP asset mechanism, how we actually reflect the real value he invested into us in XCP asset?

For example he placed X BTC for Y shares issued, which set the post-money valuation of the asset to = X BTC * Z shares we have now / Y shares issued.
How do we reflect that this was real - perhaps by receiving the funds at same BTC address, which was used for asset creation?


Speaking off, is there a way to change asset details after it was generated (i.e. amount of shares, divisibility, etc...)?

Please correct me if I've misunderstood you, but I believe you are asking: How can market valuation be reflected in reality?

Using counterpartyd, an address uses the 'issuance' function to create an asset (let's call it ASSET), and then uses the 'order' function to put ASSET on the distributed exchange, (where, in your example, syntax would be --give-asset=ASSET --give-quantity=Y --get-asset=BTC --get-quantity=X --fee=FEE --expiration=EXPIRATION).  Whoever wants to buy ASSET will have to put up an order to match yours, and, once matched, will have to use the 'btcpay' function to send BTC to the address which put up the 'trade ASSET for BTC' order. Users must send BTC to the address which is selling ASSET in order to complete the transaction.

So, if Z shares of ASSET are exchanged for X BTC per share (where Z<=the total number of shares of ASSET), then ASSET'S valuation is indeed X BTC * Z shares, just as you said. However, whoever bought shares of ASSET can then put them on the distributed exchange in exchange for any other asset, and so the greater the number of assets for which ASSET is exchanged, the more conversions you will need to do to get the market valuation in BTC, however, as long as every asset *has* a market rate, it should always be possible to determine ASSET's valuation.

The way to change the total number of ASSET, is to issue more ASSET. Only the address that issued ASSET originally can issue more ASSET. Addresses can, however, transfer ownership of an asset name to other addresses. At the moment, I don't believe there is a way to divide shares, though one of the team members may correct me on this.

I am sorry if this explanation is a bit unclear, but hopefully it helps! 

[PhantomPhreak]

I assume the devs will push a hotfix soon, although it does worry me a little bit that activity on the counterpartyd repo (including the dev branch) seems to have tailed off  -- and right when I was starting work on a GUI!.  Hope the large influx of capital hasn't diluted their shares to the point where they're losing interest.  This is a extremely promising project.

I haven't had good Internet access is all! And if there're are any particular changes to counterpartyd that you'd like to see happen in the near future, let us know.

Excellent, glad you're here.

I really like the zmq API in the dev branch.  ZeroMQ is a brilliant piece of engineering that makes true multiprocessing a snap. Is that going to be integrated into production?  If so, I'll use its pubsub for the GUI I'm building to get updates instead of polling the JSON-RPC API.

Also, are you drawing the line at 1 confirmation?  i.e, do you not want to show any 0 confirmation transactions?  If not, an easy and effective way in Python to signal whenever a new tx hits the network is to use one of the many implementation of ArtForz's old Python half-node, which is effectively a Bitcoin node (as you probably know).  In fact, Jeff Garzik has made this into a full Bitcoin node in PyNode.

Anyway, the asyncore imple is probably best for this project since it wouldn't introduce any external dependencies and can be used with any Python3 (asyncio/tulip is very cool but only 3.3+).  But this way, you can get notification of new 0 confirmation transactions without polling bitcoind listsinceblock, which is inefficient and cumbersome since you have to keep up with the tx's you've already processed.

This way, there's no 10 minute delay before a new tx shows up (of course, you'd need to indicate it's a 0 confirmation tx).  But I can understand if you've decided to only officially display 1 confirmation transactions.

Absolutely, the ZeroMQ API will be merged into master as soon as one last bug in develop is fixed.

I've thought a lot about the one-confirmation issue, and the issue is that zero-confirmation transactions, while currently pretty reliable, will not be at all reliable in the near future, e.g. when a replace-by-fee patches and alternative implementations of the Bitcoin protocol become more widely used. Yes, I think that the safe thing, at this stage, is to stick to one-confirmation.

[TheMightyX]

Burning BTC is not like burning oil, trees, or other things have real value. There's nothing lost to the world. The only result is that the rest BTC have appreciated a little bid. Therefore, it's not a waste like we burn a lot of oil or coal or tree for nothing.

Moreover, it's arguable whether giving Devs 1500 BTC is better for the incentive. If I were the dev and got 1500 BTC, I could be quite lazy and tends to enjoy the life instead of coding around the clock.

Therefore, it has to be a foundation manage the 1500 BTC transparently for bounties. In that case, centralization may lead to corruption, and community are reluctant to contribute and only paid coders work for money. Look at the progress of Mastercoin.

Burning BTC is EXACTLY like burning oil, trees or things with real value.
The electricity used to mine those BTC is a very, very real thing. As well, the money backing up those BTC is a very real thing which could be used to acquire goods or services that could benefit a lot of people instead of (in this case) no one.

I do have to agree with you about the motivation aspect though. It was something I didn't consider. The devs might be more interested in finding ways to spend their new millions. This is a valid concern. But it could be dispersed to them via an escrow system over the course of months, years via a Distributed Autonomous Corp.

Am I the only one who thinks its ironic that the system which this project intends to create could be used to pay itself over time (like a DAC). This company could be programmed to pay out a certain percent of whatever funds over the course of a time frame.

[TheMightyX]

I hate to say this after the fact, but proof of burn is a really, really, really stupid, inefficient and unproductive concept.
There are much better ways to handle proof of stake.
That money could have fed a whole village in africa for a year.
I would much rather the devs got that 1,400 BTC than it just being destroyed pointlessly.

Of course, I've said this after the fact.

You obviously don't understand Proof of Burn. The money isn't the same as the value. Value isn't the same as the money. When you destroy Bitcoin units the value itself is actually dispersed which increases the value for all who own Bitcoins.

This isn't like gold or dollars where physical destruction also destroys the value. This is digital. What that means is that value actually is increased the more scarce you make Bitcoin (deflation!).

If you think inflation creates value please check out infinitecoin. It will inflate forever so there will be plenty of coins for African children.

I think maybe you've misunderstood my sentiment. Those btc represent a real world value or service today, that I or you could buy. Instead of using them for a common good and also receiving stake, we are sacrificing the buying power of this commodity for that stake. I believe that is a very valid concern. I don't believe saying that everyone elses bitcoins absorb the value of the burnt bitcoins adequately addresses this concern.

Edit: On a related note, all though the value of other peoples bitcoins may rise, instead of giving that money to a charity or cause and making a difference, savings lives, cleaning up an oil spill; you are giving a few cents value away to a bunch of people who don't and won't notice/care about it.
"wow, someone destroyed a bunch of bitcoins, that affects the current value of my BTC 0% but the future/hypothetical value of my coins by ((total BTC before burn * BTC value) / total BTC after burn) etc etc."

I'm not sure why you've used infinitecoin as an example of something successful that will continue to be successful and has some sort of brilliant design. It was not created by economists or financial experts. It's been out for a very short period of time and its success (if you can call it that) could be attributed to the rabid environment we have today where everyone is trying to get in on the ground floor of practically everything, even stupid joke coins like doge. This environment is leading to the (at least short-term) success of every scamcoin under the sun.

[brite_enclave]

PhantomPhreak and xnova are there any plans for a user friendly client shortly after the burn period is finished? If not should we as a community start discussing and possibly set up a bounty for this? I would be happy to donate some BTC or XCP for a client.

Thanks for all the great work you guys have been doing on this. I’ve donated to the dev fund and intend to donate more.

As a third-party dev, I've started work on a user-friendly client that should be done in about 4-5 weeks working part-time.  However, if there were a significant bounty, I could probably justify working on it full-time (I'm a freelancer) and have it done in probably a week or less (at least a beta version).

I'd also love to get input from users on what you want.  At the moment, it's designed as a client with two tabs, one for your wallet (with the usual wallet features) and one for the market.  You will be able to filter the market transactions by type.  Probably a third tab for broadcasts.  Any other ideas?

Edit: Also, depending on user feedback, I could fairly easily change the tabs to a more traditional toolbar-driven interface, if that's what more people want.

[TheMightyX]

PhantomPhreak and xnova are there any plans for a user friendly client shortly after the burn period is finished? If not should we as a community start discussing and possibly set up a bounty for this? I would be happy to donate some BTC or XCP for a client.

Thanks for all the great work you guys have been doing on this. I’ve donated to the dev fund and intend to donate more.

As a third-party dev, I've started work on a user-friendly client that should be done in about 4-5 weeks working part-time.  However, if there were a significant bounty, I could probably justify working on it full-time (I'm a freelancer) and have it done in probably a week or less (at least a beta version).

I'd also love to get input from users on what you want.  At the moment, it's designed as a client with two tabs, one for your wallet (with the usual wallet features) and one for the market.  You will be able to filter the market transactions by type.  Probably a third tab for broadcasts.  Any other ideas?

Edit: Also, depending on user feedback, I could fairly easily change the tabs to a more traditional toolbar-driven interface, if that's what more people want.

We want a gui -_-

[kdrop22]

PhantomPhreak and xnova are there any plans for a user friendly client shortly after the burn period is finished? If not should we as a community start discussing and possibly set up a bounty for this? I would be happy to donate some BTC or XCP for a client.

Thanks for all the great work you guys have been doing on this. I’ve donated to the dev fund and intend to donate more.

As a third-party dev, I've started work on a user-friendly client that should be done in about 4-5 weeks working part-time.  However, if there were a significant bounty, I could probably justify working on it full-time (I'm a freelancer) and have it done in probably a week or less (at least a beta version).

I'd also love to get input from users on what you want.  At the moment, it's designed as a client with two tabs, one for your wallet (with the usual wallet features) and one for the market.  You will be able to filter the market transactions by type.  Probably a third tab for broadcasts.  Any other ideas?

Edit: Also, depending on user feedback, I could fairly easily change the tabs to a more traditional toolbar-driven interface, if that's what more people want.

We want a gui -_-

Thanks for working on this, this is exactly what the community needs.

[jimhsu]

PhantomPhreak and xnova are there any plans for a user friendly client shortly after the burn period is finished? If not should we as a community start discussing and possibly set up a bounty for this? I would be happy to donate some BTC or XCP for a client.

Thanks for all the great work you guys have been doing on this. I’ve donated to the dev fund and intend to donate more.

As a third-party dev, I've started work on a user-friendly client that should be done in about 4-5 weeks working part-time.  However, if there were a significant bounty, I could probably justify working on it full-time (I'm a freelancer) and have it done in probably a week or less (at least a beta version).

I'd also love to get input from users on what you want.  At the moment, it's designed as a client with two tabs, one for your wallet (with the usual wallet features) and one for the market.  You will be able to filter the market transactions by type.  Probably a third tab for broadcasts.  Any other ideas?

Edit: Also, depending on user feedback, I could fairly easily change the tabs to a more traditional toolbar-driven interface, if that's what more people want.

If you post a BTC/XCP address and maybe a screenshot or two, you could fairly easily get some significant donations that way. Just a suggestion.

[Patel]

PhantomPhreak and xnova are there any plans for a user friendly client shortly after the burn period is finished? If not should we as a community start discussing and possibly set up a bounty for this? I would be happy to donate some BTC or XCP for a client.

Thanks for all the great work you guys have been doing on this. I’ve donated to the dev fund and intend to donate more.

As a third-party dev, I've started work on a user-friendly client that should be done in about 4-5 weeks working part-time.  However, if there were a significant bounty, I could probably justify working on it full-time (I'm a freelancer) and have it done in probably a week or less (at least a beta version).

I'd also love to get input from users on what you want.  At the moment, it's designed as a client with two tabs, one for your wallet (with the usual wallet features) and one for the market.  You will be able to filter the market transactions by type.  Probably a third tab for broadcasts.  Any other ideas?

Edit: Also, depending on user feedback, I could fairly easily change the tabs to a more traditional toolbar-driven interface, if that's what more people want.

I think if you knocked it out in a week and released it, you would get lots of donations. Maybe even more than you would if you took donations before creating the client. I know I would donate after its done.

[TheMightyX]

PhantomPhreak and xnova are there any plans for a user friendly client shortly after the burn period is finished? If not should we as a community start discussing and possibly set up a bounty for this? I would be happy to donate some BTC or XCP for a client.

Thanks for all the great work you guys have been doing on this. I’ve donated to the dev fund and intend to donate more.

As a third-party dev, I've started work on a user-friendly client that should be done in about 4-5 weeks working part-time.  However, if there were a significant bounty, I could probably justify working on it full-time (I'm a freelancer) and have it done in probably a week or less (at least a beta version).

I'd also love to get input from users on what you want.  At the moment, it's designed as a client with two tabs, one for your wallet (with the usual wallet features) and one for the market.  You will be able to filter the market transactions by type.  Probably a third tab for broadcasts.  Any other ideas?

Edit: Also, depending on user feedback, I could fairly easily change the tabs to a more traditional toolbar-driven interface, if that's what more people want.

We want a gui -_-

Thanks for working on this, this is exactly what the community needs.

Yes, thanks for this.

I think the design sounds good. IMO simplicity and ease of use are what we should be going for.

I could contribute 1BTC to a bounty.  

Good show!
1 btc for a weeks worth of work is already pretty good freelance pay.
I could contribute a bit as well.

I think it is important to coordinate this with the original devs though so as not to produce anything similar to what they are already working on. All though I have no idea exactly what they are working on at the moment.

[TheMightyX]

I have a proposal.

We remove the counterparty burn address and replace it with the dev donation address.

We treat all donations to the dev address as burnt funds.

If we get a consensus could we not do this?

[Patel]

I have a proposal.

We remove the counterparty burn address and replace it with the dev donation address.

We treat all donations to the dev address as burnt funds.

If we get a consensus could we not do this?

Which pretty much defeats the whole concept of proof of burn? Its not gonna happen..

[TheMightyX]

I have a proposal.

We remove the counterparty burn address and replace it with the dev donation address.

We treat all donations to the dev address as burnt funds.

If we get a consensus could we not do this?

Which pretty much defeats the whole concept of proof of burn? Its not gonna happen..

The proof of burn concept was to remove the burden of trust.
The devs have already demonstrated a working product. We have demonstrated our support for this system by burning almost 1,600 BTC.
At this point there is less than 10 days to claim stake, what little is left should be put toward bounties, not destroyed.
It will only help the project succeed.

If we can put this to a vote, I think we would be hard pressed to find anyone who thinks that it would be better to burn the BTC than to put it toward community bounties and dev support.

[nakaone]

I have a proposal.

We remove the counterparty burn address and replace it with the dev donation address.

We treat all donations to the dev address as burnt funds.

If we get a consensus could we not do this?

Which pretty much defeats the whole concept of proof of burn? Its not gonna happen..

The proof of burn concept was to remove the burden of trust.
The devs have already demonstrated a working product. We have demonstrated our support for this system by burning almost 1,600 BTC.
At this point there is less than 10 days to claim stake, what little is left should be put toward bounties, not destroyed.
It will only help the project succeed.

If we can put this to a vote, I think we would be hard pressed to find anyone who thinks that it would be better to burn the BTC than to put it toward community bounties and dev support.

Even though I like your argumentation, I think it destroys the reliability of the first real proof of burn project. But maybe the developers can tell their point of view

[xnova]

Please note that counterpartyd and counterpartyd_build 0.2 have been released. This release includes a much improved API, fees for asset issuance, as well as a realtime event feed capability (via zeromq). If you are using the counterpartyd build system, please just pull the newest revision (on master), rerun setup.py and it should work.

Any issues, please post them here or make a github bug report (even better).

[TheMightyX]

I have a proposal.

We remove the counterparty burn address and replace it with the dev donation address.

We treat all donations to the dev address as burnt funds.

If we get a consensus could we not do this?

Which pretty much defeats the whole concept of proof of burn? Its not gonna happen..

The proof of burn concept was to remove the burden of trust.
The devs have already demonstrated a working product. We have demonstrated our support for this system by burning almost 1,600 BTC.
At this point there is less than 10 days to claim stake, what little is left should be put toward bounties, not destroyed.
It will only help the project succeed.

If we can put this to a vote, I think we would be hard pressed to find anyone who thinks that it would be better to burn the BTC than to put it toward community bounties and dev support.

Even though I like your argumentation, I think it destroys the reliability of the first real proof of burn project. But maybe the developers can tell their point of view

Let's not pretend that proof of burn is something that should be glorified.
We have already wasted 1.5 million dollars, yet the devs have received a little over 3 btc ($2,400).
You want this to succeed? Lets pay their bills for a few months so they can devote their time to this.

[cityglut]

Announcement: The Counterparty team will be paying out a bounty on February 14th, at 00:00 UTC (three weeks from today, midnight on Saint Valentine's Day) for work on a desktop GUI Counterparty client built on top of counterpartyd. The size of the bounty will be the balance of our donation address, 12J1YFvsWHDCU5HNAWNLNy1Q9nZo8Q4Xgs (both BTC and XCP), at the time that the bounty is closed, and the winner(s) will be chosen, thereupon, by a consensus of PhantomPhreak, xnova and myself. N.B. We prefer, but will not require, that clients be cross-platform.

Also, xnova is hard at work on a Counterparty web client, which should be available for preview in the next couple of weeks. More bounties will be offered in the near future.

This announcement was cross-posted from https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=430998, where formal submissions should be made.

[kdrop22]

I have a proposal.

We remove the counterparty burn address and replace it with the dev donation address.

We treat all donations to the dev address as burnt funds.

If we get a consensus could we not do this?

Which pretty much defeats the whole concept of proof of burn? Its not gonna happen..

The proof of burn concept was to remove the burden of trust.
The devs have already demonstrated a working product. We have demonstrated our support for this system by burning almost 1,600 BTC.
At this point there is less than 10 days to claim stake, what little is left should be put toward bounties, not destroyed.
It will only help the project succeed.

If we can put this to a vote, I think we would be hard pressed to find anyone who thinks that it would be better to burn the BTC than to put it toward community bounties and dev support.

Even though I like your argumentation, I think it destroys the reliability of the first real proof of burn project. But maybe the developers can tell their point of view

Let's not pretend that proof of burn is something that should be glorified.
We have already wasted 1.5 million dollars, yet the devs have received a little over 3 btc ($2,400).
You want this to succeed? Lets pay their bills for a few months so they can devote their time to this.

Agreed.

MasterCoin has 8 to 10 Million Dollars.
Protoshares is raising Millions, so will ethereum and others.

We have burnt 1.5 Million dollars, but our development fund has only $2,400. If we are to succeed long term we need to set up a fund or set aside 2% of inflation for paying bounties, marketing etc... The funds would be controlled by a community foundation, which can at a later stage switch over to proof of stake voting.