I'm glad to see the first DEX in action, but I'm slightly disappointed by how it is done right now.
Especially the fee-policy seems strange to me. It can't be that a DEX is much more expensive than a centralized one. I see the need for trolling prevention, but what's the point of having a troll-free DEX that is not used because it's too expensive? There is one fundamental problem if users can set the fee required when placing an offer: The market does not necessarily converge to one price. There might be one price for low fees and another for high fees. this makes the whole thing very complicated to use.
And the following DEX features are lacking (or please point me to the docs if I'm not up to date):
- minimum match quantity should be selectable when placing an offer. If I want to sell 100x I might not want to to have 100 trades of 1x, especially if the process is not automized
- multisig escrow solution. Trading XCP/BTC is ok now because both are built on top of the same blockchain and the protocol can act as the escrow. But If I would like to trade PPC for BTC, how would that work trustlessly?
However: keep going on, the bleeding edge of crypto is exciting....
Hi, you've got good points and I'll try and answer your questions.
As you know, the fee policy is only required for orders which involve the sending or receiving of BTC. Assets within Counterparty can be traded on the DEX completely frictionless and trustlessly. Since BTC cannot be held in escrow there are some measures that need to be put in place to disincentivize troll orders.
I agree that it is slightly cumbersome to use the DEX as it stands. However, the convenience that you and I seek as users are just functions of the client software. Things that I hope to see develop as Counterparty becomes more mature:
1) The client should have an option to automatically calculate the 'full' price of an order including the fee. One click to expand the underlying orders. Another click on a line item to match an order price.
2) The client could have an optional automatic BTC pay option to release payments after x confirmations of an order match. It would be optional as not everyone would want to use such a feature.
Regarding cross blockchain trading, personally I'm not sure how it would be possible to do it trustlessly. However, it has been discussed in this thread regarding the creation of a DAC which can provide a service to automatically sell and buy 'XBTC' which is a Counterparty asset based asset and held at parity with BTC. The DAC would be transparent, auditable and the health of the DAC could be seen on a dashboard. The DAC would not be trust less but the transactions would be provable. There are some additional complications when extending this to a different blockchain, but I think it is feasible to create a DAC for such purposes. You would then be able to trade frictionlessly between XCP and XBTC, and in your case XCP and XPPC.
As a side note, in your question about trading for PPC is that because you are interested in the utility of PPC? ie you want to use PPC to purchase goods or proof of stake. Or are are you interested in PPC as an investment opportunity and wish to participate in the price movements?
If it is the latter, then you do in not need to own PPC in order to be able to participate in the price movements of PPC. In theory, with a bull CFD on a BTC/PPC broadcast feed, with a leverage of 1, you could participate in the price movements of PPC without owning PPC. Do note though that the payouts for bets and CFDs in Counterparty is in XCP.
