The new Counterparty protocol on top of Bitcoin appears to be able to have similar functionality as Peershares but based on Bitcoin protocol. Over here we are biased towards the Peercoin protocol, but I’m interested to hear what the key similarities and differences are if applicable
I think XCP is more of a competitor for mastercoin: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=265488.0 , since they share a lot in common except in their ways of fund-raising. MSC is funded with more than 4,500+ btc. XCP’s proof of burn means that the 2,100+ btc that people burned are not spendable.
The reason I like Peershares is in its simplicity.
Counterparty is a beautiful system about which I am enthusiastic even though it will have severe scaling problems and will be expensive to use for applications such as company shares. It has been more successful than Mastercoin, Bitshares and Ethereum in offering a versatile financial protocol that sits on top of a cryptocommodity. It is unlikely to be dominant in its space for long but it will be the system that leads the way to something even better in my opinion.
While it allows users to create shares and distribute dividends, this would be quite expensive as you would have to buy enough XCP to represent your shares. So far as I know these features have received no use beyond testing, but I expect that to change soon. It has the problem of being bound to the Bitcoin network, which I doubt will age gracefully. The miners and other users of the Bitcoin network have different interests that will be at odds with Counterparty users at times.
Peershares has the significant disadvantage of not actually existing yet, but will provide a cheaper implementation that is dedicated to the needs of shareholders. Counterparty does many things that Peershares don’t, and it is significant for providing those functions.
I am pleased to see Counterparty has no relevance to the market our extension of Peershares aims to serve.
I appreciate the simplicity as mentioned by Redlee, also like the elegance and flexibility of having a separate PoS blockchain for Peershares. Being bound by the Bitcoin network will indeed have its restrictions and issues and yes, question is will it age gracefully?
Struggle a bit with the cost aspect Jordan mentioned. Although I understand that you need to buy XCP, I guess they can make XCP represent sets of e.g. 10 or 100 shares depending on the share price, so the relative price of an XCP would be small. As a bonus you get a share in the XCP network which might provide people with a more than average incentive to keep it going and be successful as it holds it’s own trading value. So not sure about the no relevance, but you probably have a better understanding of the market you are after.
So although having some restrictions and less flexibility I can see certain models be able to work effectively with Counterparty, the Peershares model provides more flexibility and is likely cheaper to run. Hope it can hold its own ground for a while.
A few days ago a flaw in the Counterparty protocol was exploited to counterfeit about 1.5% of the total supply of Counterparty, deposit and sell it at an exchange, and then withdraw BTC. This left the exchange (poloniex.com) apparently insolvent. No exchange will be anxious to trade Counterparty anytime soon. While the flaw has been fixed, it will take quite a while for confidence in Counterparty to reach the level it was a week ago.
Counterparty has been developed very quickly, having been around only 45 days. New versions were released several times per week, I think. This should act as a warning to the Peershares team to not compromise quality for speed of development. The results can be catastrophic.
[quote=“Jordan Lee, post:3, topic:2024”]Counterparty is a beautiful system about which I am enthusiastic even though it will have severe scaling problems and will be expensive to use for applications such as company shares.
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While it allows users to create shares and distribute dividends, this would be quite expensive as you would have to buy enough XCP to represent your shares.[/quote]