Re: [ANN][XCP] Counterparty Protocol, Client and Coin (built on Bitcoin)

Can @phantomphreak please address the claims made by ethereum founder in bitcoin magazine?

http://bitcoinmagazine.com/9671/ethereum-next-generation-cryptocurrency-decentralized-application-platform/

It seems he thinks among many things that bitcoin is not suitable to be treated as an underlying base protocol.

One of the main reasons:

Simplified Payment Verification (see the bitcoin whitepaper Section 8 ) becomes not usable. Since the miner will not verify whether a XCP transaction is valid like they do in bitcoin transactions, to check the validity of a XCP transaction, we have to track up to the very beginning (the address sent to burn address). This requires each client to download and keep the whole blockchain.

In Ethereum, they seems to find a way to solve this problem.

Detail can be found in their whitepaper: http://www.ethereum.org/ethereum.html

Personally, I don't think this is something will make Mastercoin/XCP not usable. It just increases the downloading and parsing time.

Would it be possible to have a checkpoint file that is signed by the XCP devs that clients could load instead of the entire blockchain?
For ease of use, this is almost a requirement as few normal people will wait for hours and hours for the initial sync up

It's possible, but it will not be decentralized if there's a checkpoint. People has to trust the one who publish the checkpoint. However, I think it could be very useful to provide some trustworthy services keeping some snapshots, therefore most average users can choose to trust these services and shortcut their parsing and verification. Those trustworthy services cannot cheat others for a long time as long as there're some independent clients choose to verify transactions all by themselves.