Novel uses for Counterparty

Brainstorming uses, which do fall under any legislation (afaik)…

  • Broadcasts can function as a permanent, consecutive and time-stamped unalterable ledger of historical data and contracts.
  • Coordination of events and strategies using broadcasts.
  • Gift points, and pre-order tokens
  • Tokens as concert and event tickets
  • Voting
  • In-game currencies for MMORPGs.
  • Dead man’s switch
  • Warrant canary

Feel free to add more. These are only a few.

FWIW, I thought a lot about this, and presented those thoughts at Coins in the Kingdom. The talk’s on youtube, and probably this belongs here: Counterparty and the Asset Revolution by Chris DeRose

> Dead man's switch

Fxxx yeah! Unfortunately each of those uses will become legislated as soon as it becomes popular. Where there's money/traffic, there's the taxman! 

Operating broadcast feeds (used for betting) are legal in many jurisdictions because technically the feed operator isn't touching money, but should it become popular I'm sure the remaining jurisdictions would make it "illegal". 

Voting: I have an idea related to this, which is to provide a vote buying service (escrow your shares, have the borrower vote and then return them to the original owner). There are probably simpler ways, but the essence is that one could (finally) buy (and sell!) votes in an honest and transparent way.

@brighton36, That was a great presentation on Counterparty (the recent one) and I had a good laugh when you mentioned how you sometimes watch Counterparty logs - I do the same and my approach is to watch them as they go on my Windows CLI console (green-on-black, like Cypher in The Matrix I) :-)
FLDC was quite active yesterday morning US time - I always think I should probably check if that's when it's issued or something because there's always quite a few transactions in AM hours EST time.


FLDC was quite active yesterday morning US time - I always think I should probably check if that’s when it’s issued or something because there’s always quite a few transactions in AM hours EST time.

They do daily distributions where each member gets a share of 500k FLDC released each day. FLDC is distributed in proportion to the amount of folding each member does for the project as measured by Folding@Home points.

OP is really impressive…

@weex are you actively involved in FLDC now?

@something I’ve bought some and am interested to see where it goes. I’m not doing any dev or folding though just yet.

@weex the idea is sound but IMHO I’d like to see it applied to same or different workloads similar to the way http://www.gridcoin.us/ does it. If I’m not mistaken now FLDC is donation-oriented and real commercial demand could make it much more successful.

@something Thanks for the pointer. BOINC seems like it could work with the FLDC model. @pooktwo @FBSoulman Did you guys look into BOINC at all?

@weex yes the FLDC Team did look at BOINC early on. There were a few small but significant differences and Stanford’s Folding@home was selected:

  • The initial target market for FLDC was old BTC/Altcoin miners with honkin’ AMD GPU rigs. The miners all used AMD/ATI as it performed better for the mining code. Unfourtunately most of the BOINC projects target nVidia hardware, whereas FAH targets AMD/ATI better.
  • Second was ease of setup for the end user. The install/setup process with FAH was smoother/more polished than BOINC.
We are open to the idea of incorporating BOINC, more so if the FLDC community expresses strong interest, but at the moment there are no firm plans.

Also further up the thread there was discussion of Gridcoin. They were also checked out early on, and the drawback from FLDC perspective is they are a full altcoin with their own blockchain and all that entails. With FLDC, we are a Counterparty asset, so no need to spend development time on wallets/clients and folder cycles on mining. I’m sure all of those advantages need no explanation to this forum.

Interesting discussion!

How about the potential to introduce commercial workloads? 
Is it correct to say that currently the demand is mostly from donations? Sorry if I missed something obvious.

I think the demand is currently mostly from supporters of the project. Potentially folders and supporters may speculate until some niche spending purposes arise. As the “difficulty” increases, more folders may hold their FLDC as a way to leverage the good work they are doing.

I doubt Folding@Home will introduce commercial workloads into their system. Still, some FAH folders are using enterprise-homed hardware and could start collecting FLDC for their points as a way to incentivize more folding by others. It would be an interesting discussion for them to have with their legal, philanthropic and accounting departments.

It’d be nice if some educational institution or organization decided to accept those say up to X pct of price of their courses or something like that.


Maybe FAH could leverage FLDC to prioritize certain types of workloads (assuming their users have BTC to buy FLDC or can get donations from end users who don’t want to mine themselves).

@something This is something that we have thought about. The current problem right now is we have about 5 thousand things going on, and me and @FBSoulMan are the only 2 currently putting in at least 20-30 hours a week on FLDC. We have 2 other devs that work with us about 5-15 hours a week as well.

This is why I have decided to become full time at FLDC by 2015. With it having my full attention I can actually follow up on these things. Because I have a job that takes up about 60 hours a week plus 30 hours of FLDC, I am killing myself!

But I hate my job and I love FLDC, so eliminate the bad :slight_smile: When FLDC has my FULL attention, we will start going after ideas like this, but until then, I dont want it to seem like we dont follow up with other organizations.

Sounds good @FoldingCoin!


I know how that feels, I got a ton of things going on as well. (I"m sure there must be some version of "You know you’ve got too much going on when… for Bitcoin geeks - last night I came up with one of those things “… when it’s 3am and you’re trying to sync three bitcoind blockchains in three different test/dev VMs on your laptop”).

Few months back I asked a dev friend to join together to create a similar project for different workloads (non-FAH), but sadly he wasn’t as too enthusiastic. I think it’s a great idea. 




@something What was the project you talked to your friend about, maybe it is something that we would be interested in helping develop once i go full time

I’ll PM you about that.

@something Sounds good to me :slight_smile: