I see its pretty straight forward to create an asset on counterparty - what I want to know how hard is it to distribute dividends to shareholders ?
Like where does this take place and are there any videos on this ? Thanks!
If you distribute them in XCP, it’s dead simple and only requires one Bitcoin transaction. If you want to distribute dividends in Bitcoin, you can use this script to automate things but requires counterpartyd: https://wiki.counterparty.io/w/Sendmany
If you wanted to do it without setting up counterpartyd, then it shouldn’t necessarily cost more but that script would need the list of shareholders and how much they own.
Thanks Weex. I’ll look this over thanks for the help.
Speaking of assets, I haven’t seen much (maybe I haven’t looked hard enough) discussion on the merits of using non-divisible. The other day there was a comment how people could buy minuscule amounts (say, 0.0001 BTC) to “force” the issuer to spend a lot on transactions when paying dividends.
If one needs to issue a divisible asset he could still specify (hopefully beforehand) that only holders of X or more units qualify for dividends while others would be paid retroactively later on once they hold enough units at the next payout time. Unpaid dividends could be escrowed as a bulk sum in a multisig account.
Still, I’m not sure when/why it’s better to use divisible assets.
@weex, I haven’t tried so I don’t know - is it possible to pay dividends in the asset itself? Or other Counterparty-issued assets?
@something You can pay dividends in any asset with a single transaction. https://wiki.counterparty.io/w/Assets#Paying_dividends_on_assets
Didn’t the other day someone persistently claim here that each holder requires one transaction? I hadn’t found information to substantiate that claim but also against it. I can’t see that the page specifically mentions that a single transaction.
And Sendmany seems to be making one tx per address, no?
I issued a BTC dividend through Counterwallet. Worked like a charm.
I guess the wallet has been updated with the script - but the wiki has not…
Yeah, so I heard. I don’t know if the Wiki will remain there (some content was moved to counterparty.io/docs/) or not, but if it will stay it’ll have to be updated.
Can you look up and let us know if that was a single or multiple transactions?
@weex, I was referring to this claim here:
Upon re-reading that again I see that you in fact said that it’s a single transaction, but back then I somehow missed that!
Let’s Talk Bitcoin pays out LTBcoin in amounts unrelated to how much LTBcoin anyone is holding. So they can’t use Pay distribution. They’re also not paying in BTC so they can’t use sendmany. It’s kind of worst case paying arbitrary amounts of tokens out to a given set of addresses. FLDC will have the same problem but it just means they will need some BTC to pay fees for all of that.
> It’s kind of worst case paying arbitrary amounts of tokens out to a given set of addresses.
Maybe for these sorts of things it is indeed better to issue two assets. Then for example dividends for the first can be paid the usual way, while the other - which can be callable - can be sent (given away) to the same addresses that hold the first based on certain criteria (if it’s at all possible to establish them - which may depend on each asset’s model).
I think very few (I don’t know any, but I allow there may be some) of these coins have solved this nicely. Usually there’s just one coin and it’s used for different purposes (e.g. both to reward owners (shareholders) and as a currency). Maybe I “don’t get it” but it is my impression that in most cases this is the case.
Fundamentally, Counterparty assets work better for the shareholder dividend and voting model than as currency to paying for goods and services. It’s not hard and fast though, it just means there’s some overhead when used in the latter way.
Even when used as an asset, and depending on the average relative stake and the size of the dividend vs XCPBTC liquidity, some assets will want to pay dividends in XCP and others in BTC.