Counterparty foundation in 2019? New updates?

General Counterparty
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Greetings everyone!

I’m Alan and I’ve loved using counterparty for years, as well as trading it on exchanges and using the dex, and multiple wallets. The recent delisting caught me off guard on poloniex and I was curious why this occured. I wasn’t actively involved in development or even talking with other counterpart users or devs (in the past) to use the dex or exchanges I didn’t need to. Anyway, I was like ok, other than just checking the monthly updates let me make a post on bitcointalk as I have had some small conversations with people like Jeremy (Jdog), Christian Moss, and a couple regulars in the counterparty xcp chat (no not Trevor’s one - the one with half the users, I got booted as soon as I asked why the pinned message is the way it is).

From the feedback I got (not to step on any toes, I’m a noob to this), I think many of us want similar things:

  • A few added features to make it easier to use the dex (eg use Christian Moss Integration with ledger on the dex, don’t have to input privkey, or maybe facelift the main xcp pages and dex layout with some updated YouTube videos)
  • More dex volume (ex include volunteers/market makers to create liquidity, new assets with specific uses similar to icos for investors)
  • Devs for new updates we want (including volunteers and paid)
  • Communication with other projects that can help xcp, such as the other segwit lightning enabled coins, perhaps similar to the LTC, VTC, VIA pages that are already setup to do instant btc/alt atomic swaps.
  • More social marketing

I can keep going with ideas others and I would like but, the big elephant in the room that some have known about for some time (myself only recently), the dissolved and inactive Counterparty Association needs to be reinstated to pursue the above (and other goals) effectively, in my humble opinion.

This post is an early effort to ask if others in the community feel the same way. If anyone else wants to help counterparty in anyway, perhaps first let us try to elect some members who have a drive to fulfill community goals? Is there interest to come together and make a new association? If so please post here.

Thanks for reading,
Alan

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Greetings,

Thank you all for creating and keeping this project moving forward! While I cannot contribute much as a developer today, I will promote Counterparty’s use. Creating a record on Bitcoin’s blockchain is badass. Right now, there’s a bit of a premium to do so with miner’s fees, but that ultimately lends more value to this project.

I pledge to contribute continuing into the future. These tokens are valuable tools, and they yield amaizing assets.

Keep Rare,
Jess

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Hi everyone, John here.

Last two months have been hectic on my side to say the least (between personal issues, week-long blackouts and coups on my country).

Regarding XCP, from my point of view we’re missing on several things:

  • A coordinator to concert efforts regarding XCP. This coordinator could be a person, software or a mix of them. Particularly i like to use Trello a lot, but anything that can help organize ideas goes.
  • More tools for counterparty usage: as it is, counterparty is pretty solid and it’s a great foundation for tokens. However, almost nowhere you find tools to make use of all this. E.g. Libraries for C#/Unity, Godot, Unreal Engine. Tools to drive businesses via XCP on software like Excel/Calc, etc.
  • A revamp of the website is TOTALLY needed.
  • A new, better, simpler, default wallet. Counterwallet is already showing its age.
  • More public servers. Currently there’s the official servers and JDog’s. If jdog gets fed up and closes his server and stops maintaining the other one, bye bye XCP. (love ya jdog, just illustrating the point)
  • Last but not least, more devs. We need a LOT of devs covering bases here, and the current state of affairs is that the XCP fund has only so much to cover 1 or 2 milestones of any CIP out there.

As you can see, there are fixed one-time costs and there are recurring costs. These could be covered by different solutions and all of them will require moderate to very high budgets.

Possible solutions to the budget issue:

These are possible solutions that have been talked in the past either publicly or proposed to me privately, i’m just stating them here for the sake of completitude and will state my position on another point.

  1. Debase XCP and create a treasury: regular emission of XCP targetting just a pool of address signers on multisig wallets. This pool would require N of M signers to assign funds or maybe make it decentralized like politeia on Decred, with XCP holders voting to decide who gets what.
  2. Auction 3 letter assets: It has been proposed that this could be a mechanism to capture more funds from potential buyers by doing an open auction of all the three letter assets.
  3. Create a “foundation” ran business: There has been a number of proposals thrown around in this aspect like creating stablecoins, pegged tokens for BTC, ETH, et al. XCP would need a company structure to get this moving forward.
  4. Create a new utility Token and sell it/give it as rewards: A token sale could create a big one time pool of income, and this income could be directed towards XCP’s most vital needs. This would need fund management and a preset work plan.
  5. Promote donation campaigns: as it is, counterparty is pretty shy about the need of donations to move it forward. There’s almost no info out there in that regard and most people think it’s just another token-sale-shitcoin-gone-low-volume.

My take:

Some of these solutions are very polarizing, and ppl will get hurt by each one of them. Some are kinda short sighted (solve the current problem, but are not long term) some are harder on the time dedication needed by the ppl involved. Except for the 3rd and 5th, they “break” the social contract of XCP by changing the “game rules” and favoring a crowd that hasn’t been long term “hodlers”.

Caveat: I know i’ll get some flak from my next proposal. I’m ok with that. I’m not the only or the best source of truth, open your mind.

From my point of view, the only plausible solution that will hurt the less amount of people is the one that creates a long term solution sacrificing only one promise of the XCP social contract: debasing the token on a regular interval, with a decentralized group of signers that assign big chunks of money to cover servers, developers, promotion, design and ongoing efforts, will give a net positive to XCP. For example, we could allocate 20k/month XCP emission to cover a couple coders, designers, server ops and promotion. The amount that isn’t spent on these items gets burnt/removed at the end of the period.

Our low emission “edge” hasn’t been a good promotion anyways.

This could be developed on an update in the future, and the amount could be changed by the same group on an ad-hoc basis via a broadcast.

Developing that, of course, would require a CIP, milestones, etc. The funds could be assigned from the initial emission so it would come at no cost to the current XCP holders (besides the debasing).

The funds generated could be spent on making the VM which could sink some of the generated XCP into it (as XCP would be the “gas” for the VM).

There are other proposals that could sink more XCP (i.e. the lottery proposal, nameservers on a “first level” domain bought by the foundation, etc).

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Alright here is an idea.

How about the devs go buy XCP at today prices and have some skin in the game.

XCP market cap right now $3,684,846.

Market cap of Ethereum Classic smart contract platform practically nobody uses is $751,221,482.

If your work has any value you will be rewarded. If not, well at least you didn’t break the social contract.

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Although that’s a good idea from a speculator/investor point of view, that’s not how it works from a developer’s point of view.

A developer is like a hired gun.

Anyone with the required skills to work on Counterparty can make a salary of $100k/year full-time or $40k part-time easily in anything else out there, i’ll put the required skills at the end so anyone can try and find someone with them and ask how much would they want.

Stack overflow careers is filled to the brim with remote-work options that could steal our workforce.

Given this, why any dev:

  • Spend time on something that pays less (or worse, that you must invest in).
  • Have expectation on the promise that maybe if the markets react positively (which they haven’t historically done to dev updates) they’ll have capital gains which are HEAVILY taxed everywhere.
  • Work on a VERY hostile environment where anything they do will be critiqued by armchair investors.

Take into account that promising capital gains from an investment is classified as a future and hence would make Counterparty and an eventual foundation liable of emitting an unregistered security, without counting the fact that i, as the only dev left, get inquired regularly by exchanges on this matter so they don’t deal with an instrument of this type (which could derive in further removal of the remaining exchanges).

I’ll also add that the only time counterparty surged in price was when there were heavy rumors of it forking into BCH or any other chain, proving again that the only benefited by these price surges are short term speculators which are unethical and misaligned with the needs and drives of a developer.

I don’t have any sympathy for no-skin in the game investors. Better for them to go buy ripple and call it a day.

Also, i’ll remember that this community in the past made concerted efforts to diminish a developer’s work deriving on him resigning (with the consequence of CIP6 being heavily delayed to this day and we losing a great active dev).

Again, i’m speaking from my point of view. I’m not the only source of truth, nor the best one (heavily biased here). I expect any other interested developer to speak out here, although that hasn’t happened before due to the current circumstances, dunno why it should change if the state of affairs continue.

Skills required to work on Counterparty

  • Python 3 backend development (Very high knowledge required)
    • Unit testing
    • Structured protocol understanding
    • REST and JSON RPC manipulation
    • Python introspection
    • Map/reduce semantics
  • Javascript frontend development with Nodejs (Very high knowledge required)
    • Webpack
    • Knockout.js
    • Bitcore and Bitcoinjs-lib
    • NPM usage
  • CSS and HTML5 (Moderate to High knowledge required)
  • Docker and Docker-compose usage and deployment (High knowledge required)
  • Linux sysadmin (Moderate knowledge required)
  • Git manipulation (High knowledge required)
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Additionally, the current mindset is damaging Counterparty:

  • We lost our first mover advantage
  • We lost most developers already
  • We lost most market makers
  • We lost interest and word of mouth promotion

Who in their right mind would believe sincerely that keeping the same arguments and continuing to push devs away will improve the situation?

A lot of unethical shitcoins out there have warchests 3 to 5 orders of magnitude bigger than what’s left on the XCP dev fund.

Even some shit like Enjincoin is gaining more traction (and doing more good, like funding Godot for example) than Counterparty. They are also stealing our projects away (3 of them already that i know of).

If we don’t build a warchest of ours and change the way we market Counterparty, we’re slated to go out with a whimper.

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Risking the protocol instead of taking personal risk is boring.

Crypto is punk rock.

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True…

But developers are boring :sleeping::sleeping::sleeping:

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Be the change :guitar::drum::microphone:

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I’ve been the change :wink:

But a band doesn’t has only a vocalist and a drummer… you need that strident guitar and a good bass… a good syntethizer if you want to do some teuotonic homoerotic industrial metal and don’t get me started if you want an edgy masked iowa-born NuMetal band-gone-spectacle.

:smile:

Edit: although you could be The White Stripes… but that’s just for garage rock

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Hi all, and thanks Alan for starting this thread, plus anyone else who’s weighed in constructively so far thus far.

I’m preaching to the choir here, my opinion is that counter-party as a protocol is fantastic.
I’ve followed it for a while and it’s in the handful of projects
out of hundreds that have really stood out as being interesting on many levels.
However it’s in the slim, slim minority that has nowhere NEAR lived up to it’s potential.

I feel from the point it was top 5 till now it has suffered a thousand cuts, but some of the biggest cuts it’s had are factors that have nothing to do with the strength/utility of the project itself and everything to do with external forces. Good news are most of these issues ARE fixable and surmountable.

I posit that one of the singular biggest issue counter party has faced is primarily liquidity of the native utility token.

Low liquidity has had created a negative feedback loop, whereby old AND new
investors don’t want to hold what they perceive to be an illiquid utility token (the fact the price slashed in half after poloniex included xcp in a list of coins it was delisting demonstrates this), traders also don’t want to trade- nor have they the environment to further strengthen liquidity (e.g running interexchange arb bots)- exchanges are reticent to list, citing low volume/low popularity, developers, users think the same thing- utility suffers. they go where there’s energy, things have high volume because that means they’re “alive”.

News sites, social media cover the ‘buzzing’ or ‘trending’ organically and less organically what’s been paid with PR funds. In 2017/18 the mentality was why build on counterparty when you can publish a dAPP whitepaper and get six figures. All of this lack of liquidity means interested parties (like potentially someone running a third party service relating to counterparty) or developers wishing to put in work on the underlying codebase, or someone with an idea of building something on top of the protocol did not take counterparty seriously, they simply did not have the financial incentive. Even existing holders have a harder time wanting to do something as simple as donate (money, or time) when they’re getting more and more underwater and morale is low it’s a catch 22 and counterparty doesn’t get exposure or coverage naturally, despite the fact things like counterparty updating to segwit should have been covered with the same positive reactions that exchanges got in the cryptosphere, things like. Freeport should be on the frontpage of reddit “how to create a token on bitcoin in ten seconds”.

Hard to believe 5 years ago this project help define the concept of asset tokenization and led the way with the first decentralized exchange. Before blockstream drama, devs were running frontpage AMA’s, running nodeshare programs. Morale was high. It still works great, we’re still on the cusp of a token revolution ( even the likes of microsoft plans of using the bitcoin blockchain directly for decentralized identity) and Counterparty still represents one of only notable players in the space.

But… I’ll get to the point here-- It’s been 5 years. and Counterparty is pretty present on ONE mainstream exchange. Take a look at almost any other project, let’s take ravencoin as an example. It launched a little over a year ago with the vision of basically copying and pasting counterparty ideas into the consensus layer of a bitcoin fork and adding massive amounts of gpu-only mining- not to hate on it too much; it has a few cool ideas, but it’s less interesting than counterparty in several ways

what amounts to more of less a btc fork that launched WITHOUT an asset layer
nor a DEX, nor any kind of token economy STARTED out the gates, 5% minted with a 10x higher market cap. all the while still continually emitting hundreds of thousands per day in mining rewards needlessly.

If you want one hint why… It’s so far on 13 exchanges and has 33 trade pairs. dubious volume aside- that’s liquidity, they can’t have got it from bribing exchanges with bundles because raven has the SAME open source, decentralized “don’t pay for listing” stance as counterparty.

SO… Either we have been doing something very, very, wrong with regards to exchange outreach
or there’s some sort of vendetta towards exchanges integrating counterparty. How else can you explain looking at those stats? How can you possibly explain 5 years and no growth in exchange listing? just crickets. There is not a single other active project I can think of which has such little presence after such a long time.

If ethereum was on one exchange with modest volume it too would have the same problem. . This is NOT a problem with counterparty itself, and this is addressable

Right now I feel we are at week one of launch with counterparty.

I think this is the mentality we have to have and as a community we should have the hunger, the thirst and excitement of a group of people that have just got involved in a new idea. An untapped, unrecognized project at ground floor- because that’s where we’re at, and in a weird way there
should be some optimism, there because there is huge potential for growth.

I think for far too long we’ve been far too stubborn and conservative; but now is the time for us to get together as a community and help build this thing up towards some place it could have already been and where it still has the potential to be, and that includes considering drastic overhauls or approaches forward.

Again, thanks for starting this @AL. This is a much needed discussion, and I would agree that establishing some kind of loose unofficial foundation whereby we can more effectively collectively establish a roadmap for the future is a sensible approach.

(Haven’t read other posts yet), will comment back a little later

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just a back of the napkin idea to help solve that liquidity issue. Would love if anybody can chime in with other possible suggestions

Partially/completely Decouple or free XCP from the counterparty chain-- Recognizing the liquidity issue as being relevant, also recognize that potentially one of the reasons exchanges have been avoidant at listing counterparty is because of the metalayer like structure (ie running
bitcoind/counterpartyd) is considered tricky for them (in terms of effort/reward).

Sure, they have almost no choice to do add similarly structured OmniLayer to get USDT pairings but likely they do so begrudgingly because it generates
them significant demonstrable upside. In other words the effort is worth the reward

Assuming this is a possible explanation for the baffling lack of exchange presence
collectively perhaps we could brainstorm an alternate approach that makes it easier for exchanges to list XCP, granting it more liquidity–
as ‘stake’ in the protocol, and as strengthened utility as a base pair in the DEX whilst still ensuring XCP’s utility as part of the protocol.

We have seen in the past projects which have started as an ERC* token as a means of quantifying ownership, current/future stake in the protocol
or that have started as a token on an existing platform (Like NXT) and have ultimately transitioned to their own blockchain at a later date.

We see some projects/products/services
that operate exclusively as an ERC or BNB token with their ‘product’ decoupled from that token and this enables them to be highly present on a multitude of exchanges
including various ‘permission less’ DEX’s - this let’s them gain initial liquidity and discoverability and later springboard to centralized exchanges once it’s evident there is interest and demand.

So in simple terms, if we would agree on such a move forward- holders would send the ‘old’ XCP to a burn (or multisig holding) address and be rewarded with ‘new’ XCP on an alternate chain. (e.g…ERC20…I know, I know) perhaps in a 1:100 ratio, 100 NEWXCP equals 1 old XCP stake. at this time, the only thing the NEWXCP would be is “a stake in the future”- and as to go about deciding what that future is (e.g is NEWXCP swappable via a smart contract or a swapbot for ‘old’ XCP at anytime? somewhat like reopening a perpetual burn?)

or perhaps such an approach could be made instead of ERC20 with a substitute… like sidechain like construct, if that would come to fruition, anything that could be considered lower overhead or maintenence for liquidity gatekeepers.

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Airdrop NEWXCP on XCP holders.

NEWXCP can only be used to create 1, 2 and 3 letter assets at different burn rate.

Airdrop 20% on dev fund and 20% on marketing fund of the whole NEWXCP supply.

Have something like politeia to manage it.

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One of the things that initially attracted me to the counterparty system was indeed the deflationary-model/limited capped supply- but I think you’re totally right in that that ‘edge’ hasn’t resonated with the market, at all.

Ethereum has an significantly higher, uncapped supply, it bothers nobody, actually the inverse, miners love it and it’s not the only example.

Also, as somebody that originally sold eth and others that went up 20000% and was finally convinced to go all in the discussion of the EVM coming to counterparty (at 0.021btc per xcp, down 99.6% ouch) I can say that I was very interested in the VM and it was unfortunate that was something that never got merged in. A unique, simplistic VM I think would be cool.

was just reading this actually- Smart Contracts Unchained

Debase XCP and create a treasury : regular emission of XCP targetting just a pool of address signers on multisig wallets. This pool would require N of M signers to assign funds or maybe make it decentralized like politeia on Decred, with XCP holders voting to decide who gets what.

Even extremely hyped projects like Grin have had huge roadblocks wrt to funding developers, despite VC’s pouring in $100M in pre-launch mining contracts, they had trouble even securing enough to pay developers beyond a few months because of the pure donation based model. Even BTC core needs corporate backed sponsors like Blockstream

So yes- fully support the idea of long term protocol funding via continued emission, near every project out there is inflationary, if they don’t have a huge ICO warchests or some kinda consensys like entity, andreesen horowitz etc investing in the early days- they have dev fee structure a la Decred, Zcash, BEAM etc. Short of developers and leaders who have personally invested large amounts themselves in the project with skin in the game there is no viable incentive strategy otherwise.

To be quite honest I don’t think there should be much concern with a small amount of debasement because you’d logically expect the development funds to result in things like… increased development… which would offset the increased supply with increased assurances of the projects future, and in turn increased development might result in other factors like more asset registrations (as an example,which itself reduces the available supply)

I know this option would be a controversial idea but I think it would be the healthiest
thing for the long term longevity of counterparty by FAR. Something that rewards stewards contributing to the future success, encourages skin in the game. If there is a problem with consensus on any modification to the ‘social contract’, fair enough maybe
explore a fork or relaunch entirely so as not to invalidate. Allow holders to burn old XCP to new XCP- purge & perhaps tweak the cryptoeconomics, let new blood enter the system. We could let a new group of people who weren’t around years ago get excited about this, activity and morale could be much higher now we’re not years early to the token revolution, now the market is 10x bigger and more mature. New projects unencumbered by the past always have optimism

Look at NXT-> NEM and what they managed with a community takeover, or what Monero did with the Bytecoin codebase. Even Ethereum classic. Many projects started with no funding, no backing, no ICO’s and made something huge. By taking these suggestions seriously and doing something new, community could revitalize with new energy and excitement for the future.

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Regarding the deployment idea, i have a partially done light client for XCP coded, however, as this work has been unfunded it has progressed slowly as i have been focusing mainly on things that keep my family fed.

I too felt from my interaction with exchanges the burden on supporting counterparty (and as an exchange operator myself, i feel for them).

An idea was proposed once to me that could be interesting to XCP holders, i could couple it with a network that provides services to these light nodes and generate interest on having a “masternode” (not for generating more XCP tho). The idea is quite simple: Gas for the eventual VM is another (3 letter) token that is given as stake for participating in this network, and these participants get paid for their service in that token that must be used to execute contracts. This could in turn be used to fund these servers and ppl would be interested in providing this service to the rest of the users.

Creating a new blockchain for XCP is cumbersome tho. That adds more problems than it solves, and there’s already work towards creating a federated sidechain that could be used easily with counterparty tokens.

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Alot of nice feedback, input, and ideas so far.

I like the debasing/emission idea if we were able to get a foundation together. It’s something new that can help CP similar to decree, zcash, dash type funding/dev model. The federated side chain is quite exciting as well. Perhaps that will be quite common in a couple of years with btc/liquid etc.

Didnt particularly like the change old xcp to new xcp that would probably just act as a pump for some unknown future launch that will probably never come to fruition, though I did like the other discussion in monkeys post, thanks all.

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This is a hard problem for sure.

Debasing XCP is a clever solution. But I feel that debasing XCP breaks an implicit social contract that Counterparty made at its onset.

Here’s my wild-west crypto idea for a solution:

  1. Form an unofficial and independent foundation.
  2. The foundation members invest personal funds by buying XCP.
  3. That foundation donates some of that XCP to developers as bounties to complete tasks as outlined by the CIP process.
  4. The foundation promotes the Counterparty protocol.

If the market really wants Counterparty, then usage will rise and the market value of XCP might rise enough to cover the investment.

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Thank you for taking the time to comment.

RE: 1. and 4; Fully support those ideas, I think both would be positive things and I hope we can get more discussions going there to get the ball rolling on that.

As to the middle steps, on paper- great. [That’s what we have in place already isn’t it?] but I think In practice, not the most workable long-term. (especially if someone decides at a later date now the donation has appreciated significantly it was more of a ‘lend’)

The likes of Dash, Decred, Zcash, etc have implemented some kind of ongoing development fund from block-reward or similar. They recognized, quite rightly- that even Bitcoin itself faces long-term challenges with incentivizing ongoing development via a donation based/altruistic model.

As a result external, for-profit investor backed entities like Blockstream needed to be formed to help sponsor bitcoin development.

Projects that don’t have ongoing development/ funding model are either propped up by some kind of ripple labs/consensys/stellar like foundation or entity like what Symbiont could/was insinuating to have been here, or they have large ICO warchest’s, or developers/investors/funds that themselves hold clout and large stakes (and often keep those stakes off the open market)- to take ethereum for example

https://ethinvestor.net/just-376-individuals-hold-33-of-all-ether-cryptocurrency-chainalysis/

Those ownership figures are down from more than 50% in 2016- and likely still represents an under exaggeration.

While Counterparty started with zero, Ethereum foundation started with an ‘official’ $35M+ cash injection from the general public to work with and ‘unofficially’ there was also extra capital accessible. Various crypto angel, vc types like Hoskinson, Brock pierce, Chris dixon participated. There were large founders funds awarded. In short they had plenty of resources, and key developers/leaders/investors had plenty of incentive to move forward.

Hilariously counterparty with near zero funding managed to overtake ethereum for a while, but when ethereum got on every major exchange like Kraken, coinbase etc and the marketing machine went full swing, with all that appreciating capital able to be put to work, suddenly all of those early investors had serious cash to throw around on further expansion. Community and developers gathered around the Dapp/smart contract hype and the rest is history

Joe Lubin, one of those early ETH ICO investors reportedly had upwards of $10B from his stake in the ETH protocol at peak ICO hype- when you have that kind of money donating to development, funding diversified but coupled spinoffs, external token sales, incubators etc is pretty much a no-brainer.

but If you take those same numbers and apply it to 376 counterparty “whales” they’d each hold less than usd 2,600 in current conditions. Realistically even if we can assume a couple of benevolent individuals, that logically understand donation is sensible even if they’re greedy, that’s not crazy amounts of funding. If we had some more organized consensys like company with investment and a vision for building on counterparty to increase said stakes that would be a different story, particularly given the limited supply and small cap. Not as if there isn’t upside potential. Maybe Indiesquare can get there :smiley:

Here’s a message from the anonymous founder of Grin . Notably this was project that (allegedly) received over $100M in investment from VC’s in the form of mining contracts and had a bunch of hype.

"> After just over 2 weeks of grin being live, I’m disappointed by the way the industry around Grin is shaping up. Of course it’s early, but I’d rather not this be an indication of future direction.

Grin was started with as fair of a launch as possible for what’s under our control. We did this for good reason: we believe in Grin’s mission. I think I made pretty clear that to continue forward, the project would still need help. And yet yeastplume’s campaign ([to fund 2 months of development] is still very far from being even 10% funded.

The lesson for every development or research team watching looks pretty clear: more scammy ICOs for more money and a lot less work. Perhaps forcefully taking 20% of all rewards is the only way to get any contribution out of the mining industry. Are those the conclusions you want to impress on everyone in this sector? Because if greed feeding on itself is the only lesson, then this space truly deserves a really long and hard winter. A lot more creation is needed to reach escape velocity, and that won’t happen if everyone’s goal is just feeding off it.

To be clear, this isn’t addressed to the existing community that has been extremely generous and admirable at supporting us over the last 2 years, when things were a lot more uncertain. This is directly addressed to some of the new funds, miners, mining pools and exchanges that have entered this ecosystem since the launch and benefited from it

In the short term, they implemented a “friends of grin” and “hall of fame” donation page on their site, (which I do feel is a good idea that we could implement on the counterparty site) which meant a few entities- like mining pools were more enticed to donate and get their badge/names up- hilariously after a bunch more begging even the likes of Poloniex has stated that they will donate some of their trading revenue to Grin since it’s a fair, decentralized project with no funding (funny because the average trade vol on grin there is isn’t so great compared with historical xcp trade volume ) but anyway, the point is the longer term there’s no plan there beyond asking for donations - recent deep dive reports on grin (often targeted to investors) that touch on the long term funding model raise the same sustainability concerns.

But back to Ethereum…

“A 2018 report by the hedge fund Tetras Capital estimated the ConsenSys INUFRA project with centralized servers cost Lubin more than $10 million
a year to subsidize infrastructure for many of the ethereum applications that attracted new investors to the ecosystem, even though ethereum’s distributed network wasn’t ready to support high transaction volumes”

…

"Vitalik Buterin, the creator of the ethereum blockchain project, has proposed increasing user fees on the network for the purposes of supporting developers with sustainable funding.

“I propose we consider supporting a community norm that client [and] wallet [developers] can [and] should charge a 1 gwei/gas fee for
[transactions] sent through their wallet,” tweeted Buterin Friday

At the cost of only increasing average user gas costs by [roughly] 7 percent, it would raise up to [$2 million per year] in sustainable, non-institutionally biased, market-based funding for client/wallet developers. For reference, that would cover all [Ethereum Foundation] grants to date … with room to spare.”

It’s not that Vitalik couldn’t donate his own funds to cover all those foundation grants…“with room to spare” (he’s disclosed he still holds $50M of ETH) it’s just a less sustainable strategy than devising an organized way to fund not reliant on one, or a couple individuals.

Debasing XCP is a clever solution. But I feel that debasing XCP breaks an implicit social contract that Counterparty made at its onset.

The ‘social contract’ Ethereum holders signed up to was not to rollback the DAO, but it happened, it was considered for the best, many people feel the social contract of bitcoin has in ways, been deviated from too.

But yeah, I do definitely agree with you on principle, and would even if I wasn’t a holder…buut, my POV is whilst the social contract I signed up here with counterparty did include the specific capped, deflationary supply, more than that I signed up because I was passionate about things like tokens, DEX’s and so on. Specifically on bitcoin-- I wanted to see the ideas of of user owned/controlled assets, token authorization, token based access etc live up to the potential I felt these idea could/would inevitably fulfill.

As mentioned above, the specific capped supply model hasn’t exactly been a great sell (various other projects have extreme inflation and/or limitless supply) and the lack of long-term funding in any project is a sticking point. Any longterm holder, well any holder really… is already debased AF just by having skin-in-the-game. Great the supply has remained static but poloniex diluted everyones already watered down btc representative stake more than 50% overnight. Resultingly I’m open to ANY kind of proposed change that will realistically help arrive us to the potential that counterparty could and can have with the right conditions, even if it means having a smaller slice of the pie.

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Wow. Now that’s a thoughtful forum response!

If more people thought through things they said on the internet this thoroughly, the world would be a better place.

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I do agree with what you are saying.
Counterparty at this point can’t be onchain atleast on btc.
However the proof of burn in a way ties XCP to Bitcoin.
As far as I see Counterparty first needs to fix the scaling issue.
These are all food for thought. I hold no XCP(anymore) but the dream is still there for me.
Here are some of ideas other than some people mentioned(for the most part):

  1. Sidechain
    Rsk has it own token known as RIF as well. While more of a company/lab token, the sidechain still has fees payable via bitcoin. What could be done is Counterparty forks RSk and does this:
    Tx Fees are in the pegged bitcoin CBTC???
    20% of fees go to Foundation
    10% of fees to Federation
    10% of of fees go to XCP holders(via smart contract)-this creates more demand for XCP
    60% to miners.
    Counterparty using a sidechain will still be a bitcoin token system but be more scalable and let the team to work more openly in code as it is a sidechain.
    XCP can also function as a DAO to allow changes to happen faster.
    XCP will finally have smart contracts(again?)
  2. Second layer
    LN transfers of tokens. “Smart” contracts won’t be in this however :frowning:
  3. Move to another coin.
    This is the option I hate the most. It can be done but oof. And still have the same issues as before.
    BCH also has it own tokenization protocol as well so the coins planning on scaling onchain are limited…

I personally like number 1 it more flexible,bitcoin friendly and scabable.

This is all food for thought.
Good luck on who plans to revive Counterparty wish you all luck

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