why isn’t instant? I am looking at creating community money but this is too slow…
Counterparty runs on the bitcoin blockchain which produces blocks about every 15 minutes. When you do a counterparty action like sending an asset to someone, the transaction is put in a queue of transactions waiting to be written to a block (mempool). The transaction is usually written in the next block.
You can detect a counterparty send transaction on the bitcoin network almost instantaneously, however the send transaction is not actually valid until it is written to a block.
2 Likes
Just like in the beginning when it took forever to send Bitcoin’s to somebody this holds true for counterparty assets . Until counterparty has the same kind of third-party tools that Bitcoin has acquired it will not be instant . When counterparty gets their own form of coin base that’s when you should be able to use counterparty assets as community coins efficiently
so any other alternative now? etherium/copay/coinprism? How can I set up a system that common people can use to pay for groceries?
Dogeparty is an alternative. It’s a clone of Counterparty but runs on Dogecoin. It’s a lot faster.
However, Dogeparty never took off and people keep coming to Counterparty. It’s because of the network effect. Counterparty has the most users, developers, tools, etc - all which improves the user experience.
About slow confirmations; this is a feature of Bitcoin. Many wallets at this point (include Counterparty wallets) ignore unconfirmed transactions. It’s because it’s tricky to determine whether an unconfirmed tx will go through or not. In the future for sure, better algorithms will solve this, and Bitcoin/Counterparty will be instant from a user experience.