Counterparty is a boring subject, so many ways to issue stocks know. We already knows this works.
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It is certainly a needed service in this world where you can trust no one, especially not with your crypto currencies. Thinking about the latest Localbitcoins hack where one attacker fooled the hosting support by a spoofed email address. I am sure there are 100s of more examples.
Do you realise the whole point of CounterParty is not simply a way to issue stocks. (The platform already does much more than that) but to eliminate counterparty risk? -- i.e taking steps to solve the 'trust no one' part
The whole stock issuance thing isn't that boring and we have barely scratched the surface when it comes to applications of it. Plenty of people lost money when SEC swooped in closing 2 major Bitcoin securities platforms fairly recently, and prior to that the closure of GLBSE lost a lot of people a lot of money, It was a big dent to the bitcoin ecosystem . At the moment we are left with couple of securities platforms, one which has already stole a few million dollars worth of BTC and continues to scam people, the other options are barely more attractive. Another requires a 30BTC deposit to sign up unless you want to work with a broker, requires familiarity of GPG and doesn't actually have much to trade there beyond what the owner issued themselves. The owner seems to regularly 'fluff' the trading volume but this is overlooked by the tight knit group of people that actually trade there. The last one, based anonymously in Panama has unknown ownership and seems to have a knack for losing investors money on everything they've listed ever, including their own issuances, reports that don't quite add up and also randomly goes offline at the most needed moments.
With a decentralised platform you don't have to worry about your accumulated dividends going missing because of the owner playing fractional reserve-- they come directly to your wallet and everything is on-chain. You don't have to worry about some agency in USA freezing the site down, because the data is propogated through the blockchain. There is no single point of failure. It's not just security issuance but crowfunding without restriction that's easily enabled here.
Next is decentralised exchange of smart property
You can trade a counterparty asset (which could be BTC vended in) for another asset (say gold, USD, or another alt like LTC) on the blockchain and you don't have to worry about the other party making good on the trade. The trade can be escrowed natively by the protocol. Now CounterParty has multisig, from 1 of 2 to 3 of 3 it can support mediators/auditors, escrow agents and other such independent co-signees
You don't have to place the same trust in the protocol as you place in the trust of an exchange oprtator. Whether said operator maliciously steal your funds or claims to get hacked by weak security practices the result is the same-
you've been robbed of
your funds. With CounterParty the private keys & the power is in your hands. Just like the power is in your hands holding bitcoin, instead of PayPal or Visa. I imagine it's what Satoshi intended in the first place, with the bitcoin markets features being included in early bitcoin source.
The losses the community has suffered due to weak centralised single points of failure like MT gox add up to the hundreds of millions, easily. The point some people seem to miss about counterparty is that it can massively enhance the utility (and therefore, the value) of the bitcoin blockchain beyond simply pushing 'dumb' payments. If the value of the blockchain is increased, so will be the 'shares' in that blockchain; BTC
You can find the same sentiment echoed from Bank of englands bulletin:
http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Documents/quarterlybulletin/2014/qb14q3digitalcurrenciesbitcoin1.pdfApplications of the distributed ledger beyond
payment systems
The introduction of any new technology enables the
rethinking of business processes associated with the former
technology. In the case of payments, when paper ledgers were
first computerised, the underlying processes were not
significantly changed.
It is often the case that the bulk of the gains from the
introduction of a new technology do not arise immediately
because processes that make use of the technology also need
to be rethought. For example, Brynjolfsson and
McAfee (2014) observe that when the electric motor was first
introduced to factories, the productivity improvements it
enabled only emerged after a lag of 30 years. This was
approximately the time it took for a new cohort of factory
managers to emerge who realised that instead of merely
electrifying the single steam engine powering all the
machinery in a factory, small electric motors could be fitted to
each machine. While the initial installation did reduce costs,
the authors argue that the greatest gains came from factories
being rearranged according to the most efficient flow of
materials, rather than the limitations of the machinery. It was
not the electrification itself which produced the gains but the
changes in processes which it made possible.
In a similar way, the potential impact of the distributed ledger
may be much broader than on payment systems alone. The
majority of financial assets — such as loans, bonds, stocks and
derivatives — now exist only in electronic form, meaning that
the financial system itself is already simply a set of digital
records. These records are currently held in a tiered structure
(that is, with records of individuals’ accounts stored centrally
at their bank, and banks’ reserves accounts held centrally at
the central bank), but it may be possible in the future — in
theory, at least — for the existing infrastructure of the
financial system to be gradually replaced by a variety of
distributed systems (although this article makes no prediction
in this regard). Some developers have already implemented
so-called ‘coloured coins’ which means using digital currencies
as tokens for other assets by attaching additional information.
This development could allow any type of financial asset, for
example shares in a company, to be recorded on a distributed
ledger. Distributed ledger technology could also be applied to
physical assets where no centralised register exists, such as
gold or silver.(2)
I haven't even spoke about the ability to hedge, bet and speculate using counterparty. Already the protocol has enabled something revolutionary - completely decentralised p2p betting. Take a look at something like this for instance
http://betxcp.com/about and compare it with traditional bitcoin accepting sportsbook. There is no contest.
1) How this was determined to be a positive -- (it seems backwards?)
11. What's the emission (daily inflation measured by mktvalue)?
TOP-5 emission - 2 points
TOP-20 emission - 1 point
less - 0 points
Currently all cryptos still want to attract more investors. This is easier if there are more coins being made. Few want to come to a crowded table, or buy into a pyramid scheme in its late stage. The absolute amount of money that the coin absorbs every day is a proof that it is wanted by the market.
2) How we would be privvy to this information on coins without auditable ledgers. Or in cases where we have ledgers that are transparent but care has been taken to obfuscate 'disproportionate' stakes. Secondly Is there a measurable
difference between 3 largest staked whales and 3 largest staked devs in terms of perception?
5. What % of the eventual market cap is held by the 3 largest staked devs?
<3% - 2 points
3-10% - 1 point
>10% - 0 points
Hearsay is quite enough. Without specially trying to obtain the knowledge, I have heard a lot about the situation concerning different coins/devs, and the information can be compiled.
There is a thread that tells how
it is better that whales own the coins than the devs.
BUT: people can not be categorized. Rather often, the same person is both a dev and a whale. And the issue is not to alienate these interdependent groups from each other, rather point to the problem of ((il)legitimate) free money that is typically the reason for the devs' large stashes. If there is an unfair launch lied about, and the dev has coins as a result, that will not bring a blessing to the project. Even if the dev has created his stash honestly, if it is without due payment, it is a problem. Even if the dev has mined his stash in an open market, without any spot or blemish, to support the coin, over the years,
just by the virtue that it is too big, it is a problem. See: Satoshi.
Nice response. Actually I agree with the statement that the same person can be both a dev and a whale and the general assumptions there about being too specific.
I didn't initially understand high inflation being a good thing, because in certain cases you have tokens (not really a 'coin' or a currency) which are currently not being inflated- in fact they are deflationary in the sense the tokens are required for a specific task, and the more utility those tokens get, the more attractive they can become for a store of value.
In that case it seems llogical to detract points because they aren't currently being heavily inflated by a proof-of-work process, But I can understand that evidence of the market readily absorbing mined coins, serves to demonstrate the demand for that coin - perhaps difficult to gauge how many are primarily investing during a period of high inflation in preparation for a drastic decline in emission however, and how demand would look like towards the end of that cycle.
