Hard coded features better than EVM?

Development Counterparty
4

Now that the EVM project is abolished, maybe it’s time to look at hard coded features again?

Counterparty does already have features from its early pre-EVM days. Some add a lot of value to the protocol and one is not used at all.

  • The DEX is the most used. More than 60,000 orders have been placed (Explore Decentralized Web)
  • BTCPAY is a special feature for when BTC orders match on the DEX. It’s been used almost 2000 times. It’s really a lot, considering limited wallet support.
  • Dividends let the asset owner distribute any asset proportional to all asset holders. I don’t have statistics but I recall it being used.
  • The Rock-Paper-Scissor game was introduced in 2014 as a proof of concept. It worked as intended but was not popular and later disabled.
  • Betting on oracle feeds is a feature that was used by a couple of websites in the beginning. Neither took off and betting is not used at all anymore.

Some lessons:

  • The features that have to do with asset trading or transfer are popular (DEX, BTCPAY and to some extent dividends)
  • Betting and Rock-Paper-Scissor are probably too slow to gain traction. With the 10 min block time (sometimes 30+ min) anything that require to wait for an action, then a reaction, then a third action, etc, simply won’t be used (???)
  • Someone broke the entire platform by a wrong bet input this spring (ehmmm, it was I who did it :frowning: ). Thankfully, it took Adam Krellenstein only an hour to fix. What happened is that I set the oracle fee at 4600% (not sure about the exact number but the magnitude is what matters here). So when the bet settled the oracle was paid 46x the initial bet. The code (not the betting code, rather somewhere else in the core code) snapped out that this is impossible and crashed. The bug was due to a confusion with percentages. It was assumed that 46% was the highest possible fee, which was supposed to be the implied highest value of the number format. For every new hard coded feature there is risk of a bug like this.

Also, every new feature will use computing resources, so a XCP fee should be considered to prevent spam.

Here’s a brainstorm for advanced conditional asset trades:

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