Counterparty Foundation Election 2015 (March 19th - April 16th)

General Counterparty
1

The Counterparty Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to advancing the Counterparty protocol and its products, educating the community on the Counterparty technology and its uses, driving global Counterparty awareness, and ensuring Counterparty remains a successful, thriving and growing financial platform with an increasing number of projects being built on top of its technology.

The Foundation is governed by five directors, two Founding Directors, Robby Dermody and Adam Krellenstein, and three Community Directors.

Today, weā€™re happy to announce the start of the Counterparty Foundation Community Directors election.

For the next two weeks, from March 19th till April 2nd, we are inviting everyone to participate in the election process by nominating candidates to fill three Community Director seats. The only requirement for the nomination is that the candidate hold at least 50 XCP and prove this by broadcasting a message from his or her address with the name of the nominee.

Please note that the sitting board of directors, by a super-majority vote, may disqualify non-viable candidates from election (as per Proposed changes to the Bylaws by ivanaszuber Ā· Pull Request #66 Ā· CounterpartyXCP/Documentation Ā· GitHub).

This will be the official election thread used to gather the names and addresses of qualifying candidates.

If you would like to nominate yourself or another candidate, please reply to this thread with the following candidate information:

  • First and Last name
  • Bio
  • Picture
  • Bitcoin address (must have at least 50 XCP)
  • Tx of the broadcast used to verify the ownership of 50 XCP

On April 2nd, the Executive Director will generate a Bitcoin address for each candidate that meets the requirement. Names and addresses of all candidates will be published on a public Blockscan voting scoreboard.

On the same day, the executive director will issue a voting token called CFELECTION of 10 million units (divisible and locked) and send dividends to all XCP holders with this vote token as the dividend asset (meaning that all XCP addresses will receive some quantity vote token in proportion to their XCP balance).

During the two-week long voting period, from April 2nd till April 18th, owners of addresses with a vote token balance will be able to send them to one or more of the addresses corresponding to the candidate(s) they wish to vote for. Candidatesā€™ current scores, will be publicly displayed on the Blockscan voting scoreboard.

After the election, top three addresses that receive the highest number of vote tokens will be announced as winners, and their owners receive Community Director positions for the term of one year.

Weā€™re looking forward to your candidacy and hope this election will be a fair, successful and transparent process of selecting the best candidates to fill these key positions.

4

I am nominating myself, Devon Weller, as a candidate for Community Director.

Name

Devon Weller

Bio

I have worked full time as a professional internet applications developer for the last 15 years. In early 2013 I bought my first bitcoin and I have been hopelessly obsessed with cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology ever since.

I am excited about Bitcoin and Counterparty because I have a vision of a world where anyone can effortlessly represent physical items and services with cryptographically secure tokens. By removing the friction between trading goods and services we can dramatically improve the lives of many people around the world. In short, tokens just work better.

Counterparty combines the security, decentralization and widespread adoption of the bitcoin network with the rapid innovation of a new protocol. These are the things that make Counterparty the best platform for the coming tokenization revolution.

I served as the project manager for the launch of LTBcoin which is the rewards token for the Letā€™s Talk Bitcoin network. We chose Counterparty because it was and is the best solution for our needs. I am currently co-founder and CTO of Tokenly along with Adam B. Levine and Nick Rathman. We are building fully open source tools and services on top of Counterparty to help create a peer-to-peer tokenzied world that looks a little more like the one I described above.

Our mission at Tokenly is aligned with the needs of other Counterparty developers and the community. Our goal is to build tools that will help the entire Counterparty ecosystem grow. A growing and thriving user base is essential for all of us.

As a Community Director, my efforts will go toward promoting the growth of Counterparty in all ways. But I am especially interested in growing adoption of the protocol beyond just the reference Python implementation. As a first step toward this goal, I am currently leading a project to document the protocol specification.

In summary, this is why I am a good choice to represent you, dear community member, as a Community Director this year:

  • I have a deep conviction that we can change the world by enabling frictionless exchange of value, goods and services through tokenization
  • I have been closely involved with LTBCOIN, the most active asset on Counterparty, since its beginning
  • As a co-founder of Tokenly I have a strong interest in seeing Counterparty thrive
  • I am actively building open source tools for Counterparty at https://github.com/tokenly
  • I am leading a project to document the low-level Counterparty specifications at https://github.com/tokenly/counterparty-spec
  • I am a Lifetime Member of the Counterparty Foundation

Picture

Devon Weller

Bitcoin Address with at least 50 XCP

1H9zNf1E7H55SQpm16p2xMU2tRfdNgG5YQ

Broadcast Transaction ID

e972aecc5a7b48706b7ab8822094e19932f60238af35516a219c53818845db01

7 Likes
6

I nominate myself

Robert Ross

Bio:
When myself and James discovered Counterparty and started FoldingCoin back in July 2014, we really just had plans of creating FLDC as a fun way to incentivize miners to start using their mining equipment towards something more beneficial to mankind. Since our community has grown and the response from the project has been well received, I decided to go full time in the crypto world this past January with the goals of bringing FoldingCoin Inc to new levels. I am now the full time director of FoldingCoin Inc.

Since going full time, we learned quickly that since we are going in the non profit direction with our project, that more than just working on FoldingCoin is important for the community. Since many of our members are new to either crypto or Counterparty, donors have come to us looking for guidance and answers to questions. I spend a good amount of my day explaining to folks the ideas and benefits of Counterparty. So far, the FoldingCoin project has accomplished the following benefiting the Counterparty community:

  • FLDC is the second most transacted asset on the Counterparty protocol
  • We have successfully converted 2 traditional Altcoins over to the Counterparty protocol instead of keeping their existing blockchains, OCTO and POWC
  • We have developed a way for Counterparty tokens to be distributed either promotionally or for a duration of time on our Merged Folding platform: BITCRYSTALS, FDCARD, SCOTCOIN, OCTO, POWC, and FLDC and will assist in helping Altcoins hold burns to transfer their coins to the Counterparty protocol
  • We have developed a voting system in which participants to the FoldingCoin project can vote on major upcoming implementations to the project and we will help any Counterparty project along the way looking to do a similar process. Votes can also be viewed on Blockscan
  • We had a 3.5 hour interview on DogedCoinRadio mostly explaining Counterparty and we have setup another radio show with an entire panel of CounterParty leaders to appear on the same show March 27th at 10pm EDT (mark your calendars)
  • We have a complete document going over the advantages and disadvantages of Counterparty tokens vs. traditionally mined Altcoins
  • FoldingCoin is looking to create an Ebay style Marketplace for Counterparty tokens VISUAL DIAGRAM, DETAILED BREAKDOWN

All of our success has been the combined effort of our team of 6 dedicated volunteers in which all of us are knowledgable and willing to help any new comers to the Counterparty space.

Once again, the above mentioned are some things FoldingCoin as a team has done. Here is what I will bring to the table for the Counterparty project (though many of the following tasks I will still receive a great amount of help from the FoldingCoin team):

  • Will creating more Counterparty tutorials on how to use the Counterwallet and future desktop wallet releasing new videos 1-2 times weekly and will setup a google docs form to take requests on tutorial videos needed
  • I will start a Counterparty based Google Hangout and take live Q&As towards the end of the show. After the show, I will turn it into an audio podcast for future listening and post the Google Hangout on the FoldingCoin YouTube
  • I am now an organizer setting up 2 Indianapolis Meetups to help bring Bitcoin and Counterparty awareness to local businesses and Nonprofits and will be speaking regularly about Counterparty to the members. http://www.meetup.com/IndyBitcoin/ and http://www.meetup.com/Hacking-Diseases/

I am extremely responsive on all forums, emails, and other forms of media that I am involved in, and this would still hold true if I am to become a Community Director. All of my contact information is readily available http://foldingcoin.net/fldc-dev-team/#rross and will be available for any newcomers to the Counterparty space on guidance, setup, explanation, etcā€¦ and would love to be the person newcomers come to for advice. I hope you select me to help spread awareness and answer questions to this wonderful project, thanks for reading.

Robert Ross
FoldingCoin Founder
rross@foldingcoin.net
Skype: foldingcoin
Twitter: @foldingcoin

BTC Address: 16muW9htJAYrrXrKN8BwWTmT6cgXscXDzJ Blockchain or Blockscan

TX of the Transaction:

  • Blockchain fe382ee8351cc995ce7cd11573e32f85e1b857e422b86ba189d3e2597c56d506

  • Blockscan 11612025

http://foldingcoin.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/ross.jpg

5 Likes
7

Hello Everyone, itā€™s me! Chris DeRose hereā€¦

Whatā€™s up party people! If youā€™re reading this, you probably know who I am already. But in case you donā€™t recognize me, Iā€™m the incumbent Community Director of the Counterparty foundation.

https://www.chrisderose.com/assets/profile-c5752821cd35dcd0d30b5729e0c51014.jpeg

Who am I?

Iā€™m a journalist, a programmer, and a public advocate of crypto-currency that lives in South Florida. Iā€™ve run a technology consulting company in Fort Lauderdale for a little over ten years, and have been programming in some form or another for almost twenty years. I discovered Bitcoin sometime in late 2010, and have been increasingly investing my time and attention to the crypto-currency space ever since.

For a more detailed account of who I am, head on over to chrisderose.com.

What have I done for you thus far?

Besides the normal day-to-day job of representing counterpartyā€™s interests online, in chat rooms, and forums, I have also provided consultation to various members of industry, bitcoin companies, and venture capitalists.

In a more public capacity, I have achieved the following in my very short three-month interim term thus far:

My Values and Beliefs

I think the values of all candidates for this position should be delineated in a formal capacity, and as such, Iā€™m going to outline my values below. Additionally hereā€™s my long-term forecast of our Bitcoin future.

Bitcoin Maximalism
I am an unapologetic Bitcoin maximalist. I have seen countless alt-chains come and go, and while there may be room for a chain other than Bitcoinā€™s, I donā€™t believe itā€™s worth our time to be distracted by this remote possibility at the current time.

Meta-coins are with us, not against us. Alt-chains are against us
I do not make disparaging statements about Omni, or Colored Coins. While I believe Counterparty is the superior technology in the metacoin space, I also believe that there is benefit in competing metacoin implementations. I believe our actual competition exists with technologies such as Ripple and (maybe) Ethereum/Bitshares.

Counterparty is Bitcoin
Central to all my advocacy is the equivocation of Counterparty and Bitcoin. Counterparty is to Bitcoin what CSS is to HTML. This is the primary reason I gravitated to Counterparty in the first place.

Mobile Integration should be a primary focus
I believe that the best place for Counterparty to grow is via integration with the mobile Bitcoin wallet designers. This integration may take a while, but I do believe that Counterparty has a very immediate ability to provide ā€œkiller appsā€ once tokens are send and receivable in userā€™s preffered Bitcoin wallet software.

Counterpartyā€™s primary source of growth will come from its developers
Developers, developers, developers! While competing 2.0 platforms are primarily focused on growing their community via fundraising and stock-ownership, my belief is that the way to grow a 2.0 community is by courting to developers, and their projects.

XCP is not a pump
I do not pump XCP. Frankly Iā€™d prefer XCP to stay ā€˜cheapā€™ as I believe this will aid in our ability to court developers. I donā€™t discourage people from purchasing XCP, but I donā€™t encourage people either. I donā€™t believe that we should be pumping counterparty as an altcoin.

Counterparty is Open Source. Not a company.
Ethereum, Bitshares, and countless others in this space ā€œfundraisedā€ for their development. This makes them, IMO, companies and not open-source platforms. Counterparty is a sustainable project in the same way Bitcoin is a sustainable project, because it never raised money. There is a uniquely egalitarian structure to what weā€™re doing in the 2.0 space. This is an important feature of Counterparty, and should be expressed at such.

Bitcoin is not a currency
To be clear, Bitcoin does all of the things that currencies do, but Bitcoin does so much more! As such I have adopted the opinion that Bitcoin is a protocol for settlement and value transfer. Bitcoins themselves are a useful commodity, which will be expended as the protocol grows. Counterparty is a logical outcome of this belief.

Having fun and taking our time!
There are many advocates in this space which feel that cryptocurrency should be presented as a imminently disruptive technology that will cause the incumbents to fail spectacularly and in short time. Or alternatively, there are those that feel Bitcoin will be co-opted by suits from wall street, and that professionalism and conformity is the path towards adoption. I believe that this movement will take a good while to manifest into the disruptive force itā€™s being billed as. I further believe that a message that provides quality content, coupled with responsible fun, will be more accessible to the general public and provide a more sustainable growth path for us, as our community matures.

Ainā€™t no party like a Counterparty!

Hopefully you like my platform and I can continue working for you! I do this work for fun, the challenge of understanding the world around me, and the satisfaction of making a difference.

Thank-you for your consideration everyone! Itā€™s been an honor to be your director for this short time thus far, and I would love to keep the party going all year long. (Later Party People!)

5 Likes
8

Election Q&A has been moved to a new topic: [Q&A] Counterparty Foundation Election 2015 Q&A

Great discussion guys! Please continue to share your thoughts and ideas in the new topic, letā€™s keep this one only for nominations.

9

What happened to MattY? I nominate him, wherever he is.

10

Hey! Iā€™m JP Janssen, aka JPJA on the forums. I hereby nominate myself.

Iā€™m originally from Norway where I graduated with a MSc in Economic Analysis five years ago. Iā€™ve since worked in finance, with trading and programming, in New York and Singapore. More recently I relocated to Latvia where I run my own real estate business.

Me enjoying Countercoffee.

Iā€™ve been obsessed with Counterparty ever since I discovered it last spring. What I find so fascinating is that it offers new building blocks to the world of finance, it is open source, the core developers are donating their own time and money, it runs on top of Bitcoin, and it is backed by the network effect of a growing community.

The point about new building blocks is particularly interesting. The asset system is a huge success, and with new services such as Coindaddy and the Chrome Plugin, the snowball keeps growing. Unfortunately, the betting system, which technically is just as impressive, never reached the critical mass of users and is practically dead by now. The last bet was placed Dec 29 last year.

If I get a seat at the foundation I will emphasize teaching how CP can benefit you, your business and society in general. In most cases CP can complement existing finance, not replace it. How best to implement CP deserves a study on its own. It is essential that we have a down-to-earth approach where weā€™re humble about CPā€™s limitations, yet excited about its opportunities. For example, hereā€™s how I envision CP can be used for funding a business.

The foundation as of today works pretty well. So what can I contribute with? I am one of the most active forum users (especially on Reddit). I encourage playing with CP and experimenting with new ways of using it. For example, I made a URL forwarding system for asset names. Within the foundation I hope to contribute with making instructional videos, contributing to forums, documenting the protocol, and talking with media. Having my name associated with the foundation will add more weight to my words. If you believe my involvement will benefit Counterparty as a whole, then consider voting for me.

P.S. Letā€™s not forget the elephant in the room ā€“ the XCP price. I see two main drivers for its price. The first is anti-spam fees. The second, and much more important one, is XCP being used to escrow bets. To achieve the latter, the foundation should advocate the platform, not the coin. Members should never discuss the XCP price beyond some general statements. As the platform becomes more popular, the XCP price will naturally follow.

3 Likes
11

Iā€™m Joel Dietz, Swarm founder. I have put together a document that Iā€™m circulating privately at the moment in order to collect critical feedback and decide if it is worth running.

My main consideration is this. Iā€™m interested in Counterparty becoming a healthy and growing ecosystem. This means that it needs all of the following:

(1) Excited developers building on the platform
(2) Business potential, either current or future
(3) Competitive advantage vis-a-vis other platforms offering the same or similar services
(4) Engaged community promoting the platform

Obviously Iā€™ve already committed a lot of time and energy to this ecosystem, but itā€™s not entirely clear to me that it is growing at the pace necessary to be competitive.

First, developer evangelism while perhaps better than any other 2.0 project on the Bitcoin blockchain is not nearly at the same level as other off-chain projects (NXT, BitShares, NuBits, Ethereum). I estimate that there are something like ~10 developer actively building something on the project and none of the bigger players are releasing back open source code.

A good example of this is Swarm, weā€™ve had a strong desire to contribute back open source code but have been inhibited by the fact that there is a strong internal competitive nature to the ecosystem. Compare the slogans of the different folks now working around the ecosystem: cryptoequity (Swarm), smart securities (Symbiont), cryptoequity (Overstock), smart corporations (Koinify).

Can you tell what the difference is? Probably not. I certainly canā€™t. Although Swarm was the first to describe or offer any of this, it makes for a fairly cluttered ecosystem.

Also, if you look at the stats youā€™ll see that although Counterparty has greater than 80% of the transaction volume among Bitcoin blockchain projects, the market capitalization of Maidsafe (on Omni/Mastercoin) is greater than all Counterparty projects combined.

The net result that Iā€™ve observed is that many of the companies in the space are less committed to Counterparty than they once were. For example Koinify, who even now has a board seat on the Counterparty foundation, is not doing any of their announced upcoming sales on Counterparty. The only one they did, GEMS, was from someone who had already decided to use Counterparty in advance of the sale.

So in general people are making only a loose commitment to the underlying technology and ecosystem, which makes sense from a business perspective but is disappointing to me since in general when I started with Counterparty I invested a fair bit of effort and time in an effort to see the whole ecosystem grow.

My general feeling about Counterparty at the moment is disappointment. I donā€™t have a specific desire to invest a lot of time and energy promoting something that is going to ultimately turn into a second place solution. I do have a large desire to open source code and provide other resources back to the community, but donā€™t feel like I can do that in the current environment with the risk of taking a major economic loss on my part as a result.

In any case, all of these are factors in my decision to run or not run for the Counterparty board. If they canā€™t be resolved, I honestly donā€™t think Counterparty has a future.

Also, although I think it is nice to have a ā€œcommunity director,ā€ what is really needed is not simply some idea of ā€˜community,ā€™ but some more long-term strategic planning to build out the whole ecosystem. In my opinion so far thatā€™s been neglected ā€“ and the XCP price shows it.

12

Joel, Iā€™d be a lot happier if this were discussed in an on-topic thread. Respectfully, Hernando.

2 Likes
14

Attention all candidates

On April 3rd, 10 PM EDT, there will be a live debate hosted on DogeCoin Radio for all candidates. Material for the debate is outlined in the public Google Doc and open for the community to edit.

Details on the debate can be discussed in the Q&A thread and will be announced in the upcoming Counterparty community update post.

1 Like
16

Please scroll up and follow the directions Ivana outlined for nomination. Your message does not conform to that.

17

Just seeing this now. Thanks for the nomination, however, I must decline for now. At this time the current candidates make more sense than me as they have more time to dedicate to the project and they are all capable. I am holding myself in reserve in case people start running that I deem to be terrible (and actually have a shot at winning). If that were to happen, I will run against them and/or be very vocal in my opposition in order to protect Counterparty.

2 Likes
19

This is being moved to April 3rd at 10 pm EDT to accommodate the rest of the candidates

23

In accordance with the newly ratified changes to the Counterparty charter (PR66) I officially nominate the disqualification of Chewbacca from eligiblity as a candidate in the upcoming election. For all other foundation members in agreement, please ACK this nomination if there is no opposition. (sorry Chewy!)

24

@brighton36, ACKing.

25

I am opposed to the motion.

26

@brighton36, ACK ā€¦

27

First and Last name:
Andreas Antonopoulos

Bio
My name is Andreas Antonopoulos and Iā€™m running for the community director of the Counterparty foundation. I am a known entity in the Bitcoin space, and am a well respected speaker. I have recently begun a consulting company that focuses on Bitcoin and have been a fan of the Counterparty project for a long time. Iā€™m sorry to be submitting my nomination at the last minute, but have been going back and forth trying to decide whether I should or shouldnā€™t join another foundation after my very public kerfuffle with the Bitcoin foundation. I would like to work with the Counterparty foundation in its early stages to make sure that the same sort of problems that happened there do not happen here.

I am busy, as I have just recently launched a new firm and am focused on building it. That said, I think that I can find the time to promote a worthwhile project such as Counterparty. In the next few days, as you consider who you should vote for in this election, consider my experience and all that I have done for Bitcoin. I think I would make a great community director, and excitedly await your support.

Picture: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/24/Andreas_M._Antonopoulos.jpg/450px-Andreas_M._Antonopoulos.jpg

Bitcoin Address: 1Jk4kwAutsj8eeYuJN97Ztqn38nM7stYJU

Tx of the broadcast: http://www.blockscan.com/txInfo/11622263

28

This Andreas nomination is a fake, here is the tweet from Andreas

29

Andreas M. Antonopoulos here. The previous post presenting me as a nominee for the election is a well executed prank, not me. I verify this on my well known twitter account:

1 Like