Whats up with the new counterparty platform?
I was looking around today and noticed from the mass of twitter feeds that counterparty seems to have a way to use bitcoin to function on an ethereum virtual machine to make it possible to run smart contracts on the bitcoin blockchain. I was wondering if anyone has any ideas on the matter. Curious about the effect this could have on the ethereum market, the benefit for bitcoin, and the value of xcp (Counterparty's native currency). Lets get a discussion going....
Vice versa - Counterparty ports EVM on Bitcoin blockchain with XCP as "gas"
The 1st and main beneficiary seems to be CounterParty :-), the 2nd is Bitcoin as you should pay fees with BTC while sending tokens and trading on DEX .
Thanks, I need to look into this a bit more. I don't truly understand the 'burning' of BTC for creation of XCP either....
The implementation of turing-complete smart contracts on the Bitcoin blockchain is awesome, as it’s more secure than other blockchains like Ethereum or possibly Lisk.
Counterparty is actually working on including the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) to their protocol since 2014. When they posted their blog post on their progress the price of their token actually climbed about 25% what shows the hope of the Bitcoin community for a fitting smart contract implementation. It is an overlay protocol that enables you to use the EVM on the Bitcoin blockchain. Their approach has great potential but there are some obstacles to overcome. As their protocol uses the Bitcoin blockchain validation takes 10min time – compared to ~12 sec in Ethereum.
Just like Counterparty Factom us an overlay protocol of the Bitcoin network that enables turing-complete smart contracts on the Bitcoin blockchain – but Factom only needs 1 min for confirmation.
From my point of view Rootstock is the best way to implement smart contracts to Bitcoin as it uses a pegged sidechain implementation and only needs 10 sec confirmation time. This is close to the approach Lisk proposed recently; by outsourcing applications to sidechains the parent chain remains light. And by using the Rootstock sidechain Bitcoin miners are rewarded. This is actually a big thing. Once the mining reward gets halved lots of mining equipment will most likely become unusable for regular Bitcoin mining. Yet it can still be used to mine on the Rootstock sidechain for quite a while (maybe 3 years?). I can only recommend looking into the Rootstock Whitepaper.
To date news on Counterparty and similar solutions already impact the BTC price. My personal opinion is that these solutions won't harm Ethereum in the near future but they will have a long term impact on Ethereum. My personal experience is that banks and businesses outside the crypto-scene are hyped about Ethereum and still fear Bitcoin as criminal e-money. They do not want to use the Bitcoin blockchain as infrastructure. This point of view will vanish over time and at that moment Ethereum might have a problem.
Lisk might also be a great solution for smart contracts (JavaScript programming and sidechain implementation) that could harm Ethereum; but wen have to wait and see what their influence and market share will be.
Good points in this post. Good to see I'm not the only one that is thinking about this. The real risk lies in the fact that the market is so irrational. Do you know this interesting site? https://www.coincheckup.com Complete Coin analysis about the team, product, communication transparency, advisors and investment statistics.