BTT thanks for your post, I think I understand a bit better what you are proposing to do. Can I just clarify your business model a little bit out of curiosity? It sounds like you will essentially be a middle man listing assets on behalf of others, for which you will charge a fee. In this case the requirement to issue several assets is understandable and I can appreciate your desire to keep costs down.
However, I still think that asset squatting is an issue for usability, although I think that this can probably be addressed on the client side by filtering assets somehow. Don't get me wrong, I like that you are helping the system develop, my only issue is that, under a low issuance fee scenario, I can see the whole thing degenerating to a free for all where we have a million assets that have been squatted on or don't really represent or mean anything. If I was a new user I would take one look at that, think that there was nothing in CP I was interested in, and go elsewhere.
I don't know if this is practical from a protocol perspective, but one idea that I think was mentioned before would be to charge a reasonably large fee for a top level asset name (E.g. BTT-Coin or BTT) and then have no or minimal fees for sub assets (BTT-Coin.gold; BTT-Coin.silver; BTT-Coin.1gold.5silver; Etc).
I also wondered if we should make a distinction between hard assets and financial assets at the protocol level or at least on the client side to allow people to find the assets they are interested in. I have always envisaged CP as a crowd funding vehicle or a way to raise money for new businesses. Obviously that is not the only application but it is the one that for me personally is most compelling to the value of the whole protocol and infrastructure.
Anyway just some thugs I've been thinking about. I'll be watching the development of BTT with interest!
EDIT: sorry for this redundant post, I wrote it yesterday but was only able to access the site now to post, and in the meantime caught up on all the other posts addressing this. Fully supportive of these suggestions!
I like the idea of a hierarchical fee structure. Maybe GLDBTTXXXXX
Where,
GLD = Gold
BTT = Bitcoin Tangible Trust (i.e. Issuer of assets)
XXXXX = Asset ID (i.e. individual assets in the catalog, fully redeemable thru the BTT redemption procedure, eg. silver coins)
Maybe top level names such as GLD are not even available for purchase -- they would common property of all users of the protocol -- and then BTT could pay, say, 5 XCP for the GLDBTT name, and then for each unique asset created under that name, ie. GLDBTTXXXX1, GLDBTTXXXX5, then BTT could pay, say, 0.01 XCP, or something de minimus, so as not to create a competitive disadvantage for the business model.
EDIT: I posted this prior to reading the thread from GLaDOS referencing the idea posted earlier on the official forums.
EDIT 2: I actually like the "dots" as proposed by GLaDOS, eg. GLD.BTT.XXXX1, makes it easier on my eyes! =)
EDIT3: A question for everyone, should it be "GLD.BTT.XXXX1" or "BTT.GLD.XXXX1" - does it matter?