There's a new CW enhancement request (#593) that I thought to solicit some feedback for: the idea is simple and I think provides some interesting possibilities without major changes to the code (but what do I know, the devs may disagree).
It's a "Validate" menu item on coin/asset in your wallet (right now there's Send, for example, so this would be below Send).
Upon log on, the user is presented with a "Validate your asset dialog box.
Then if he manages to validate it, he's allowed to continue. If not, he's kicked out... Or maybe shown a dialog box with instructions how he can get validated.
This is in regards to https://github.com/CounterpartyXCP/counterwallet/issues/593 but it’s not clear to me what is being validated and to whom. Is this about creating a signed message, updating balances, or some kind of watch-only type feature?
While I like the idea of tons of counterwallet servers out there, I don’t want to trust them to deliver the client-side code. I would rather have a Chrome or Firefox plugin that would handle the client-side stuff. I’m sure that’s been proposed but is not a pressing need as long as the main Counterwallet server can handle the load for free. If anyone wants higher level security, they can do the Armory thing or run counterpartyd.
If I were to run a CW server and wanted it to be financially self-sustaining, I would do it via an optional fee either in BTC or in XCP until the month’s costs were paid. Maybe if 0.0005 BTC is going to the miners on any transaction, 0.0001 BTC would go to the CW server wallet until I can cover the $50-100/mo it might cost to run such a server ~= 3k transactions a month to break even. If a donation were made directly, the CW instance could turn off donations early.
You’re right about the DIY approach, but it’s simply not happening. I’m too busy to try to come up with a Docker image and due to other priorities there’s noone working on that at the moment, so I don’t think that will be available within 2-3 months.
On the other hand enhancement I propose takes 5-8 hours of work.
Donations and membership fees: noone would use those servers (same reasons that you mentioned - trust and trouble of figuring out who’s a pure scammer and who’s merely a potential scammer). It’d be much more harder to implement a gateway outside of CW (obviously you wouldn’t want people to enter their passphrase in some non-CP passphrase box, whatever the assurances on it claimed) and they wouldn’t want to register (email/password) either.
Wallet providers would be like your local bank branch (maybe offer your favorite exchange pairs like XCP/Z$, maybe run some complementary service (“ATM in 7-11”), etc. That’s how they’d add value to CW, create liquidity and not lose money.
Not bad for a day of work, but of slightly sensitive nature so it’s probably not something that could be created by a 3rd person dev and readily accepted by the devs if they disagree with the approach.
To insert yourself (I mean the wallet host) in the transaction stream to shave off a % of every transaction would be a bad approach, I think. I think holding a share (assets) is a cleaner and simpler approach, but you may be right.