@Equality 7-2521 I think Poloniex (not an endorsement, just saying) is not bad.
And I think the removal of BTC Pay is helping more than hurting. I don’t think there’s a problem with exchanges. Actually the DEx works well if you denominate in XCP (or other CP asset). But the relatively low liquidity compared to traditional crypto exchanges means that most daytraders don’t care about the cost of trading (i.e. they’ll gladly pay 0.2% from each trade to Poloniex to be able to day trade until they drop) - they care about the speed.
What’s really good about the DEx is that it’s currently still not pestered by the crappy API bots. It’d be nice if we all motivated others to denominate in XCP.
As far as the exchange rate is concerned, I use a very simple approach and compare it to the market cap of NXT (which is currently 5X more valuable) and since we’re not dealing with copper and zinc, each can jump 10x, but it can also crash to 0.
The real challenge is to create services on top of the platform. If there is demand, the price will go up. If we just sit and wait for the rate of XCP to match BTC and make us filthy rich, it’ll go down.
There is no doubt that the developers behind Counterparty are
exceptionally talented and the coding may provide incredible utility for
accomplishing revolutionary tasks. I was initially extremely attracted
to this as a potential investment vehicle (Bryne’s plans are
impressive), especially since there is no mining and a cap of less than 3
million coins.
However, from an investment standpoint, I have a
real problem with getting optimistic about the longer term valuations of
Counterparty because 1) all of the code is open source and it can be
duplicated & lacks proprietary value; 2) Bitcoin itself could end up
adopting these features; 3) a big player like Google could bring yet
another coin with all of these features (and much more) which could
overtake the dominate role for this space; and 4) there are no
guarantees that Bryne’s dream of an alternate exchange will be the one
that actually gets off the ground with all of the regulatory hurdles and
track record of contrary political positioning that has been so
unpopular with regulators and Wall St. The scum hate him with a
passion. As a result, these factors pose a long term threat to the
viability of this coin ever reaching significant value.
I would
love to be proven wrong and, thus, provided with a good incentive to
invest. But I am afraid that what Counterparty has created for the free
market is somewhat similar to what pharmaceutical drug companies would
be up against if they ever attempted to patent naturally occurring,
unaltered herbs and healing plants as cures for diseases. There is
nothing in place to protect the exclusivity or scarcity of this very
impressive technology that has been released out into the wild.
As for anyone coming along and forking CP, well yes, but I’m sure CP will get the advantage of network effect rolling, especially if Overstock gets listed.
1) It was already duplicated several times, there are at least 2 known forks.
2) Bitcoin has sidechains.
3) Google: well what can you invest in if you’re always afraid of Google? So far they haven’t been able to come up with anything and in all likelihood they won’t either (they created Google Checkout (a failure) and invested in Ripple (hmmm…))
4) Overstock: well, there is no guarantee, but market cap for XCP is still not bloated (compare it with the value of some small listed company that makes financial software)
I’m not saying your concerns are not justified, I’m saying that I think they’re “known unknown” factors and probably largely reflected in the the recent price.
Free market and OSS: the same argument applies to Bitcoin itself, and it’s still alive and the float is valued at billions of dollars. And on the other side you have some closed source wallet companies that are valued more than Counterparty, which also doesn’t make sense.
Personally I think the worst part is unknown unknown factors and I’m mostly concerned about the entire crypto system (regulations and so on) rather than just Counterparty.
[1] Human Readable Asset Issuance Fee - (Squatting deterrent, Fee is burned) [2] Dividend Payment Fee - (Spam deterrent, Fee is burned) [3] Smart Contract Computation Fee - (DDOS deterrent, Fee is burned)
Indirect XCP Utility:
[1] All future proof-of-stake voting, e.g. for protocol changes, voting functionality, DACs, etc. will be determined by XCP holdings [2] Trading with XCP on the distributed exchange is (and always will be) cheaper and faster than with BTC [3] You can use only XCP for making bets, CFDs and asset callbacks. Forthcoming complex features and financial instruments will also likely be restricted to denomination in XCP
Economics/Philosophy:
[1] XCP supply is actively Deflationary [2] Counterparty is an unencumbered open platform upon which many services have chosen and will choose to build. Each of these services has the option to utilize XCP - the native currency of Counterparty and its sole first-class
citizen [3] Ease of migration from the Bitcoin Blockchain (Anti-Fragility)