deweller: deweller: Do any of you have any ideas about how to grow our contributing developer community and how to spur our developer community into action? It seems to me that we have people who are willing to contribute. But we need something to help the developers work toward completing meaningful project milestones. I think the foundation might be able to help in a meaningful way here, but I’m not sure how. Do any of you have any ideas?

In January 2015 at TNABC Miami, I had an engaged and detailed conversation with Eric Larchevêque (Founder of Ledger - hardware wallets) about Counterparty. I explained to him the benefits of Counterparty and the enthusiasm of the community behind it.

A large portion of our discussion was about the possibility of them making their wallet become Counterparty aware. I walked away feeling confident that this was something that might actually happen. As we now know, the “Ledger Nano S” is now Counterparty compatible.

That same week I had a very similar conversation with Paul Puey of Airbitz. He seemed receptive and it appears from their developer site that there has been movement in the direction of supporting meta-tokens like Counterparty. A recent quote from Paul to me: “We have a significant refactor of our wallet this year that would make it much easier to make it counterparty aware.” Paul further stated: “Any dev on counterparty however would probably need to happen from a 3rd party.” “We’re happy to start talking to counterparty devs to show the new architecture and get feedback. If there is any interest.”

I see this as a good thing to move the ball forward.

Numerous times I spoke with Alena Vranova (@AlenaSatoshi) of Satoshi Labs and other members of the team about Counterparty integration and the request was always well received.

There is no way to know whether the actions of these example companies were directly attributable to my efforts but I’m okay if it was just part of the accumulative effect of hearing this request from multiple people in the Bitcoin community.

There are ideas that I have that would incentivize developers to take on various projects with a clear Scope of Work. This would require that the Foundation drive and manage this plan along with the community consensus regarding which projects are a priority. It would require that the community agreed that it would benefit the Counterparty platform by increasing developer achievements. My ideas may or may not require a CIP, but the details are outside the scope of a brief answer in the AMA.

longtime_cp_follower: longtime_cp_follower: What do you like about the counterparty platform?

I love the DEX. I was originally attracted to the fact that Counterparty did a proof of burn rather than a money raise. That made a big statement to me.

I like the fact that an asset owner can make their own business plan and business rules. It reminds me of when anyone could have their own domain name and build out their vision of a website. Some have great value and others go straight to the potato.

Assets will be the same way. We have barely gotten out of the starting gate - the innovations that we will soon see will astound many of us ‘longtime Counterparty people’.

Several years into the Web I thought that I had seen it all - now I am constantly surprised and amazed by what people do with the Web that we hadn’t even considered in the early days.

I look forward to seeing that same explosive innovation in our space.

longtime_cp_follower: longtime_cp_follower: What are your thoughts on how to best grow the community in the coming year? How would you contribute to that effort?

I have been putting effort into growing the community for a few years now. I know it has been effective based on the feedback from the attendees of the 150+ weekly Bitcoin Meetups I have co-hosted.

I have also been educating members of the domain investor community which we have much in common with. Many of them have become very involved with Counterparty assets and these are the types of people who look to find ways to actually build things out.

I expect to continue and expand my reach and dialogue moving forward.

longtime_cp_follower: longtime_cp_follower: Should Counterparty move to another blockchain for faster transactions and cheaper fees? When?

We would all ideally like to see faster transactions and cheaper fees including Bitcoin users that never use Counterparty.

I’m confident that these hurdles will be overcome either by some of the solutions that are currently proposed. It wouldn’t surprise me if another solution presents itself that is not currently being considered.

In my opinion, moving Counterparty to an alt-coin could be a big mistake. No other blockchain has the security of Bitcoin.

If Counterparty assets were to become utilized in such a way that each token of an asset represented something of great value (imagine a token being paired with a diamond or something similar), it is conceivable that the value held in Counterparty assets could dwarf the entire market-cap of bitcoin itself.

While the energy burned today is adequate to make the value of Bitcoin secure it is an open question as to what happens once we make the network hold an unexpected extreme additional value.

Even with Counterparty on the most secure blockchain (Bitcoin) there are those potential future concerns. Moving Counterparty to any other blockchain that is far less secure is a scary thought and could make the platform unusable for assets and tokens carrying great value in the future.

longtime_cp_follower: longtime_cp_follower: Do you think the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) should be enabled on counterparty? Why?

I believe that the EVM introduces potential attack vectors that we don’t currently need to worry about. If we had our own DAO style incident it could cause many unintended consequences and potential liabilities for our platform.

I believe we have attributes that can be celebrated that Ethereum does not. There are so many additional value-added features that we can build into Counterparty. I don’t think we need to be a different flavor of Ethereum.