This is the point right here. *Of course* Bitcoin was never intended to store and transmit Counterparty tx data. Counterparty hadn't been invented yet! That's what makes all great technology so amazing: when people take it and use it for things you never even dreamed of.

+1

If anything I hope I've given the impression that I think all these "Blockchain 2.0" projects probably have terrible flaws in them right now. But flaws can be fixed, either by upgrades or starting over; what I care about is that something worthwhile is bound to emerge in the end. In the meantime I can bring value to these projects - that is earn my pay - by being independent and objective enough to give good advice and do good research. Which incidentally I think the Bitcoin developers are currently failing at themselves because they're too focused on their narrow use-case for Bitcoin as cheap transactions - take this advice to just resort to insecure centralization and/or easily attacked DHT's:


Or for that matter the discussion around my post on Decentralized digital asset exchange with honest pricing and market depth.

Edit: To be clear, all this discussion about moving things like Counterparty to different independently or merge-mined blockchains as a "solution" to the "problem" of adding data to the blockchain is either mistaken or downright deceptive. Fact is these systems all get much better security by being embedded rather than independent. Decentralized consensus system security is a game of strength in numbers, and you want to be making use of the largest system you can afford. Merge-mining looks like a nice way to achieve that, but in reality just leaves you vulnerable to zero-marginal-cost attacks until you get the support of a large % of the total hashing power. A real world example of this is how Luke-Jr used Eligius to attack the merge-mined alt Coiledcoin. That leaves us with embedded consensus systems, and fortunately with Bitcoin only explicit blacklists have any hope of censoring their transactions rather than just making them a bit more expensive. (perhaps the even stronger requirement for explicit whitelists if my timelock crypto scheme can be made practical)

I guess technically no one has to choose to upgrade right ?

Didn't someone just say that there was a proposal to remove multisig

Either it's a proposal or a not very subtle threat, No?

   

No, it is a lack of understanding how bitcoin works.  Peter Todd's proposal suggests not relaying bare multisig transactions, and I wrote the code to do that:  https://github.com/jgarzik/bitcoin/tree/bare-multisig

"Non-standard" means "most nodes probably won't relay your transaction" but nothing more than that.  No protocol change or fork.  Miners are free to continue to put such transactions in blocks, assuming that they receive the transactions somehow.

So maybe if we just doubled the fees than the TX wouldn't be considered a bare multisig

There are subtle differences between changes to the Bitcoin protocol and the default rules of Bitcoind for relaying transactions.

bitexch's point still stands, however, as he was (as I understand it) using the word 'protocol' in a general sense.

These are all technical issues, and the questions are at the level of implementation details, not problems with Counterparty itself.

Also, 'change the protocol' sounds much scarier than it should.