Possible April Fools' joke...
While the "no funding" thing is in some ways a disadvantage, mostly due to the lack of funding, in other ways it's been advantageous.
Counterparty is about five months old as a project and we have the first functioning DEx as well as a fully functioning deterministic web wallet that was created in a few months, drastically increasing usability and it will be live shortly. That is great progress.
Burning bitcoins into a black hole is never going to be the most "productive model" because you are destroying value. You are trading monetary value in order to ensure risk and reward are both distributed as evenly as possible. It also immediately aligns developer priorities with every person who burnt a bitcoin.
The Counterparty developers are developing at an incredibly fast pace. Compare Counterparty's development timeline to other second generation projects. Five months in, I have no complaints. In fact, no funding appears to have had no effect on the project's development. The same can be said for other unfunded projects, such as Linux. Furthermore, too much money, too soon, can easily destroy a project.
Nontechnical people likely "only care about the price" when an altcoin does not have significant utility behind it. There are no apples to apples comparison for Counterparty because of the utility that the protocol provides. When Counterparty is easier to use, people will be buying and selling XCP to do various actions within the Counterparty ecosystem, not because of the price. Also, the recent downturn in market caps has largely been "industry" wide, from bitcoin on down.
Everything in it was factual.I wouldn't argue that counterparty has come a long way and the developers are doing amazing work.That being said, the developers are working in a bubble at the moment.
Who is here to see their achievements but us?Are there ever any news reports? Why isn't this all over the mainstream news?
We all know this project is huge, but regular folks don't.
This project is designed to replace and improve a corrupt financial system.
This is big shit we are talking about.
You say that regular people only care about the price when a coin is useless. I don't agree with that. Counterparty has probably the most utility behind it than any protocol out there at the moment, but no one knows about it, even in the altcoin community! The fact of the matter is people are busy. People are also impatient, arrogant, lazy and ignorant. We cannot succeed on our merits alone.
This may seem like a stupid idea that has probably been covered already, but what would be the downside of counterparty functioning on its own PoS blockchain?
In this regard wouldn't we need significant less hashing power to secure the blockchain? And what if bitcoin could be cloned and all addresses transferred over? If bitcoin was cloned wouldn't we be able to import our addresses into the new blockchain without losing any progress? We would all have the same amount of XCP, we wouldnt be reliant on bitcoin for security and we would make our own rules.
We could up the block speed and increase the OP_return on our own. The PoS minting could just pay off transaction fees.
So instead of paying fees to bitcoin miners we would be paying fees to ourselves.
This whole reliance on bitcoin just seems foolish and nearsighted.
If we can't clone bitcoin and change it into a PoS blockchain couldn't we adopt our own PoS chain and use proof of burn to transfer XCP to the new blockchain?
10 min blocks and a 13Gb blockchain to download is admittedly suffocating this startup.
That is an unusually high barrier to entry that most people are not going to take the time to figure out.
13gb in a year or two? Sure, that might be ok. But if people can't download the software, run it, sync the blockchain within 20 minutes and use the stupid thing; You are yelling at deaf people.