Topic: Time to Move Bitcoin 2.0 tech (Counterparty/Mastercoin) out of "Alt Coins" (Read 4201 times)

Here is a very quick and arbitrarily abstract Venn diagram of the cryptocurrency ecosystem with an emphasis on the Bitcoin ecosystem and the fundamentally different fields of discussion and development that are currently operational and will be operational in the near future:



There already is an "Alternate Cryptocurrencies" sub-forum. There are very clear use cases for a dedicated "Bitcoin 2.0 Technology" sub-forum which can be further subdivided into "Sidechains" and "Metacoins".

I've personally never heard one. And wow, rekt. Your entire post deserves nothing less than a standing ovation.

Both CounterParty and Ethereum were borne after devs splintered off  as a result of differences of opinion in the mastercoin project-. Mastercoin had the idea of adding functionality to bitcoin; some of those ideas were initially envisioned at the initial release of bitcoin where satoshi embedded a draft marketplace but nowadays have no chance of being shoehorned into reference client. I think the assumption that XCP was created simply for pump-and-dump/and directly competes against bitcoin (it's host) is at best a short-sighted one. A cognitive bias that seems to surprisingly prevalent amongst circles of bitcoin purists. I do remember seeing an early set of posts by Mike Hearn discussing CounterParty and was shocked at the gross misunderstandings demonstrated from such a senior figure in the community- a 5 minute skim should of cleared those misconceptions up. It seems some have taken a cursory glance at the project and dismissed it the second they realise it's not explicitly bitcoin-only. (bitcoin the token not Bitcoin the protocol). The fact developers can be potentially enriched by a secondary token- XCP and not BTC for their work seems to upset bitcoin maximalists, Despite the fact CounterParty developers never received a cent directly from any entity for their work prior or during the proof-of-burn stage, it was completely open for any bitcoin holder to participate in- still is open for any bitcoin holder to participate in and the value of whatever holdings of XCP they have relies solely on the strengths of their own contributions to their project as well as the markets own interpretation of the value the token holds. You know, much like bitcoin itself..  

Meanwhile the same folks seem to love sidechains- for which the devs recently raised $21 million from venture capitalists and wall-st affiliates  (but not joe-public) in the for-profit BlockStream venture , again the same folks seem to love the colored coins model with quasi-centralized intermediates like CC exchanges collecting fees along the way as their profit models, or individuals placing their trust in singular asset tracking servers (unlike counterparty) because these are all' pure and untainted' bitcoin.. Even if the CounterParty guys collectively held 100% of the total supply of XCP, the amount they'd each earn minus the amount invested works out less than buying than $15 worth of bitcoin in very early 2010 and selling somewhere near the peak. God knows they've put in more work than a passive early adopter who invested the equivalent of a couple of Happy meals or left their netbook generating coins while they took a walk in the park, then forgot about the old wallet.dat.   If you take the current market cap of CounterParty (9.7 million right now) and subtract the dollar amount of btc destroyed at the time you're left with around $6.9 million overlap- so again even if you assumed the developers owned the entire supply. I'm confident they have added more than $6.9 million worth of value to the Bitcoin ecosystem.  It's less than some companies building  businesses raise at seed stage.. I am more happy with that than ripple labs xrp being entitled to upwards of 2 billion dollars  or paycoin at 150 million $, or litecoin at 1 billion $, or auroracoin at 850 million $ etc.. All of which are competitive to bitcoin moreso than counterparty simply by virtue of enticing users to focus their incentives maintaining consensus& protecting an alternative ledger.

CounterParty is complimentary, not competitive to bitcoin. as a protocol it is primarily a way of extending vanilla Bitcoins capabilities.  Not in the form of BIP proposals greenlighted by select few core devs in a close clique or years old forum posts and partially fleshed out whitepapers -- (no criticism of bitdns, NMC there), CounterParty is in the present here and now providing utility to the blockchain. The developers stepped forward and brought something tangible and usable to us. CounterParty expands this blockchain ecosystem to more than just 'dumb payments', having funds sit idle in wallets or off-chain services, paying merchants via bitpay for them to convert to USD etc. IMO the real value of the bitcoin token is largely derived from the utility and ubiquity of the blockchain itself, something which there is still precious little of more than half a decade later.

You can easily store CounterParty smart property on a regular bitcoin address, paper wallet or armory cold wallet and interact in quite a frictionless way through Bitcoin-> CounterParty bridge; almost like sidechains  And therefore it's benefits should (and do indeed) extend to those holding bitcoin only with no intention to diversify into holding a speculative secondary token. When the Bitcoin network surpassed 100,000 transactions recently counterparty took up over 3% of the volume on-chain, and of course BTC fees are used during interaction with CounterParty-> Bitcoin network.

Thousands of BTC were initially sent to the ether during the proof-of-burn CounterParty genesis. Since those BTC's were sent to an unspendable address, reducing the supply of Bitcoin in circulation it had the net effect of directly enriching holders of BTC

Anyone holding BTC only can use the CounterParty protocol to create an asset represented on the blockchain- it could be shares of a company, physical commodity like gold served as a digital certificate, reward coupon, voting token, access control etc. No need to touch anything else

More to the point anyone holding BTC only can indirectly enjoy the wealth of extensions that CounterParty affords to the bitcoin ecosystem without ever touching XCP, such as turing complete smart contracts (a whole expansive world in their own right) Trustless betting, public broadcasts, asset ownership, decentralized exchange of smart property.. After seeing the amount of shit in the last 5 years with millions of bitcoins being lost, stolen and hacked by centralized single points of failure, gox being one of the recent highest profile examples-- all of which caused immeasurable damage to bitcoins public's perception it's upsetting that  technology which puts a positive step forward in combating bitcoins damaged mainstream reputation by providing decentralized solutions to centralized problems is quickly tarnished as a pump n dump.

I mean seriously... CounterParty developers could have done many things differently to send the market cap of XCP sky-high if it was a quick cash grab pump n dump they were after. Certainly there could of been a lot more "marketing fluff". Puzzling because the relative lack of which compared to many other offerings was one of the reasons I'd followed the project- They would of actually done an IPO rather than an open, equitable proof-of-burn,for which they nor anyone else received even a cent.  They would of created the tech on their own blockchain with "ultra fast 2 second transactions", they would of asked for funds before any protocol spec or working implementation was open sourced. CounterParty Developers would not have had the protocol code peer-reviewed by unndergoing multiple security audits by respected names in the bitcoin space out of their own pockets, nor would they have refunded few users affected by implemntation a js lib out of their own pockets, nor would they have put up the funds for bug bounties, again out of their own pockets. They would not have hired additional team members,  They would not be here a year later drafting up legal framework in order to pass over the reigns to CounterParty foundation, the project's Github https://github.com/CounterpartyXCP would not have anywhere near the amount of diligent, regular contributions, We would not be seeing consistent weekly community & developmental updates http://counterparty.io/news/ , None of that behavior correlates with what you would tradtitionally brand a 'pump n dump'

hell, recently BitBay raised more in an IPO to their pockets than CounterParty deleted with a few buzzwords and empty promises despite having red-flags all over. That was an actual pump n dump where the perpetrators were handsomely rewarded from scamming. Paycoin is a pump n dump, Calling just about anything a pump n dump willy nilly just waters down the definition of the word and discredits genuine hardworking individuals contributing to this scene.

Seeing as the Bitcoin blockchain is the traintrack on which CounterParty train is programmed to run on, unlike an indepedent chain like  NXT, Bitshares or Ethereum it's an essential component and the health of it is important.  CounterParty devs have already spearheaded a program to encourage the adoption of full bitcoin nodes. I am fully confident most of the 'investors' in CounterParty primarily hold bitcoin and  chose to invest in counterparty too as a way of pushing the envelope & evolving bitcoins featureset - something which is happening in a very gloopy way with bitcoin.

So as far as the criticisim that XCP (the counterparty token) is an unneccesary addition goes, From those individuals I am always interested to hear at the least detailed technical explanations. of how CounterParty could implement counterparty-specific features..without counterparty specific tokens.  For example simply natively escrowing BTC at a protocol level instead of XBTC for use in decentralized exchange or enabling trustless p2p distributed betting, or implementing effective anti-spam measures e.g for alpha asset creation using ONLY bitcoin. etc..  Ideally, a user friendly >FUNCTIONAL bitcoin-only model will be demonstrated in this present moment to prove that counterparty specific tokens right now are not necessary . I'm sure such a model will be highly praised.

As to the OP, I personally don't consider these type of projects 'alt-coins' in a classical sense, it's not a shit scrypt clone with tweaked supply and a dog logo.. but in a strict sense any project which is not bitcoin and uses independent token is an altcoin. I wouldn't campaign for them to get their own subsection or any other form of special treatment. If the market deems them innovative enough critical mass off users will naturally drive spotlight, doesn't need to be forced

Counterparty is most certainly not an altcoin, it didn't even have a fundraiser and it cannot exist without BTC (nor does it ever plan to replace it). It is a toolkit that allows people to use the Bitcoin blockchain for more powerful and innovative uses than simply transferring currency, such as smart contracts. A simple way to visualize this would be to say that it is building a 'free market Wall Street' using Bitcoin transactions themselves. XCP is a necessary protocol-aware intermediate currency, and trust me the devs would use BTC if they could. Their motivations are pretty much directly aligned with Satoshi's, and the free software community.

If you want to create (numeric) assets on Counterparty, and trade them with each other, you only need Bitcoin. You can create your own tokens/coins and trade them using only BTC. You can also pay dividends in BTC to your assets. I repeat, if you want to create assets and trade them with each other on Coutnerparty, you never need to even touch XCP.

The purpose and philosophy of Counterparty has always been to extend the feature-set of Bitcoin without the use of a secondary currency as much as possible. XCP is sadly a technical necessity for many features, because it has to be protocol-aware, whereas BTC is not. If you have a way to implement these features without an intermediate currency (which in no way shape or form should EVER replace BTC, because XCP cannot exist BTC), then there are millions waiting for you.

You are welcome to install the develop testnet version of Counterparty with smart contracts: https://github.com/CounterpartyXCP/counterpartyd/tree/develop
You can code ethereum smart contracts and work with them today. They are undergoing a very comprehensive security audit and rehaul to make sure they are stable and secure, but that doesn't mean tehy don't work. Smart contracts can replace pretty much every altcoin:
https://github.com/ethereum/serpent/blob/master/examples/namecoin.se

There are development updates on a weekly basis, and it is quite possibly the fastest developing crypto project today: http://counterparty.io/news/

P.S. Counterparty is literally the only "2.0" (I really hate this term) coin project which is actually in the portfolio of a company actually listed on a real stock exchange. OVERSTOCK is putting single digit millions to build on top of Counterparty.

P.P.S. This is a good place to start dispelling some myths: http://coinedtalk.com/12-myths-about-counterpartyxcp/ (may be slightly outdated, though)

So Counterparty and Mastercoin is only clone from Bitcoin or from some other Altcoins? No new innovations or anything what bitcoin itself cannot do?

"Bitcoin 2.0" is what altcoins call themselves to convince people that the altcoin in question is different from the thousands of other altcoins when in fact it is just another clone.

Read just this old topic. Can someone explain what then is Bitcoin 2.0, if not something like Counterparty and Mastercoin? Can you give examples what that have and what not.

I really don't see what differentiates counterparty and mastercoin from other altcoins hence why I don't think they deserve their own subforum. As was already mentioned, putting your transaction data into the Bitcoin blockchain doesn't make your coin Bitcoin, it's still an altcoin. That doesn't mean those altcoins are useless, but they're not Bitcoin and they're not Bitcoin 2.0.

By the way, discussion about how an altcoin affects or differs from Bitcoin may be posted on subforums other than alternate cryptocurrencies, so discussions about blockchain bloat caused by altcoins are allowed outside of the altcoin section.

If you have seen the news, Overstock is now building a cryptosecurity exchange for wallstreet using Counterpary (which is a fork of Mastercoin). I realize that may not change anyones opinion about the project, but it would seem like it's time to have a more open discussion regarding these technologies (or scam coins as some might prefer to call it).

Link: http://www.coindesk.com/overstock-hires-counterparty-developers-build-cryptosecurity-stock-exchange/

You guys amaze me sometimes. Mastercoin and Counterparty are both using the Bitcoin blockchain, thus (if you run a full node) they are using your hard drive space regardless and are poised to only use more and more of it as time goes on.

It's baffling why you wouldn't want to at least engage these groups in a productive discussion about how to do this in a responsible way, especially if you dislike the 'blockchain bloat/spam' as some people call it, as much as some people claim to. The angry attitude isn't going to make it go away, indeed they are already working on a way to make it even harder to block: https://github.com/mastercoin-MSC/spec/issues/248

But heck, maybe it's better this way right? The less discussion we have about how to use the blockchain responsibly, the more people can use it however which way they want.

MSC is an alternate cryptocurrency. It is not "Bitcoin 2.0". Just because it uses technology which involves Bitcoin doesn't mean we all need to know about it and that it needs to have it's own section on Bitcointalk.

Same applies for Counterparty - well, at least the second half of the sentence previous to this one does apply. I'm not well informed on Counterparty and what it is, because to be honest, I don't really care about alts anymore.

I notice you say "mastercoin" but not "Counterparty" is that on purpose? Do you honestly think there is a difference between the two?

Hey crazy_rabbit, Mastercoin is not Bitcoin 2.0. It is an altcoin that chose to leverage the Bitcoin blockchain for it's own network security, while creating it's own competing currency.

They are not Bitcoin 2.0. That's a marketing gimmick. They're altcoins.

1) Why would that be bitcoin 2.0?

- Thats what the press calls it, for lack of a better word.  source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/06/03/mastercoin-maidsafe-crowdsale/

2) AFAIK a potential bitcoin 2.0 is for sure NOT bitcoin.

- It runs on bitcoin, which can't be said of Litecoin for example, and it affects bitcoin users and miners (nodes have to hold much larger bitcoin chains, miners have to decide to filter or not their transactions). That makes it pretty relevant for bitcoin in my opinion. Just because you don't like it, doesn't mean these people aren't going to still do it and you're not going to still have to deal with it. If the two (or more sides) could talk about it in a better way, maybe a better solution could be found.

3) It's like your old idea of making testnetcoins a valuable altcoin: non-sense

Yeah that was a bad idea, I admit although I thought it reasonable at the time, but time has moved on. That said, mastercoin and counterparty are nothing like testnetcoins.

1) Why would that be bitcoin 2.0?
2) AFAIK a potential bitcoin 2.0 is for sure NOT bitcoin.
3) It's like your old idea of making testnetcoins a valuable altcoin: non-sense

Regardless of whether or not something is a scam, people building things on top of the blockchain is a reality. I can understand the 'don't bloat the blockchain' thinking, but by not engaging the bitcoin 2.0 crowd there are no productive discussions about how both can coexist- be it on the blockchain or on some sort of side chain, merge mining, etc, etc, etc.....

I think both sides would find a more satisfying solution if there could be better crosstalk. Ignoring bitcoin 2.0 projects, or relegating them in "alt-coin land" doesn't seem as productive as it seems spiteful.

Stuffing your altcoin's transaction data into the Bitcoin blockchain doesn't make it not-an-altcoin. The main sections are for the Bitcoin currency and things that you can directly do with bitcoins. If I can take my bitcoins, deposit them into your site, and then do something interesting without explicitly converting to a different currency, then your site can go in the main sections. For example, a casino could use a Counterparty currency as "chips", and this would be OK for the main sections as long as the casino could automatically convert deposited BTC into these chips. Similarly, if someone was selling Overstock shares for BTC, then this trade would be OK for the main Marketplace regardless of the technology used to handle the Overstock shares. (But don't try any nonsense like saying that every unit of an altcoin is a share in a company...)


Mastercoin is a normal scamcoin (more scammy than usual, in fact). Apparently it's common to transact in BTC using Counterparty, but Counterparty also has its own currency. I suspect that Counterparty has no really useful technology, but all I can find about their technology via Google is marketing fluff (bad sign), so I can't be sure. They both use the Bitcoin block chain for timestamping instead of doing their own mining. I think that this is often a good idea, but it doesn't mean that they're not altcoins (or that they're actually useful).

By the way, if you're already using the Bitcoin block chain, then why are you even creating a currency? Just use BTC. From what little I've read about Counterparty, it looks to me like their XCP was included just to enable pump-and-dump. (The BitDNS proposal that I co-authored in 2010 was probably the first to propose using the blockchain like this, but it just used BTC.)

"Alternative Currency" is a bit hard to define. Maybe every non-mainstream currency is alternative currency?
Altcoins are alternative to Bitcoin - they're based on Bitcoin.

Hilighted the important parts. For example: We've not even seen Ethereum working. Just words about how Ethereum supports everything.

Also, I support what ForgottenPassword said in this thread.

Can't stop the free market imo, altcoins will be here forever