Topic: [ANN][XCP] Counterparty - Pioneering Peer-to-Peer Finance - Official Thread - page 239. (Read 1276936 times)

I'm really impressed by the Counterwallet. I'm big supporter of this project, and the developers are on the right track. But as with any beta software there are things that could improve. Here's a list of things that could be done, in my opinion:

(1) When users trade with BTC there should be a clear warning that it is still beta. Especially when you want to buy BTC at market rate there's a chance the other side won't be logged in, so you'll never receive the btcpay. This happened to me in the beginning, and I thought i had lost some XCP (thankfully, I didn't). When buying XCP for BTC it can be advised to use a decentralized exchange.

(2) The GUI for trading can be more intuitive. I know you are working on this, and I look forward to the update. Personally I like the GUI at bter.com. You can click on a price in the order book and it fills in the trade form automatically. Click on your balance and it fills out quantity. Buy and sell forms are side by side are on the same page. In counterwallet you could do the same, i.e. on the first page only select asset #1 and asset #2, but not specifying which ones to buy and sell.

(3) When an order matches, the user should immediately get a notice. E.g. "Order Matched. Pending Block Confirmation". Real time feedback is very important for most users.

(4) Dust amounts on escrows accumulate. It would be good to view this amount under "My Account Balances" and redeem it by one click.

(5) The passphrase can be tricky to enter for children, dyslectics, and non-native English speakers. Maybe there should be an option to display the characters when entering it? Personally I'd also like have the option to enter the passphrase in a more compact encoded format. This could be displayed under "Show option" (not on front page to avoid confusion) and have characters grouped ("10420e3b0" => "104 20e 3b0") to make it easier to type manually.

Other than that, I can just say that the Counterwallet is awesome. The system for betting is excellent.

Yes, we need this. This is an important feature for peer-to-peer organizations, as well as multi-sig.

Wrt to exchange confusion,  we heard you guys.  We have a single page buy/sell page design proposed that should be a major improvement. Ouziel can begin work on this as soon as he is done fixing some urgent outstanding bugs in counterwallet.

This wont address the whole problem (specifically around challenges trading when btc is involved... We are looking at protocol level enhancements to improve that)

Thanks Eric. FYI, Swarm is using a vending machine based upon the code from Vennd (www.vennd.io).

Regards,

Jeremy.

I actually had no real interest in investing in Swarm, I just did it as a test to see if I could at least buy some asset. Yes, if it were easier I would probably purchase more assets. I don't care that much about the exact rate. It is very hard to figure out how much I would normally be paying anyhow.

As an asset issuer, this would be a huge plus though, since it would make it much more simple for people to buy my asset. I would not even have to tell them the other more complicated ways of buying it.

- Eric

Thanks for the feedback Eric. For your information, you don't need to leave Counterwallet open to receive SWARMPRE.

Question for you and other people who are interested in investing in XCP. If the same process was available to you, would you take that option? The price would be advertised on a web page, like a BTC ticker. However, purchasing through such a means may incur slightly worse rate (say 5%) for the convenience and ease of transaction. There are other options to purchase XCP: DEx, centralised exchanges and between users but this would be just another option available to people.

I posted earlier about my troubles in counterwallet.co buying XCP and then an asset using BTC (I never ended up with any XCP or the asset), but I read an article today about
Swarm so I decided to try investing my counterwallet.co BTC balance in that instead because it sounded a lot easier. I just followed the instructions on the main page of swarmcorp.com, which said "Send BTC from your counterwallet to the SWARM address" (I could have instead sent XCP to a different address if I had any XCP). I left my wallet open (it was unclear if I could close it or not for this to work) and 2 hours later I came back to my computer and now have 2 SWARMPRE in my counterwallet.co wallet. It could not have been any easier. I am not sure how Swarm was able to do that, but all the Countercoin assets should be setup that way.

- Eric


 

It would help the fee issue if CP allows as many tx as possible to lump into one send.

Ok, so slight revision

the action is "I will buy A of B if C total amount of B is also purchased at the same time.  I was sent here by Z"

Z is a referrer payment address, it would get 1% or a user defined split of the tokens, which comes out of the crowdfunders side.  Basically 99% would be assigned to the sender and 1% would be assigned to the referrer, this would make it very worthwhile to run a site with a selection of campaigns that will attract investment.

So now the incentives say that an ideal crowdfunding site should have ALL the projects currently seeking funds who people will actually send money to, because they earn a little of
everyone they bring in

It is hugely expanded coverage for any but the largest crowdfunding campaign, and the cost is only 1%.  There is almost no infrastructure or financial or compliance cost because the

crowdfunding sites no longer do anything but showcase

and individuals even just on a blog can be a "Crowdfunding site" in this model

and it's (I believe) the first affiliate program built into a coin
-

Many of the problems of XCP use right now are caused by the chicken/egg of XCP being a much better currency to use (from a user experiance and cost standpoint), but few people having it and the standard way of acquiring it (for Bitcoin) is one of the clunkiest types of tx in the Counterparty system.

Soon you'll be able to open a counterwallet, send it some bitcoin, send some of the bitcoin to a Vending machine address which will send you back XCP at the days rate.  That is days or weeks away, hang tight.

This idea isn't going to work . CounterParty just introduced a BUTTload more complexity onto Bitcoin. People still don't even get what Bitcoin is let alone some confusing thing called Counterparty!   Plus, most of this is highly illegal. Just setting up a database for the SEC to go after ?  Good idea in general, but it will fail miserably.

The only fees are miners fees for the cancel transaction.

They need to be more like the real exchanges in this area. (No fees for cancelled orders). Would encourage people to make more use of the CP exchange.

That is good to hear.

Because Counterparty escrows funds and I never have access to them, I don't have to worry about creating user account capability, cold storage, two factor authentication, none of that. I just have to broadcast feeds and display that information on a website, and that is significantly less complex than running a sportsbook. This is part of the reason why a standard vig at an online sportsbook is 5-10% and on BetXCP the commission is a flat 0.5%.

You may not see them yet, but this statement is very incorrect. 

An asset may be "locked", i.e., prevented from issuing any more units.  Everyone can see whether an asset is locked or not.  Of course people will be wary of assets that are unlocked.  In these cases, it will come down to a matter of trust in the asset issuer.  An asset such as LTBCOIN has good reasons for issuing more coins as they go along, and of course Adam Levine has a vested interest in avoiding any deviation from the issuance plan which he laid out in advance of the coin being created.

from what I understand, there is nothing stopping the issuer from diluting assets on counterparty by issuing more and more. unlike an alt-chain, where the distribution schedule is built into the distributed protocol.  very confusing. Is there any docs comparing and contrasting counterparty assets vs stand alone alt-coins?

One of the reasons that there is not a rush of outside developers creating Counterparty add-ons is that the CP devs cannot offer bounties, like pre-mined coins can. They are not sitting on a stash themselves, and did not reserve such a horde for development. I think the lack of a pre-mine or IPO is a good thing, but at the moment it handicaps the development of an entire system around XCP. So how can this problem become a virtue?

One answer is Swarm. This is precisely the kind of situation that the kickstarter-like crowdfunding platform is made for. Unfortunately, Swarm won't be ready for awhile. Is it possible to create something shorter term that is custom-made for raising escrowed funds (to create bounties) that would encourage outside developers to create functionality for the Counterparty system? Could the CP devs do the escrow themselves, say, by creating an asset which anyone could buy? What if they created, say, asset CPGUI, with specific terms about what a GUI would require (code-wise), how the coders of the GUI would be paid, etc? How would buyers/holders of this asset get paid back?

Is any of this making sense, or are there logical/logistical problems with trying to fund development by issuing such an asset? Would the original CP devs welcome the work of outside developers?   

Yeah, I agree that this is a problem.  Pissing away satoshis on mysteriously failed orders doesn't feel good.  I realize that the amounts involved are small, but multiply by X and they get bigger.

Could you please expand a little bit on that? What sort of costs Counterparty allow a startup to avoid?

My knowledge of what it takes to make a start up is weak.