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

[miscreanity]

This is a fine idea, but with such things the devil is realyl in the details. It's very important to keep the Counterparty protocol as simple as possible... especially at this stage, when people are not using the existing functionality anywhere near as much as they could. The network has a great potential to scale, and we have to avoid hard-coded values, fees, etc. wherever possible. Worse is better.

Simply lock the XCP required for asset issuance, only to be released upon liquidation of the asset. This can then be counted as a financial (cash equivalent?) asset in bankruptcy circumstances.

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[qtgwith]

I have a couple of questions.  I recently purchased some XCP on an exchange.  I have not yet set up an XCP wallet/client, and I will probably just wait until a Mac wallet is released, because I don't want to download yet another full BTC blockchain in a VM on my MacBook.  But I would like to get my XCP off the exchange for security purposes.

So, can I withdraw my coins from the exchange?  Can I just give it one of my BTC addresses, and the XCP will be sent to that address?  (I believe the answer will be yes.)  I understand that I will not be able to send/spend them until I set up an XCP wallet, and that's fine... this is more of a "buy and hold" investment.

Assuming that the answer to the first question is "Yes", is my BTC address now restricted in any way?  I understand that XCP uses BTC as a "transport layer".  Does this mean that my BTC address will receive some amount of BTC, with the XCP encoded on it somehow?  If so, I would have to be careful not to send out those "XCP marked" BTC.  Or is the whole thing handled differently, and I'm free to spend my BTC address down to 0 BTC if I want to, but my XCP will still be tracked separately?

I think I know the answers here, but just wanted to be sure before withdrawing my XCP to a BTC address that I use frequently.

The answer is "yes".

[qtgwith]

Latest Counterwallet development update (with new screenshots):

https://forums.counterparty.co/index.php/topic,79.msg1235.html#msg1235

Great work.

One question:
Since the web wallet is based on pass phrases, there's no way to import private keys. Hence, the users have to send their XCP holding to a new address generated by the web wallet, right? In this case, my previous prediction that the web wallet will bring a lot of sellers immediately may be not so correct, hence they still have to install all the dependency before they can send their XCP.

Unfortunately, the developers are planning to implement the "import/sweep private keys" feature.

Don't worry XCP price. It will go to moon in middle-long term. We should pay more attention to the project progress,not the price.

[BitThink]

One quick question,

To import an existing fund, is there a command to send asset to many holders in batch, something similar to BTC's sendmany?

[kdrop22]

I have a couple of questions.  I recently purchased some XCP on an exchange.  I have not yet set up an XCP wallet/client, and I will probably just wait until a Mac wallet is released, because I don't want to download yet another full BTC blockchain in a VM on my MacBook.  But I would like to get my XCP off the exchange for security purposes.

So, can I withdraw my coins from the exchange?  Can I just give it one of my BTC addresses, and the XCP will be sent to that address?  (I believe the answer will be yes.)  I understand that I will not be able to send/spend them until I set up an XCP wallet, and that's fine... this is more of a "buy and hold" investment.

Assuming that the answer to the first question is "Yes", is my BTC address now restricted in any way?  I understand that XCP uses BTC as a "transport layer".  Does this mean that my BTC address will receive some amount of BTC, with the XCP encoded on it somehow?  If so, I would have to be careful not to send out those "XCP marked" BTC.  Or is the whole thing handled differently, and I'm free to spend my BTC address down to 0 BTC if I want to, but my XCP will still be tracked separately?

I think I know the answers here, but just wanted to be sure before withdrawing my XCP to a BTC address that I use frequently.

The answer is "yes".

You can send it to any Bitcoin address for which you control the private keys. There will be no issues intermingling BTC and XCP in an address. You can verify the amount of XCP in the address at www.blockscan.com.
I would recommend you create a paper wallet and send those funds in there.

[halfcab123]

selling 3 XCP for 30 BTC if anyone from the future is interested.

[baddw]

I have a couple of questions.  I recently purchased some XCP on an exchange.  I have not yet set up an XCP wallet/client, and I will probably just wait until a Mac wallet is released, because I don't want to download yet another full BTC blockchain in a VM on my MacBook.  But I would like to get my XCP off the exchange for security purposes.

So, can I withdraw my coins from the exchange?  Can I just give it one of my BTC addresses, and the XCP will be sent to that address?  (I believe the answer will be yes.)  I understand that I will not be able to send/spend them until I set up an XCP wallet, and that's fine... this is more of a "buy and hold" investment.

Assuming that the answer to the first question is "Yes", is my BTC address now restricted in any way?  I understand that XCP uses BTC as a "transport layer".  Does this mean that my BTC address will receive some amount of BTC, with the XCP encoded on it somehow?  If so, I would have to be careful not to send out those "XCP marked" BTC.  Or is the whole thing handled differently, and I'm free to spend my BTC address down to 0 BTC if I want to, but my XCP will still be tracked separately?

I think I know the answers here, but just wanted to be sure before withdrawing my XCP to a BTC address that I use frequently.

The answer is "yes".

You can send it to any Bitcoin address for which you control the private keys. There will be no issues intermingling BTC and XCP in an address. You can verify the amount of XCP in the address at www.blockscan.com.
I would recommend you create a paper wallet and send those funds in there.

Thank you!

[halfcab123]

Xnova: 2 questions if you have time. I know you are busy making magical things that will make us all very happy.

1. Are we going to be able to import private keys ? I hope to God lol. This could put a damper on new investors being able to even use this if they have XCP associated with a Bitcoin address on blockchain.info and have no way to send these xcp to the wallet or import the private key for the addresses that have xcp.

2. I'm a developer, I'm very interested on how to setup a server that syncs the bitcoin blockchain, I assume thats in the Bitcoin wiki ? ANy idea where ? And then how to get counterpartyd to run on the server, but most importantly how to interface and keep track of several user accounts. Is this setup going to be like blockchain.info where the server doesn't actually have access to the user accounts ? Like andreas antonopolous said about blockchain.

EDIT: Also what extra security measures are going to be in place beyond that which the hosting service provides, unless of course you are hosting your own. In addition, last question, how is this being funded, upkeep etc., ?

[sparta_cuss]

You might put James Turk, founder of GoldMoney.com, into the mix. [snip]

Much gratitude from our team. Your referral to James Turk is helpful. We were aware of GoldMoney, but not of their bitcoin trials and struggles. We will reach out to him to connect as I think we might learn from their actions and we may be able to add value to their efforts with bitcoin and Counterparty.

Thank you.

There were several surveys conducted with existing clients and GoldMoney now has a partner company, Netagio.

It looks like Netagio is a European corporation. According to their website, anyone outside of Europe cannot open an account. So there could still be an opening for Counterparty.

Edit: What does a distributed protocol offer that a private company does not? This is a question that all cryptocurrencies will have to answer.

[frozen123]

Someone posted these?   info from  cityglut1  :Sergio Lerner, a Bitcoin security expert, began his audit of counterpartyd on March 5, and will be completing it by March 19. He and PhantomPhreak are in correspondence regarding the Counterparty protocol.

[Matt Y]

Someone posted these?   info from  cityglut1  :Sergio Lerner, a Bitcoin security expert, began his audit of counterpartyd on March 5, and will be completing it by March 19. He and PhantomPhreak are in correspondence regarding the Counterparty protocol.

https://www.counterparty.co/sergio-lerner-peter-todd/

[user1922]

Trying to get Counterpary running on Desktop Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (64-bit) but seem unable to do so. Building updating, bitcoin reindexing all went fine, tutorials are all quite clear. I am now running counterparty v6.6 and bitcoind v0.8.6.0-g03a7d67-beta

But I get an error message when I try to run the counterparty server:
# counterpartyd server
Status: RESTART
Unhandled exception in thread started by
libgcc_s.so.1 must be installed for pthread_cancel to work
Aborted (core dumped)

I have installed the IA32-libs and there are 2 editions for libgcc_s.so.1:
$ find /lib -name 'libgcc*'
/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libgcc_s.so.1
/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgcc_s.so.1

But I still keep getting this error.
Any tips?

[halfcab123]

Trying to get Counterpary running on Desktop Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (64-bit) but seem unable to do so. Building updating, bitcoin reindexing all went fine, tutorials are all quite clear. I am now running counterparty v6.6 and bitcoind v0.8.6.0-g03a7d67-beta

But I get an error message when I try to run the counterparty server:
# counterpartyd server
Status: RESTART
Unhandled exception in thread started by
libgcc_s.so.1 must be installed for pthread_cancel to work
Aborted (core dumped)

I have installed the IA32-libs and there are 2 editions for libgcc_s.so.1:
$ find /lib -name 'libgcc*'
/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libgcc_s.so.1
/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgcc_s.so.1

But I still keep getting this error.
Any tips?

Any other information in the log?

[halfcab123]

Can someone help me port the Android bitcoin wallet to run Counterpartyd?

[user1922]

Trying to get Counterpary running on Desktop Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (64-bit) but seem unable to do so. Building updating, bitcoin reindexing all went fine, tutorials are all quite clear. I am now running counterparty v6.6 and bitcoind v0.8.6.0-g03a7d67-beta

But I get an error message when I try to run the counterparty server:
# counterpartyd server
Status: RESTART
Unhandled exception in thread started by
libgcc_s.so.1 must be installed for pthread_cancel to work
Aborted (core dumped)

I have installed the IA32-libs and there are 2 editions for libgcc_s.so.1:
$ find /lib -name 'libgcc*'
/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libgcc_s.so.1
/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgcc_s.so.1

But I still keep getting this error.
Any tips?

Any other information in the log?

Nope:
2014-03-14-T10:51:04+0000 Status: RESTART

[halfcab123]

Go back through the installation

[xnova]

Latest Counterwallet development update (with new screenshots):

https://forums.counterparty.co/index.php/topic,79.msg1235.html#msg1235

Great work.

One question:
Since the web wallet is based on pass phrases, there's no way to import private keys. Hence, the users have to send their XCP holding to a new address generated by the web wallet, right? In this case, my previous prediction that the web wallet will bring a lot of sellers immediately may be not so correct, hence they still have to install all the dependency before they can send their XCP.

There is "sweep" functionality (I have a screenshot of the dialog provided). You basically input a private key string into the Private Key textbox in the dialog, Counterwallet then gets the address associated with it, queries it for balances (BTC, XCP, any assets), and you can sweep over one or more of those into one of the addresses in your wallet. Since, yes, the wallet is deterministic and we don't want to store any private keys on the servers, this is the way that we can handle imports. Hopefully that helps clear some things up.

And if people want to sell their XCP as soon as the web wallet comes out, they should go for it. I think it's kind of like stepping over a dollar to pick up a nickel though. (Unless it's a small amount to, say, reimburse the initial investment during burn.)

[halfcab123]

And if people want to sell their XCP as soon as the web wallet comes out, they should go for it. I think it's kind of like stepping over a dollar to pick up a nickel though. (Unless it's a small amount to, say, reimburse the initial investment during burn.)

That right there ^

[xnova]

Xnova: 2 questions if you have time. I know you are busy making magical things that will make us all very happy.

1. Are we going to be able to import private keys ? I hope to God lol. This could put a damper on new investors being able to even use this if they have XCP associated with a Bitcoin address on blockchain.info and have no way to send these xcp to the wallet or import the private key for the addresses that have xcp.

2. I'm a developer, I'm very interested on how to setup a server that syncs the bitcoin blockchain, I assume thats in the Bitcoin wiki ? ANy idea where ? And then how to get counterpartyd to run on the server, but most importantly how to interface and keep track of several user accounts. Is this setup going to be like blockchain.info where the server doesn't actually have access to the user accounts ? Like andreas antonopolous said about blockchain.

EDIT: Also what extra security measures are going to be in place beyond that which the hosting service provides, unless of course you are hosting your own. In addition, last question, how is this being funded, upkeep etc., ?

1. See my response to BitThink on this matter.

2. That's a pretty open question. In the scope of Counterwallet, it does not keep track of "user accounts", as this concept does not really exist. (See https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Deterministic_wallet for more info.) It does, however, double hash the seed (pass phrase) client-side and store that on the server, as a key to retrieve that user's stored preferences (i.e. # of addresses created, UI theme and language selected, address nickname/label storage, etc). None of this information stored is particularly sensitive, and even the non-watch addresses that have stored nicknames are hashed client-side before being stored on the server so that even if someone were to get the server data, they couldn't gather any info on address associations/groupings. That data is pretty much worthless as far as an attacker is concerned.

If you made your own system, you could of course have user accounts, or take a more blockchain.info approach, where you had a wallet file stored server side and encrypted, and the decryption was done client side. As Counterwallet itself is a deterministic wallet, it does not have this approach. However, there are pros and cons to each method. (Effective 2 factor authentication, for instance, is something that is...challenging...with HD wallets, but we have plans in the future around that.)

The core team is going to operate the main Counterwallet site, but anyone is welcome to set up their own Counterwallet server and run it. The cool part is that you can log in at our site, or your site, or anyone else's Counterwallet site, and have access to your same addresses and balances. (Only your preferences will not persist across platforms.) This makes Counterwallet highly resistant, because even if the main site went away, people could simply host their own Counterwallet sites and still have full access to their funds. *However*, there are still trust requirements for any Counterwallet site, as a malicious owner could, for instance, modify the javascript code to divert sent funds to himself, and disable the checks in the client itself against this. There are potential solutions for this though, such as a 3rd party site that will drill down through the served assets and verify their checksums against a known-good source (however, it would need to randomize IP access and access patterns so that the attacker could not detect this and supply it with a different version of the sources). As 3rd-party Counterwallet servers come online in the future, this would be an awesome project for someone in the community to write (i.e. a site that compiles the list and automatically checks them against known-good code).

Regarding setting up your own Counterwallet server, we provide a full guide for doing this at http://counterpartyd-build.readthedocs.org/en/develop/SettingUpAFederatedNode.html  ...note that this script we provide is only for Ubuntu 13.10...no plans to support existing OSes/versions (beyond 14.04 LTS when it comes out), due to the amount of things this script does...also plans to move to a more elegant build system in the future than that...still, it works.

That document also outlines some of the security precautions we take with the main Counterwallet servers. (To answer your other point, we operate our own dedicated servers at several datacenters.) Also, these servers are not like MtGox, where if someone were to get the data on them, they could take all of your money. However, modifying the source code on the servers (which is sent to clients as they load the wallet) is a potential issue with Counterwallet and any other site, for that matter. To that point, we are putting automated off-server verification procedures in place that can detect this and alert on it, as well as several security precautions.

This all is self-funded. The recurring costs aren't too bad, actually, and we will be able to maintain and fund the primary site indefinitely (donations are always welcome though, and DO help out).

Hopefully that answered your questions.

[halfcab123]

....
Hopefully that answered your questions.

Thank you so much for that detailed response. You nuked my questions into oblivion. I have to say also those screen shots portray something so elegantly assembled, it makes me happy to be here. And it's an honor to even get the privilege of discourse. Thank you for sharing your much needed skills not just with the community,  but ultimately with the world.