18 Counterparty Myths

General Counterparty
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I have put together this article to address frequently reoccurring debates in the community. 

[color=green][size=14pt]18 Myths about CounterpartyXCP[/size][/color] (updated from 12)
http://coinedtalk.com/12-myths-about-counterpartyxcp/

And remember, always do your own research. Don’t let any FUD or hype convince you on its own.

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That’s great very informative.

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Hi,

I am now starting my own research about the article. Could you share URLs if you already discussed it? I want to use it as a reference.

Some points of the article seems to be true but some opinions are not true or already solved. I am very curious about that.

Thanks,
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I am sorry... I made a mistake. The article argued against the myths.. I thought that the article just argued against counterparty.

I am excited about counterparty and I believe the future. But I was looking for the negative aspects of counterparty in order to be fair or calm down. 

Thanks,
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Counterparty may be a bit difficult to use for non-technical users (Like Bitcoin was in its first year)., and is limited to the Bitcoin minimum transaction speed (10 mins). Also the development is progressing so rapidly that new bugs may be introduced sometimes. I’d love to have a discussion about what people think are downsides and negative aspects of Counterparty, so we can work towards improving them as a community.

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Counterparty may be a bit difficult to use for non-technical users (Like Bitcoin was in its first year)., and is limited to the Bitcoin minimum transaction speed (10 mins). Also the development is progressing so rapidly that new bugs may be introduced sometimes. I’d love to have a discussion about what people think are downsides and negative aspects of Counterparty, so we can work towards improving them as a community.

Count me in.

1. Faster bootstrapping

Why does it take three or four days to bootstrap a new Counterparty node?

Am I just doing it wrong or is there no way to process blocks in parallel? Is it possible for the Counterparty Foundation to seed a weekly or monthly torrent to make it go faster?

2. BTC trading

This has got to improve. I don’t want to trade into XBTC to then trade into some other asset, and I’m sure asset owners don’t want to sell their assets for XBTC.

This could be fixed IMO with multisig “GreenAddress” BTC trades. You’d move BTC to a special trading wallet where it would be stored in 3 of 5 multisig. It’d be you and three agents out of a big network of agents. The agents would get called on to execute BTCpay on your behalf.

3. Thin client security

There has to be a way to verify Counterparty’s ledger data on a thin client without a full node running. A native client like Electrum or BitcoinAuthenticator would be better than Counterwallet.

4. Proxy support

Every counterparty CLI should have the ability to proxy network connections through SOCKS or HTTP.

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There were many attempts to improve BTC in such a way, or similar ways. I believe the problem there is motivation, legislation, and not a technicality. I think this is something that could be handled by a third party. Smart contracts will make BTC trading more seamless, and XBTC more reliable, but you are right that solutions such as your proposal are still necessary. 

Are you using an solid state drive?

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  1. Bootstrapping the database takes only a couple of hours with the kickstart command, which reads directly from Bitcoin Core’s local database. Also, we do publish regular snapshots: https://s3.amazonaws.com/counterparty-bootstrap/counterpartyd-db.latest.tar.gz

    2) This is perfectly possible, just disabled in Counterwallet, which the Foundation itself runs. At any time, someone else can run his own copy of Counterwallet (or any other wallet) with this enabled.

    3) The only way to do this is to trust a (possibly large) set of servers to do the proccessing for you. There’s no such thing as SPV for Counterparty.

    4) The best way to handle this is to use third-party wrappers.
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Some folks at MIT proposed an alternative to SPV (which could maybe be integrated into Counterparty ) and someone else pledged 125 XCP towards that goal (unverified).

https://github.com/CounterpartyXCP/counterpartyd/issues/426

Here is the whitepaper:
http://people.csail.mit.edu/nickolai/papers/vandenhooff-versum.pdf

Although these claims are far too technical for me to confirm/deny, it may be worth a look.