deweller: deweller: Here’s my wild-west crypto idea for a solution:

Thank you for taking the time to comment.

RE: 1. and 4; Fully support those ideas, I think both would be positive things and I hope we can get more discussions going there to get the ball rolling on that.

As to the middle steps, on paper- great. [That’s what we have in place already isn’t it?] but I think In practice, not the most workable long-term. (especially if someone decides at a later date now the donation has appreciated significantly it was more of a ‘lend’)

The likes of Dash, Decred, Zcash, etc have implemented some kind of ongoing development fund from block-reward or similar. They recognized, quite rightly- that even Bitcoin itself faces long-term challenges with incentivizing ongoing development via a donation based/altruistic model.

As a result external, for-profit investor backed entities like Blockstream needed to be formed to help sponsor bitcoin development.

Projects that don’t have ongoing development/ funding model are either propped up by some kind of ripple labs/consensys/stellar like foundation or entity like what Symbiont could/was insinuating to have been here, or they have large ICO warchest’s, or developers/investors/funds that themselves hold clout and large stakes (and often keep those stakes off the open market)- to take ethereum for example

Ethereum Investor – 16 May 19 Just 376 Individuals Hold 33% of All Ether Cryptocurrency: Chainalysis -... A third of all ether, ethereum’s native cryptocurrency, is owned by just 376 whales as of May 1, new research indicates. Blockchain analysis startup Chainalysis published a study on Wednesday, indicating that, while these 376 individuals control...

Those ownership figures are down from more than 50% in 2016- and likely still represents an under exaggeration.

While Counterparty started with zero, Ethereum foundation started with an ‘official’ $35M+ cash injection from the general public to work with and ‘unofficially’ there was also extra capital accessible. Various crypto angel, vc types like Hoskinson, Brock pierce, Chris dixon participated. There were large founders funds awarded. In short they had plenty of resources, and key developers/leaders/investors had plenty of incentive to move forward.

Hilariously counterparty with near zero funding managed to overtake ethereum for a while, but when ethereum got on every major exchange like Kraken, coinbase etc and the marketing machine went full swing, with all that appreciating capital able to be put to work, suddenly all of those early investors had serious cash to throw around on further expansion. Community and developers gathered around the Dapp/smart contract hype and the rest is history

Joe Lubin, one of those early ETH ICO investors reportedly had upwards of $10B from his stake in the ETH protocol at peak ICO hype- when you have that kind of money donating to development, funding diversified but coupled spinoffs, external token sales, incubators etc is pretty much a no-brainer.

but If you take those same numbers and apply it to 376 counterparty “whales” they’d each hold less than usd 2,600 in current conditions. Realistically even if we can assume a couple of benevolent individuals, that logically understand donation is sensible even if they’re greedy, that’s not crazy amounts of funding. If we had some more organized consensys like company with investment and a vision for building on counterparty to increase said stakes that would be a different story, particularly given the limited supply and small cap. Not as if there isn’t upside potential. Maybe Indiesquare can get there

Here’s a message from the anonymous founder of Grin . Notably this was project that (allegedly) received over $100M in investment from VC’s in the form of mining contracts and had a bunch of hype.

"> After just over 2 weeks of grin being live, I’m disappointed by the way the industry around Grin is shaping up. Of course it’s early, but I’d rather not this be an indication of future direction.

Grin was started with as fair of a launch as possible for what’s under our control. We did this for good reason: we believe in Grin’s mission. I think I made pretty clear that to continue forward, the project would still need help. And yet yeastplume’s campaign ([to fund 2 months of development] is still very far from being even 10% funded. The lesson for every development or research team watching looks pretty clear: more scammy ICOs for more money and a lot less work. Perhaps forcefully taking 20% of all rewards is the only way to get any contribution out of the mining industry. Are those the conclusions you want to impress on everyone in this sector? Because if greed feeding on itself is the only lesson, then this space truly deserves a really long and hard winter. A lot more creation is needed to reach escape velocity, and that won’t happen if everyone’s goal is just feeding off it. To be clear, this isn’t addressed to the existing community that has been extremely generous and admirable at supporting us over the last 2 years, when things were a lot more uncertain. This is directly addressed to some of the new funds, miners, mining pools and exchanges that have entered this ecosystem since the launch and benefited from it

In the short term, they implemented a “friends of grin” and “hall of fame” donation page on their site, (which I do feel is a good idea that we could implement on the counterparty site) which meant a few entities- like mining pools were more enticed to donate and get their badge/names up- hilariously after a bunch more begging even the likes of Poloniex has stated that they will donate some of their trading revenue to Grin since it’s a fair, decentralized project with no funding (funny because the average trade vol on grin there is isn’t so great compared with historical xcp trade volume ) but anyway, the point is the longer term there’s no plan there beyond asking for donations - recent deep dive reports on grin (often targeted to investors) that touch on the long term funding model raise the same sustainability concerns.

But back to Ethereum…

“A 2018 report by the hedge fund Tetras Capital estimated the ConsenSys INUFRA project with centralized servers cost Lubin more than $10 million

a year to subsidize infrastructure for many of the ethereum applications that attracted new investors to the ecosystem, even though ethereum’s distributed network wasn’t ready to support high transaction volumes”

…

CoinDesk – 8 Mar 19 Ethereum Creator Vitalik Buterin Proposes Wallet Fee to Fund Developers -... The creator of the world's second largest blockchain proposed today on Twitter a new norm for the ecosystem – a flat wallet fee of 1 gwei.

"Vitalik Buterin, the creator of the ethereum blockchain project, has proposed increasing user fees on the network for the purposes of supporting developers with sustainable funding.

“I propose we consider supporting a community norm that client [and] wallet [developers] can [and] should charge a 1 gwei/gas fee for

[transactions] sent through their wallet,” tweeted Buterin Friday

At the cost of only increasing average user gas costs by [roughly] 7 percent, it would raise up to [$2 million per year] in sustainable, non-institutionally biased, market-based funding for client/wallet developers. For reference, that would cover all [Ethereum Foundation] grants to date … with room to spare.”

It’s not that Vitalik couldn’t donate his own funds to cover all those foundation grants…“with room to spare” (he’s disclosed he still holds $50M of ETH) it’s just a less sustainable strategy than devising an organized way to fund not reliant on one, or a couple individuals.

Debasing XCP is a clever solution. But I feel that debasing XCP breaks an implicit social contract that Counterparty made at its onset.

The ‘social contract’ Ethereum holders signed up to was not to rollback the DAO, but it happened, it was considered for the best, many people feel the social contract of bitcoin has in ways, been deviated from too.

But yeah, I do definitely agree with you on principle, and would even if I wasn’t a holder…buut, my POV is whilst the social contract I signed up here with counterparty did include the specific capped, deflationary supply, more than that I signed up because I was passionate about things like tokens, DEX’s and so on. Specifically on bitcoin-- I wanted to see the ideas of of user owned/controlled assets, token authorization, token based access etc live up to the potential I felt these idea could/would inevitably fulfill.

As mentioned above, the specific capped supply model hasn’t exactly been a great sell (various other projects have extreme inflation and/or limitless supply) and the lack of long-term funding in any project is a sticking point. Any longterm holder, well any holder really… is already debased AF just by having skin-in-the-game. Great the supply has remained static but poloniex diluted everyones already watered down btc representative stake more than 50% overnight. Resultingly I’m open to ANY kind of proposed change that will realistically help arrive us to the potential that counterparty could and can have with the right conditions, even if it means having a smaller slice of the pie.