Worried about "Unable to decode output address"

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Today I saw I received a number of shares that I already had awaited to show up. Iam the majority shareholder of the security.

Then I saw I received some Bitcoins too. In fact 5430 satoshies. (Why is xcp showing only 7 decimals? It looks a bit strange to cut the 8th decimal. Can I enable it again)

I saw, by reading on here, that these 5430 are a special amount sent. I wonder what exactly it is. First I thought it might be a test-div-payment. But seeing that this number is special I doubt that.

Though when I check out my address on blockchain I see “Unable to decode output address”. It seems to me that it is some special thing of counterparty that it creates transactions in a strange way even though the transactions are still valid.

So what happened here? Is it a div payment, is it another test of something?

And since we searched for a good exchange since some time, found xcp, but now reading about sent coins to exchange addresses that might be lost because of “Unable to decode input address”, I’m actually worried if this is a risk.

So what is this “Unable to decode” for? Is it to protect other shareholder addresses receiving divs too? Staying anonymous?

But still… it surely will be a problem when the targetted address can’t handle it. So please explain about this.

And till now I thought counterparty addresses are basically normal bitcoin addresses. I can import bitcoin addresses from core or from electrum and export them to them too. But I found a dev or mod on here writing about them being special bitcoin addresses. Which again raised worries.

I hope it was the right choice to suggest to host the security on xcp…

Edit: Regarding giving out the transaction details I would prefer doing so in private, via pm.

Greetings!
Sebastian

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I checked the inputs for another address I have on xcp, with having attached another security and it first received the same unable to decode amount. Later a small div that is not unable to decode.

So sending coins from that address can be a problem when this first transactions bitcoins are included?

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5430: if you search the forum for “5430” you will see why 5430, eg What is the difference between 'miner's fee' and 'redeemable fee'?

If the eight decimal is zero, then there’s no point of showing it.

Of course. You need to use a Counterparty blockchain explorer or decode by yourself manually. Or use any Counterparty wallet.

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Thank you for the link. Though I wonder, when this is the miner fee then does it come from the isser of the shares?

Then what happens when I would offer some shares on the market and a user that does not hold shares on an address is buying shares from me. Do I have to pay that 5430 satoshi then?

And will the 5430 satoshi from my address still be there? I don’t understand how it can be a miner fee when it is still there.

The article mentions that it can be swept. Will there be a problem when I send dividend bitcoins, which are normal, to an exchange and the transaction includes those 5430 satoshi. Can I lose my dividends then in the worst case?

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The miner doesn’t know about any of that, they just validate bitcoin transactions.

Yes and no. You could “sell” your address to the buyer, for example, but this would assume he trusts you enough to believe that you haven’t retained a copy of the private key. Unnecessary to say, nobody will trust you that much, so then you can either find a lawyer where you’d have to sign a statement saying you don’t have a copy of the wallet pass phrase or the private key (which would cost you at least $25) or you can take the expense of 5430 satoshi.

Actually Counterwallet automatically uses 10,000 to pay miner fee (0.0001 BTC), but if you use a wallet which can set a different transaction fee and don’t care if it takes 12 hours for the transaction to get enough confirmations.

5430 is the minimum size of bitcoin transactions below which most miners simply don’t care about transactions, that’s why Counterparty assets are now automatically bundled with 5430 satoshi - to not be ignored by the miners.

It doesn’t matter, because you’d send 5430 satoshi with each and every sale to an address that’s not under your control, so even if those satoshi’s are there, you don’t have a way to get to them.
You can redeem dust from your own transactions (e.g. on the Counterparty Distributed Exchange) that is found on your addresses, not from other people’s addresses. For example you may have 1000 satoshi of dust in unspent outputs in each of 30 transactions you did from this address, if you redeem it your balance will increase for that sum (0.0003 BTC).

You can use Testwallet (https://testnet.counterwallet.io) to experiment with these things using 2 or 3 different wallets.

Well, so far that hasn’t been much of a concern because not many issuers pay generous dividends, but yes, if you paid dividend to all holders, exchanges would pocket a big part of those. (The “funding” address is usually the exchange, not owner’s, address, and some are held in cold wallets, which are again, not under the direct control of real owners). You can’t sweep any of those addresses because you don’t control any of them (don’t know their private key).

The only way to prevent this as an token holder is to get the coins out.
The token issuer has no way of contacting every single holder, so it would be ridiculous if someone sent 1 TOKEN to his Poloniex account and claimed that dividend for TOKEN was issued illegally because he didn’t have time to follow what’s going on with TOKEN.
The token issuer can announce (or incorporate this info in token/asset description) when dividends are paid. From that point on, it’s up to each holder to keep himself informed.

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Thank you for your answer. Now the satoshies make sense to me. Being the minimum amount of bitcoins needed to be transferred. That means I need 543 satoshies for each buyer of my shares on top of the 543 satoshies that are already on my address I guess. Didn’t think I have to upload bitcoins first to sell shares… guess I have to wait for my first dividend.

Well the security I helped moving onto here pays 5 to 10 bitcoins dividends each month on the 15th… when all goes well. The token is a security so it should not be traded on a normal exchange. So sending to or from exchanges should be no problem.

What I wanted to ask was how can one deal best when the shares you own are worth k of usd? I saw the xcp volume on poloniex is only 5 to 8 bitcoins a day. So public auctions would be best or how should one deal with this?

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Please try some sample scenarios using Counterwallet on testnet, it’s really the best way to see how it works and understand scenarios you’re interested in.

I am not sure I completely understand your plan, that’s why I am suggesting this.

For example, XCP liquidity should not be an issue for you - people can buy and sell any Counterparty token for BTC. (But if you on purpose want to denominate prices in XCP, then it would be an issue; that’s why I suggest you try out the entire scenario).
[The reason, or one of main reasons, why XCP turnover is low is because Counterparty does not force, or even encourage, users to denominate or issue assets in exchange for XCP. If you need to issue a token you need 0.5 XCP and then for dividend payments there is (IIRC) a smaller charge for each dividend payment (regardless of the number of recipients/holders), and that’s it.]

You should simply sell your token for BTC, check out CoinDaddy.io or Tokenly service for “vending” (which may be more suitable for you if you don’t want to write your own Web front for that). I think one of features those have is your sell price can be set (on their back-end) in USD, and they show the current BTC amount to prospective buyers, so you don’t have to constantly reprice your token in BTC as you would have to if you were to sell the token denominated in BTC, but for a fixed price in USD).

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Interesting. I will take a look at coindaddy and tokenly, though I wonder if these websites are as safe as counterparty itself or if they have similar risks a normal exchange would have.

The token is already created on xcp and I could find it with coindaddy.

But did you mean I can offer the token for xcp on counterparty market directly too? I have some shares but when I search for a combination then it finds the share name I hae and on the right side I chose “Other” than XCP. But it seems those are all tokens. I found something named Bitcoin but honestly, I would fear that this bitcoin is only a token name and not an actual bitcoin. I tried btc and xbt but it does not show up. Is BITCOIN the real token for offering the shares for bitcoins? It looks more like a scammer tried to catch some cheap shares with it, isn’t it?

So did you mean selling shares for bitcoins is only possible through these other sites?

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Well there is always counterparty risk, but Coindaddy and Tokenly have been great members of the community.

Yes.

Yes, that is the correct way. The problem is Counterwallet doesn’t allow the use of BTC (the reason is silly, more on that below).

BITCOIN is just an asset, of course.
https://coindaddy.io/search?network=xcp&q=bitcoin

If you want to sell for BTC (the real Bitcoin), it’s a bit complicated.

Why is BTC trading not possible in Counterwallet?
The DEx works by taking tokens into the protocol escrow. But BTC cannot be taken into protocol escrow, so if anything is bought/sold for BTC, the protocol expects BTC will be sent to the protocol escrow address within 18 blocks (this was the default) from the moment the BTC order is matched. So if you’re paying with BTC on the DEx, you have to watch out for notifications (can’t close Counterwallet) as long as your order is valid, and once it’s matched, you have to send BTC to the protocol (the other side doesn’t have to watch out for anything, their token is either XCP or some Counterparty asset and therefore in protocol escrow).

Most people don’t bother to read the docs, so they just leave, or they close Counterwallet, etc. and the bottom line is their orders fail, and they complain. After a while the developers simply removed the feature in late 2014.
So now some more experienced users want to use that feature again and some other developers have started adding it or intend to add it.

On the protocol level if hasn’t been disabled (it used to be called “BTCSell” or “BTC_Sell”, the use of BTC on the DEx) so it’s only a matter of interface. The Counterparty CLI still supports it, obviously, as well as the API.
For your users maybe Indiesquare wallet would be best (at least for those with iPhone’s) be good - I assume it has order matching notifications built in… Because if users buy your token with XCP, they need to perform BTC_Pay, which means they must not miss the matching notification.

Although if your token is already on offer (e.g. you’re selling 100 TKN for 0.1 BTC), their order would be matched within 10 mins or so, so you could simply tell them to check their wallet within 15 to 30 mins, and then transfer BTC because by then match should be made (as long as they offered price equal to or higher than you asked).

They can also watch the status outside of Counterwallet, such as on blockscan.com or https://xcpdex.com/ and send BTC once the order is matched and awating payment.

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Thanks for your answer though unfortunately I don’t really get it. I’m surprised that a colored coins network based on bitcoins had restricions sat up from the start of the implementation that would make it hard to trade against bitcoin. And I think when I don’t really get it fully then for sure nearly no normal newer user will understand.

Which would translate to it being pretty hard to sell shares. To be exact, Iam not the issuer, Iam only a bigger shareholder and of course I hoped that, besides divs, I can have some income from selling my shares.

But when I read your text and don’t really understand then this sounds like a pretty impossible since I won’t find many buyers that way.

When it is not easy to offer shares on counterparty directly I mean. Third parties might only mean that less users see the orders too.

So what do you think would be the best way to deal with that in order to achieve sales? Trying to offer the shares for XBT on XBT?

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Does any colored coin (or metacoin) based on Bitcoin allow more convenient trustless trading with Bitcoin? I don’t know much about other coins, but I was under the impression that others don’t have a better approach either.

Well you could consider selling for SJCX or something that’s liquid/stable.

If you find a volume buyer (say, 1 BTC or more), it’s easy to make him an offer (that is, you create a SELL offer first) and he can pay in BTC in 10 mins, using any Counterparty wallet with DEx interface (there’s three of them I think). There is nothing for him to know. He clicks on your offer, hits BUY, and pays with BTC.

It is only when he wants to create a BUY order for your coin that he has to watch out for matches. But people simply don’t create large offers and just let them sit there, because any offer is a BTC transaction (unlike on cryptoexchanges where you can create and cancel as you please).

So in case of trustless trading with BTC, it is less convenient only for BTC owners who want to create, rather than match existing, offers. But for any large amounts you would never do that anyway, because the liquidity is low. In the end it boils down to finding a large buyer/seller indirectly (say on the asset issuer site, shareholder meeting, community, etc.) and then meeting on the DEx to perform a trustless exchange. The main strength of the DEx isn’t liquidity, it is trustlessness.

Of course we’d want to see more trading on the DEx, but a distributed exchange can’t be faster or cheaper than a centralized exchange.

I don’t know, haven’t dealt with large amounts of any cryptocurrency. There are people (brokers) who specialize in this kind of stuff (finding large buyers, for a cut) but I don’t know about that much.

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I don’t know about other colored coins networks. The thing is that I would have never gotten the idea that trading bitcoins for shares on a colored coins network based on bitcoins would be hard to do.

Well, finding a buyer on the forum is something I could do though it is a real pain that no real orderbook exists in bitcoin. I mean only such an orderbook would bring all interested party to one table. The small and the big ones. I would have not awaited having to deal with this manually.

For suing DEx wallets… I think it would be simply easier to use an escrow then. People know how escrows work, they could deposit the bitcoins with the escrow and release them after the shares are on the buyers address. It would probably be easier than to find out for yourself and explain how dex wallets work.

I’m a bit disappointed. Well XCP market seems to be there. I will observe the xcp price a bit, maybe it is usefull as a marketplace after all.

You mentioned developments in the direction of bitcoin trading. Does this include a normal orderbook like on centralized exchanges? If so, when can such a bitcoin orderbook be awaited?

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It’s impossible for Bitcoin, as far as I know, until there Smart Contracts. Because with bitcoin (BTC) meta protocol cannot keep it in escrow as it can with its own tokens/assets. Then the only way is that the other side (token/asset) is kept, while the person using bitcoin has to send it it once the order is matched.

If you want to sell token for BTC, then it doesn’t matter to you, the buyer can buy in one move (see your asset, submit a buy order with the full amount of BTC required).

It’s not contradictory to selling your asset on DEx.
For example if you have 1,000 of something, and you want to sell it for 1BTC, on DEx you put a sell order valid for 2000 blocks (or even a week of you want) and tell your middleman to sell your token at any value over 1 BTC.
When he finds a buyer, he gets (say) 1.1 BTC from someone who wants to buy you token, uses 1 BTC to buy 1,000 of your tokens on the DEx and gives them to the buyer.

You seem to assume this:

  • the escrow service works for free, i.e. that he or she will sell your 1,000 tokens for 1BTC and not make any money in the process
  • that he or she is reputable and won’t disappear with your 1,000 tokens (and the buyer’s 1.1 BTC)

I’d be curious to know if you will find a trusted escrow who won’t take at least 5%. Which may be okay if you’re selling something that can be marketed well, but DEx isn’t meant for marketing, it’s for trading of stuff that is already known to buyers and sellers, so in that case value added sales activities are needed.

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Will DEx be implemented in counterwallet? Since most users are using that wallet, I think, it might be possible to build a real orderbook and real market then.

You are right with the escrow fees. What does the middleman on DEx takes?

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DEx is implemented in Counterwallet.

There is no middleman on the DEx, just buyers and sellers.
If you use it you’ll see how it works. As I suggested before you can create 2 wallets on testnet and trade among addresses from the two wallets to see how it works.

XCPDex.com shows the current mainnet status without login to Counterwallet.
IndieSquare Wallet and I think XCP Wallet also can interface with the DEx.

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You wrote about a middleman in the previous post so I thought there is a system that overrides that 10 minute restriction by having a middleman who constantly recreates the orders… or something like that. So that a btc orderbook builds up that constantly is staying there, like on exchanges.

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Sorry about the misunderstanding. I mentioned that as a comparison/alternative if you did the same thing (sold your shares) using a traditional approach (broker).

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Ah ok. I hope to see a real bitcoin orderbook so that all shareholders see it by default, will come into existence soon. That would be the best solution for trading.