So Counterparty and Mastercoin is only clone from Bitcoin or from some other Altcoins? No new innovations or anything what bitcoin itself cannot do?
You Answer in post #15 in this thread.
~BCX~
Mastercoin is a normal scamcoin (more scammy than usual, in fact). Apparently it's common to transact in BTC using Counterparty, but Counterparty also has its own currency. I suspect that Counterparty has no really useful technology, but all I can find about their technology via Google is marketing fluff (bad sign), so I can't be sure. They both use the Bitcoin block chain for timestamping instead of doing their own mining. I think that this is often a good idea, but it doesn't mean that they're not altcoins (or that they're actually useful).
By the way, if you're already using the Bitcoin block chain, then why are you even creating a currency? Just use BTC. From what little I've read about Counterparty, it looks to me like their XCP was included just to enable pump-and-dump. (The BitDNS proposal that I co-authored in 2010 was probably the first to propose using the blockchain like this, but it just used BTC.)
Both CounterParty and Ethereum were borne after devs splintered off as a result of differences of opinion in the mastercoin project-. Mastercoin had the idea of adding functionality to bitcoin; some of those ideas were initially envisioned at the initial release of bitcoin where satoshi embedded a draft marketplace but nowadays have no chance of being shoehorned into reference client. I think the assumption that XCP was created simply for pump-and-dump/and directly competes against bitcoin (it's host) is at best a short-sighted one. A cognitive bias that seems to surprisingly prevalent amongst circles of bitcoin purists. I do remember seeing an early set of posts by Mike Hearn discussing CounterParty and was shocked at the gross misunderstandings demonstrated from such a senior figure in the community- a 5 minute skim should of cleared those misconceptions up. It seems some have taken a cursory glance at the project and dismissed it the second they realise it's not explicitly bitcoin-only. (bitcoin the token not Bitcoin the protocol). The fact developers can be potentially enriched by a secondary token- XCP and not BTC for their work seems to upset bitcoin maximalists, Despite the fact CounterParty developers never received a cent directly from any entity for their work prior or during the proof-of-burn stage, it was completely open for any bitcoin holder to participate in- still is open for any bitcoin holder to participate in and the value of whatever holdings of XCP they have relies solely on the strengths of their own contributions to their project as well as the markets own interpretation of the value the token holds. You know, much like bitcoin itself..
Meanwhile the same folks seem to love sidechains- for which the devs recently raised $21 million from venture capitalists and wall-st affiliates (but not joe-public) in the for-profit BlockStream venture , again the same folks seem to love the colored coins model with quasi-centralized intermediates like CC exchanges collecting fees along the way as their profit models, or individuals placing their trust in singular asset tracking servers (unlike counterparty) because these are all' pure and untainted' bitcoin.. Even if the CounterParty guys collectively held 100% of the total supply of XCP, the amount they'd each earn minus the amount invested works out less than buying than $15 worth of bitcoin in very early 2010 and selling somewhere near the peak. God knows they've put in more work than a passive early adopter who invested the equivalent of a couple of Happy meals or left their netbook generating coins while they took a walk in the park, then forgot about the old wallet.dat.
If you take the current market cap of CounterParty (9.7 million right now) and subtract the dollar amount of btc destroyed at the time you're left with around $6.9 million overlap- so again even if you assumed the developers owned the entire supply. I'm confident they have added more than $6.9 million worth of value to the Bitcoin ecosystem. It's less than some companies building businesses raise at seed stage.. I am more happy with that than ripple labs xrp being entitled to upwards of 2 billion dollars or paycoin at 150 million $, or litecoin at 1 billion $, or auroracoin at 850 million $ etc.. All of which are competitive to bitcoin moreso than counterparty simply by virtue of enticing users to focus their incentives maintaining consensus& protecting an alternative ledger.
CounterParty is complimentary, not competitive to bitcoin. as a protocol it is primarily a way of
extending vanilla Bitcoins capabilities. Not in the form of BIP proposals greenlighted by select few core devs in a close clique or years old forum posts and partially fleshed out whitepapers -- (no criticism of bitdns, NMC there), CounterParty is in the present here and now providing utility to the blockchain. The developers stepped forward and brought something tangible and usable to us. CounterParty expands this blockchain ecosystem to more than just 'dumb payments', having funds sit idle in wallets or off-chain services, paying merchants via bitpay for them to convert to USD etc. IMO the real value of the bitcoin token is largely derived from the utility and ubiquity of the blockchain itself, something which there is still precious little of more than half a decade later.
You can easily store CounterParty smart property on a regular bitcoin address, paper wallet or armory cold wallet and interact in quite a frictionless way through Bitcoin-> CounterParty bridge; almost like sidechains And therefore it's benefits should (and do indeed) extend to those holding bitcoin only with no intention to diversify into holding a speculative secondary token. When the Bitcoin network surpassed 100,000 transactions recently counterparty took up over 3% of the volume on-chain, and of course BTC fees are used during interaction with CounterParty-> Bitcoin network.
Thousands of BTC were initially sent to the ether during the proof-of-burn CounterParty genesis. Since those BTC's were sent to an unspendable address, reducing the supply of Bitcoin in circulation it had the net effect of directly enriching holders of BTC
Anyone holding BTC only can use the CounterParty protocol to create an asset represented on the blockchain- it could be shares of a company, physical commodity like gold served as a digital certificate, reward coupon, voting token, access control etc. No need to touch anything else
More to the point anyone holding BTC only can indirectly enjoy the wealth of extensions that CounterParty affords to the bitcoin ecosystem without ever touching XCP, such as turing complete smart contracts (a whole expansive world in their own right) Trustless betting, public broadcasts, asset ownership, decentralized exchange of smart property.. After seeing the amount of shit in the last 5 years with
millions of bitcoins being lost, stolen and hacked by centralized single points of failure, gox being one of the recent highest profile examples-- all of which caused immeasurable damage to bitcoins public's perception it's upsetting that technology which puts a positive step forward in combating bitcoins damaged mainstream reputation by providing decentralized solutions to centralized problems is quickly tarnished as a pump n dump.
I mean seriously... CounterParty developers could have done many things differently to send the market cap of XCP sky-high if it was a quick cash grab pump n dump they were after. Certainly there could of been a lot more "marketing fluff". Puzzling because the relative lack of which compared to many other offerings was one of the reasons I'd followed the project- They would of actually done an IPO rather than an open, equitable proof-of-burn,for which they nor anyone else received even a cent. They would of created the tech on their own blockchain with "ultra fast 2 second transactions", they would of asked for funds
before any protocol spec or working implementation was open sourced. CounterParty Developers would not have had the protocol code peer-reviewed by unndergoing multiple security audits by respected names in the bitcoin space out of their own pockets, nor would they have refunded few users affected by implemntation a js lib out of their own pockets, nor would they have put up the funds for bug bounties, again out of their own pockets. They would not have hired additional team members, They would not be here a year later drafting up legal framework in order to pass over the reigns to CounterParty foundation, the project's Github
https://github.com/CounterpartyXCP would not have anywhere near the amount of diligent, regular contributions, We would not be seeing consistent weekly community & developmental updates
http://counterparty.io/news/ , None of that behavior correlates with what you would tradtitionally brand a 'pump n dump'
hell, recently BitBay raised more in an IPO to their pockets than CounterParty deleted with a few buzzwords and empty promises despite having red-flags all over. That was an actual pump n dump where the perpetrators were handsomely rewarded from scamming. Paycoin is a pump n dump, Calling just about anything a pump n dump willy nilly just waters down the definition of the word and discredits genuine hardworking individuals contributing to this scene.
Seeing as the Bitcoin blockchain is the traintrack on which CounterParty train is programmed to run on, unlike an indepedent chain like NXT, Bitshares or Ethereum it's an essential component and the health of it is important. CounterParty devs have already spearheaded a program to encourage the adoption of full bitcoin nodes. I am fully confident most of the 'investors' in CounterParty primarily hold bitcoin and chose to invest in counterparty too as a way of pushing the envelope & evolving bitcoins featureset - something which is happening in a very gloopy way with bitcoin.
So as far as the criticisim that XCP (the counterparty token) is an unneccesary addition goes, From those individuals I am always interested to hear at the least
detailed technical explanations. of how CounterParty could implement counterparty-specific features..without counterparty specific tokens. For example simply natively escrowing BTC at a protocol level instead of XBTC for use in decentralized exchange or enabling trustless p2p distributed betting, or implementing effective anti-spam measures e.g for alpha asset creation using ONLY bitcoin. etc..
Ideally, a user friendly >FUNCTIONAL bitcoin-only model will be demonstrated in this present moment to prove that counterparty specific tokens right now are not necessary . I'm sure such a model will be highly praised.
As to the OP, I personally don't consider these type of projects 'alt-coins' in a classical sense, it's not a shit scrypt clone with tweaked supply and a dog logo.. but in a strict sense any project which is not bitcoin and uses independent token is an altcoin. I wouldn't campaign for them to get their own subsection or any other form of special treatment. If the market deems them innovative enough critical mass off users will naturally drive spotlight, doesn't need to be forced
