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Counterparty Foundation Bounty Program

10/11/2016 by Jeremy

Counterparty Development- The Counterparty Foundation is starting a program to allow the community to fund features they want added to the Counterparty protocol.

  • We will facilitate payment plans for development requests with widespread interest.
    • Plans will be started immediately after the plan is approved, fully funded and an appropriate developer is found.

Community Control

  • The Counterparty bounty program gives the community control over prioritization of upgrades to Counterparty.
  • All money that’s donated will be used to facilitate and speed up development of Counterparty development initiatives. No funds will go to marketing or other non-development activities.
  • Speeding up development of core technical initiatives is the best way to push an open-source project forward. Any funds raised will be transparently held and expenditures will be communicated to the community via the Counterparty website.
  • Jeremy Johnson (J-Dog) will be holding the fund for general donations at 12ri2iypq8tMcKXSwycfzWbNvQAyncGpyA.
  • Bounties will be priced out by a qualified developer selected by the Counterparty board. The developer pricing the bounty will not have any relation to the develop working on the bounty.
  • The board will negotiate payment and review the work of any developers that are contracted to work for Counterparty. The community directors and any active Counterparty founders will vote on the best candidate to hire for a particular development project.

Disclaimer

  • Larger projects such as the EVM are hard to price accurately and for this reason, bounties won’t be used. Instead, we’ll look to secure additional full or part-time development using resources from the general donation address for larger projects.
  • This will be a community effort but the ultimate decisions related to the distribution of funds will be in the hands of the Counterparty Foundation.
  • There is absolutely no recourse for funds donated to the Foundation for the development fund and in the most literal interpretation funds can be used however the Foundation deems appropriate.
  • For the time being, a general donation address has been created. BTC and XCP are the best currencies for paying developers.
  • General Donation Address: 12ri2iypq8tMcKXSwycfzWbNvQAyncGpyA

The Value of Subassets

  • Our first goal, based on the conditions stated above, will be the implementation of subassets on Counterparty.

  • Why Subassets?

    • The feature extends the value and utility of named assets.
    • Counterparty is the leading platform for digital game items. Game developers need subasset support to maximize the usability of blockchain based items.
    • Subassets can help to recover lost or squatted asset names for aspiring projects. Instead of having to acquire 50 token names the project might be able to acquire a few token names on the secondary market and accommodate much of their needs through subasset issuance.
    • Subassets are necessary in some form because projects need to be able to issue common items. It would be poor planning to have every project fighting over the use of “sword” and similar asset names.

Subasset Pricing

  • 1K XCP for subassets paid through milestone payments.
    • 1/3 for working code and tests on testnet.
    • 1/3 for PR passing Ruben’s inspection and merged into develop.
    • 1/3 for API docs being updated and code merged into master.

Subasset Considerations

  • Having an anti-spam fee for subassets in a similar manner to named asset registration is necessary.
  • This fee must be priced in XCP.
  • The fee should be high enough to discourage abuse and spam of the Blockchain via subassets.
  • The fee in XCP should always be low enough in real terms to prevent asset and subasset creation from being cost prohibitive.
  • XCP has value due to its utility and scarcity. By pricing subasset creation in XCP another use for XCP is created.
  • Burning .25 XCP per subasset will make XCP more scarce over time.
  • Unlike many cryptocurrencies, XCP is not competing with Bitcoin for use as a currency. XCP is a commodity that offers utility on the Bitcoin blockchain but the value of XCP is derived from scarcity.