Trading Counterparty assets for Bitcoin, as currently implemented in the protocol, is a two-step process requiring settlement transactions (‘BTCpays’) to be made soon after any orders match. Unfortunately, such a system doesn’t work well with Counterwallet, because the Counterwallet servers (by design) don’t have any control over user private keys, and so can’t make the settlement transaction automatically on behalf of users.
The workaround so far has been to require users to stay logged in to Counterwallet indefinitely while their trades are open, but this has proven unreliable.
After consulting with the community on this topic, we have disabled BTC trading in Counterwallet to better focus our efforts on developing a novel trading system that should dramatically improve usability, settlement times and reliability of BTC trading in Counterparty.
Please note that this is a change with Counterwallet only, not with the Counterparty protocol itself – BTC trading will still be entirely possible using counterpartyd and any other Counterparty software.