Luke's suggestion seems reasonable. However, the second step in the immediate plan is quite difficult, if not impossible. How can we persuade the operators of BtcGuild, GHash.IO, and Discus Fish to accept the patch? Moreover, there are around 30% of the hashing power belong to 'Unknown'. Who to contact for these miners? Most likely the Eligius is only one can apply the patch since it is run by Luke himself, but Eligius only have around 14% of the shares. (according to
http://blockchain.info/pools)
More practical way is
1. Write Bitcoin Core patch to whitelist 80-byte OP_RETURN-based Counterparty transactions.
2. contact major mining pools and request them to apply this patch, and open merge request with mainline Bitcoin Core.
3. Use OP_RETURN for data <= 40 bytes. Keep using CheckMultiSig for data > 40 bytes, until more than 60% (GHash.IO + BTCGuild + Eligius + Discus Fish) of hashing rate accepts that patch, and then use addnode to get it relayed to miners. Otherwise, just wait until the new core with the counterparty patch is out (Personally I think the latter, although difficult, has higher chance to be successful).
I believe the main operators are as reluctant to take the counterparty patch as they will take other patches to filter CheckMultiSig. Therefore, everything will be fine if the official core accepts the counterparty patch before accepting the filtering CheckMultiSig patch.
A friend had asked the owner of Discus Fish (the pool control ~13% of btc), if he is willing to implement patch. he noted it but is busy with other projects, by the way their pool should soon comfortably have >50% of LTC, so you can see alt-chain is not so safe. I don't think that Ghash will be receptive, judging by there previous behaviour
Many pool operators are already comfortably making profits. They don't have a direct incentivization to add any new features
or introduce any extra work to themselves, with patch upon patch unless they see a direct benefit to their wallets. They want to know if it either generates a profit for them or protects them from losing profit otherwise it's business as usual.
These projects are incredibly useful to bitcoin ecosystem.
A trust-less decentralized solution to trading assets!. hundreds of millions of dollars lost, stolen, hacked by 'trusting' your funds on centralized exchanges, many exchanges randomly offline. Bitcoin private keys should be in your possession. How did we even get to the stage where it's normal to hand over your private keys and trust somebody elses integrity or competence not to dissapear with funds.? The damage that caused to the public perception of bitcoin is huge, and will take a long time to repair or forget. Perhaps it's already too late. It's hard into a serious discussion with some normal members of public. ie not geeks without them bringing up some of the more well-known cases-. I cannot understand for the life of me how projects like this are being suppressed, innovation like this is best for everyone and stifling it would seem to naturally result in a migration onto a project that encourages it.