Hey have you guys seen the leader of SWARM came into the Counterparty nomination forums and basically said he thinks we have no future? What do you guys think? I personally responded in the Q&A section (my username there is simba6)
I'm Joel Dietz, Swarm founder. I have put together a document that I'm circulating privately at the moment in order to collect critical feedback and decide if it is worth running.
My main consideration is this. I'm interested in Counterparty becoming a healthy and growing ecosystem. This means that it needs all of the following:
(1) Excited developers building on the platform
(2) Business potential, either current or future
(3) Competitive advantage vis-a-vis other platforms offering the same or similar services
(4) Engaged community promoting the platform
Obviously I've already committed a lot of time and energy to this ecosystem, but it's not entirely clear to me that it is growing at the pace necessary to be competitive.
First, developer evangelism while perhaps better than any other 2.0 project on the Bitcoin blockchain is not nearly at the same level as other off-chain projects (NXT, BitShares, NuBits, Ethereum). I estimate that there are something like ~10 developer actively building something on the project and none of the bigger players are releasing back open source code.
A good example of this is Swarm, we've had a strong desire to contribute back open source code but have been inhibited by the fact that there is a strong internal competitive nature to the ecosystem. Compare the slogans of the different folks now working around the ecosystem: cryptoequity (Swarm), smart securities (Symbiont), cryptoequity (Overstock), smart corporations (Koinify).
Can you tell what the difference is? Probably not. I certainly can't. Although Swarm was the first to describe or offer any of this, it makes for a fairly cluttered ecosystem.
Also, if you look at the stats you'll see that although Counterparty has greater than 80% of the transaction volume among Bitcoin blockchain projects, the market capitalization of Maidsafe (on Omni/Mastercoin) is greater than all Counterparty projects combined.
The net result that I've observed is that many of the companies in the space are less committed to Counterparty than they once were. For example Koinify, who even now has a board seat on the Counterparty foundation, is not doing any of their announced upcoming sales on Counterparty. The only one they did, GEMS, was from someone who had already decided to use Counterparty in advance of the sale.
So in general people are making only a loose commitment to the underlying technology and ecosystem, which makes sense from a business perspective but is disappointing to me since in general when I started with Counterparty I invested a fair bit of effort and time in an effort to see the whole ecosystem grow.
My general feeling about Counterparty at the moment is disappointment. I don't have a specific desire to invest a lot of time and energy promoting something that is going to ultimately turn into a second place solution. I do have a large desire to open source code and provide other resources back to the community, but don't feel like I can do that in the current environment with the risk of taking a major economic loss on my part as a result.
In any case, all of these are factors in my decision to run or not run for the Counterparty board. If they can't be resolved, I honestly don't think Counterparty has a future.
Also, although I think it is nice to have a "community director," what is really needed is not simply some idea of 'community,' but some more long-term strategic planning to build out the whole ecosystem. In my opinion so far that's been neglected -- and the XCP price shows it.
OK apologies in advance for the rant, it's meant in defense of the admiral Counterparty team, who at their own cost have built something incredible, functional and leading in the cryptosphere yet are getting talked down by a guy who's built next to nothing in a year at considerable expense to investors.
To me Counterparty is more interesting than Bitcoin itself, allowing business or individuals to produce tokens that can be used for anything from representing loans to business equity, whilst providing the mechanism to instantly administrate repayments or send dividends. This gives the opportunity to offer a value proposition to investors where Bitcoin fails.
Joel and his small team of young web designers took over $1m in fundraising a year or so ago to create an unfinished website. The proposition itself, was for them to syphon off as much cash as they can from anyone offering or purchasing crypto equities in exchange for using a platform they had yet to start (isn't Bitcointalk better for this purpose anyway? works fine, did for them, Counterparty, Mastercoin and many others! plus has massive amounts of established traffic to target prospective investors!).
It really is amazing what a non nonsensical 8 page PDF filled with pictures and charts that don't tally up can do!
A respectable business startup should take personal risk, sacrifice determination and passion ala Counterparty. I'm not saying theres anything wrong with raising funds to meet a goal but Joel and his team were aiming for the $21m mark nearly ten times Oculus Rift funding goals! seriously WTF! Joel & co are extremely lucky to have been supported so heavily in their efforts.
To put things in perspective I've got friends locally here in Chiangmai who are fantastic web designers with vastly more experience and their commercial rates are only in the $15 an hour bracket, $600 a week. OK it's a particular cheap place to live but come on, a $600 a week subsidy should be plenty enough for any young group of coders, just out of uni to follow their dreams.
If you put the amount they raised, into man hours of graft at that rate, it works out that they have about 70k hours of coding (8 years!) during which they're certainly not going to starve anywhere on the planet.
What Joel and his team have achieved in a year with a million dollars, I could pay a couple of friends locally to do for a few $k in far fewer months, pretty shameful. More shameful and a testament to the amount of front he's got, is that he's spreading muck about some of the most dedicated and on the money coders, who have built the most functional platform to date for the purpose of distributing custom tokens.
How he's got the nerve, or even feels that his opinion should be considered relevant a year after raising so much money, and producing so little himself really is beggars belief. Pretty funny! Joel you should perhaps reflect on the stark contrast and speed between your own heavily funded work, and the work the Counterparty team have produced at their own cost, in a similar time period.
