if xcp runs on top of btc, then wouldn't overload and pollute the btc blockchain if it became successful? or is it like ftc, that only locks in one chksum of the sidechain every 10 minutes, reducing the effect on bitcoin?
Luke-jr may not like it, but if they're paying their transaction fees...
with just transferring BTC in the BTC network, the tx fees become burdensome fast. this is the problem that occurred when the price went up to $1200. All of a sudden it became "cheaper" to use Visa/Mastercard.
imagine having to pay a large group of people with BTC, the costs would be very very high.
now imagine that all of those people have some meta-token using XCP. the XCP system knows who they are and only requires 1 BTC transaction to do a pay all payment to the entire group
http://counterparty.io/docs/pay_distribution/
this saves a lot of tx fees and unnecessary BTC transactions.
so yes perhaps XCP does "pollute" in some case, but in other cases it allows for efficiencies that help BTC network squeeze more TX into 1 block that it otherwise could never achieve.
another use case, which has not been developed is the payment of recurring subscription services.
in this case a user address would send a "subscribe" type message to another address, or a smart contract, which would mark his address with a subscription token which presumably would be used to give access to some online service or content. the contract would then deduct some amount of XCP (or SJCX or BCY ) at set block intervals specified in the contract. The contract would also know to delete the seubscription token if the subscriber address ever defaulted on payment (did not have enough funds to make the scheduled payment).
in this case, it would allow the bitcoin network to support possibly millions of subscription transactions over long periods of time, without needing to do a btc transaction each month. that allows BTC to scale to handle more transactional capacity without having to do large increases in blocksize which some people are again.
