Counterparty Recreates Ethereum’s Smart Contract Platform on Bitcoin
The limitation of Counterparty up to now has been that all of its smart contracts have had to be hard‐coded into the protocol’s reference client by a set of core developers (as is the case with Bitcoin itself). This means that the addition of new features has been much slower than it needed to be. The solution to this problem is to allow users to write their own smart contracts, which they (and other contracts) can execute whenever they want.
This is the basic model of Ethereum, which is a project to create a novel blockchain in addition to a programming language and virtual machine for the creation of smart contracts. But the development of a new blockchain is unnecessarily slow and risky. Instead of reinventing the wheel, we, the cryptocurrency community, should be making evolutionary, tractable improvements to Bitcoin itself, whenever possible.
Counterparty Contracts
With Counterparty Contracts, users may write Turing Complete smart contracts into the Bitcoin blockchain and execute their code on all Counterparty nodes. We’ve ported Ethereum’s language and virtual machine over to the Counterparty platform, using the pyethereum codebase. The result is hosted on GitHub and open for public testing. Today, you can take Turing Complete Ethereum code, or write your own, and run it on Bitcoin with Counterparty. Anything that one could ever do with Ethereum, one can now do with Bitcoin and Counterparty.
One of our primary focuses was around maintaining compatibility between the Counterparty and Ethereum contract language. This also maximizes the security of the system. Our success is reflected in the fact that our implementation passes 100% of pyethereum’s contract execution integration tests:
~/counterpartyd > py.test test/pyethereum_contracts_test.py -v -x
=============================== test session starts ================================
platform linux -- Python 3.4.2 -- py-1.4.25 -- pytest-2.6.3 -- /usr/bin/python
collected 14 items
test/pyethereum_contracts_test.py::test_evm PASSED
test/pyethereum_contracts_test.py::test_sixten PASSED
test/pyethereum_contracts_test.py::test_returnten PASSED
test/pyethereum_contracts_test.py::test_namecoin PASSED
test/pyethereum_contracts_test.py::test_currency PASSED
test/pyethereum_contracts_test.py::test_data_feeds PASSED
test/pyethereum_contracts_test.py::test_hedge PASSED
test/pyethereum_contracts_test.py::test_post PASSED
test/pyethereum_contracts_test.py::test_suicider PASSED
test/pyethereum_contracts_test.py::test_reverter PASSED
test/pyethereum_contracts_test.py::test_stateless PASSED
test/pyethereum_contracts_test.py::test_array PASSED
test/pyethereum_contracts_test.py::test_array2 PASSED
test/pyethereum_contracts_test.py::test_array3 PASSED
==============================14 passed in 63.47 seconds ===============================
~/counterpartyd >
http://counterparty.io/news/counterparty-recreates-ethereums-smart-contract-platform-on-bitcoin/
Bitshares devs are going to be left behind. Not only has Counterparty snatched up Overstock support but now they've got Turing complete scripting. This would explain why the XCP price has been shooting up.
Can Bitshares devs accelerate plans for Turing complete scripting?
While this is fine and dandy:
- Getting a solid client
- Getting on/off ramps established
- Use cases for bitUSD with high risk merchants
- Marketing push on the above
That's where our immediately value comes from in my opinion. If we would have beat CP to the punch, we would have had a blip of news about it. CP is adding the features of an alt chain to Bitcoin, that's the real story.
Don't get me wrong, of course I want to see turing complete scripting. I'm just adding my thoughts on where our real immediate value proposition lies.