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

How much of this proposal, and of other similar proposals, can be handled by the asset description field? (Not much space is needed to store a URL.).I love namespaces, etc., but I want to keep the protocol-level as simple and as stupid as possible. We could do this sort of thing is Counterwallet and BootleXCP themselves, for example.

Extremely good point and porqupine has also communicated the same to me.

We would only need a naming convention on how to format the asset description field. The rest can be up to the client side to parse it.

As long as there was some defacto which was perhaps outlined by the Counterparty team but not necessarily enforced, then everyone would be a happy camper.

Eg Lets just use the tilde as a delimiting character in the description. Field 1 = namespace, field 2 = description, field 3 = url

It needs to be a new long asset name field that is enforced by the protocol for long names. A description will not work because users can put anything in there.

My understanding (a dev can correct me) is that the description field can be modified for an asset.

So lets just say we all agree on a defacto standard for the description field. There are 3 fields delimited by a tilde.

Each of the clients can just invalidate and fail to show any asset in their list where 3 tildes aren't found. The asset owner would have motivation to get it right.

Long asset names should not be changeable just like short names. The long names are enforced at the time of issuance to be valid only if the issuer also owns the top level asset.

Afterward everything should go through the protocol using only the short names.

To clarify, in my proposal the long name wouldn't be changeable.

In the leave things mostly as they are scenerio, which is what I was describing above then the 'name space' would be able to change since it is just part of the asset description. The asset name is still the primary key and has to stay the same.

I can see the disadvantage of this where people can issue spam assets to 'typosquat' or even create duplicates of the same namespace. If it's not enforced by the protocol as you said, it's going to cause confusion.