Hi, all! I'm one of the developers of this project, and I'm also a long-time Hacker News reader. If you have any questions about Counterparty, please don't hesitate to ask! Better yet, if you think you might want to build something on top of Counterparty (which is a totally open platform), we welcome all contributions to any of our GitHub repositories (https://github.com/CounterpartyXCP/).

Alternatives are:

http://mastercoin.org

and

http://nxt.org

I wish somebody would write a blog post summarizing and comparing all the developments in this field.

First I heard about Colored Coins / BitcoinX [1], then Mastercoin [2], then Etherium [3], then CounterParty [4], nxt.org [5] and TruthCoin [6].

Some people think, that Bitcoin protocol can and eventually will be extended for smart properties and there is no need in all of this.

[1] http://coloredcoins.org/

[2] http://www.mastercoin.org/

[3] https://www.ethereum.org/

[4] https://www.counterparty.co/

[5] http://nxt.org

[6] https://github.com/psztorc/Truthcoin

Tim Swanson has a really good post on this http://www.ofnumbers.com/2014/03/04/chapter-3-next-generatio...

Here is the web wallet, which includes decentralized exchange, smart property creation, and dividend distributions.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8L6aXXyobFGD2ADJVwRGoQ

Read the following "with approximately 2.6 million XCP created by burning bitcoins in January 2014" on the wiki ... Is someone knowledgable enough to explain what they mean?

https://wiki.counterparty.co/w/Main_Page

Bitcoins were sent by the Bitcoin community to an unspendable address (1CounterpartyXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXUWLpVr, which has no knowable private key), and the Counterparty protocol detects this and creates XCP in proportion to the destroyed bitcoins, crediting them to the sending address. (This was only for the month of January... don't send any bitcoins to that address now!)

what is the significance of the tail end ...UWLpVr? why not just X's all the way?

Every Bitcoin address includes a checksum at the end, so while you can make up any address like in this example, the checksum still needs to be correct in order to form a valid address. It's a great feature against typos, btw.

It says "Enter your 12 word passphrase" at their bitcoin wallet login prompt. Hard core.

Looks like a standard deterministic seed used by most SPV clients (electrum etc)

whats "SPV"?

Simplified Payment Verification

http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/4649/what-is-an-s...

is xbet (built using counterparty) the first truly decentralised, trustlesss p2p betting platforms?

the possibility of using broadcasts as heartbeats and warrant canaries too interest me greatly this seems to fit the job

exciting stuff. Bookmarked for reading later.

Can you please post a link to xbet? The only one I found is this one [1], which I doubt to be using XCP.

[1] http://xbet.ucoz.com/