Adam Back and Austin Hill are developing sidechains, probably with the full moral support of Bitcoin Core developers.
However, so long as there is a blockchain in some form, there can be Counterparty. The way I see it, nothing can be done to outright ban third parties from using the blockchain in a particular way or in any way they damn well please. The developers can call it a hack and a farce, but it isn’t clear that they can produce a better system.
And anyway, you can’t tell me what I can or can’t do on a blockchain. It’s not a matter of morals, it’s a matter of fact.
I don’t see Counterparty gaining traction on the OP_RETURN 80 issue. It’s not an issue users care about, and it’s not gaining support amongst Bitcoin core devs. I’ve seen limited support for it on Reddit, but especially now with the push for sidechains, I don’t see it amounting to much. If I’m wrong here I’d be open to reversing my views. In my experience, and I believe some of you will be my witness, the btcpay mechanism is an essential selling point for Counterparty. I think burning could effectively replace that angle.
You’d have to duplicate the community of Counterparty, and you’d have to create liquidity for a futures market and stock market for it to be successful as a sidechain. In the case of sidechains, you’d also have to merge mine it to create ample security, presumably without a direct economic reward for miners. This either requires a centralized mining effort for the sidechain, or an act of chivalry on a grand scale.
The market potential of Counterparty dwarfs the market value of Bitcoin, so forget about doing others political favors. I think it’s rather clear the Bitcoin developers don’t care about Counterparty and aren’t willing to listen to your needs anyway.
It’s worth it for the network to bear the cost of Counterparty. You’re doing fantastic work, and don’t let Mike Hearn tell you otherwise. Mainstream investors could care less about infighting amongst Bitcoin core developers or whether a technical implementation detail costs the network more over the long run. They’re going to use whichever solution is the easiest, fastest and cheapest for them regardless of what it is or what ramifications it has on the blockchain.
If burning Bitcoins couldn’t be stopped on the blockchain or on any sidechain, and if none of the core devs are sympathetic anymore to OP_RETURN 80, what’s the use in us NOT burning more BTC for tiny amounts of XCP?
What if it drastically improves the user experience of the DeX? Click a button, and you’re good to go.
Bitcoin developers are crying foul on PhantomPhreak, and he hasn’t even done anything wrong. The situation looks unsalvageable. We’ve tried our best. Now could be the right time to eliminate btcpay and implement burning in its place so that users could easily obtain small amounts of XCP for use on the DEX. This would enable the DEX to have an undeniably best-in-class user experience.
The Bitcoin core devs have already burned the bridges so it’s time to forget about politics. The DEX is everything. Make it better at any and all costs.
The success of Bitcoin itself proves the futility of playing political games. Innovation at the edges is the only way forward.
Just my 2C
care to explain how burn replaces btc-pay and what makes it politically problematic?
editing my post because I think I’m overreacting. I think Counterparty will be fine either way.
My understanding is that unlike XCP and assets, BTC cannot be debited (pulled). And so, BTC sellers must send (push) their BTC with a separate transaction once a match was found. Still don’t see how burning solves it.
I got into cryptocoins because some farmer started selling Alpaca socks, and I am tired of high-frequency traders taking a lot of overhead of any corn I sell on the commodities market.
What I see with Bitcoin right now is the same guys that figured out how to legally front-run commodities trades have likely got a pretty good idea how to capture bitcoin, so there’s a very strong financial incentive to block counterparty in any way possible.
So what I need to know is what code changes can I make to Catcoin and to counterpartyd to seamlessly store the information needed without this OP_RETURN_40 nonsense, and how to make this work on another network without requiring any burn. Personally I’d like to just get rid of ‘burn’ completely, and have the underlying copycatcoin just charge extra fees for various counterparty transaction that go to the miners.
The other critical piece that is needed is cross-chain trades, so I can trade Catcoin for Bitcoin using the counterparty protocol running on top of each blockchain.
Now before someone starts whining about ‘security’ and 51% attacks because of a split hash rate, we have a partial solution to that as well, and you can see the beginnings of it in the latest catcoin changes. Bitcoin is already 51%'ed by early adopters and venture capital, so the new reality is you have to be able to reliably trade assets with a blockchain where attackers can show up with 10X your nominal network hash rate.
And no, I can’t meet good ‘cryptographic’ proofs that I have a system that will actually survive 10x hashrate attacks. However I don’t need to prove it’s good, it only has to be good enough to average better than all the hidden costs in trading on centralized commodities exchanges with HFT skimming a couple percent from every trade.
So quit arguing with the bitcoin devs, and take your development to blockchains and developers that understand the real value of blockchains is in price discovery and trading of physical assets, not some currency ponzi-scheme store of value.