

Counterparty Recreates Ethereum's Smart Contract Platform on Bitcoin - PhantomPhreak
http://counterparty.io/news/counterparty-recreates-ethereums-smart-contract-platform-on-bitcoin/

======
drcode
It's great that counterparty is adding contract support sometime soon.
Counterparty technology has promise, but it has fundamental differences
compared to ethereum.

Running contracts on a layer on top of bitcoin vs an idependent blockchain
like ethereum is a very different experience.

It will take time to figure out what sort of model wins out- Let's all hope
the best technology wins.

~~~
Kinnard
Please elaborate

~~~
drcode
(Disclosure: I own ether, but not XCP)

Well, both platforms require you to use a new currency (ether and XCP
currency.) Counterparty will make it easier to write contracts that involve
bitcoins (I think, not totally sure how that works) ethereum will have a 12
second block time vs a 10 minute block time (very different) and ethereum
transaction costs should be lower (for several reasons.)

Additionally, counterparty will probably launch their product first.

Also, ethereum is only one piece of a much larger technology stack being
worked on, linking contracts to things like private messages between users, a
file distribution system, a webkit-based webrowser/wallet system, etc.
Additionally, ethereum can support SPV, a technology very relevant for mobile
apps, which apparently isn't possible with a XCP-type system.

(Counterparty also has add-on technologies, but I'm not that familiar with
their stack.)

~~~
brighton36
So it's confusing, but Counterparty doesn't exactly require new currency.
There's a few ways to think of Counterparty's XCP, but in all of those ways it
augments Bitcoin. XCP is used to store 'value in escrow', fight spam (such as
in the case of asset name declarations), and now to control of execution
times. There may be some other uses in there.

The 12 second blocktimes of Ethereum will be considerably longer than the
instantaneous times of Bip70 insured (or let's see what medici comes up with
maybe) Bitcoin/Counterparty transaction times. Further the chain will almost
certainly be less secure, but since this chain doesn't exist even in theory
yet, it's hard to say.

As for the rest of Ethereum's promises, yep, they're tackling just about
everything that could ever be included in a protocol. As to whether any of
this will scale down to a mobile device, it's just a marketing claim right
now, they have way to much work to do in the base platform to care at all
about mobile yet.

------
brighton36
IMO Counterparty is (still) the most underated technology in the crypto space.
Since it utilizes the same addresses and Blockchain as Bitcoin, it has just as
many users as does Bitcoin. The protocol is clearly tackling all the features
that Ethereum has promised, and it works _today_. It's a fair comparison to
suggest that Counterparty is to Bitcoin, what css is to html. They work
together

~~~
drcode
> it works today

No, it works on a testnet, just as ethereum currently does.

~~~
brighton36
Counterparty has a production release which is entirely functional, and in
active use (I think they just hit 100k transactions). In fact, it's usually
responsible for 1-2% of Bitcoin's daily transaction volume. The contract
feature was just announced today, but Counterparty's development is very
quick, and the feature will be in production soon, judging by their pace thus
far. The project went from starting out in January, to securing the Overstock
deal in November. Compared to Ethereum's glacial pace, I'd not be surprised if
these contracts are in production before Ethereum even enters beta.

~~~
drcode
Yes, I agree this is likely to launch into production before ethereum does.

------
Taek
One thing that concerns me is that every node needs to run every contract.
Computers that are connecting to the network for the first time and doing full
verification will have many, many contracts to compute. Catching up could take
significantly longer than it already does.

~~~
DSingularity
Shouldn't be a problem. The checking part is computationally fast. The real
problem is downloading all the data. For that they can just DL the blockchain
to avoid the slow transfer speed of the bitcoin network.

~~~
PhantomPhreak
Yes. And 'catching up' with the blockchain is much faster before, with this
set of changes (only a couple of hours on my machine):
[https://github.com/CounterpartyXCP/counterpartyd/pull/409](https://github.com/CounterpartyXCP/counterpartyd/pull/409)

