Fascinating that Counterparty has had two competitors who “stole” its code.
Viacoin used its own chain optimized for the metalayer. Afaik Viacoin is dead.
Dogeparty used Dogecoin for faster confirmations and lower fees. Not much happening there anymore.
That Counterparty is still alive and kicking proves that its approach works. Just wonder why? In theory the other approaches had some advantages, yet Counterparty is the only one flourishing.
I would not say the word “stole” because when something is open sourced, its impossible to steal because who ever open sourced it actually gave it away. Under the assumption that its stolen leads to believe that anything that is expanded on open source code is therefor stolen.
I think its great that Viacoin and Dogeparty used the counterparty protocol and here is the main reason why: If they using counterparty, then odds are that they will at least create 1 commit that will be useful to be applied to the actual CP on Bitcoin, it only helps having more people try and fork it.
That being said, I agree that those two projects have kind of hit a wall and arent used that much. Perhaps they will again in the future, but i dont know much about them recently since they have kind of stopped.