as the premise of the thread goes, personally whilst I don't beleive XCP will rise in price 256 times over to match ethereums market cap as posited here, I certainly don't believe it should be sitting below fedoracoin in the charts either.
As far as I'm aware CounterParty was the first to launch with the fair and equitable proof-of-burn strategy, the first launching the world's first decentralized exchange based on the bitcoin blockchain, the worlds first voting system on the bitcoin blockchain, the worlds first trustless games ON the blockchain and the world's first decentralized betting feed, cfd etc platform on the bitcoin blockchain , I think it's a valid project sitting in the shadows for a while with potential for upwards growth, and even from the perspective of a pure-bitcoin holder I think counterparty adds value to the bitcoin blockchain so I'm excited to watch it's progress.
Just want to mention some of the non smart contract related use cases for counterparty
Here's an example of the voting mechanism in practice:
http://blockscan.com/vote/XCPELECTION for the CounterParty election. (The bitcoin foundation also previously used CounterParty for the first ever provably transparent bitcoin-based real time vote in their history)
Here's an example of the trustless gaming element:
http://counterparty.io/news/introducing-fully-trustless-games-on-blockchain/It's quite trivial to create a payment gateway accepting some sort of meta-token. This meta-token could act as a gift-card, a login badge, it could trigger some sort of external real world event like opening a door, it could represent something tangible like a silver coin, it could be a rare in game item. All of these digital tokens can be traded directly, p2p or via the protocols baked in decentralized exchange. Trading GOLDSWORD3 for WIZARDHAT or something might be slow but it's decentralized, purely p2p and we've never had anything like this before. You could own assets just like you own bitcoin, completely under your control, so nobody could gox them. That's why I got excited about CounterParty, just like OB
What would this forum be without AnonyMint
The technical weakness of CounterParty is that Bitcoin can't verify the CounterParty transactions, thus there is no record of the consensus about which CounterParty transactions are valid:
https://counterpartytalk.org/t/questions-about-counterparty-consensus-and-validation/688http://counterparty.io/docs/faq/#how-do-smart-contracts-form-a-consensusThis presents some technically insoluble problems (they are fundamental and can never be fixed):
1. No one can determine if there was consensus about an external data feed after the fact. Some of the ramifications of this include that if someone hacks the sources of a data feed temporarily, then no one will be able to reach consensus about which set of transactions on the Bitcoin block chain are valid, except by creating a hardfork of the CounterParty chain and writing a new protocol which makes that decision. And this would need to be done every time one of these attacks occurs. So basically CounterParty will be toast if it supports external data feeds and becomes popular enough to be worth attacking.
Edit: voting via signatures can substitute for external data feeds, thus this issue may be solvable.
2. Double-spends in the same Bitcoin block can't be differentiated. Thus the only possible action is to ignore both (all) of them. Thus 0-confirmation transactions are absolutely impossible in CounterParty. Thus CounterParty will always be slow (10 min confirmations).
3. Ordering of transactions can't be enforced within a block, thus contracts can not be written which depend on such ordering. I haven't really thought about the impact this has yet. CounterParty doesn't seem to acknowledge this as one of the differences when running Ethereum scripts on CounterParty, so maybe they are not even aware of this flaw.
4. The Bitcoin block chain can't handle the increased scaling load to be a database server.
There are probably many other corner cases and problems. I haven't really thought about it too deeply.
Seems very kludgey and I would avoid it. Non-starter to build smart contracts on the Bitcoin block chain.
@anonymint
I'm far from an expert don't pay much attention to the alt scene these days so take this comment with tablespoon of salt, but point 4...well come on, really?. I think we've moved beyond the 'spam' argument several years ago, anyways from a quick glance it seems in the last 24h counterparty transactions only made up 1.5% or so of total transactions. Moving on to point 3, smart contracting solutions obviously have their own severe inherent limitations; I'd expect contract writers to attempt to work within the constraints of the system so assuming they would test such cases in advance- surely not perfect but hardly a dealbreaker.
Point 1, you've addressed, as far as point 2 goes, Vitalik proposed a back of the napkin idea a while back.
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
Create a 2-of-2 multisig address M.
B creates an unsigned tx from A to M.
A signs the TX, and creates a tx from M to A with a locktime, which A sends to B.
B signs the TX, and gives to A.
A makes a TX that sends from M to (99% A, 1% B) with a slightly lower locktime, signs and sends to B, repeat.
sourceidk about the plausibility of that specifically. but regardless counterparty just like bitcoin will be slow but that doesn't mean there can't be workarounds, nothing to say some ideas from bitcoin proper can't be examined.. devs have said segwit support is coming to CounterParty soon for instance.
Also I think nobody in their right mind should be designing or wanting a messaging app working via a smart contract or anything time sensitive anyway- the kind of high-latency project counterparty is a
perfect fit for are things like
Token Controlled Access, Betting, Verifiable transparent voting, Derivatives, Token based puzzles, batch trading, settlement etc. These are all applications that counterparty can serve some level of actual utility towards and that gives it it's own value proposition IMO, when many other alts haven't really formulated a plan beyond tweaking litecoin and imagining one day it'll be used to buy coffee with.
Anyway it is nice to hear your input Anonymint, valid criticism there, although as always you do sound the death-knell