I guess the past few responses to me have made it clear that people on this thread don't want to discuss or solve things, but merely make strawmen and misrepresent the reasonable statements of others.
We are all eager to discuss these issues and to resolve our disagreement. Your main argument, however, just doesn't have leg to stand on, IMO.
If it didn't have "leg to stand on", you wouldn't need to misrepresent me.
Ok restate a concise version, if you have time.
- The blockchain must be stored and downloaded by every Bitcoin full node.
- Every Bitcoin full node, upon adopting Bitcoin, agreed implicitly to store a specific kind of data in the blockchain: financial transactions.
- Therefore, there is consent to store these financial transactions in the blockchain.
- On the contrary, there exist nodes among these which have not consented to store other data.
- Therefore, there is not consent to store that other data in the blockchain.
To extend Bitcoin, one should keep these facts in mind.
Non-transactional data should be stored parallel to the blockchain, possibly available for anyone who wants to download/store it (perhaps using an extension to the p2p protocol to relay it), but not inside it (which has never been demonstrated to have any necessity/value anyway).
As a reminder, my only comment here on Counterparty specifically has been:
In your opinion, which category do you feel XCP falls into?
I haven't looked at XCP in detail yet, so I'll have to defer to others who have.
Again, we only store financial transactions in the blockchain, and we are paying for the space that we're using. Financial transactions in OP_RETURN outputs aren't any more painful for a full-node to store than anything else.
Would you be willing to consider Peter Todd's proposal? If not, how would you make it better?