On the Counterparty Discord, on April 14th, 2018, there was an open meeting for anyone interested in Counterparty development. The meeting was recorded and the conversation transcribed. Please review the discussion below and feel free to comment on this thread about the topics discussed.
Also, we’re looking to arrange another meeting, in the near future, where we can start to get some resolution and clarity on some of the open questions brought up during this meeting. Please, state your interest and time preferences.
High-Level:
- Who has commit access, who should have access, what is the process?
- Who can help take on the curator role of the CIP repository?
- When would be a good time to meet next and how can we get more attendance?
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- Especially, from people with commit access.
Participants:
- Dan Anderson
- Dante DeAngelis
- Shaun Applebaum
- Chris Moss
Archive.org:
Audio Recording: https://archive.org/details/counterparty-development-meeting-04-14-2018
Raw Audio Files: Counterparty Development Meeting 04-14-2018 [Raw Audio] : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
Transcription (w/ timestamps): https://ia601505.us.archive.org/19/items/counterparty-development-meeting-04-14-2018-transcription/counterparty-development-meeting-04-14-2018.txt
Transcription (w/o timestamps): https://ia601505.us.archive.org/19/items/counterparty-development-meeting-04-14-2018-transcription/Counterparty-development-meeting-04-14-20181.txt
The audio and transcription of this meeting is released into the Public Domain.
Transcription:
Keep in mind, this was generated by a computer with some editing by myself. The audio will be the most reliable source on what what discussed and said…
Dan Anderson: OK, so this is basically the developer meeting that I suggested and invited people to, to talk about how to get involved with Counterparty development further and just answer each other’s questions and just chit chat and get to know each other. Today is April 14, 2018. It’s 14:00 UTC. And this is that, you know? I’m here with Dante, I’m here with King David, I’m here with Chris aka Mandelduck. What’s going on guys?
Dante DeAngelis: Good morning.
Chris Moss: Good evening.
Shaun Applebaum: Hey, everybody.
Dan Anderson: And I don’t mean to make it like a podcast format, it’s just, I guess that’s just what I’m used to.
Chris Moss: Who’s King David? Would I know you by any other name or handle? Did someone say you’re Shaun. Is that Shaun?
Shaun Applebaum: Cam Boy Shaun.
Chris Moss: Sorry?
Shaun Applebaum: I said Cam Boy Shaun. I do the Junseth’s World podcast with Dante and Junseth.
Chris Moss: OK, cool. To have to tune in, but anyway, nice to meet you.
Dante DeAngelis: Don’t worry. Is the worst show ever.
Chris Moss: I think like the quality of shows and Crypto is relative, so I’m sure it’s up there.
Dan Anderson: So one of the things we were talking about before we started recording is, sort of like, our interest in development and for me I run XCPDEX.com and I have a project called Bitcorns.com. I have some CIPs I’m proposing and, I just, I’m finding that, it seems like maybe a meeting like this could be a good thing to have now and then or even regularly, because, you know, there’s a number of open items I’d like to see addressed in terms of development and just furthering my involvement in the project. I think Chris, you were saying something about that too, where you and Indie Square are looking to maybe involve yourself further. Do you want to talk about that?
Chris Moss: Yeah, so for Indie Square wallet, we want to kind of, you know, add a bunch of features, like SegWit being the first one, and then we’re interested on working on CounterParty swaps and things like that. I think there was a little bit of like a disconnect when Indie Square were kind of saying, you know, “So, when are the CounterParty developers, or when is SegWit going to be done?” And I kind of said, “Well, it’s open source. We should really step in.” Now that the foundation somewhat been dissolved. I guess my goal- I also worked with EDS, Spells of Genesis, as well. So, I suppose my role is trying to see what can be done and how to do it and try and encourage Indie Square and EDS to offer resources to help out.
Dan Anderson: I think with SegWit, one of the things that happened, and I think I saw you mention this on twitter, is that the person that was championing that CIP, I think Devon Weller, he more or less resigned as a core developer. You mentioned that on twitter.
Chris Moss: Yeah, that was a shame because I think what kind of happened is, I think there’s enough devs in the community just because Devon was hired as full time, everybody just stepped down and did their own projects because, you know, Devon is a competent dev and he was doing it. And now that Devon stepped down a little bit of reorganization needs to take place and obviously people can’t jump on Counterparty development straight away because we’ve all got our own things going on, right? But yeah, Devon spec’d it out. And to give credit to Devon and he seems like he’s approachable, you know, to help out for advice and things like that. So, I’ve spoken to him a few times.
Dan Anderson: Sure, yeah. He’s very knowledgeable about the code base. In terms of SegWit, what is your understanding about what it takes to go from where we are now to SegWit because I have some ideas, but maybe you can- what is your understanding of what it takes to go from where we are now to SegWit?
Chris Moss: Well, I’m not too familiar with the CounterParty code base, but I did actually make some SegWit transactions because SegWit is mainly, it’s about inputs. Obviously there’s some outputs, if you used the new Bech32 address, but to support the nested SegWit… You know, the backwards compatible SegWit addresses… I made a transaction that sent a CounterParty token with SegWit inputs and sent it to a backwards compatible nested SegWit address and it works. The only issue was that when it was unconfirmed and when it was confirmed the txid changed. So, obviously there was a little bit of an issue in counterparty-lib. I know that in SegWit you have the txid and the hash. So, they’re slightly different things because one has signatures and the other doesn’t.
Chris Moss: So, I think that’s the low hanging fruit. If that could be kind of fixed or addressed, then it would let people use CounterParty with SegWit. However, I suppose the holy grail is to have full support and Devon kind of laid out what needs to be done in the CIP. I suppose, hopefully, it’s really just making good use of the python library to pass new address formats. I think there is one issue where I think we might need a new message format because I know that the enhanced send, I think it limits the address to 20 bytes and the new SegWit address is 32 bytes. There’s a bit of work to be done there, I think, but that’s my understanding so far.
Dan Anderson: My understanding, and it could totally be wrong, is some of the things that might have to happen before SegWit can be adopted is that the federated nodes, for example, are not running the latest version of Bitcoin Core. So, I think some of the steps to that, and I think Devon was working on some of this, is replacing AddrIndex or Address Index with indexd.
Chris Moss: Yep, I ran that on testnet.
Chris Moss: I think when I made my SegWit transaction, and I think it was like maybe December or November, I used the latest version of Bitcoin Core then with the indexd. Yeah, I think that’s kind of seems to be the first thing to do is just to make sure that that’s, you know, production ready.
Dan Anderson: I also think maybe, if I recall correctly, maybe CIP 6 is a different type of transaction encoding that I believe that might need to be added. That’s something that’s useful for other CIPs, CIP 6, that allows for different types of encoding.
Chris Moss: Is that the P2SH one that Ruben spec’d out?
Dan Anderson: Yeah, yes.
Chris Moss: Yeah, Devon had some concerns about that. Wasn’t it implemented by John? I think I saw Devon saying, “It’s complicated.” So, like…
Dan Anderson: So, for example, one of John’s CIPs is the multi asset multi party sends. His latest messages that I’ve seen from him say that he needs to CIP 6 to be approved and reviewed and accepted, as part of his. So, it’s sort of like a prerequirement for his particular CIP because he does a lot of interesting and coding in his CIP. Which I reviewed in January, but I don’t think anyone else has reviewed yet. It’s interesting because what it allows you to do is send in one transaction, to multiple people, different assets, in a very clever way. And there was a lot of interest in it, I think in January, because the fees were, it was like, OK, this is a fee saving mechanism. I think maybe now with the fees lowered, the sort of impetus or drive behind it has been reduced as well. Slightly.
Chris Moss: We’ve got some breathing room I think. But yeah, I think, I don’t know, it’s hard to say what the future is, but I think if we’re on the Bitcoin chain that we have to assume at some point that, you know, fees are not going to be like one satoshi per byte forever. Not speaking for Spells of Genesis, but I know that they’ve expressed a need for, well I think Folding Coin, as well, to have the ability to do batch sending because I think they both want to do monthly or weekly reward type things. Where you’ll send a token to the hundred top players, etc.
Dan Anderson: FLDC’s distributions definitely need it, for sure.
Chris Moss: It can kind of be done with dividends, right?
Dan Anderson: No, they don’t use dividends because they’re not able to use dividends because people are getting different amounts proportional to their computational power.
Chris Moss: I see.
Dan Anderson: Whereas the dividend would be proportional to your token holdings.
Chris Moss: Yeah, I see. Makes sense.
Dan Anderson: But if anyone’s in the future listening to this or couldn’t make it to the meeting, if you’re interested in multisends, check out John’s CIP, I believe it’s- What’s the CIP number? Maybe 13? Hold on, let me check real quick. But basically he has a pull request against the CounterParty library and he’s just looking for more review. I’ve reviewed it, but it needs more.
Chris Moss: Yeah, so like I contacted John to see it if I could help out. He seems like a busy guy. But yeah, hopefully, I can take a look, for whatever that’s worth.
Dan Anderson: Yeah. Any amount of review I think is good review.
Chris Moss: Yeah, I think the Indie Square developer is quite competent, as well. He doesn’t really kind of speak a lot in the community too much, but I’ll try and get him to take a look. He kind of does all the back end of the Indie Square, but I know he’s somewhat familiar with the CounterParty code. I think he’s made a pull request or bug fixes, things like that.
Dan Anderson: I have a couple of things that I’d like to bring up, if no one minds, things that I want to get out there and some questions, open questions, that I have about CounterParty development. I don’t know if the people here are in a position to answer all these questions, but I’d like to have them on this recording. I’m looking at the GitHub repo and right now I see five people as being, having committed access. I think maybe more people than these five have commit access, but these are the ones that are part of the organization. And that’s Ruben. That’s Robbie. That’s Fabian. That’s Devon. And that’s John Villar. And my understanding is that Ruben is not really active. I think Robbie explicitly has left the project. Fabian was paid at sometime, but I don’t think is active currently.
Dan Anderson: And I have a message here in the Slack from Devon in January where he explicitly says that he’s resigned and should be removed. He says, “you can remove me from commit access,” but I’m not sure who would be in such a position to do something like that. And I know John is quite busy with many other projects. So one of my questions would be- and John Villar was also given commit access recently. So, I’m not sure how he received git access, but I would be interested to know what’s the process for getting commit access? And, who, how that works, you know, I think that would be interesting. I’d like to see more people with active interest have commit access.
Chris Moss: I can speak to that a little bit. So maybe you’re not part of the channel, but there’s a channel on slack, on the Counterparty Slack, called core team.
Dan Anderson: I’m not a member of that.
Chris Moss: Ok.
Dan Anderson: I submitted a- I’ve had a CIP that’s been open for- I just want a CIP number. Not even like to have it accepted. I just want to CIP number, as a draft. It’s been open for a month and John Villar tagged the core group to review it and that’s like a private group. So, I don’t know who’s in this core dev chat or who these core dev people are, but it doesn’t seem like anyone’s home.
Chris Moss: Well, yeah, I got invited to that channel and it’s not too active. It’s just like Devon was in there, John was in there, Ruben was in there, JDog was in there. I think in that channel, Ruben also kind of stepped down as well. Officially. I think he’s just saying that, you know, he just doesn’t have time to work on Counterparty because he has, you know, his job at BlockTrail. So I think. Yeah. So that’s in that channel. I kind of said, well it seems like all the people with commit access are all inactive. You know, Devon stepped down, Robbie stepped down, Ruben stepped down. I think I suggested giving commit access to somebody who’s active and I think John was like the next in line.
Chris Moss: I think that’s why John got commit access there. But, I agree. It does seem that the whole “who has access” needs to be looked at, but I’m not sure who has authority or I’m still a bit confused about the makeup of Counterparty. I know there were three founders, but most of the founders, apart from Robbie, don’t seem to have anything to do with the project anymore. So, yeah, I suppose I would like a bit of clarity on that. It seems that JDog, in a way, seems to be the person with most access to things, bar the Github, like the website and the wallet and things like that. But apart from that, I’m not sure who has authority on what.
Dan Anderson: I’m not sure anyone is an authority, but-
Chris Moss: Authority is a bad word but-
Dan Anderson: I think it’s useful though for people to see that and for this discussion be aired because, from my perspective, I think if- Indie Square, which is running, Indie Square wallet, the Takara App… Is Book of Orbs Indie Square or am I confusing companies there?
Chris Moss: So, Koji, he was actually part of Indie Square and Spells of Genesis. So, Spells of Genesis or EDS, I should say- Everdream Software is a company, Spells of Genesis is the game, and with Indie Square they did Book of Orbs together. Book of Orbs has since moved. It’s completely under Everdream Software, however, it uses the Indie Square API. If Indie Square went down, it would go down, pretty much.
Dan Anderson: Well. So, in my opinion, if Indie Square is so central and a good contributor to the community, I think at least somebody at Indie Square should have commit access. That would be my vote. I don’t think anyone would be objectionable to that, but I don’t know what the process is, you know, like I think there should be a better process. And as to this chat room on Slack, or even for my own CIPs, I have CIPs that I’ve made as pull requests, seeking numbers- For them to be referred to as numbers, basically. And the review that I’ve received, unfortunately, has been on things like Telegram. My concern about Slack and Telegram is that… In Bitcoin, they have like a dev list where it’s archived and it’s public and it’s easy to like get caught up if you’re a new developer. My concern about the current state of how Counterparty works through Slack and Telegram, primarily, is that this review is not recorded on the GitHub or in a more easily archived format. So, that’s another thing that I would hope to see maybe change. Not to create overhead, but to create just ease of access.
Chris Moss: I think John is organizing that. I think he did contact me the other day and I think he contacted a few people. He’s looking for, what’s the word? A CIP Curator or somebody to do the role of assigning CIPs.
Dan Anderson: Who contacted you about that?
Chris Moss: I think JDog mentioned it a while back. But John Villas also contacted seeing, you know, “would you be interested as a custodian?” That’s the word I’m looking for. So, I think he’s looking for somebody to do that. I think obviously John is busy with his own projects, but it seems like he’s taking on lead developer, but maybe myself or somebody else will be the CIP custodian who takes a look at the CIP and assigns numbers. I’m not sure, but it seems like it’s been organized somewhat. I think I agree with the mailing list idea that’s probably a good idea.
Dante DeAngelis: I think the current CIP custodian is Devon. Is that correct?
Dan Anderson: Devon pretty much stepped down in all roles and John Villar is essentially the only active commit access across the entire repo. So, John Villar is simultaneously the person for all these roles. I’ve been asking him to give me a CIP number and he seems very busy. He says so himself. I’m looking for the creation of a path for people to- if the number of people with commit access are not active in their roles, which is fine. I’m not saying these people are like, you know, doing something wrong by not being active. I’m just saying I’d like to see some path where other people could get access and it could be a more clear process. Because I appreciate Chris’ input here, but it’s like, “so and so told me”, “so and so said this”, it’s sort of like, it’d be nicer if that were a mailing list or at least a something more referrable to, basically.
Dante DeAngelis: There’s also a core dev style group that’s in GitHub, as well. I’m not sure if it’s called core dev something similar.
Dan Anderson: Yeah, it’s called Core, but the members are private, but I’m not sure why.
Dante DeAngelis: So, it seems like the review process that you were referring to earlier actually went through that particular core dev group because I’m in the other core dev group over in Slack and there was no discussion of that item.
Dan Anderson: Yeah. So, I guess these are my open questions: how does git commit access work and how do you get a CIP number? It seems like solving the CIP process would be to just have somebody, one or two people, committed to that. I don’t think it’s a task that takes a bunch of time. So, anyone that’s motivated to do that I think would be able to manage it. It’s not like the volume is super high. But I’ve been talking to a lot of people with really interesting CIP ideas. I mean I’ve seen some ideas out there floating around where somebody wants to make it so you can’t resend tokens or something like that, as a flag.
Chris Moss: Yeah, that’s the Monaparty developer, Crypto Junkie.
Dan Anderson: Yes sir. Yeah, I saw something like that. But I’ve also seen someone suggest like the ability to transfer all assets at an address to another address, as a sort of consolidation tool or like a portfolio management tool. I’m proposing three letter assets and schedule distributions. Also seen people suggest, I’m trying to think of some other ones, but basically I’ve seen a number of people with different CIP ideas but a lot of people aren’t sure how to get their CIP a number and what the process is like. Even though it’s well documented, it seems socially it’s not very clear who does what. And, in my case, like I have some CIPs I’d like to have numbers and I’m seeing other CIPs accepted before mine, either without code or, for example, John Villar’s CIP is accepted as a “pre-draft”. So, I’m just looking to get my CIPs accepted as drafts, which doesn’t mean they get put into the code base. It means they get numbers such that they can be discussed.
Chris Moss: Previously, how this worked when there was a Counterparty foundation, before it was dissolved… My understanding is that the members of that foundation would vote every few months. They’d vote on who did what.
Dan Anderson: Well, we don’t have a foundation, so we need to move forward.
Chris Moss: That’s what I’m saying.
Dan Anderson: Maybe to that end, Chris and Sean and Dante, maybe we can discuss meetings like this as a way to move forward. It’d obviously be nice if we could grow attendance to a meeting like this. Maybe we would have regular meetings like this. But these kinds of decisions, I think we need more people involved. Hopefully, people listen to this recording later and involve themselves. What do you think we can do to get more public, more broad interest on how we can move forward from the foundation being dissolved?
Chris Moss: Personally, I kind of think we need to kind of look at who are the, maybe stakeholders is a bad word, but who are the more active projects in the space who have the most, well not the most users, but who are, you know, who are using the protocol the most.
Dan Anderson: That would be exchanges, primarily. They are using- they are doing the most sends, out of anyone.
Chris Moss: Yeah. Well, that’s why I try to word it carefully. It’s hard to give a metric, you know, obviously it’s not just going to be the most sends, but, you know, I suppose the projects in the community they should have some say. Indie Square at the moment has been pretty silent and hasn’t really given any input, but I think we should have a seat at the table. You know, the rare pepe project seems to be pretty popular. That’s one way forward.
Chris Moss: I suppose at the moment, the difficult thing is… The previous members who seem to have commit access or had, you know, not authority, but they had the ability to make changes or propose things. They’ve kind of stepped down but they haven’t passed anything gone. They’ve just gone quiet and it’s a bit confusing. Who’s taking what role now or who, who has… you know?
Dan Anderson: I would agree with that assessment. It does seem like people have stepped back but not given other people a way to step up.
Chris Moss: Exactly. Yes.
Dan Anderson: It seems like I have some interest. I think you have some interest and maybe other people that work with you through Indie Square- So, is there… Timing wise, it looks like we only got a few people to show up to this meeting. Maybe, we should think about in the future different times. Maybe that can happen offline after this is a put out, but let’s try to put together a bigger meeting after this.
Chris Moss: I think we need some people who are more involved with the GitHub account, as well as, the Counterparty official website.
Dan Anderson: That would be John Villar. That would be Devon. It would be Fabian and Ruben.
Chris Moss: Well, I think Devon and Ruben, unless they are needed, I think they kind of somewhat taking a step down. And Fabian, I think I’ve contacted Fabian a few times because I was looking at his payment channel code. Uh, you know, he seems to be a busy guy with other projects. To my mind, at the moment, the three people… Obviously, John, from a developer point of view, JDog has access to the website, if I’m not wrong. And I think he’s also producing the newsletter each month.
Dan Anderson: Did you say John Villar is producing the newsletter, I thought it was Rebekah?
Chris Moss: JDog. Yes. It’s Rebekah with JDog. That’s my understanding.
Dan Anderson: I thought you said John, my bad.
Chris Moss: Sorry, it’s my accent maybe. It’s late here as well. Also, I think Joe seems to be quite active. I think he’s working with rare pepe. Right? So that’s quite an active project. You know, I understand there are some tensions in the community, but hopefully we can kind of get past those and work out roles for everybody.
Dan Anderson: I think there’s definitely tensions. I think- I don’t- I don’t think that some- not all of them are unfounded. I think this is maybe not a good state currently to have. My concern, my primary concern, is a headless GitHub. I think that would be very detrimental to the project is if the GitHub was just headless. As in, there’s no commits possible. That would be very detrimental. So, I would like that addressed. I think this is a good start. It starts the discussion.
New Speaker: Yep.
Dan Anderson: I don’t feel like this was a contentious conversation.
Chris Moss: No, no, like I said, I think hopefully next time, it would be nice to have a discussion with somebody who has control of the GitHub, as well, so we could possibly discuss, you know, having a few other people with access. And I think, I guess everybody’s main concern is just to get development rolling again. Right?
Dan Anderson: Yessir.
Chris Moss: Yeah, that’s, that’s the main priority. And the, at the moment it’s somewhat stalled, but, you know, I think there’s definitely interest. Like we don’t have to be concerned about people not wanting to develop. There’s lots of people who want to develop. It’s just unclear of how to do that at the moment, right? As you said, you know, we can’t propose CIPs and we don’t have commit access. So, you know, if we wanted to develop, you’d pretty much have to fork at the moment. Right?
Dan Anderson: Basically. Yeah, unfortunately.
Chris Moss: Unfortunately, but we don’t-
Dan Anderson: Yeah, we don’t need to go through-
Chris Moss: Yeah, exactly. I’m just saying, you know, um, yeah, I think seems to be the main blockade at the moment is that John seems to be very busy with other projects and. But to his credit, he’s looking, well, he mailed me a, I suppose it would be nice if we made a more public statement saying he was looking for a custodian or you know, but it sounds like there was definitely interest to get the ball rolling.
Dante DeAngelis: The other important thing is to know what does it take and who has the ability to add another person would commit access. So, since John has commit access, does that mean that he has permissions to add another person with commit access?
Chris Moss: Yeah, that’s something I wondered, as well. Maybe John can answer that, but he’s not here.
Dan Anderson: OK, well I think these are good open questions. I think I’ve exhausted the number of things I wanted to bring up.
Chris Moss: Um, yes, I think so.
Dan Anderson: Maybe… OK, go ahead. Sorry.
Chris Moss: I have a meeting with Indie Square on Monday, so I’ll bring it up with them and they have expressed an openness to help support the project. So yeah, I’ll check, if they would be interested in it. Obviously, it’s not my decision to make, but maybe being open for Indie Square or some of the engineers to have commit access or it would be nice to touch base with John just to confirm a few things around that.
Dante DeAngelis: It makes sense. That sounds good.
Dan Anderson: So going forward, if you’re listening to this, why don’t you pop into any of the channels that are Counterparty channels if you have, especially the dev channels, if you have an interest in participating at another meeting. I don’t have any date off the top of my head for another meeting, but maybe Chris when you guys, when you have a meeting Monday with Indie Square, maybe you guys can arrange a time where more than more than just you could be there and then maybe that could be a good jump off point, day-wise.
Chris Moss: Yeah, I think that’s a good plan. I think I’ll also bring this up in the slack, the core team channel just to see, you know, well just to express it there because that seems to be where most of the previous stakeholders…
Dan Anderson: I’ll just put out there that I don’t think that a chat room like that is the path for an open source project. I think that discussion should be much more archivable and public.
Chris Moss: Yeah
Dan Anderson: It’s also beneficial for people that aren’t developers to see that there is actually development happening and discussion happening and to understand where the project is.
Dan Anderson: So, that these channels are all private or invite only. It’s detrimental, I think, to the perception of the project.
Chris Moss: I agree. I would just like to state it’s not very active, but from what I have seen it was not a place for us to discuss development. And I think that was like, well, I’m not sure where that’s discussed, but it was, it seems to be. I was added to it later, but when I was added it was very much around the time about, around the fork. So I think it was a place for some people to discuss the fork issue there. Uh, but it, but I agree some sort of mailing list seems like the obvious choice. Ah, I’m still quite new to open source projects, but uh, you know, I can’t, I’d like to hear any reasons against that. I can think of a good one, but that would be nice to have some sort of open public irc or mailing lists, etc.
Dan Anderson: Well, Bitcoin and Monero have those to great effect.
Chris Moss: You know, I can’t think of a good reason against it, but-
Shaun Applebaum: Yeah, getting a mailing list sounds like a good idea. Um, until then, I guess is Counterparty talk the best forum if we’re going to have more of an online conversation?
Dan Anderson: It’s a good suggestion. From my experience, when I post things there, it’s like 50/50 if I get responses, but I do get feedback there if I promote it and link to it. So, I think that’s probably a good suggestion in the interim just to promote that further.
Dan Anderson: It’s also explicitly part of the CIP process.
Shaun Applebaum: You mean like posting the CIP there first for discussion and then…
Dan Anderson: Yeah.
Shaun Applebaum: OK.
Dan Anderson: If anyone’s interested in Counterparty development, I suggest checking out the counterparty repo. There’s a CIPs folder and there is CIP 1 that explains the process of how it works basically. And it’s a very clear. You kind of gauge interest and then maybe you start with a rough draft as a gist or counterparty talk thread and then you escalate from there, over time. But it is a timely process. It takes time for sure.
Dan Anderson: I don’t know how to end this discussion guys, at least the recording
Chris Moss: End on a good note, I suppose. You know, it seems like things are coming together and there’s interest in development. So, uh, yeah, I think hopefully we can progress from here.
Dante DeAngelis: Yeah. And I think the GitHub is definitely a good place to start getting your head around how the process works so you can think about what things can be made easier so that things can move along with less friction.
Dan Anderson: This is a separate topic, but I’m super curious, Chris, about the counterparty community in Japan. Uh, I understand that you’re somewhere in Japan. Uh, could you talk to that because I see that there are several projects in Japan, in Japanese to Japanese audiences and counter party and I just have very little insight into that. But it, it’s obviously like there’s a lot of interest in Japan as far as I can tell from all my traffic stats and just projects I see. Can you talk on that?
Chris Moss: Yeah. Well I suppose “big in Japan” is the phrase they say. So Counterparty was pretty big maybe last year there were, there were quite a lot of projects I think are quite a few companies who are interested in using it. I think a lot of the attention now has gone to Ethereum and also NEM. NEM is like Japanese based. I think it’s not Japanese based. Pretty much, from what I understand, like the developers, it’s quite centralized around a Japanese exchange. Uh, so now I’m a pretty big but um, but Counterparty is still popular.
Chris Moss: What can I say? There’s been a bit of a setback I think recently due to Japanese regulation that kind of… I know that the dex in Japan is pretty much not allowed at this moment though. It’s somewhat gray, but it’ll cost you like 100,000 dollars to find out, you know, if it’s allowed. I remember that rare pepe was quite popular over here and there’s also a Japanese version of rare pepe. There’s two Japanese versions which are also popular called memory chain. I forgot the name of the other one. So I think that’s where a lot of the traffic goes. Indie Square seems to be driving most of it adoption in Japan. That’s pretty much the gist of it.
Dan Anderson: Thanks. I’m just curious.
Chris Moss: Yeah. Well, you know, I think like Japan is generally a big market for crypto in general, right? I think like the, even Bitcoin, Japan must be number one or number two traffic. Right.
Dan Anderson: Are you in touch with any Japanese developers? Do they have trouble with English language documentation? Would it be beneficial to get the docs translated?
Chris Moss: That’s what I thought. Like I thought would it be an issue and I think, well most engineers or programmers in Japan actually do speak English even though they pretend they don’t. Well at least they can read. So I think they have an issue speaking, but that’s a general trend in Japan that people can’t speak English, but they can read it because that’s what they learned in school. They learn how to read like a text, so it’s not a big deal. Um, I think the main issue in Japan is News. Koji. I think Koji Higashi was probably quite instrumental in making Counterparty popular in Japan and he often blogs in Japanese about Counterparty and still does. I think generally it’s OK.
Chris Moss: I think the, the main problem is the opposite. I think lots of Japanese Counterparty projects don’t get known about abroad at all in America or England or Europe. So I think the, the opposite is more the issue because there’s quite a few projects and teams who are interested in using Counterparty. And you mentioned before the Monaparty dev who proposed a CIP. So, Monaparty is also quite popular in Japan because Monacoin is the Japanese, it’s a Japanese fork of litecoin, but he’s quite active as well and he works on the project, but he’s also, yeah, he seems quite willing to help out on counter party as well. It’s like a friendly fork. There definitely could be more translation between entities like the western community and the Japanese community.
Dan Anderson: I just saw one project called HESOKURI, have you seen that or heard of that?
Chris Moss: I haven’t seen that. No
Dan Anderson: I think it’s new. It’s, it’s, it’s seems to be like a cartoon cat, a kind of a rare thing, but with a cartoon cat?
Chris Moss: Yeah, that could be related to the oasis mining, which is like, uh, cause I think pepe is funny and it’s quite popular in Japan, but Japan has its own sense of humor and style of art. I’m sure people riffing on that.
Dan Anderson: 'm gonna throw it a little plug too. So I’ve been gathering interest, engaging interest for a Counterparty conference in New York City and I have been talking to a venue, I’m still waiting to hear back from them for like what the dates that are available. But the space would be free, which would be awesome. And the goal of the event like that, which is still super, super, super like early idea phase. Just seeing if I could secure space, seeing if it’s feasible to do, but there’s been a good showing of interest there. And so I think an event like that could be in the same vein of what we’ve been talking about, growing the network so that the people who have like a positive energy and are interested in moving things forward can better collaborate. Even people- you don’t have to be a full time developer to, to contribute to a project. There’s a number of ways people can contribute. So, just looking for ways to grow the interest, grow the number of people involved in, through meetings like this through in-person meetings, and Counterparty continues to be a very stable and successful project. But we have to reboot development, if we can.
Chris Moss: Yeah, I second that. Like the conference we had in Japan, it wasn’t a conference, it was like a meetup, that was very popular. That was last year. I think. So yeah. I think there’s to definitely meeting face to face the people in the community.
Dan Anderson: Would there be interested in people who are in Japan to come to New York City if they had enough advance notice? Would that be too difficult?
Chris Moss: I could spread the word. I think one thing with Japan is that holidays are very, very difficult to get, like you can’t take more than a few days off in a row. I think advanced notice would definitely be a necessary thing. I was going to suggest also like I know that I think scaling Bitcoin is in Japan this year. Correct me if I’m wrong, so it might be nice to have a satellite conference in Tokyo as well about counterparty, you know?
Dan Anderson: Cool. Yeah, that sounds great to me.
Chris Moss: Yeah, it’s like two birds with one stone.
Dan Anderson: Yeah, no, exactly. Awesome.
Chris Moss: Well I’ll try and ask Indie Square because you know, the um, we’ve been talking about doing like a hackathon and conference for ages, but you know, there’s always been, you know, we’ve been busy developing things, but I think we’re going to plan to do something at some point, so hopefully they have. That can be pretty cool. I’ll inquire about that.
Dan Anderson: I’m really excited based off of just talking to you, Chris. Uh, I mean there’s a lot of the things I think me and Sean and Dante here didn’t know about, uh, in regards to Indie Square and Japan. So, like I just, the way I see these phone calls could be as like, you know, if there was double the people here or triple the people here, we would just have so much information exchange that it would be, it’d be great.
Chris Moss: You have to be careful. Japan and maybe China to an extent, you get kind of these like galapagos style effects, right? Were kind of like, you know, entities don’t mix and they kind of just end up doing their own thing which is uh, which is a bit of a shame. But yeah. But I definitely like, I think I’ve be saying to indie square, you know, we need to kind of branch out because there’s a lot of people that don’t know about Indie Square wallet. And I think, I don’t think that is maybe apart from JDog’s, there’s no other mobile wallet at the moment.
Dan Anderson: Book of Orbs is like a wallet that some people use just because it supports a lot of the projects that they use and they don’t use much outside of that or pretty much.
Chris Moss: That’s pretty much Indie Square. But with a fantasy skin.
Dan Anderson: And then, uh, I think free wallet might be one.
Chris Moss: I’m the dev on Book of Orbs and Indie Square wallet, also there are a few other engineers at Indie Square that kind of help out. But mainly it’s me, so I kind of see them as the same.
Dante DeAngelis: Chris, I’d like to ask you, you know, all of these games are using various cards and what have you. And they all have different desirability because of their effectiveness or their powers or… Is that a fair assessment?
Chris Moss: I couldn’t quite hear you. You broke up a little bit.
Dante DeAngelis: OK. So, in other words, a lot of these games obviously have cards. Uh, have you considered anything about maybe having a little bit of crossover between different games and the use of the cards from other games as a way to help cross promotion, that type of thing.
Chris Moss: I’m all for that. I think there’s actually a telegram channel that popped up the other day that was kind of aimed at kind of, well, partially aimed at developers collaborating, but yeah, but that’s definitely something like my game uses Spells of Genesis, well my game uses all tokens, but with an emphasis on Spells of Genesis and rare pepe. I’m kind of interested like with the Age of Rust and Age of Chains. I get those two confused.
Dante DeAngelis: You seen any of the cards even though it’s early, early, early days. Have you seen any of the cards of from Bitcorns?
Chris Moss: Seen a few pop up on Takara, but yeah, I’d say I was gonna speak to Dan maybe in private to see if we could collaborate somehow.
Dan Anderson: Get that plug in, I love it.
Dante DeAngelis: I can post the link, although it won’t be in the audio, you know, it would’ve been easier- I did try to show someone the museum the other day and I was just looking for a top level link that was easy to find, you know, from the main Bitcorns.com page. But I had to go dig into a telegram chats to find that link. But that museum has every single one of the official cards that had been approved and they’re listed there. And the reason I’m bringing this up. Yeah, yeah, sure. Maybe I’m trying to plug in a little bit, but more important than that, I wanted Chris to see some of the cards and see if he could envision any of those cards as being something that would be acceptable if it were going to be cross utilize in, in the game that he’s involved with wanting to get his reaction.
Chris Moss: I couldn’t hear everything because the it team to break up. I think I got the gist. Uh, but like, so the current game I’m working on at the moment is, so SaruTobi Island, and it’s still somewhat in development, although it’s kind of out in a demo, but the premise is that any token can be used by default, but I’m also interested in like allowing certain special items or special monsters that can only be came through specific tokens. Uh, so yeah, you know, if Bitcorns seems to be quite popular, I heard about it in Japan as well. So I’m interested in discussing more maybe having a special monster of special quest.
Dante DeAngelis: I just sent you a link and I think even in the early selection of the cards that are in the museum, just take a quick look at those and tell me if anything jumps out at you as in “wow, that could easily be used.” And um, I’m uh, I’m sure not every, let’s say pepe card for an example. I’m sure not everyone. One of them would be something that you would say, “hey, let’s use that card in the game.” I don’t know that you would use all 1800 of their cards, for example.
Chris Moss: The way that my game works at the moment is it will get the image of the card of a token, and it will use that image as the monster skin. But for that to work effectively, the cards need to be on Book of Orbs because I use the Book of Orbs API to get the images. But I think you’ve like… Have you spoken with Dan…
Dante DeAngelis: I’m sorry you broke up. You broke up.
Chris Moss: You’re breaking up here.
Dante DeAngelis: Hello?
Shaun Applebaum: Yeah. Dante, you’re, uh, it’s, it’s very choppy on your end, just so you know.
Dante DeAngelis: Ok, I think I can fix that.
Dante DeAngelis: How’s that? Is that any better?
Shaun Applebaum: Ya that’s better. As we’re kind of getting into like project to project discussion… Do we want to, and maybe get Dan’s input on this, but keep the recording going? Or kind of end the main reason we were here and then maybe just continue the conversation in a different way or…
Chris Moss: Hey, maybe we should because I’ve actually got to go. It’s getting late here in Japan, so I’ve got to drop off…
Dante DeAngelis: I’m going to stop the recording and then we could just chat casually, if we’d like.
Dan Anderson: All right, well thanks for listening, if you listen to this. Buh-bye… That’s my podcast outro. The real-fake podcast meetup outro.
Dante DeAngelis: Saint Catherine, pray for us.
I will be attending the May 4th meeting. FoldingCoin would love to help in the development. There are things we need (most notably CIP 6, 10, and 13) and we would love to give dev hours, reviewing, QA, and/or other resources to help get these things implemented.