You DO own a stake in the underlying technology.....In exactly the way 1 BTC entitles you to 1 share out of 21million in the Bitcoin protocol. 1 XCP entitles you to 1 share in the CounterParty protocol
What I meant was:
Say counterparty plays host to Etherium and Bitcoin (by porting the Etherium code to counterparty etc and allowing access to the Bitcoin blockchain). That was gave it its last rise.
Great. But by investing in counterparty, you neither end up owning a stake in the Etherium project nor one in the Bitcoin blockchain. That is what I meant by "unerlying technology". Sure your investing in counterparty but that's just the broker. I thought that revaluation was rather hollow for that reason.
True, but broadly seperate the two things, ethereum blockchain, and ETH token
the largest reason people invested a stake in ethereum was because it allowed users to execute turing complete code on a blockchain. That is the greatest value proposition of owning ETH. The fact you can execute python like contracts in a p2p decentralised fashion. The more successful smart contracts are, the more ETH will be required to be spent, hence the more a proportional share of ETH (should) be worth.
Except right you don't need to spend ETH to execute smart contracts, nor do you need to use a seperate blockchain. Everything can be compatible with bitcoin ecosystem . As far as executing most smart contracts go there is no requirement anymore for owning or spending ETH so there is no incentivization to own a stake. CounterParty isn't going through Ethereum as a middleman to executing contracts, they've just directly ported the ability to intepret and run that code.
So now users have a choice to buy a stake in ETH to execute identical smart contracts on the ethereum blockchain, (when released) or you can execute those same contracts with a stake in XCP on the Bitcoin Blockchain using CounterParty protocol right now which, currently has a much greater network effect. So although XCP doesn't have it's seperate blockchain you still require the token to execute smart contracts. You cannot just do it with BTC in fact there really is not a lot of use in seperate blockchains- the solution now is more like a sidechain.
So again, the same applies - the more successful smart contracts are, the more XCP will be required to be spent, hence the more a proportional share of XCP should be worth. The fact it doesn't run on it's own blockchain really doesn't mean you don't own it all of a sudden or that you're only brokering;
Aside from the ported smart contract features XCP is also required for trustless escrow/ asset issuance/ certain transfers which you cannot do using vanilla Bitcoin protocol, and all those
are original creations)