CIP03 - Reset Token & Divisibility Statuses for Unused Asset

Development Counterparty
1

It would be great to hear what you think before formalizing a CIP.

If the asset owner holds the entire supply and the asset is not locked, then allow the owner to reset the supply (e.g. set the supply at zero) and change the divisibility status.

This can be achieved with a function reset(asset, issuance, divisibility). Asset must be the name of an asset owned by address making the call. Issuance is the new total number of issued tokens. Divisibility is boolean; true if divisible, false if indivisible.

Thousands of good asset names are registered by squatters and intended to be resold. Unless this CIP (or something similar) is implemented these names will always be limited by the initial parameters set by the squatters.

Most squatted assets have issuance at zero, so for these there is obviously no need to reduce the supply. However, quite a few good assets, e.g. GOLD, have issued a large amount of tokens, which may limit a potential use case.

Most squatted assets are divisible. There are at least two use cases where this causes problems:

  • Token represents a trading card (or a coin) and a seller puts an order at the DEX. A buyer grabs a fraction of a unit to troll/harm the seller by effectively destroying his card/coin.
  • An asset owner pays a daily distribution. A XCP fee applies per recipient. An attacker can send dust amounts of the asset to thousands of addresses once, thus forever make it too expensive for the owner to pay daily distributions.

I believe the reset function should be limited to cases where the owner holds the entire issuance (every token) and the asset is not locked. Otherwise, changes in these fundamental properties would maybe lead to uncertainty and technical challenges (?)

2 Likes
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Hmm, this is actually a great opportunity for the mob to liberate the squatted asset namesā€¦ For example there could be a competitive proposal to auto-expire names that havenā€™t been updated in (365 * 144) blocks. :wink:

I support the idea to allow big changes, assuming the fee is equal to issuance fee. Who wants to make a major change like that should repay a small price (actually the development of this feature could be crowdsourced by those who want the feature, assuming it is acceptable to the community).

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Thanks for the feedback. I strongly warn against auto-expiry though. It is against the social consensus of what an asset name is. It will piss of the squatters, which (whether you like it or not) are a major part of the community

I donā€™t see the need for a fee. The essence of this proposal is to enable resetting of properties of unused assets, which is healthy for the ecosystem as a whole.

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Iā€™m not in favor of it either, Iā€™m just saying if enough people gang up it could appear in a competing CIP.

Hereā€™s why I think there should be a fee:

  • ā€œUnusedā€ assets is just another name for squatted assets. People created them before they needed them and while doing that they did a poor job.
  • A minority of owners of such assets are non-squatting users who registered their asset but didnā€™t want to think, ask or read the docs. Itā€™s like the idiots who by mistake register a misspelled domain name (it happened to me as well) and then want their money back.

All those asset names that are right now not usable but would become usable and more valuable after asset change would be value created by the developers. The rules at the time of creation were ā€œno changes in those asset propertiesā€. If they expect to get this value, they should pay up.

I have nothing against squatting, but why reward incompetence by developing a feature for that part of Counterparty users? Again, maybe itā€™s a good chance for those owners to crowd-source this feature if the idea gets approved by the community.

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FYIā€¦ I asked the devs about this functionality a while agoā€¦

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Ah, good. I see that was for locked (and unlocked). This is only for unlocked (since locked are out of question, according to Adam).

Do you think itā€™d be reasonable to charge 0.5 XCP per each change?

I have less than 10 assets and I didnā€™t look at them lately so I canā€™t tell if Iā€™d like to change any, but if it came to that Iā€™d be willing to pay.

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I donā€™t think there should be charges related to changing an asset that you already own. I think the only requirement for changing the divisibility, destroying supply, or unlocking an asset supply should be that the asset owner is in 100% control of the supply (ie, 100% of the tokens exist in the issuer/owners address).

Also, I think it goes without saying, I donā€™t support any auto-expiring of assets for inactivity :slight_smile:

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Fortunately not many CPers are SJWs.

1 Like
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@jdogresorg - great, weā€™re at the same page it seems.

The aim with this thread is to formalize a CIP and submit it at https://github.com/CounterpartyXCP/cips

Is this summarization ok with you?

If the asset owner holds the entire supply and the asset is not locked, then allow the owner to reset the supply (e.g. set the supply at zero) and change the divisibility status.

Are callable, call date/price still part of the protocol? If yes, maybe allow these to be changed too, as you mentioned on github.

@something, I think fees would complicate things. This CIP will benefit not only squatters but also 2nd hand buyers of asset names, let alone the eventual users. I cannot think of any group who would lose from this CIP.

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Callable was removed a while ago, but I guess maybe the idea was to reuse that feature to make it easier to recycle the token from yourself (the issuer)?

I suggest you join the Slack to get additional feedback from others, more people hang out in there.

Iā€™m not in favor of fees being part of the CIP, Iā€™m just saying I might support that option if that was up for vote :slight_smile:

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@JP: yeah, that summarization works fine for me.

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Iā€™m a so called squatter. Iā€™ve invested in this platform, knowing that I will not develop all of the assets I registered and not knowing if I am throwing money down a hole. However, I believe in the idea and will sell the assets I currently own to someone who is motivated to use them. The test of that motivation is the fact that they are willing to purchase ownership. I believe it would be a great idea to allow them, or anyone, the ability to tweak the asset before they issue/reissue tokens, so long as they own all of the issued tokens. It is only fair to allow a new owner a bit of say on what they purchased in order to more robustly fulfill their respective vision.

The new owner should have the right to shed my initial idea on what the particular asset means. Say I own indivisible asset called BOGO, meaning Buy One Get One. Someone buys the asset name from me, but the new owner wants to treat it as a divisible token for their Bank Of Georgia Offering. So long as all tokens are under the owner, then whats the harm in allowing changes to be made to divisibility and token numbers? None.

Of late, I have routinely issued 1 token for every registered asset. However, in the beginning, I issued millions for each name out of ignorance of CP and fear that XCP would rise to such a value, that I would not want to pay a prohibitively expensive fee for each subsequent issuance of tokens when the need arose. Therefore, I issued divisible, non divisible, 10K, to millions, while trying to read the tea leaves of where this was going. Iā€™m quite sure I was wrong on many counts.

Sure itā€™s messy, I may be ignorant, and deserve an unsavory moniker such as squatter. However, the squatters are spending XCP, reserving assets as groups of names that show clear patterns of thought, themes and possible future interactions. The only thing missing is a dependable, consistent, easy to use platform that someones Grandma could understand. When that happens, you may be thanking the squatters for cultivating small gardens of finely pruned assets that they will sell to well heeled and motivated groups to push Counterparty into the future. That, or we will have crippled the system for any real use.

I like your ideas for allowing future owners a limited ability to erase the ignorance of past asset owners. The rest, fees, expirations, etc? Well, changing the rules mid-stream is a sure way to flush the whole thing down the toilet. Without mutual trust, this would be a pointless endeavor.

2 Likes
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I understand this point and being a small time squatter (ā€œasset connoisseurā€?) I get the idea that even someone who doesnā€™t resell the asset may change their business plan and need to tweak it before putting the asset to use (or selling it, it doesnā€™t matter). I have 2-3 of such assets myself.

Iā€™m just saying that from a healthy (free) market perspective, we deliberately took risks (of registering before we needed it, thinking that the benefit of owning it anyway (even if wrongly issued as divisible instead of indivisible, or vice versa) is higher than the benefit of waiting until we need it. So we gambled.

In any market there should be a price to pay for mistakes and I think some fee ought to apply (in addition to the mandatory bitcoin transaction fee).
Itā€™s similar to buying options - you take a risk, so they may expire worthless. In case of adding another burn fee itā€™d be a small price to pay (you can still retain the squatted asset or just wait till someone needs it as-is).

But the rules never allowed any changes to assets, so being able to rescue a practically worthless asset (say, GOLDCOIN that was issued as a divisible token) for (say) 0.1 XCP is a major positive change to people who already burned (pun intended) 0.5 XCP and as of without this change stand close to 0 chance of recovering their sunk cost, right?

(As an aside, if anyoneā€™s asset resale plan can get derailed because the total cost of asset created jumped from 0.5 to 0.6 XCP, itā€™s probably a very crappy asset to begin with :slight_smile: )

Iā€™m curious what @brighton36 thinks, he once recorded a video blog about asset squatters in which he wasnā€™t against it, but otherwise - unlike free market proponents - likes regulation :wink:

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I like the concept of this.

I could go ether way on the fee requirement. But for consistency, I lean toward no fee.

I think the most expedient way to implement this from a technical perspective is to modify the rules of the create_issuance call since it can already be used to change the description or issue additional quantity of an existing asset. I imagine it would be simplest to just add a reset flag to this call. And I think this would be the easiest implementation.

Speaking of implementation, are you able to write an implementation or do you have a developer willing to submit a patch if this is endorsed by the community?

This will be a protocol change, so it will require a mandatory upgrade by a certain block if this goes through. Thatā€™s a factor to consider as well.

3 Likes
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Thanks for the thumbs up.

Iā€™m not able to write an implementation, so I will need to leave that for a developer.

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RE: Iā€™m curious what @brighton36 thinks
I like JPJAā€™s suggestion here. I think that if an owner of an asset owns all itā€™s issuances, that he should be able to change the terms. I donā€™t see why that would negatively impact the network in any way (and frankly, I just assumed weā€™d end up doing this at some point)

RE: but otherwise - unlike free market proponents - likes regulation :wink:
I just donā€™t know what a free market is. Can you give me an example of one?

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Many ā€œcryptoexchangesā€ are very close to operating that way: thereā€™s very little or no regulation for BTC<=>altcoin exchange.
But, I was just poking you :wink: We can leave this for another time.

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hah - thereā€™s tons of regulations affecting Bitcoin to altcoin exchange.

Much of the desire for Bitcoin is as a method of payment for goods and services which are unserviced by fiat. That demand heavily weighs into the exchange value of Bitcoin. Additionally, The conversion service itself is so risky for american businesses to process, that the majority of these exchanges have operated out of the US. (Poloniex and Cryptsy are testing the regulations here - and we shall see what the regulations offer)

I donā€™t see how this market is free of regulatory pressures.

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In that sense I agree - itā€™s not a free market, regulation does exist, but but a fair number of crypto-brokerages operate as if regulations donā€™t apply or exist. Itā€™s a regulated market thatā€™s working as free market - simply because the fish is too small to fry.

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IMO - If the referenced crypto brokerages are ā€˜too small to fryā€™, then the regulatory environment is such that theyā€™re regulated to perform their business in a way that captures whatever inefficiencies arenā€™t being captured by larger exchanges. And, as soon as they hit the regulatory threshold - theyā€™ll be fried. (Thus incentivizing the next round of small-fish exchanges to start up)

Itā€™s hard to find an unregulated market. I suspect itā€™s even completely impossible. This is why ā€˜regulation existingā€™ doesnā€™t bother me much - I suspect itā€™s a reflection of nature in an anarchic world.