When can the GUI client roughly be expected (dont want a guarantee just a rough estimate)? Would that GUI client go along with an easy installation?
Two other questions I have:
How many developers are working on counterparty right now and are they full time?
I assume counterparty is working on the bitcoin blockchain which means that transactions/contracts are facilitated by bitcoin miners. Correct? Would it be possible to migrate to an own/different blockchainl with counterparty? Any plans here?
The community has multiple desktop clients in the works.
Regarding a web-wallet, I have posted a written tech preview of "Counterwallet", which is the upcoming deterministic web wallet the Counterparty team is hard at work on. Check it out on the counterparty forums at: https://forums.counterparty.co/index.php?topic=79As I stated in that thread, screenshots should be coming by the end of the week. Things are moving along very well.
As far as your other question goes, currently Phantom and I are working on Counterparty (pretty much) full-time. We have future plans for additional full-time devs.
Thanks for the answer!
What about the very last question:
I assume counterparty is working on the bitcoin blockchain which means that transactions/contracts are facilitated by bitcoin miners. Correct? Would it be possible to migrate to an own/different blockchainl with counterparty? Any plans here?
and
Would the GUI client go along with an easy installation?
How flexible is the Counterparty Protocol in terms of it being run atop other alt-coins instead of just Bitcoin?
Has anyone got any opinions about which alt-coin might be the optimal base for Counterparty?
Most alt-coins are nearly identical to Bitcoin, and Counterparty will run fine on any one that is. It would need a little tweaking for something like Namecoin or Peercoin, but not much, I think.
By which you mean support for OP_RETURN feature of Bitcoin? I think I read something on that before, i.e. that it is used to store data on the XCP transaction taking place.
I was reading an article on one of the bitcoin magzine websites and they mention that apart from the obvious external dependency (i.e. btc blockchain) the other problem is that it could be sluggish or time consuming searching the block chain for specific transactions that have stored XCP data. Is this a concern for you at this stage.
As far as I know, most alt-coins support multi-sig, which does suffice.
It's not a problem, as all of the transactions only need to be found once, in order, and then they are stored in their own (much smaller) database. And we have ten minutes between blocks, so there's
plenty of time to parse new transactions as they appear on the network. The main disadvantage of the 'meta-coin' approach is that there can't be any SPV clients (someone needs to store the whole blockchain, as it were), but there are plenty of ways around that.