Topic: [ANN][XCP] Counterparty - Pioneering Peer-to-Peer Finance - Official Thread - page 123. (Read 1276936 times)

FoldingCoin is going to start merged-token distribution soon which is a first I think for any token so far. Their post on it is here: http://foldingcoin.net/2015/01/merged-folding/

What effect do you think this kind of activity might have for the space of Counterparty tokens?

I appreciate the time taken to answer.

A lot of these strange 'ideas' I always see resurfacing on Bitcointalk and other forums seem to be primarily driven by irrational fear.

Counterparty has billions of other uses apart from Medici... You're basically saying "Will Bitcoin be an abandoned sandbox if Coinbase shuts down?" The answer is thankfully a resounding no in any case. Look at GEMZ, Storj, SWARM, Foldingcoin, Bitcoin Tangible Trust, LTBCOIN, etc. And that's just the beginning.  

And Overstock has repeatedly confirmed (as recently as last week) that they will be using the existing Counterparty platform. It's been repeatedly confirmed by the devs in this very thread too:

https://twitter.com/BitcoinCenterNY/status/557341163821498369
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.10216793

And the most effective token to trade against will always be XCP. There's absolutely no question about it. It's the native token of the protocol, and the fuel for smart contracts.

P.S. No Counterparty developers have ever abandoned Counterparty, and they will continue working on Counterparty as mentioned earlier in this thread. Their commitment is as much logical as it is ideological.

thats ridiculous.

I just cannot see the Counterparty founders abandoning XCP and the tokens that came from the original proof-of-burn.

XCP is still the "native" currency of Counterparty, and for smooth transactions in the DEX, trades should be denominated in XCP.

The Overstock spokesman mentioned perhaps other tokens like XCPUSD, pegged to the US dollar, to facilitate securities trading in Medici.  XCPUSD would still be a Counterparty asset, and purchasing XCPUSD would still best be accomplished on the DEX by using XCP, although it's likely that you would also be able to buy XCPUSD directly on a centralized exchange somewhere.

In the end though, the value of XCP is more tied into its role as a facilitator of transactions.  Any Counterparty asset can be traded for any other Counterparty asset in a fairly seamless manner.  You could own millions of dollars worth of Medici-facilitated stock shares or other Counterparty assets without owning any XCP.  But XCP is required to create those assets.

Here is my question and the CP team answer about future of XCP, I thought this might be interesting to you,

Q. Except for token (asset) creation is there any other usage for XCP or have you any plan to give more role to XCP?

A. There are at least two others (it's used for dividend payments and also binary bets (bets don't "burn" XCP, they just use them).
But a bigger one should appear in a month or two, and that is Ethereum-style Smart Contracts - "fuel" for those will be XCP (IIRC the current thinking is to simply "burn" such fuel and thereby deflate the value of the remaining XCP float).
Smart Contracts are available on testnet and you can see people are testing them already - e.g. http[Suspicious link removed]cuteInfo/2075 is one transaction of Smart Contract execution.
Contracts must be written in pythereum. There's more about this on the Web site and the forums, although not a lot because we're still working on the implementation and currently they're available only on testnet.
Smart Contracts are larger in size compared to regular transactions so personally I think those should create more "XCP burn" than the current platform features as they should be more numerous and the cost should be proportional to contract size, but that's just my personal expectation by observing it transaction logs from testnet. It's going to be a competitive market (with Ethereum and maybe other platforms doing the same thing either in Q1 or later) so Counterparty won't have a monopoly on that market, that's why regardless of compute cost, contracts will have to be competitively priced. It's impossible to know in advance, so we'll have to wait and see.
Regards
Counterparty Support

So I am curious as I have read no clear answer to the implied question here.

Will Medici leave counterparty investors behind?

In other words, will the existing counterparty system, and sidechain be utilized with this new Medici system, or will it have been an abandoned sandbox once Medici comes?


Market seems to believe #2.

Two new posts from the Counterparty team:

Dev Update: http://counterparty.io/news/counterparty-development-update-12/ &
Foundation Board Meeting: http://counterpartyfoundation.org/notes-from-the-second-counterparty-foundation-board-meeting/

No problem!

Meanwhile, you could get familiar with Serpent PoC7 (the scripting language for smart contracts). When the features reach the main network (around 2-3 months?), by that time you will know everything you need to get started.

@Anotheranonlol and @deliciousowl, thanks for your guys' help! Sounds like what I'm after isn't directly available yet.

As far as I know, the protocol dictates tokens are send to the address that originally requested the creation of them. It's then up to the issuer to decide to distribute them in whatever manner they see fit.

I think the closest thing in the protocol to some form of automatic token distribution is the burn message https://github.com/CounterpartyXCP/Counterparty#burn used for the initial proof-of-burn. The only similarities to traditional proof-of-work distribution really were that 'difficulty' increased over time- less and less 'rewards' were generated and after the end-block was reached, the supply had been permanently capped. I don't think you can use the burn message for your own token though.

You always have turing complete smart contracts with SEND opcode for distributing tokens, (once live on mainnet)- You're free to play around with implementations on testnet now though. You could probably make something closer to the '1 cpu, 1 vote' idea than the version of bitcoin that currently exists today

Another  basic idea could be generate a list of public keys derived from weak passphrases and send token(s) to each, in effect they would be mineable by bruteforce. You could add fun social/gamification elements into play, like revealing part of the input used to create the key (or the entire key itself for the first user to sweep the token) through counterparty broadcasts, public puzzles. twitter etc.

Currently, not on the main network (which uses real BTC and XCP). However, everything that you describe is possible with smart contracts. Once those are finalized, security audited and live on the main Bitcoin network, all of this will be possible. It's been estimated that this will be sometime around March or so.

Does counterparty have support for doing this with standard user issued tokens? Could you set a maximum number of tokens that could be created through proof of Burn?

Thanks for your help, Delulo.

Yes, I am talking about user issued assets. I understand what you mean about mining being just as centralized of a way to hand out tokens as giving them in exchange for another resource (if not more centralized). But I think we are thinking about different methods to issue tokens for resources. Like mining, I was hoping there is some way to distribute tokens of a particular asset according to some set schedule and to any node, rather than one person creating all the tokens and giving them out according to those rules. The first case I would think of as decentralized distribution, and the second as centralized distribution.

Maybe I am just not sufficiently familiar with counterparty, but I thought only one entity could issue additional tokens for a particular asset at a time. Is this correct? I know you can transfer the rights to issue new tokens, but I'm thinking it would be interesting if assets could be created in a process similar to mining (although, as you said, energy doesn't have to be the resource consumed), where tokens are distributed in a certain schedule and not through a central entity.

You could distribute them by using a burning process instead of selling them, like Counterparty did with XCP.

You should make an effort and define " in a decentralized way" and get rid of the nonsensical idea that mining would serve that purpose better than giving them away for any resource (a fundraiser achieves the same here, there is also a resource required to obtain coins (money as opposed to hashing power (hashing power = electricity/money + mining equipement = knowledge + money))).
Edit: I think you are talking about user issued assets / custom tokens on Counterparty... The same as above applies: Distribution via mining is not more decentralized than given them away for any other resource. Not idea whether you could let someone mine user issued assets but I also do not see a reason / use case.   
And the Bitcoin blockchain is used with Counterparty for processing tx.

If someone from counterparty could check out my question on the bitcoin stack exchange, I'd appreciate it! Here's the link: http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/35645/how-can-counterparty-tokens-be-distributed

Basically, I'm wondering if counterparty tokens can be distributed in a decentralized way at all, or if they can only be created and issued to a single address. It would be really cool if there were a way to use the bitcoin block chain for security of transactions, but still issue tokens via a mining process.

as usually good progress again.

New Community Update:  http://counterparty.io/news/counterparty-community-update-jan-21/

In summary, we held the second meeting of the Counterparty Foundation Board of Directors (Notes from that meeting will be published on the Foundation's blog), launched a giveaway campaign offering annual membership at a discount price with free XCP and store coupons and made our usual weekly development progress.

Is that PhantomPhreak dishing out some swag in the background?!