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.

Damn... and people burned over 2000+ BTC on a protocol that has this big gaping hole?

No, it's just a weakness, not a show stopper.

Worse case is that you have to download the whole BTC blockchain to use Counterparty. Otherwise, you could trust some big websites to verify the transactions for you (like the blockchain.info for BTC).

The only difference with current status of BTC is that 1) it's more difficult to build a light-weight client such as Multibit, and 2) the parsing time could be long when the history of XCP becomes long.