Blockchains can do much more than just payments. One interesting observation is, in our quest to make the Bitcoin blockchain do more than remittances, we have to abandon BTC as the unit of account. Take colored coins, Counterparty, Ethereum, or sidechains for instance. None of these systems uses actual BTC as the unit of account. Not even sidechains will use the BTC unit of account. Instead they have to invent a brand new way to lock up the BTC unit of account and release an alternate unit of account that isn't as limited.
And if you believe the Bitcoin blockchain is the strongest chain, but aren't comfortable with hard forking Ethereum into Bitcoin Core, (never gonna happen) then systems like Counterparty are a valid approach.
"My personal opinion is that XCP-style meta-consensus systems are the next generation from here, at least as far as Bitcoin-based protocols are concerned". --
Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum lead dev "So, Counterparty sucks because it is too powerful?
I was involved in the colored coins project for a few months before I moved to my position that XCP-style systems are strictly superior to CC in basically every possible way (and moved to Ethereum full-time, but I will say that Ethereum is not superior to CC in every possible way because it is not directly based on Bitcoin so doesn't have as nice interoperability properties" --
Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum lead devOur compatibility with Ethereum smart contracts is at the virtual machine level, so it doesn't matter what language (Serpent, Solidity, LLL, etc.), you write the contracts in---they'll run on both Counterparty and Ethereum the same. Between the Counterparty and the Ethereum communities, we'll figure out what languages we want to write contracts in and develop those. --
Adam Krellenstein, Counterparty lead dev So we have a system which is entirely compatible with what is arguably Ethereums biggest selling points (turing complete dApps/smart contracts) with the real negative of slower block times but the real positive of a stronger, battle tested chain with a comparatively long established ecosystem.
And yet..
CounterParty current market cap:
$2.70 MillionEthereum current market cap:
$1.37 BillionEthereum is worth 378 times as much as CounterParty, ($1.35 Billion more!) Personally I think that disparity is too large to remain forever. XCP is valued around
10 times less than of it's ATH. If Ethereums vision of programmable money in the form of smart contracts takes off, then we will have a wealth of code ready to be ported across to run on bitcoin blockchain too.
The only choice to run them on the bitcoin blockchain is Counterparty. CounterPartys gas costs are deductible in XCP which is removed from supply upon contract execution, rewarding XCP holders. XCP is also deflationary due to being debited when registering 'premium' alphanumeric asset names, and so far near 50k assets have been brought out of nearly 500k total transactions. With a fairly limited total supply (2.6MM) of coin, and a new well-funded fintech offshoot in the form of Symbiont incorporating CounterParty in their stack an uptrack in asset registration and usage of smart contracting when the feature is greenlighted on main-net could feasibly raise the price up an order of magnitude back to previous heights, at least.
