Topic: [ANN][XCP] Counterparty - Pioneering Peer-to-Peer Finance - Official Thread - page 240. (Read 1276789 times)

Please  yield to the community voice about a new front end. I am spending 2 hours a day trying to teach people about how to use the system and why it is so confusing. I have had 2 people just give up and say to hell with it, very discouraging  . Most people have no clue what counterparty is either so a little bit of PR might help to.

Right. At the moment, all of the liquidity is with BTC, because that's what people go to first.

Hello, Eric

Try http://nxtreporting.com/. It will show you all of your assets and your current total gains/losses. It also provides info on all available assets, and overall statistics for the Nxt ecosystem.

I appreciate your post. I bought XCP back in January and think that it is very smart and powerful. But I, too, have been very frustrated trying to use the GUI. It's a great back end, but is still waiting for someone to write a conventional front end, like Nxt has. I'm still a believer, and if your criticisms are used to inspire a new front end, this would add tremendous value to Counterparty and Bitcoin.

PhantomPhreak - Yes, it seems like all those issues can be easily fixed with Counterparty. And yes, using BTC was part of the problem, but I only used BTC because I first tried to buy XCP (using BTC) at the market price and the order never completed, so after 3 hours I gave up and tried it using BTC instead.

 

Thanks for the feeback. As I understand it, the NXT asset exchange was easier to use for three reasons:

1) Buying NXT could be done by sending BTC to an address.

2) There exists a website where you can easily see a list of existing assets.

3) The trades were completed quickly.

1) and 2) are not handled by the protocol, they are just external services that no one has yet set up for Counterparty. Moreover, I know that we have people that are currently working on them right now. With regard to 3), I can say that your trades with Counterparty would have been completed very quickly, too, if you used XCP, Counterparty's native currency, instead of BTC, to make your trades. Because of 1), Counterparty users are inclined to buy assets with BTC rather than XCP, which is much slower. Of course, NXT could never support trades with BTC.

I posted a few days ago about how difficult it was for me to buy a Counterparty asset (see https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.7583587 ), and I ended up giving up and not buying it at all. And, I have owned my own Internet business since 1995 so I am not a newbie.

I am not trying to say bad things about Counterparty, I am just trying to help give suggestions to improve it, so in that spirit yesterday I setup an online NXT wallet at
secureae.com and transferred $1 in BTC from my Coinbase account to it (by sending it to the Bitcoin address they gave me). Secureae.com automatically converted my BTC to NXT and the NXT just showed up in my secureae.com account without me having to do anything.

I then went to trustyourassets.com (NXT also has an official exchange with a lot less listings at http://www.nxtcommunity.org/nxt-asset-exchange ) to see a list of available assets I could buy. I sorted by the Dividend column, so it would only show me the ones with dividends, since those are the only ones I was interested in (Yes, I know NXT is still working on getting their dividend payment system working correctly but it sounds like it should be done soon). I then went back to secureae.com and did a search for each of the assets I wanted to buy (it would have been easier if trustyourassets.com had a Buy Now type link that would automatically open the asset's page in my secureae.com wallet, or at least if secureae.com had a bulk search feature so I could match a large list of assets). Since I only had $1 to spend, I only choose to buy assets that were very low priced, so I could get several different ones with the $1 I had.  I submitted Buy orders for each of the assets as the market price and within minutes all the assets showed up in my wallet (at secureae.com):
My Assets
Asset    Quantity    Total Available    Percentage    Lowest Ask    Highest Bid    Value in NXT    Transfer
JAFFA   1   1'333'333   0.00%   0.4   /   /   Transfer
KGallery   4   1'000'000   0.00%   0.25   /   /   Transfer
nXtGenKHS   1   250'000   0.00%   2.5   1.51   1.51   Transfer
Supercell   2   10'000'000   0.00%   0.569   0.4   0.8   Transfer

I also placed a few Buy orders below the current asking price, just to see if they ever get triggered (so far they have not):
Buy Orders
Asset    Quantity    Price    Total    Cancel
Coinomat   1   2.01   2.01   Cancel
NxtAT   100   0.008   0.8   Cancel

Unlike, with Counterparty, all of this was very very easy to do, just like using any other online service (Paypal, an online stock brokerage, Amazon, etc.). Also, it very clearly stated there was a 1 NXT fee for each transaction. And, when I was done I could easily see what I had bought and any open orders. My only suggestion would be that when it lists my assets, it should also show what price I bought them for, and the total value of my portfolio of assets.

I know Counterparty has some advantages over NXT, especially when it comes to paying dividends, so I am pointing out all of of these issues to try to help make Counterparty better.

- Eric

Let's see when Counterparty can get more established in China.  

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/29gwk8/we_are_okcoin_auaask_us_anything/cikt34l

Nice, if it will happen then price will really rise too fast.

Hey storj is considering crowdfund on XCP or MSC.

http://storjtalk.org/index.php?topic=1341#

I'm in favour of this. I think baking in an assurance contract into the Counterparty protocol makes sense.

I take the red cross in "Uses BTC Blockchain" of NXT as a HUGE ADVANTAGE.

Loving Matty 's post 

Matt Y, thank you for the detailed answer.

I didn't know a third one exists (NXT).

Still learning 

In addition to the below, there are a number of differences that may or may not matter to you.

Counterparty was founded in January by a team of three founders. At this time Mastercoin had been around for about a year. When Counterparty launched, it launched with more features and functionality than Mastercoin has today. And that's with a team that's a fraction of the size of other projects and no millions in outside funding.

Counterparty never accepted funding. To me this is a benefit, although others may see it differently. The bottom line is that the founders of Counterparty took the same risk as everyone else by not taking money and that sits well with me. I think it also leaves a clearer path for Counterparty if the gov ere to ever go after appcoin "IPOs". What will be the outcome of projects that raised millions from unaccredited investors while promoting the "IPO" on all channels available? I'm not a lawyer, but I'm glad that that cloud does not loom over Counterparty.

The other main difference is that there is no fee to use Counterparty. When you make transactions on Mastercoin you pay a bit of Mastercoin to the Mastercoin foundation. The money they raise is used for the future promotion of mastercoin.

Counterparty is completely free to use and there is no foundation that taxes your transactions in order to continue paying salaries, bounties, and so on. Counterparty is so awesome that there is no need to charge users to promote the protocol. People will just want to use it. For example, I am launching a betting site soon (betxcp.com) that will offer commissions that are 90% lower than the traditional alternatives. Additionally, my model has significantly lower startup costs than a comparable model that does not use Counterparty.

Counterparty's Founders are successful business people or investors that do not require salaries to live on and the work they do for Counterparty, in contrast to Mastercoin, is done for free. They Created Counterparty because it needed to be done and it was the right thing to do. All that said, don't use Counterparty because the project is super ethical and the people involved in it are awesome. Use it because it's the best platform.

Noob question,
Can someone please tell me what is the main difference between master coin and xcp ?

Is it like the same idea with 2 different teams?

Absolutely.

I'm not trying to solve the convert to XCP problem, that will be solved by centralized exchanges or even BTC -> XCP vending machines.

You can't do this with BTC in the same way, it's just not possible.  It is possible with XCP, and it is a very desirable feature, so I think just because XCP is difficult to acquire now doesn't mean we're not about to surpass those artificial barriers.

Just to clear up confusion, Counterwallet uses Forex currency pair naming (see http://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/currencypair.asp). The rule system we employ with which currency is the base currency, and which is the quote, is as follows:

* If XCP is either one of the two assets, then XCP is the base currency
* Otherwise, if BTC is either one of the two assets, then BTC is the base currency
* Otherwise, the base currency is the currency whose name comes first, alphabetically

So we do have a system in place, but I can understand how this is still confusing to people (and to be honest, forex currency pair conventions are definitely counter-intuitive...I had the same issue with them as well). To me, it seems that the exact convention used in Bitcoin-space can be inconsistent. You have sites like BTC-e.com, which seem to use this same Forex convention, and then you have sites like Poloniex, which at one point months ago seemed to use the inverse, but now also seem to be on this same forex currency pair system. So, as far as the XCP/BTC type syntax, on second thought I'm not 100% sure where the confusion lies, as it's the same convention many/most of the BTC exchanges use.

However, regarding the buy/sell interface itself, I can understand people's objections, specifically that it's a) not what they're used to with regular BTC exchanges and b) that the interface can be confusing in some regards. As a response to this, I did put together some proposed tweaks to our trading interface that I'm thinking may help make the interface more user friendly (but I could be wrong, or may have missed something). User input is welcome. Please feel free to comment on the github issue here: https://github.com/CounterpartyXCP/counterwallet/issues/238

We are considering adding proof-of-stake voting to Counterparty. At a high level, how we see this working is where an issuer/owner of a given token could create a protocol-level 'referendum' event, which would most likely reference an external URL  (and could include a hash of that URL's content, to ensure consistency). The URL would point to a .json file with the referendum text, the voting end date, etc, as well as the possible choices (similar to how we do today with extended asset and feed info). Holders of the coin, via Counterwallet or similar, would then be able to vote on the referendum, and their vote would count in proportion to the amount of coin they hold out of the total amount created (or, in circulation). As these votes are done on-blockchain, they could then be easily tallied up, and there would be a clear audit trail for verifiability.

I'm thinking this feature would open Counterparty up to all sorts of interesting political applications, as well as faciliate organizational governance for companies that do crowdfunding on the platform.

Thoughts? If we can see enough interest in this feature, we can add it.

I like the general idea but it doesn't solve the problem of having to convert to XCP first. If you had to do BTC -> XCP -> SWARM you've increased difficulty rather than decreased it (although for repeat participants it could be a very significant net benefit). Very much like the idea of programmable escrow regardless.