Let's be clear: Counterparty is not yet anywhere near 100% reliable. The basic protocol, however, is, yes, unambiguous, if for no other reason than that it has a reference implementation.
However, it will get there much sooner than mastercoin. The stress test program can be helpful in finding all the bugs.
Any estimate on when counterparty is ready for massive stress testing? I think this will be a critical piece to get in place and then publicize (as soon as XCP passes)
When it comes to money, reliability is really the most important thing. Cost savings is probably in second. By passing stress test, intrinsically from not having fees and with automatic scripts that optimize trade outcomes, we can prove that XCP is not only the most reliable platform, but it makes you the most profit.
James
The thing is that XCP has already been pretty seriously stress tested (in fact, I alone probably broke the network 3-4 times already), and even in alpha state, does work (without anyone's XCP going into a black hole so far). This is undoubtedly due to the massive amount of feedback in this thread.
And about the whale; If I burned 50 grand, I'd at least want something back to recoup my costs (which looks to be what's happening here) no matter how I feel about the project. And 7-8 times over the burn price isn't exactly crashing. In reality, I probably burned less BTC than most people in this thread (simply because I don't have much to begin with). A lot of my cold storage went into this project.
I think the XCP devs are being super cautious about any reliability claims, for obvious reasons. Also, I think you are severely underestimating the level of stress testing I am thinking of. it needs to be so intense that any competitive system would go back home crying to mommy.
Massive amounts of simultaneous transactions, everything, from multiple servers, overflowing blocks, the works.
If we want the rest of the world to use XCP for big money transactions, we must make it 100% reliable. Since the XCP protocol is simple and sane, it might take some time, but it is something that will be achievable. Blackbox testing, clearbox testing, graybox testing, flaw analysis, independent source code reviews, everything.
Raise the bar so high that any competitor would have to spend months and months and months going in circles trying to fix all their bugs. From what I have heard, it sounds like it is quite possible that mastercoin has too much complexity and when you combine too much complexity with large scale real world volumes and complexity, well, it breaks.
James
