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

[kdrop22]

Why should I buy 1 BTC of this coin instead of Mastercoin or Ethereum?

Compare the Valuations of MasterCoin and Counterparty.

Counterparty has a working product. A Distributed Exchange and Ability to issue assets. Mastercoin has a distributed exchange but the assets and betting functionality is still being developed.

MasterCoin
Price: 34$
MarketCap: 21 Million

Counterparty
Price: 2$
MarketCap: 6 Million. (30% of Mastercoin)

To me Counterparty seems undervalued relative Mastercoin.

Ethereum - The concept only exists on paper and there is no working prototype till Q4 2014 (which might get further delayed).

[romerun]

Primecoin isn't any more energy efficient, it just produces prime number strings of possible scientific value (instead of useless leading 0 hashes); PPC is, but it's only 1 PoS block per 4 PoW blocks, which I don't think is very noticeable when PoW mining returns are much higher than PoS returns; someone can correct me on this though.

if you look at the current http://ppc.blockr.io/block/list/ , POS is already 90%.

Regarding to whether or not XCP should hop to altchain. Nobody seriously cares of alts, seriously. What makes XCP/MSC interesting is they are living in Bitcoin, not one of those obscure chains which are likely to be irrelevant in the future, why? unless they come out with blown away features, not just different money distribution schemes, or minor improvements, they won't match the Btc first mover advantage. Ethereum does promise a good load of somewhat blown away features, so it's got a lot of attention lately, but if we have the strength of Btc network and its widespread adoption + 2.0 protocols on top of it, there might be no points of Ether.

[mindtomatter]

@MattY, have you considered leading the way to an open forum podcast or regularly scheduled broadcast/chat ? With the speed of progress it seems quite sophomoric to remain pegged to forum communication which in many ways can be considered slower than email in practice. Just thoughts.

It is not something I have considered, but I'm happy to consider it, and I'm sure the developers will as well.

I do think forums work quite nicely for communicating as that is specifically what they were designed for, and they have enjoyed use all across the entire internet because of their ability to assist decentralized groups with communications. If some of these discussions were happening on a podcast, my fear would be that a much smaller audience would see them or be able to participate before the discussion was over. Ideally, I'd like to see much of these conversations move to the Counterparty forums, but people love them some Bitcointalk, so here we are.

LTB Would be happy to provide a platform for this.  We've extended the same offer to all the 2.0 communities.

[nakaone]

Primecoin isn't any more energy efficient, it just produces prime number strings of possible scientific value (instead of useless leading 0 hashes); PPC is, but it's only 1 PoS block per 4 PoW blocks, which I don't think is very noticeable when PoW mining returns are much higher than PoS returns; someone can correct me on this though.

if you look at the current http://ppc.blockr.io/block/list/ , POS is already 90%.

Regarding to whether or not XCP should hop to altchain. Nobody seriously cares of alts, seriously. What makes XCP/MSC interesting is they are living in Bitcoin, not one of those obscure chains which are likely to be irrelevant in the future, why? unless they come out with blown away features, not just different money distribution schemes, or minor improvements, they won't match the Btc first mover advantage. Ethereum does promise a good load of somewhat blown away features, so it's got a lot of attention lately, but if we have the strength of Btc network and its widespread adoption + 2.0 protocols on top of it, there might be no points of Ether.

+1

even though I think ether will still have arguments - but probably their currency is not needed

[BitzMD]

An off topic question here and excuse me if its ridiculous,

How does one transfer xcp from a central exchange to an offline wallet?

[Fernandez]

Why should I buy 1 BTC of this coin instead of Mastercoin or Ethereum?

Buy 0.5 BTC of each.

Yes, my maths is correct. Its because Ethereum is Vaporware.

[kivsman]

Im waiting until Ethereum coins are actually being sold be the devs to buy them,

tbh, I woke up this morning, pulled out my phone, read something good about Counterparty, and panic bought the hell out of it, sent all my LTC into XCP

this thing better pop

[qtgwith]

Why should I buy 1 BTC of this coin instead of Mastercoin or Ethereum?

Compare the Valuations of MasterCoin and Counterparty.

Counterparty has a working product. A Distributed Exchange and Ability to issue assets. Mastercoin has a distributed exchange but the assets and betting functionality is still being developed.

MasterCoin
Price: 34$
MarketCap: 21 Million

Counterparty
Price: 2$
MarketCap: 6 Million. (30% of Mastercoin)

To me Counterparty seems undervalued relative Mastercoin.

Ethereum - The concept only exists on paper and there is no working prototype till Q4 2014 (which might get further delayed).

Totally agree. Counterparty's marketcap should be bigger than mastercoin at least. Counterparty is undervalued seriously.  Counterparty should take action in marketing and advertisement after the issue of the counterwallet. Let more people know Counterparty and use it.

[InsertUsernameHere]

Why should I buy 1 BTC of this coin instead of Mastercoin or Ethereum?

Compare the Valuations of MasterCoin and Counterparty.

Counterparty has a working product. A Distributed Exchange and Ability to issue assets. Mastercoin has a distributed exchange but the assets and betting functionality is still being developed.

MasterCoin
Price: 34$
MarketCap: 21 Million

Counterparty
Price: 2$
MarketCap: 6 Million. (30% of Mastercoin)

To me Counterparty seems undervalued relative Mastercoin.

Ethereum - The concept only exists on paper and there is no working prototype till Q4 2014 (which might get further delayed).

I'd go with Counterparty.

[kivsman]

Whats a good price for counterparty? $10? When can this be achieved? I think alt coins can spike up real quick

[Patel]

XCP is great, but I think before any major innovations come, we need to see what is going on with OP_RETURN.

Once there is clear consensus, everyone will know where XCP is headed.

[romerun]

An off topic question here and excuse me if its ridiculous,

How does one transfer xcp from a central exchange to an offline wallet?

just send it to a btc address that you have control of the private key, XCP address = BTC address

XCP is great, but I think before any major innovations come, we need to see what is going on with OP_RETURN.

Once there is clear consensus, everyone will know where XCP is headed.
[/quoted]

if we are banned from every corner, I bet PP should be able to find a way to compress XCP into 32 bytes OP_RETURN in the worst case

[baddw]

So it's better for counterparty to just react, instead of act? Are we really doomed to just follow the current trends? Piggybacking from one solution to the next?

What about actually taking a fucking stance? What about making a decision instead of letter other people make decisions for us.
This is the worst business advice ever. Is it a risk? Sure! But those that never take risks have nothing to gain.

Winning the race of utility but not usage?
I would posit that counterparty has less adopters now than when it started as some early adopters have sold out and moved on.

Even Satoshi himself thought PoW was an inherent weakness of the bitcoin protocol.

Counterparty is very active and is currently leading the second generation space with regards to functionality.

Counterparty is not piggybacking from one solution to the next, it is staying on Bitcoin. You are the one suggesting the project moves to another blockchain, then denouncing that very thing in a later post as you say "are we doomed to have to follow trends" while you pitch a PoS solution that is itself a new and upcoming trend in the digital currency space, while Bitcoin has been around forever and is much harder to consider a "trend".

Do you feel Counterparty has taken no risks? The project has been rife with risks from day one, and those risks are gradually being mitigated and eliminated.

What decentralized exchange is winning the race of "usage"? What decentralized financial market is winning the race of usage? Nobody. Let's check back on that in a few months or so.

So, according to you, early adopters sold some or all of their positions in XCP, and that somehow decreased the number of total XCP holders. How are you able to infer that everyone who has bought XCP over the past few months already held XCP?

I never said Counterparty wasn't leading in terms of functionality.
Nor did I say that Counterparty has taken no risks. But huddling behind bitcoin for protection is obviously an aversion to risk when we know that we have more to gain by leaving then by staying.

What you suggested in your previous post was that at a later time if it becomes necessary CP will move to another or its own blockchain (this would be reacting and piggybacking from one solution to the next).
What I suggested was a proactive decision to move not from one solution to the next, and the next, and the next (which is what will invariably happen should we continue down this road), but to move to a final solution.
Our own blockchain would be the final solution. You admitted it yourself. Why don't we just jump ahead a few years then and save ourselves some wasted time? We are wasting time trying to play nice with bitcoin when we could be growing.

According to you "PoS" is a trend and bitcoin has been around "forever". You know they thought email was just a trend? They said it was pointless and stupid and we would never have a need for it. But some people, they saw it for what it was. It wasn't a trend, it was a solution.

You calling PoS a trend shows where your mindset is.
To anyone outside our community bitcoin itself is a trend, or a scheme, or a fraud. You are equating what you and I know to what the world thinks it knows.

My comment regarding counterparty having less adopters was and is evident by the list of trading over the past two months on the exchanges. Any new adopters would have had to buy XCP from poloniex. We can see there has been very little trading on poloniex. So very little XCP was bought. I would also assume the majority of XCP bought on poloniex was from XCP holders. Obviously that is just a theory and is inconsequential anyway.

Look, you have no control over Counterparty.  Some pretty smart dudes have control over Counterparty.  If you want control over something, fork Counterparty yourself, or pay someone to do it for you.  Everyone's a critic, but few are artists.

There's a concept called over-engineering.  It is especially problematic in fast-moving industries such as cryptocurrencies.  Everything is moving so fast, you're saying "let's look 5 years on the horizon!" when nobody really knows what lies 5 years on the horizon.  Any plan that we made to hit a target 5 years from now, would need to be changed several times before we got there.  It's a moving target.

Proof-of-Stake is currently flawed.  There is no good implementation of pure Proof-of-Stake.  Maybe the entire idea will be discredited in 6 months, and the new concept will be called Proof-of-Something-Else.  Creating a Proof-of-Stake coin out of thin air and moving Counterparty to it would be a bad move.

The opposite of over-engineering is under-engineering.  Creating the least viable product.  The most minimal, simple implementation that can do what you want it to do.  Counterparty is this solution for the distributed exchange/Bitcoin 2.0 idea.  It works, today.  It does so by leveraging the existing Bitcoin network and protocol, which allows the developers to devote their time to getting the important parts right.  How much would the Counterparty codebase increase in size if it required its own blockchain?  I'm betting it would be somewhere in the triple to quadruple range.  Counterparty will continue to work for at least the near future.  If a day comes when it is made not to work by outside forces, Counterparty will change in order to work.

There are plenty of other people working on building distributed-exchange coins from scratch.  Counterparty made the explicit decision not to be one of those guys.  To put it simply, "built on Bitcoin" is THE central idea behind Counterparty.  If you don't agree with that decision, you should be backing the other guys.

[qtgwith]

So it's better for counterparty to just react, instead of act? Are we really doomed to just follow the current trends? Piggybacking from one solution to the next?

What about actually taking a fucking stance? What about making a decision instead of letter other people make decisions for us.
This is the worst business advice ever. Is it a risk? Sure! But those that never take risks have nothing to gain.

Winning the race of utility but not usage?
I would posit that counterparty has less adopters now than when it started as some early adopters have sold out and moved on.

Even Satoshi himself thought PoW was an inherent weakness of the bitcoin protocol.

Counterparty is very active and is currently leading the second generation space with regards to functionality.

Counterparty is not piggybacking from one solution to the next, it is staying on Bitcoin. You are the one suggesting the project moves to another blockchain, then denouncing that very thing in a later post as you say "are we doomed to have to follow trends" while you pitch a PoS solution that is itself a new and upcoming trend in the digital currency space, while Bitcoin has been around forever and is much harder to consider a "trend".

Do you feel Counterparty has taken no risks? The project has been rife with risks from day one, and those risks are gradually being mitigated and eliminated.

What decentralized exchange is winning the race of "usage"? What decentralized financial market is winning the race of usage? Nobody. Let's check back on that in a few months or so.

So, according to you, early adopters sold some or all of their positions in XCP, and that somehow decreased the number of total XCP holders. How are you able to infer that everyone who has bought XCP over the past few months already held XCP?

I never said Counterparty wasn't leading in terms of functionality.
Nor did I say that Counterparty has taken no risks. But huddling behind bitcoin for protection is obviously an aversion to risk when we know that we have more to gain by leaving then by staying.

What you suggested in your previous post was that at a later time if it becomes necessary CP will move to another or its own blockchain (this would be reacting and piggybacking from one solution to the next).
What I suggested was a proactive decision to move not from one solution to the next, and the next, and the next (which is what will invariably happen should we continue down this road), but to move to a final solution.
Our own blockchain would be the final solution. You admitted it yourself. Why don't we just jump ahead a few years then and save ourselves some wasted time? We are wasting time trying to play nice with bitcoin when we could be growing.

According to you "PoS" is a trend and bitcoin has been around "forever". You know they thought email was just a trend? They said it was pointless and stupid and we would never have a need for it. But some people, they saw it for what it was. It wasn't a trend, it was a solution.

You calling PoS a trend shows where your mindset is.
To anyone outside our community bitcoin itself is a trend, or a scheme, or a fraud. You are equating what you and I know to what the world thinks it knows.

My comment regarding counterparty having less adopters was and is evident by the list of trading over the past two months on the exchanges. Any new adopters would have had to buy XCP from poloniex. We can see there has been very little trading on poloniex. So very little XCP was bought. I would also assume the majority of XCP bought on poloniex was from XCP holders. Obviously that is just a theory and is inconsequential anyway.

Look, you have no control over Counterparty.  Some pretty smart dudes have control over Counterparty.  If you want control over something, fork Counterparty yourself, or pay someone to do it for you.  Everyone's a critic, but few are artists.

There's a concept called over-engineering.  It is especially problematic in fast-moving industries such as cryptocurrencies.  Everything is moving so fast, you're saying "let's look 5 years on the horizon!" when nobody really knows what lies 5 years on the horizon.  Any plan that we made to hit a target 5 years from now, would need to be changed several times before we got there.  It's a moving target.

Proof-of-Stake is currently flawed.  There is no good implementation of pure Proof-of-Stake.  Maybe the entire idea will be discredited in 6 months, and the new concept will be called Proof-of-Something-Else.  Creating a Proof-of-Stake coin out of thin air and moving Counterparty to it would be a bad move.

The opposite of over-engineering is under-engineering.  Creating the least viable product.  The most minimal, simple implementation that can do what you want it to do.  Counterparty is this solution for the distributed exchange/Bitcoin 2.0 idea.  It works, today.  It does so by leveraging the existing Bitcoin network and protocol, which allows the developers to devote their time to getting the important parts right.  How much would the Counterparty codebase increase in size if it required its own blockchain?  I'm betting it would be somewhere in the triple to quadruple range.  Counterparty will continue to work for at least the near future.  If a day comes when it is made not to work by outside forces, Counterparty will change in order to work.

There are plenty of other people working on building distributed-exchange coins from scratch.  Counterparty made the explicit decision not to be one of those guys.  To put it simply, "built on Bitcoin" is THE central idea behind Counterparty.  If you don't agree with that decision, you should be backing the other guys.

I don't think "built on Bitcoin" is the central idea. "Counterparty protocol" is the central idea.
We can have many choices besides bitcoin.

[dexX7]

Totally agree. Counterparty's marketcap should be bigger than mastercoin at least. Counterparty is undervalued seriously.  Counterparty should take action in marketing and advertisement after the issue of the counterwallet. Let more people know Counterparty and use it.

Not want to start another meta discussion, but one may also think about implicit value besides available functionality. There are about 4000 BTC available to be spent over time for developement and other funding tasks. (yup, only about 15 % spent since Exodus and already leading to very interesting projects like XCP as side effect)

[maaku]

There are plenty of other people working on building distributed-exchange coins from scratch.  Counterparty made the explicit decision not to be one of those guys.  To put it simply, "built on Bitcoin" is THE central idea behind Counterparty.  If you don't agree with that decision, you should be backing the other guys.

Except... it's not built on bitcoin. That's exactly the gripe of myself, jtimon, and others I'm sure. Counterparty does not interoperate with bitcoin scripting. You cannot have bidirectional transactions between the two. Counterparty rules are not validated by bitcoin nodes. Lightweight clients can't rely on most-work as an indicator of validity. Counterparty is built separate from bitcoin. If I take a bible and start scribbling in the margins, do I get to go on a pulpit and claim a biblical foundation for my scribbled theories? No, it has no relevance.

Counterparty transactions are scribbled in the margins of validated bitcoin transactional data. So what? Bitcoin does gain from this. Counteryparty doesn't gain from this, any more than they would from a fully merged-mined datachain or any other equivalently powerful proof-of-publication sytem. And Counterparty could be doing much better by having miners which validate its transactional data.

[qtgwith]

Totally agree. Counterparty's marketcap should be bigger than mastercoin at least. Counterparty is undervalued seriously.  Counterparty should take action in marketing and advertisement after the issue of the counterwallet. Let more people know Counterparty and use it.

Not want to start another meta discussion, but one may also think about implicit value besides available functionality. There are about 4000 BTC available to be spent over time for developement and other funding tasks. (yup, only about 15 % spent since Exodus and already leading to very interesting projects like XCP as side effect)

Funny

[baddw]

I don't think "built on Bitcoin" is the central idea. "Counterparty protocol" is the central idea.
We can have many choices besides bitcoin.

There are many people out there building Counterparty-like systems, many with their own blockchains.  It's an obvious next step for crypto-currencies.  Obviously it's the central "idea" of Counterparty in some sense.  Maybe I should have said that it was the central "insight" of Counterparty to be built on Bitcoin.

Except... it's not built on bitcoin. That's exactly the gripe of myself, jtimon, and others I'm sure. Counterparty does not interoperate with bitcoin scripting. You cannot have bidirectional transactions between the two. Counterparty rules are not validated by bitcoin nodes. Lightweight clients can't rely on most-work as an indicator of validity. Counterparty is built separate from bitcoin. If I take a bible and start scribbling in the margins, do I get to go on a pulpit and claim a biblical foundation for my scribbled theories? No, it has no relevance.

Counterparty transactions are scribbled in the margins of validated bitcoin transactional data. So what? Bitcoin does gain from this. Counteryparty doesn't gain from this, any more than they would from a fully merged-mined datachain or any other equivalently powerful proof-of-publication sytem. And Counterparty could be doing much better by having miners which validate its transactional data.

Well, we're disagreeing about the meaning of "on bitcoin" here; obviously you're right in one sense, and I'm right in another sense.  Counterparty was designed to work within the known existing constraints of Bitcoin, without requiring any change to Bitcoin itself.  Getting Counterparty transactions to be verified by miners would require tons of work, and it would be fraught with danger of screwing something up in the basics of Bitcoin itself.  However, by doing it this way, if there is something wrong with Counterparty, the larger Bitcoin ecosystem will not be affected at all.  Miners still mine, nodes still nodulate, nobody has to download a new client version or anything. 

There's a sort of partitioning of dangers and responsibilities which I think makes the overall system more robust.  It's kind of like encapsulation in programming: you work on your functions, and make sure that they work; and I'll work on my functions, and make sure that they work; and my functions don't have to know about the inner workings of your functions, and vice-versa.  It results in an efficient division of labor, where the Counterparty devs don't have to get involved with Bitcoin development, and Bitcoin devs don't have to get involved with Counterparty development. 

In theory, at least.  Obviously the current problems are the result of this NOT happening.  Bitcoin changed a spec at the last minute, and Counterparty had to adapt in a way that the Bitcoin devs didn't like.  Makes me wonder what would have happened if this had simply been kept quiet by the Counterparty devs.  If they had just quietly resorted to using multisig (that is what they're using now, right?  It's hard to keep up) instead of OP_RETURN, without the furor on this forum, would the Bitcoin devs ever have noticed Counterparty?

[Matt Y]

In theory, at least.  Obviously the current problems are the result of this NOT happening.  Bitcoin changed a spec at the last minute, and Counterparty had to adapt in a way that the Bitcoin devs didn't like.  Makes me wonder what would have happened if this had simply been kept quiet by the Counterparty devs.  If they had just quietly resorted to using multisig (that is what they're using now, right?  It's hard to keep up) instead of OP_RETURN, without the furor on this forum, would the Bitcoin devs ever have noticed Counterparty?

We were using bare multi-sig while waiting for .9 to come out, so nothing changed. We continue to use the same solution that we were before.

[maaku]

There are two problems with that.

First, the system adopted by Counterparty is hugely inefficient. It won't scale. That's why we're making all these complaints about node validation and SPV mode - because these are what lets bitcoin scale even to the level it is currently at. And Counterparty as implemented lacks this capability entirely - and in such a way that it cannot be retrofitted in later.

Second, Counterparty should be working as Bitcoin developers and using existing Bitcoin code and infrastructure. Writing this sort of consensus code is the same difficulty whether you are doing it as a fork or improvement to bitcoin, or doing it as soem sort of embedded/parasitic system. Really, it doesn't make a difference: you still have to deal with the same sorts of issues in either case. The analogy about code encapsulation is cute but doesn't apply: here there are gains to be made from symbiosis. By choosing to make a separate system Counterparty developers are hurting both Bitcoin and themselves.

In theory, at least.  Obviously the current problems are the result of this NOT happening.  Bitcoin changed a spec at the last minute, and Counterparty had to adapt in a way that the Bitcoin devs didn't like.  Makes me wonder what would have happened if this had simply been kept quiet by the Counterparty devs.  If they had just quietly resorted to using multisig (that is what they're using now, right?  It's hard to keep up) instead of OP_RETURN, without the furor on this forum, would the Bitcoin devs ever have noticed Counterparty?

I participated in those developer discussions, so let's get something clear: I was not, and I don't think any of the other developers were aware of Counterparty's intention to use OP_RETURN + 80 bytes. If so, there would have at least been better communication about the change. OP_RETURN should only ever be utilized in user transactions as a last resort, and even then as a temporary measure until some other infrastructure could be built, and certainly only for financial data relating to transaction processing. Examples would be 256-bit scalars or compressed public keys and a few bits of prefix data for stealth addresses. It was pointed out that under no circumstances would this exceed 40 bytes, so the rather arbitrarily chosen 80 byte limit was twice as big as it needed to be.

There is not and never has been an adversarial relationship between bitcoin developers and Counterparty developers. If we appear antagonistic, it is because we are being critical of the design of Counterparty, which is flawed and needlessly detrimental to Bitcoin.