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

[Patel]

The thing I really got from all these discussions is that Bitcoin is controlled by 12 miners. This is scary and is opposite to the decentralized nature.
I guess when big money comes in greed overrules everything and power grab happens.

If that's what you got from it, then you're either assuming that a majority of people would do things differently (unlikely), or that Bitcoin being controlled by 12 developers is somehow better (no thanks)...

Luke will you shut the fuck up? If your not gonna listen to what the community wants, then get out of this thread. You've sounded nothing short of a arrogant prick in all your posts.

If you don't like Counterparty, close the door on your way out.

[sherlock421]

http://bitcointangibletrust.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/BTT_PoweredBy_XCP.jpg

+1
Glad to see you back.

Thanks! We definitely have more good news to share! We're just waiting on another partner to close on our agreements.

http://newsbtc.com/2014/03/25/agora-commodities-reports-10-million-bitcoin-sales/

great

it's good  like "Intel inside"
http://imgt1.bdstatic.com/it/u=4080961430,4012133445&fm=116&gp=0.jpg

[Bountyful]

OP_RETURN can be used to store references to external resources, say for example very long meta transactions that don't fit into 40 byte, an asset contract or whatever. The storage pointed to could be a website which lists something like <hash_used_in_op_return_tx><very_long_message> (for the sake of an example), a side chain or a P2P structure like a DHT. To my knowledge this was discussed several times, but never tested on a broader scale.

I've started researching the DHT myself, dexX7. However, a side-chain structure like a DHT would require a good understanding of the particular DHT algorithms that would be a best fit for Counterparty or even Mastercoin or any other possible bitcoin layered protocol.

An interesting introduction to the Chord and Kademilia algorithms is by a bitcoin developer here: http://offthelip.org/?p=149

Do you have any resources that you've looked at as well?

[Fernandez]

@Fernandez. Yup. Bitcoin hangs by a thread. If you have a miner, point it at p2pool and do your own transaction selection. You'll make more money anyways (p2pool has a lower stale rate than any of the pools).

Cheers. I think this should be more publicised. I had no idea that there were only 12, or that that 13% of the total hash is controlled by Eligius whose owner has destroyed a different coin which is nothing short of criminal, IMO (I knew earlier he had, didn't know he used others hashes to do so).

Getting back on topic, both MSC and XCP has nosedived. Is it just in response to BTCs performance or due to this OP_RETURN issue?

[Luke-Jr]

whose owner has destroyed a different coin which is nothing short of criminal, IMO

Oh really, which part of stopping scammers from screwing people is a crime?

(I knew earlier he had, didn't know he used others hashes to do so).

That's because this part is a lie. I did it myself. It wasn't hard.

[Fernandez]

whose owner has destroyed a different coin which is nothing short of criminal, IMO

Oh really, which part of stopping scammers from screwing people is a crime?

(I knew earlier he had, didn't know he used others hashes to do so).

That's because this part is a lie. I did it myself. It wasn't hard.

Very much tempted to contest this, but I have already dragged this thread off topic.

[sia331]

Something fishy going on here. ...

What you said is fishy,
What fishy is going to happen?
 

[sia331]

I am worried how this hack affects the future of XCP...        

XCP security is a step by step to improve!
In the future the hackers on the XCP no way!

[atweiden]

@maaku: Electrum 198 checks eight random Electrum servers for chain length before establishing the trustworthiness of any one instance.

The decision to encase Bitcoin in minimal purity may be technically correct, but I'm personally not interested much in living in the world of today. I want a new world. I can't speak for others, but we have to decentralize everything to get there, and I don't think PhantomPhreak and Xnova are new to worthy goals like this.

I grew up in the age of Napster, and I remember file sharing services being infiltrated early on by those who wished to corrupt the P2P movement. People coming together at large scale is what overpowered it. Bitcoin history runs parallel to P2P history, and so the success of Bitcoin will identically be a question of "people".

Large scale decentralized marketplaces are an essential factor in recruiting people at large to the idea of a decentralized economic system. Consequently I think it is a tactical mistake to become divided on OP_RETURN 80 since it leads to virtually identical network topology, but enables Counterparty and by extension Bitcoin to become massively better at uniting people the world over under a new economic system.

[Luke-Jr]

Nobody here wants to "encase Bitcoin in minimal purity".

[Bellebite2014]

The thing I really got from all these discussions is that Bitcoin is controlled by 12 miners. This is scary and is opposite to the decentralized nature.
I guess when big money comes in greed overrules everything and power grab happens.

If that's what you got from it, then you're either assuming that a majority of people would do things differently (unlikely), or that Bitcoin being controlled by 12 developers is somehow better (no thanks)...

Luke will you shut the fuck up? If your not gonna listen to what the community wants, then get out of this thread. You've sounded nothing short of a arrogant prick in all your posts.

If you don't like Counterparty, close the door on your way out.

What a clown. XCP is 100% dependent of BTC. Keep biting the hand feeding you, this is the only proper thing to do, you are right.

Don't come here crying once the value of XCP is 0 because of arrogant, clueless bozos like you.

[atweiden]

@luke, but this logically results from discouraging the use of OP_RETURN while criticizing developers who use the blockchain for anything that isn't by-the-book, doesn't it? It may be technically beneficial to keep these applications off of Bitcoin's back in a perfect world, and I would agree that in this form Bitcoin stays what it is which could be a good thing. However it has the effect of keeping Bitcoin unchanging, i.e. pure, which has I would argue adverse implications on the number of people interested in the idea of a decentralized economy. I'm just of the opinion that the "solution", whatever it is, has to be using Bitcoin. I don't think other cryptocurrencies can rise to the same level of success, and I also don't think OP_RETURN 80 has a noticeable effect on the long-term network topology.

[Luke-Jr]

@luke, but this logically results from discouraging the use of OP_RETURN while criticizing developers who use the blockchain for anything that isn't by-the-book, doesn't it? It may be technically beneficial to keep these applications off of Bitcoin's back in a perfect world, and I would agree that in this form Bitcoin stays what it is which could be a good thing. However it has the effect of keeping Bitcoin unchanging, i.e. pure, which has I would argue adverse implications on the number of people interested in the idea of a decentralized economy. I'm just of the opinion that the "solution", whatever it is, has to be using Bitcoin. I don't think other cryptocurrencies can rise to the same level of success, and I also don't think OP_RETURN 80 has a noticeable effect on the long-term network topology.

Unless I misunderstood someone, I believe every Core developer who commented here (jgarzik, maaku, and myself) supports Counterparty using OP_RETURN/80 transactions until better solutions are implemented.

[dpb]

If the method counterparty uses is not ideal, and there exist alternatives, where are they?
This works right now; there is a live, working, decentralized stock market available to any individual with an Internet connection.

The effort going into modifying Bitcoin to keep things like counterparty out would be better spent on the aforementioned alternatives.
The full-node compensation problem isn't relevant yet; it might get solved as a consequence of other innovations.

I'm not involved in the development of any of these projects; I might have misrepresented the situation, but this is how it appears from my perspective.

[sia331]

Newbie here.  So is proof-of-burn still how people are buying these?  Or should I buy through Poloniex?

Yes,
You should buy some,
This is a very promising, I am very optimistic about it!

[sia331]

Really looking forward to the web wallet implementation.

Yes
Looking forward to the web wallet implementation
The web wallet implementation will bring many benefits and convenience to us!

[Peter Todd]

Every release since 0.7 has included performance improvements as a key feature, starting with the very important merging of Pieter Wuille's ultraprune branch. Remember that this time last year we were ridiculing Peter Todd's "keep bitcoin free" campaign to enshrine the 1MB block limit. Even Peter Todd has switched positions on that one, so I think I can generalize to say that we all see the need for bitcoin to scale to higher traffic levels, and identify many outstanding problems to be solved between here and there. But beyond that I don't feel comfortable commenting on the specific positions of individual developers other than myself.

No I haven't. What I have done is (maybe) found ways to make Bitcoin scale by replacing the linear blockchain with alternative designs. (e.g. tree-chains) But without a solution being implemented that changes the underlying O(n^2) scaling my position is unchanged: increasing the blocksize as your scaling solution will centralize Bitcoin and ultimately destroy its value.

Incidentally, the fact that such an approach might be possible in the future was something I discussed at the time with gmaxwell as well as the media/PR team I was working with, and we decided that simplifying the message was definitely the right idea. You can always update your message later when non-off-chain alternatives become viable. Meanwhile the "keep bitcoin free" video ensured that the most important messages got out to the community: that there is a tradeoff between decentralization and blocksize, and solutions exist other than simply raising it or eliminating the limit. By that measure the video was a great success and achieved my goals for it.

[Peter Todd]

OP_RETURN can be used to store references to external resources, say for example very long meta transactions that don't fit into 40 byte, an asset contract or whatever. The storage pointed to could be a website which lists something like <hash_used_in_op_return_tx><very_long_message> (for the sake of an example), a side chain or a P2P structure like a DHT. To my knowledge this was discussed several times, but never tested on a broader scale.

You know, an interesting question to ask yourself is if it's totally ok to just embed a hash of the actual data in the blockchain, and rely on the data itself being made available by some DHT or something, why can't Bitcoin itself do that to make blocks smaller and improve scalability?

Remember that Bitcoin would work just fine if miners didn't validate transactions if clients implemented client-side validation, as is done in Mastercoin and Counterparty, and to a lesser extent, Colored Coins. What's so special about actually putting those tx's in the block?

[RoxxR]

OP_RETURN can be used to store references to external resources, say for example very long meta transactions that don't fit into 40 byte, an asset contract or whatever. The storage pointed to could be a website which lists something like <hash_used_in_op_return_tx><very_long_message> (for the sake of an example), a side chain or a P2P structure like a DHT. To my knowledge this was discussed several times, but never tested on a broader scale.

You know, an interesting question to ask yourself is if it's totally ok to just embed a hash of the actual data in the blockchain, and rely on the data itself being made available by some DHT or something, why can't Bitcoin itself do that to make blocks smaller and improve scalability?

Remember that Bitcoin would work just fine if miners didn't validate transactions if clients implemented client-side validation, as is done in Mastercoin and Counterparty, and to a lesser extent, Colored Coins. What's so special about actually putting those tx's in the block?

+1000 awesome point. 

[prophetx]

Here is what Satoshi Nakamoto had to say about Bitcoin scalability:

Long before the network gets anywhere near as large as that, it would be safe
for users to use Simplified Payment Verification (section '8') to check for
double spending, which only requires having the chain of block headers, or
about 12KB per day.  Only people trying to create new coins would need to run
network nodes.  At first, most users would run network nodes, but as the
network grows beyond a certain point, it would be left more and more to
specialists with server farms of specialized hardware.  A server farm would
only need to have one node on the network and the rest of the LAN connects with
that one node.

http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg09964.html

Maaku, Electrum server has implemented your ultimate blockchain compression concept, and I know for a fact that it it is still quite resource intensive. It is in Python, so there's that .

Do you forsee a future where average users can use your C++ blockchain compression implementation to easily access the blockchain via Bitcoin-QT directly? Do you forsee the user experience of Bitcoin-QT competing with Electrum's speed, simplicity and ease of use?

I am heavily biased here given that I've poured my own resources into Electrum (Kivy) for the better part of 2013 and 2014 so far, but I see no future in which average computer users are running Bitcoind or Bitcoin-QT. Maybe I'm mistaken and ultimate blockchain compression will turn things around. However, the user experience and branding of Bitcoin-QT make it seem like a reference client and I do not think it will grow to be much more than that.

You'll have to excuse me but the death of Bitcoin talk has got to be an exaggeration. I'm sorry, I don't mean to offend, but that has to be an exaggerated assertion. If you are in fact right about the scalability concerns, Bitcoin is surely doomed. Malicious third parties will seek to corrupt the network, and they certainly won't seek out amiable terms with Bitcoin developers.

One last thing. I feel you're really underestimating system adminstrators who are dedicated to Bitcoin. Realistically, unless I'm wrong and your C++ ultimate blockchain compression will flip the Bitcoin-QT user experience upside down, system adminstrators or perhaps philanthropic users who are sold done-for-you services are going to be the only class of users capable of running full nodes. This has implications on network topology, for better or worse.

Bitcoin isn't dying, at least I hope not. But Bitcoin-QT may in fact be systematically losing market share to competing wallets. And for good reason. Users aren't used to software that requires a blockchain to function. The existence of a blockchain is 100% weird to the vast majority of computer users, who have grown to expect Facebook and Twitter to work instantly with no questions asked. Most people have no interest in the blockchain. The people who require a local blockchain (and not one that is for example reachable over Tor), can be serviced with done-for-you automated server setup solutions and whatnot. I suspect Satoshi foresaw this very early on.

interesting

Here is what Satoshi Nakamoto had to say about Bitcoin scalability:

Quote
Long before the network gets anywhere near as large as that, it would be safe
for users to use Simplified Payment Verification (section '8') to check for
double spending, which only requires having the chain of block headers, or
about 12KB per day.  Only people trying to create new coins would need to run
network nodes.  At first, most users would run network nodes, but as the
network grows beyond a certain point, it would be left more and more to
specialists with server farms of specialized hardware.  A server farm would
only need to have one node on the network and the rest of the LAN connects with
that one node.