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

[HinnomTX]

I want to hear more from topynate. Pass the popcorn.

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[mindtomatter]

I think this conversation should be viewed as the most bullish indicator for the future of fast-blockchain altcoins.  If Bitcoin devs don't want platforms like MSC and XCP build on their protocol, they're not the only game in town and the market is hungry for anything willing to differentiate itself.   Until a few days ago I did not see any future value for something like Litecoin, but with a 5x faster blocktime resulting in 5x faster action execution, there are already tangible advantages of being on a faster blockchain.

Add to that things like Florincoin where they already have a 160 arbitrary message field and a 40 second block time, and Bitcoins security headstart gets a little less compelling.  Given the option, I bet a lot of Scrypt miners drop everything to mine the coin that powers the most responsive, cheapest DEX and asset platform.  I know I'll be interested in it.

[TheMightyX]

It's never appropriate to use the blockchain as storage.

I guess you are speaking for satoshi then?

I find your reasonings behind much of your arguments to be rather moot.

I get it, you don't want to force everyone to relay our data.
That is fair.
Also what you are arguing right now is that having 40 more bytes of storage will increase spam which... I'm not sure what your point is.

But obviously the future makes that argument moot doesnt it?
In the future downloading the entirety of the blockchain won't be necessary, due to pruning or redundant mirroring with integrity checking storage (a la Freenet or torrent) or even some selective blockchain transactional query type system. So who really cares if there is more spam in the blockchain? You won't have to see it or download it.


Heres an excerpt from wiki regarding Kryder's Law:

A PhysOrg.com article reports on a 2009 study by Mark Kryder.[4] According to the report, if hard drives continue to progress at their current pace, then in 2020 a two-platter, 2.5-inch disk drive will be capable of storing more than 14 terabytes (TB) and will cost about $40.

And from another site regarding Nielsen's Law:

Nielsen's Law of Internet bandwidth states that:

• a high-end user's connection speed grows by 50% per year

So if downloading the blockchain and storing the blockchain is not the problem because we won't need to store the entirety of the blockchain in the future and because obviously we don't really need to worry about any increase in blockchain size going forward, what is your current argument? That today and right now this second you don't want an extra 40 bytes max per tx taking up space on your HDD?


Obviously the future of bitcoin does not entail downloading the whole blockchain. This is inefficient and crude to say the least.
So you want to stifle innovation now because of a perceived problem that will be rendered moot/irrelevant in the near future.
Do you not see that as nearsighted?

tl;dr: Bitcoin devs cut max bytes from 80 to 40 to reduce spam, irrelevant due to Nielsen's/Kryder's laws and the advancement of bitcoin technology in general.

[kdrop22]

Benefits for Bitcoin users
Counterparty provides us (Bitcoins users) the ability issue shares, pay dividends and trade on a distributed exchange using BTC (without the need for XCP). This is a valuable functionality for all Bitcoin users and increases Bitcoin's value proposition. It is not in the best interest of Bitcoin users to shutdown this valuable functionality. Especially when there are competitors like - - Ethereum, Nxt, Protoshares, eMunie whom will have asset trading platforms built into their blockchain.

[mindtomatter]

Benefits for Bitcoin users
Counterparty provides us (Bitcoins users) the ability issue shares, pay dividends and trade on a distributed exchange using BTC (without the need for XCP). This is a valuable functionality for all Bitcoin users and increases Bitcoin's value proposition. It is not in the best interest of Bitcoin users to shutdown this valuable functionality. Especially when there are competitors like - - Ethereum, Nxt, Protoshares, eMunie whom will have asset trading platforms built into their blockchain.

dividends is a gigantic benefit that won't be properly appreciated until we do something totally crazy with it like we're talking about internally

[Luke-Jr]

Benefits for Bitcoin users
Counterparty provides us (Bitcoins users) the ability issue shares, pay dividends and trade on a distributed exchange using BTC (without the need for XCP). This is a valuable functionality for all Bitcoin users and increases Bitcoin's value proposition. It is not in the best interest of Bitcoin users to shutdown this valuable functionality. Especially when there are competitors like - - Ethereum, Nxt, Protoshares, eMunie whom will have asset trading platforms built into their blockchain.

Unfortunately, it sounds like the Counterparty team is not interested in being a teamplayer and working with Bitcoin development, and giving Bitcoin no choice but to activate self-defences.

[mindtomatter]

Benefits for Bitcoin users
Counterparty provides us (Bitcoins users) the ability issue shares, pay dividends and trade on a distributed exchange using BTC (without the need for XCP). This is a valuable functionality for all Bitcoin users and increases Bitcoin's value proposition. It is not in the best interest of Bitcoin users to shutdown this valuable functionality. Especially when there are competitors like - - Ethereum, Nxt, Protoshares, eMunie whom will have asset trading platforms built into their blockchain.

Unfortunately, it sounds like the Counterparty team is not interested in being a teamplayer and working with Bitcoin development, and giving Bitcoin no choice but to activate self-defences.

Luke, thank you for playing your role to the T The only way the cryptocurrency ecosystem can truly break away from the paradigm of "Bitcoin as sole superpower" is if people like you become antagonistic towards metalayers, chasing their valuable features off the Bitcoin chain and onto other chains, giving them a chance to differentiate and succeed in a way not otherwise possible if Bitcoin already offers those features albiet with worse stats (block time as action granularity)

Man i'm loving this.  No matter what happens users like me win, and it might be a great speculative opportunity on which fast alt picks up the metalayers.

[sparta_cuss]

Benefits for Bitcoin users
Counterparty provides us (Bitcoins users) the ability issue shares, pay dividends and trade on a distributed exchange using BTC (without the need for XCP). This is a valuable functionality for all Bitcoin users and increases Bitcoin's value proposition. It is not in the best interest of Bitcoin users to shutdown this valuable functionality. Especially when there are competitors like - - Ethereum, Nxt, Protoshares, eMunie whom will have asset trading platforms built into their blockchain.

Unfortunately, it sounds like the Counterparty team is not interested in being a teamplayer and working with Bitcoin development, and giving Bitcoin no choice but to activate self-defences.

Please distinguish between Counterparty "team" members (there are only two developers) and the supporters, fans, and investors (the rest of us) who are certainly feeling frustrated and confused, and can't always make sense of what seem like arbitrary rules.

It will not help move this dialogue forward if arguments and observations are personalized, and that is the case for people on all sides of this discussion. All of us want alternatives to the centralized, fiat currency systems that have profound social and economic consequences for all of us. If we can all just focus on solving the problem that we have, then we can help XCP, and, by extension, BTC, move toward achieving the social and political goals that are central to its founding and implementation.  

[HinnomTX]

Benefits for Bitcoin users
Counterparty provides us (Bitcoins users) the ability issue shares, pay dividends and trade on a distributed exchange using BTC (without the need for XCP). This is a valuable functionality for all Bitcoin users and increases Bitcoin's value proposition. It is not in the best interest of Bitcoin users to shutdown this valuable functionality. Especially when there are competitors like - - Ethereum, Nxt, Protoshares, eMunie whom will have asset trading platforms built into their blockchain.

Unfortunately, it sounds like the Counterparty team is not interested in being a teamplayer and working with Bitcoin development, and giving Bitcoin no choice but to activate self-defences.

This quote is the unmasking. When I replace the first 'Bitcoin' with 'my' and the second 'Bitcoin' with 'me', it becomes obvious that Bitcoin is no longer decentralized but operates as a cabal. It may well be time to form Plan B.

[Luke-Jr]

Benefits for Bitcoin users
Counterparty provides us (Bitcoins users) the ability issue shares, pay dividends and trade on a distributed exchange using BTC (without the need for XCP). This is a valuable functionality for all Bitcoin users and increases Bitcoin's value proposition. It is not in the best interest of Bitcoin users to shutdown this valuable functionality. Especially when there are competitors like - - Ethereum, Nxt, Protoshares, eMunie whom will have asset trading platforms built into their blockchain.

Unfortunately, it sounds like the Counterparty team is not interested in being a teamplayer and working with Bitcoin development, and giving Bitcoin no choice but to activate self-defences.

Please distinguish between Counterparty "team" members (there are only two developers) and the supporters, fans, and investors (the rest of us) who are certainly feeling frustrated and confused, and can't always make sense of what seem like arbitrary rules.

PhantomPhreak is one of the two listed, and has expressed that he is only willing to do things under certain Bitcoin-hostile terms.

We're not going to regress from relaying our transactions through the main Bitcoin network to relaying them, through central points of failure, directly to some subset of mining pools that have specifically whitelisted us with a patch. We won't depend on any feature not supported by vanilla Bitcoin Core, even if it means storing the message data in unprunable, (or even unspendable!) outputs for the time being.

[mindtomatter]

Benefits for Bitcoin users
Counterparty provides us (Bitcoins users) the ability issue shares, pay dividends and trade on a distributed exchange using BTC (without the need for XCP). This is a valuable functionality for all Bitcoin users and increases Bitcoin's value proposition. It is not in the best interest of Bitcoin users to shutdown this valuable functionality. Especially when there are competitors like - - Ethereum, Nxt, Protoshares, eMunie whom will have asset trading platforms built into their blockchain.

Unfortunately, it sounds like the Counterparty team is not interested in being a teamplayer and working with Bitcoin development, and giving Bitcoin no choice but to activate self-defences.

Please distinguish between Counterparty "team" members (there are only two developers) and the supporters, fans, and investors (the rest of us) who are certainly feeling frustrated and confused, and can't always make sense of what seem like arbitrary rules.

PhantomPhreak is one of the two listed, and has expressed that he is only willing to do things under certain Bitcoin-hostile terms.

We're not going to regress from relaying our transactions through the main Bitcoin network to relaying them, through central points of failure, directly to some subset of mining pools that have specifically whitelisted us with a patch. We won't depend on any feature not supported by vanilla Bitcoin Core, even if it means storing the message data in unprunable, (or even unspendable!) outputs for the time being.

You're asking them to do something that isn't trasmitted on the normal bitcoin infrastructure.  To this point the blockchain has been agnostic, so this is abnormal.  How is that statement bitcoin-hostile?

[Luke-Jr]

You're asking them to do something that isn't trasmitted on the normal bitcoin infrastructure.  To this point the blockchain has been agnostic, so this is abnormal.  How is that statement bitcoin-hostile?

Bitcoin doesn't have Counterparty support. I'm asking them to use a temporary side-channel in addition to normal relaying-to-random-nodes until the Bitcoin network has upgraded to support Counterparty.

[Spekulatius]

I was under the impression Zerocoin was supposed to merged on top of bitcoin originally - I haven't read their white paper in detail though.
Real-world utility is essential to the value and success of a crypto-currency, therefore most of the alt projects just seem like moot (especially at the stage where even bitcoin lacks wide-spread adoptation). On the other hand blanket opposition to any kind of innovation on the bitcoin blockchain seems just as counter-productive.

There's a lot of options for Zerocoin - most recently they've been talking about doing it as an alt-currency, however I was talking to their Ian Miers at the Financial Cryptography 2014 conference a few weeks ago about how Zerocoin could be implemented as an embedded consensus system within Bitcoin. The big advantage there is increasing security. Of course, there's the obvious resistance to 51% attacks that being embedded as opposed to independent provides. But a more subtle advantage is that Zerocoin does require a trusted setup phase. During that phase secret keys are generated, if the keys are not deleted they can be used in the future to produce fake proofs and thus create fake zerocoins. By making Zerocoin be an embedded consensus system, rather than an independent one, it becomes much easier for mutliple Zerocoin's to be setup, each initialized by different, independent, parties. The security of each version is the same - the security of the underlying Bitcoin blockchain - yet you get the advantage of being able to pick and choose who you trust to do the setup phase honestly. I guess we'll see what the team chooses to go with in the end, but in any case if they do not go with the embedded route I'd certainly consider forking the project and releasing a version under that model myself.

I think their team is looking for decentralized ways to generate the initial public parameters to prevent counterfitting of Zerocoins, like the RSA UFO method gnos1s of Anoncoin is trying to implement atm. Sources:
http://youtu.be/FXU65XsLiFk?t=21m52s until 27:00 a couple of times, especially in the last 30 seconds

Participant 10:   You mentioned [Inaudible 00:27:10] property for the Zerocash system? Do you need them to be honest all the time or just one person being honest at one time and destroy the hidden parameter he had?  

Matt:     That’s a great question. One person being honest at one time take the computer they used, set it on fire, and you’ll never have to think about this again. It’s not an online partner who has to trust to do this.

Participant 10: I hope that we live in a world where one person can be honest one time.

Matt:    I agree..

http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=q3rgh5ZY

So assuming they go down the public approach and let everybody who wants to calculate one piece of the initial public parameters, what other major problems would you see with Zerocoin/cash? Im very interested in the project but unfortunately the devs are not very talkative about it.  

[sparta_cuss]

Benefits for Bitcoin users
Counterparty provides us (Bitcoins users) the ability issue shares, pay dividends and trade on a distributed exchange using BTC (without the need for XCP). This is a valuable functionality for all Bitcoin users and increases Bitcoin's value proposition. It is not in the best interest of Bitcoin users to shutdown this valuable functionality. Especially when there are competitors like - - Ethereum, Nxt, Protoshares, eMunie whom will have asset trading platforms built into their blockchain.

Unfortunately, it sounds like the Counterparty team is not interested in being a teamplayer and working with Bitcoin development, and giving Bitcoin no choice but to activate self-defences.

Please distinguish between Counterparty "team" members (there are only two developers) and the supporters, fans, and investors (the rest of us) who are certainly feeling frustrated and confused, and can't always make sense of what seem like arbitrary rules.

PhantomPhreak is one of the two listed, and has expressed that he is only willing to do things under certain Bitcoin-hostile terms.

We're not going to regress from relaying our transactions through the main Bitcoin network to relaying them, through central points of failure, directly to some subset of mining pools that have specifically whitelisted us with a patch. We won't depend on any feature not supported by vanilla Bitcoin Core, even if it means storing the message data in unprunable, (or even unspendable!) outputs for the time being.

You're asking them to do something that isn't trasmitted on the normal bitcoin infrastructure.  To this point the blockchain has been agnostic, so this is abnormal.  How is that statement bitcoin-hostile?

Exactly, mindtomatter.
PhantomPhreak is saying that he will NOT do something that depends on enlisting a small subset of mining pools, precisely because he wants to be a team player and build only on "vanilla Bitcoin Core."

[PhantomPhreak]

Benefits for Bitcoin users
Counterparty provides us (Bitcoins users) the ability issue shares, pay dividends and trade on a distributed exchange using BTC (without the need for XCP). This is a valuable functionality for all Bitcoin users and increases Bitcoin's value proposition. It is not in the best interest of Bitcoin users to shutdown this valuable functionality. Especially when there are competitors like - - Ethereum, Nxt, Protoshares, eMunie whom will have asset trading platforms built into their blockchain.

Unfortunately, it sounds like the Counterparty team is not interested in being a teamplayer and working with Bitcoin development, and giving Bitcoin no choice but to activate self-defences.

Please distinguish between Counterparty "team" members (there are only two developers) and the supporters, fans, and investors (the rest of us) who are certainly feeling frustrated and confused, and can't always make sense of what seem like arbitrary rules.

PhantomPhreak is one of the two listed, and has expressed that he is only willing to do things under certain Bitcoin-hostile terms.

We're not going to regress from relaying our transactions through the main Bitcoin network to relaying them, through central points of failure, directly to some subset of mining pools that have specifically whitelisted us with a patch. We won't depend on any feature not supported by vanilla Bitcoin Core, even if it means storing the message data in unprunable, (or even unspendable!) outputs for the time being.

That's not even close to what I said.

This is getting ridiculous. I have work to do.

[Luke-Jr]

PhantomPhreak is saying that he will NOT do something that depends on enlisting a small subset of mining pools, precisely because he wants to be a team player and build only on "vanilla Bitcoin Core."

This is nonsense. Nobody on the Bitcoin Core dev team wants Counterparty to abuse multisig.
"Enlisting ... mining pools" is the only alternative to forcing mining pools against their will by hiding it in multisig (although hopefully soon we'll have a filter to deal with that).

Eligius is over 10% of the network, so it's hardly a "small subset" anyway.
Besides, if you're so confident that the other pools won't freely service Counterparty, maybe you should really re-think whether forcing it on them is acceptable??

[mindtomatter]

I believe the Counterparty devs are saying they expect their transactions to be treated the same as any other on the bitcoin network, because they're paying fees and working within the protocol as presented to them.  That seems like a reasonable expectation, why should their transactions be singled out for some kind of special routing arrangement?

You're asking them to do something that isn't trasmitted on the normal bitcoin infrastructure.  To this point the blockchain has been agnostic, so this is abnormal.  How is that statement bitcoin-hostile?

Bitcoin doesn't have Counterparty support. I'm asking them to use a temporary side-channel in addition to normal relaying-to-random-nodes until the Bitcoin network has upgraded to support Counterparty.

While at the same time the upgrade you're talking about is being downgraded from useful to non-useful.  

It's disappointing to have such vocal core devs who don't support a content-agnostic blockchain.  Fees are there for a reason.

[Bountyful]

Let's have some figures, shall we? Tarsnap charges 300 picodollars / byte-month. Assume ten thousand full nodes with their own blockchain, that's 3 microdollars / byte-month, or 3*12*80 microdollars / year = 0.3 cents / year for 80 bytes. But of course the cost of storage falls exponentially, let's say a three year halving time; then the total lifetime cost for storing your 80 byte OP_RETURN on every full node in the Bitcoin network is given by the sum of a geometric series with first term 0.3 cents and common ratio 2^(-1/3).

That's a total cost of 1.5 cents. At current prices, and with the above generous assumptions made on behalf of miners and other full node operators, the correct maximum additional charge for a filled 80 byte OP_RETURN is 0.025 mBTC (it can be argued that the additional demand for Bitcoin created by permitting new uses is a driver of increased Bitcoin prices and thus should lead to a discount, but that's harder to quantify). So just set that as the default until floating mining fees are introduced in (hopefully) 0.10. Bitcoin users who don't want to "provide" that storage can go ahead and not run a full node.

The idea Luke-Jr raises occasionally of a social contract existing between Bitcoin node operators to store and process only financial transactions needs dealing with. Bear in mind that in his maximalist interpretation, absolute consensus between all node operators is morally required to change that contract. It falls through on several grounds, principally vagueness and lack of historical support. Vagueness we've seen in this thread: no-one is quite clear on what makes a transaction financial. Is a transaction transferring a currency other than Bitcoin part of the social contract? Is a transaction containing what is effectively routing data (c.f. stealth addresses) fully financial, or is the additional stuff an anonymity functionality not part of the social contract? And so on. As to historical support, allow me to quote from someone who would know:

The network is robust in its unstructured simplicity. Nodes work all at once with little coordination. They do not need to be identified, since messages are not routed to any particular place and only need to be delivered on a best effort basis. Nodes can leave and rejoin the network at will, accepting the proof-of-work chain as proof of what happened while they were gone. They vote with their CPU power, expressing their acceptance of valid blocks by working on extending them and rejecting invalid blocks by refusing to work on them. Any needed rules and incentives can be enforced with this consensus mechanism.

The thing is, Luke, that like it or not, Satoshi is/was a libertarian, and his creation embodied the 'take it or leave it' aspect of that political philosophy. Consensus means a consensus of mining power. Coordination means passing around proofs of work. If you feel that the amount of storage space the blockchain needs is too onerous to justify running your huge mining network, then by all means take your ball and go home, or for that matter start playing a different game - you have every right to reject whatever blocks you wish. Bitcoin will be just as pure as the majority of mining power wishes it to be.

Welcome back, Satoshi. Been a long time.

[baddw]

Since OP_Return was reduced to 40 bytes right before the release of .9, Counterparty is currently using Multi-sig (which was supposed to be deprecated) which is undesirable for reasons aforementioned by Peter Todd. On the other hand I do not think I've seen anyone present a line of technical reasoning as to why OP_Return 40 is alright while OP_Return 80 is undesirable.

My understanding is that Counterparty is functioning, right now, using Bitcoin as a transport layer.  In order to do so, it must be using existing, accepted features of Bitcoin.  It might not be the most ideal or efficient use of Bitcoin, and it may not be the full implementation of Counterparty, but it is functioning.

Wait for Zerocoin to boot BTC out.

You prefer an altcoin that requires centralised trust, over a decentralised Bitcoin?

Decentralized Bitcoin, which requires getting the permission of ~15 powerful individuals in order to have transactions confirmed; transactions which fully comply with the existing Bitcoin specifications and implementations?

Nobody is forcing you to run the reference client.
Fork it. Please.

I am providing material and other support to several groups (in particular, the BitShares folks) who are in the business of making Bitcoin irrelevant.  Getting rid of mining completely, as it inevitably results in centralization of power, no matter the algorithm chosen.... not to mention a huge waste of resources.  Of course, Bitcoin has a pretty strong first-mover advantage, and Counterparty is an interesting use of it.  (Just in case it is not perfectly clear, I am NOT involved with Counterparty in any way, other than holding some XCP that I bought recently.  And I hold BTC as well, and mined it until recently (just sold my last miner today), although I'm seriously reconsidering my BTC holdings due to revelations in this thread.)

And no, the Counterparty writeup is not an "existing Bitcoin specification".

No, I meant that Counterparty is already running, using existing features of Bitcoin.  It is a fait accompli.

For that claim, the developers should collaborate with the existing Bitcoin development community to formally define a BIP.

So that it could be sat on and debated by committee for months?  Inventors don't wait for approval, they get out there and do it.  Did Satoshi run it by the Federal Reserve before releasing Bitcoin?  Did Linus Torvalds consult with Richard Stallman before he released Linux 0.01?  Counterparty already has code written and functioning.  They have achieved the first functional distributed exchange.  An accomplishment not quite on par with the invention of Bitcoin, but definitely one of the most important developments for crypto-currencies since Bitcoin. 

I'm sure that the Freimarket guys have some good ideas, but a "let's put out a white paper describing every function of our software and then take several years to develop it" philosophy just ain't gonna work.  Their stuff is going to be so late to the party, it won't even matter how good it is because several competing systems will already have been running, debugged, and iterated multiple times.

[kdrop22]

Benefits for Bitcoin users
Counterparty provides us (Bitcoins users) the ability issue shares, pay dividends and trade on a distributed exchange using BTC (without the need for XCP). This is a valuable functionality for all Bitcoin users and increases Bitcoin's value proposition. It is not in the best interest of Bitcoin users to shutdown this valuable functionality. Especially when there are competitors like - - Ethereum, Nxt, Protoshares, eMunie whom will have asset trading platforms built into their blockchain.

Unfortunately, it sounds like the Counterparty team is not interested in being a teamplayer and working with Bitcoin development, and giving Bitcoin no choice but to activate self-defences.

Please distinguish between Counterparty "team" members (there are only two developers) and the supporters, fans, and investors (the rest of us) who are certainly feeling frustrated and confused, and can't always make sense of what seem like arbitrary rules.

PhantomPhreak is one of the two listed, and has expressed that he is only willing to do things under certain Bitcoin-hostile terms.

We're not going to regress from relaying our transactions through the main Bitcoin network to relaying them, through central points of failure, directly to some subset of mining pools that have specifically whitelisted us with a patch. We won't depend on any feature not supported by vanilla Bitcoin Core, even if it means storing the message data in unprunable, (or even unspendable!) outputs for the time being.

PhantomPhreak is saying that he will NOT do something that depends on enlisting a small subset of mining pools, precisely because he wants to be a team player and build only on "vanilla Bitcoin Core."

This is nonsense. Nobody on the Bitcoin Core dev team wants Counterparty to abuse multisig.
"Enlisting ... mining pools" is the only alternative to forcing mining pools against their will by hiding it in multisig (although hopefully soon we'll have a filter to deal with that).

Eligius is over 10% of the network, so it's hardly a "small subset" anyway.
Besides, if you're so confident that the other pools won't freely service Counterparty, maybe you should really re-think whether forcing it on them is acceptable??

Jesus Christ, what a troll!

Take your goatee and go away please?

You seem to be a more involved in the Mastercoin thread. Please, do not piss off someone in the name of Counterparty.