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

[jgarzik]

OP_RETURN and 40 vs 80 bytes:  If the miners agree with you, you don't have to care what the network relays.  Has Counterparty directly approached miners, to get them to mine 80-byte OP_RETURN transactions?  What was the response?  If the miners agree, great, let's do it.  If the miners don't agree, there is no point supporting it in Bitcoin Core software.

As a miner I fully support exploring any functionality which adds value to Bitcoin, the only request being that introducing it be done in a controlled manner. The risk of increasing OP_RETURN to 80 bytes does not seem to outweigh the potential benefits, especially when multisig might not be prunable.

Of course a lone miner's opinion is unlikely to sway the argument, so what would the dev criteria be -- a major pool supporting the change, Gigavps getting onboard, a certain number of signatures obtained for a petition, etc?

What pool do you run?

I'm talking about miners -- the people who collect transactions into a block -- not the people who contribute computing services to a mining pool, yet have zero impact over how the network is run.

[Anotheranonlol]

Assets name why can not start with "A"?

You might want to get a dictionary, or learn how to make a proper full sentence first before posting, thanks.

Don't be a provincial ass, Bellebite. (How's that for a complete, grammatically correct sentence?) Not everyone on this forum is a native English speaker, but their input is significant and valuable.

Ahah, that is a first. You need to be a native speaker now to be able to build a sentence made of 8 words ?

Without a doubt, people have their priorities just right. Let's invest in crypto, I will attend school and learn how to make a proper 8 words sentence in another life...

Stop being a clown. the guy is chinese. I understood the question perfectly well. If this was a chinese-localized project primarily on a chinese forum for instance you would run into same issues trying to speak natively or run through a translation. just because you speak a language other than english does't mean you are any less eligible to invest in crypto projects as other guy above rightly said. and doesn't mean you are more or less stupid. fucking hell come on. no need to be intentionally abrasive over non issues like that.. and to answer the question it's because A get's translated as 0. Asset names are converted to decimal, decimal cannot begin with a 0.

What pool do you run?

I'm talking about miners -- the people who collect transactions into a block -- not the people who contribute computing services to a mining pool, yet have zero impact over how the network is run.

Huh? you mean pool operators?

[jgarzik]

The definition of a miner is someone who collects bitcoin transactions into a block, and attempts to produce a nonce value that seals the block into the blockchain.

According to BFL_Josh's off-the-cuff estimate, we have about 12 miners in bitcoin.

[supersuber]

Assets name why can not start with "A"?

You might want to get a dictionary, or learn how to make a proper full sentence first before posting, thanks.

Don't be a provincial ass, Bellebite. (How's that for a complete, grammatically correct sentence?) Not everyone on this forum is a native English speaker, but their input is significant and valuable.

Ahah, that is a first. You need to be a native speaker now to be able to build a sentence made of 8 words ?

Without a doubt, people have their priorities just right. Let's invest in crypto, I will attend school and learn how to make a proper 8 words sentence in another life...

Stop being a clown. the guy is chinese. I understood the question perfectly well. If this was a chinese-localized project primarily on a chinese forum for instance you would run into same issues trying to speak natively or run through a translation. just because you speak a language other than english does't mean you are any less eligible to invest in crypto projects as other guy above rightly said. and doesn't mean you are more or less stupid. fucking hell come on. no need to be intentionally abrasive over non issues like that.. and to answer the question it's because A get's translated as 0. Asset names are converted to decimal, decimal cannot begin with a 0.

Thank you very much!

[ginko-B]

PM each other for communication is more suitable for this stage.

+1
This seems to be the best option right now, for the Counterparty devs and Bitcoin devs to engage via private channels.
The back and forth on the threads will not contribute to a productive dialog.

+1,

Yes, in terms of process, perhaps best if core devs take this discussion offline and then present options to the community incl. merits and demerits once they've had a chance to consider all available options.

[l4p7]

Different topic: When about will the web wallet be ready for use and can I import burner private keys with the webwallet?

[Luke-Jr]

The core devs' views seem at odds with the founder's — Opposite ends of the spectrum even. Not only was Satoshi advocating the use of Bitcoin's blockchain to store data, he wanted it cheaper! How about them apples ?

(Quote in reference to BitDNS.)

Satoshi came up with merged mining for this, which BitDNS (now Namecoin) has used to much success.
Other innovative altcoins like p2pool and Freimarkets have further developed merged mining technology.
As I have said before, I completely encourage making better use of merged mining to extend things in any way you like.

Edit: I understand that Counterparty stores data in the chain in such a way that was not meant to be used. Have you seen how quickly the developers of this initiative have moved forward ? Do you appreciate the movement of 2.0 projects ?

Pedantic point: Projects which aim to "start over" are not Bitcoin 2.0 projects, they are just new innovative altcoins, and their developers are not Bitcoin developers (unless they so happen to also do Bitcoin development, of course).
Bitcoin developers are continually working on new improvements to Bitcoin:

• Hierarchical deterministic wallets, and recurring invoice ids
• Headers-first full nodes
• Payment protocol
• GetBlockTemplate decentralised mining
• Pegged side-chains (XCP should be participating in this!)
• ...

Let's stop arguing about the technicalities for just a moment; Let's talk about "where do we go from here," with this innovative project ? Can we work together to come up with a solution ?

After having read the Counterparty document, I would personally suggest using 80-byte OP_RETURN transactions as a temporary solution, and collaborating with the Freimarket developers to move forward, ideally providing a clean upgrade where XCP assets become Freimarket assets.

It's not enough to have a couple of pools mine our transactions. We need to keep the block time as close to ten minutes as possible.

Then contact more than a couple of pools. This statement sounds like you wish to force miners to include your transactions; surely you didn't mean it that way?
If you can provide a patch that identifies transactional-only Counterparty OP_RETURN transactions uniquely from 80-byte abuse, I will discuss whitelisting it on Eligius with wizkid057.
This is with the understanding that Counterparty will seek to migrate to a more acceptable solution long-term.

[bitwhizz]

sounds like hassle,

Is this solution also what is in store for mastercoin?

[samperi649]

Different topic: When about will the web wallet be ready for use and can I import burner private keys with the webwallet?

If testnet goes well, webwllet should be released by April 1st week(as told by XNOVA) and yes you can import the burner private keys

[miscreanity]

What pool do you run?

I'm talking about miners -- the people who collect transactions into a block -- not the people who contribute computing services to a mining pool, yet have zero impact over how the network is run.

I no longer run a pool or solo mine.

So you suggest major pool operators  (e.g. eleuthria) and large, independent mining owners (e.g. gigavps) are the ones to discuss the options with?

[porqupine]

It seems like the argumentation in this thread is becoming circular. Would very much like to see a response to these two posts:

Edit: To be clear, all this discussion about moving things like Counterparty to different independently or merge-mined blockchains as a "solution" to the "problem" of adding data to the blockchain is either mistaken or downright deceptive. Fact is these systems all get much better security by being embedded rather than independent. Decentralized consensus system security is a game of strength in numbers, and you want to be making use of the largest system you can afford. Merge-mining looks like a nice way to achieve that, but in reality just leaves you vulnerable to zero-marginal-cost attacks until you get the support of a large % of the total hashing power. A real world example of this is how Luke-Jr used Eligius to attack the merge-mined alt Coiledcoin. That leaves us with embedded consensus systems, and fortunately with Bitcoin only explicit blacklists have any hope of censoring their transactions rather than just making them a bit more expensive. (perhaps the even stronger requirement for explicit whitelists if my timelock crypto scheme can be made practical)

As I see it, the best solution is to keep the OP_RETURN size at 40 bytes, for simplicity and compatibility, but to allow multiple OP_RETURN outputs per transaction. There's no reason that 40 bytes of misc. data per transaction is better for Bitcoin than 80, or 120 bytes.
[snip]

Actually what should be done that would - in theory - please both sides of the issue would be to do a patch that makes embedding data in OP_RETURN transactions as expensive as doing so by creating unspendable outputs. Basically what the OP_RETURN payload is just made unlimited (up to the max size of a transaction) but you bump the min fee by the same amount that would have been simply burned in the unspendable output. I'd further recommend that the cost be set slightly less than that amount, to always incentivize using prunable blockchain space rather than unprunable UTXO space. (a legit concern in the current design, although my TXO commitments scheme probably reduces the problem greatly)

I'll do up a pull-req for this.

[Fernandez]

Is Mastercoin having the same issue?

[BldSwtTrs]

Moving on antoher blockchain would be disatrous, please don't do that.

[PhantomPhreak]

Let's stop arguing about the technicalities for just a moment; Let's talk about "where do we go from here," with this innovative project ? Can we work together to come up with a solution ?

After having read the Counterparty document, I would personally suggest using 80-byte OP_RETURN transactions as a temporary solution, and collaborating with the Freimarket developers to move forward, ideally providing a clean upgrade where XCP assets become Freimarket assets.

It's not enough to have a couple of pools mine our transactions. We need to keep the block time as close to ten minutes as possible.

Then contact more than a couple of pools. This statement sounds like you wish to force miners to include your transactions; surely you didn't mean it that way?
If you can provide a patch that identifies transactional-only Counterparty OP_RETURN transactions uniquely from 80-byte abuse, I will discuss whitelisting it on Eligius with wizkid057.
This is with the understanding that Counterparty will seek to migrate to a more acceptable solution long-term.

We'd be glad to collaborate with Freimarkets to achieve our common goals. Freimarkets is a great idea, and the more our protocols can be compatible, the better.

It's not a question of forcing anyone to do anything, of course. Counterparty can't default to constructing transactions that are not relayed by default by the official, vanilla Bitcoin Core software.

[porqupine]

Freicoin is 80% premined.

[prophetx]

Few (I didn't say none) of those arguments pass the smell test.

• OP_RETURN and 40 vs 80 bytes:  If the miners agree with you, you don't have to care what the network relays.  Has Counterparty directly approached miners, to get them to mine 80-byte OP_RETURN transactions?  What was the response?  If the miners agree, great, let's do it.  If the miners don't agree, there is no point supporting it in Bitcoin Core software.
• "core devs are censoring and killing innovation!"   Counterparty is very clearly misusing a feature intended for ECDSA public keys, in a manner that very clearly results in harm to the overall network, short and long term.  Other people/companies/projects are extending the bitcoin protocol and not meeting the same resistance.
• To repeat earlier posts, my criticism is not about counterparty in general, just this ONE CheckMultiSig flaw.  Fix that, and my criticism is gone.
• As Peter Todd has noted, CheckMultiSig has other problems also.  It may go away regardless.

Please do not paint all Counterparty criticism with a broad brush.  My opinions are my own, and in particular I do not agree with all of Luke-Jr's points or point of view.

There are plenty of ways to innovate and extend the bitcoin protocol.  People are doing this every day.

It is always a mistake to base an entire engineering system on a subtle technical quirk that "just happens to work."  Counterparty is stuffing its own data where ECDSA public key data is supposed to go.  That is clearly not the intended use.

I think from a strategic level one must ask why are some projects unable to communicate intention and influence development, rather than getting into tactical details such as this.

It is quite clear to everyone that p2p systems can be used for all sorts of transactions that make up contracts.  If the inability to communicate and resolve needs is causing friction one must ask how the overall system should evolve to mitigate long term harm, while maximizing long term capabilities depth of the network.

[Luke-Jr]

If you can provide a patch that identifies transactional-only Counterparty OP_RETURN transactions uniquely from 80-byte abuse, I will discuss whitelisting it on Eligius with wizkid057.

Counterparty can't default to constructing transactions that are not relayed by default by the official, vanilla Bitcoin Core software.

Sure it can. Just setup a few nodes dedicated to Counterparty and have your client relay to them by default.

[PhantomPhreak]

If you can provide a patch that identifies transactional-only Counterparty OP_RETURN transactions uniquely from 80-byte abuse, I will discuss whitelisting it on Eligius with wizkid057.

Counterparty can't default to constructing transactions that are not relayed by default by the official, vanilla Bitcoin Core software.

Sure it can. Just setup a few nodes dedicated to Counterparty and have your client relay to them by default.

I don't mean that it's technically impossible.

[led_lcd]

If you can provide a patch that identifies transactional-only Counterparty OP_RETURN transactions uniquely from 80-byte abuse, I will discuss whitelisting it on Eligius with wizkid057.

Counterparty can't default to constructing transactions that are not relayed by default by the official, vanilla Bitcoin Core software.

Sure it can. Just setup a few nodes dedicated to Counterparty and have your client relay to them by default.

Luke-Jr what is your opinion regarding the pull request offered by Peter Todd?

Miners could still still make their decision on whether they wish to include such transactions in a block and Counterparty would use pruneable blockchain space.

[Luke-Jr]

Luke-Jr what is your opinion regarding the pull request offered by Peter Todd?

He has 5 pull requests open, none of which seem relevant to this discussion.

Miners could still still make their decision on whether they wish to include such transactions in a block and Counterparty would use pruneable blockchain space.

Blockchain space is never prunable. Only UTXO space.