About 12 miners? Ain't that about how many people run the Federal Reserve?

Be careful what you wish for about "go fork bitcoin core and see if anyone wants your fork coins." The real money is coming online to BTC, they will outmine you, outfork you, and outregulate you - brute force - if you get in their way.

I never said I didn't want the Bitcoin protocol to change.
On the contrary, I support extending it to do what Counterparty wants.
But such extensions are slow-moving right now, and take time to implement properly.
I also understand Counterparty wants a solution "today".
I agree the 80-byte OP_RETURN is a good short-term way to do this.
Deploying a whitelist to miners, to accept these Counterparty transactions can be done within a few weeks.
But deploying a default relay policy change requires months (releasing a new version of Bitcoin Core, and the slowest part: waiting for all the users to upgrade).
Thankfully, there is an immediately available workaround to not having the default relay policy "on your side":
Just have Counterparty participants relay their transactions to nodes running the updated relay policy.

So, recommended course of action:
Immediate-term:
1. Write Bitcoin Core patch to whitelist 80-byte OP_RETURN-based Counterparty transactions.
2. Deploy patch to major mining pools, and open merge request with mainline Bitcoin Core.
3. Begin using OP_RETURN Counterparty immediately; use addnode to get it relayed to miners.
Short-term:
4. After discussion, patch is merged to Bitcoin Core.
5. Bitcoin Core 0.10 is released with a default relay policy accepting Counterparty transactions, and addnode is no longer needed.
Long-term:
6. Counterparty developers discuss future plans with Freimarkets developers and others interested in this kind of functionality.
7. Interested developers figure out the best way to do everything, probably including using merged-mining, side-chains, and other things that are impractical today.
8. Interested developers implement new system, and write a BIP documenting it.
9. BIP gets reviewed.
10. Counterparty users upgrade to new version based on BIP.
11. Everyone gets a break.

Hopefully that clarifies my position.

Agree. Bitcoin and Counterparty are not competitors, they are collaborators. Ethereum, Bitshares, Peershare, NXT will be competitors of Bitcoin. Luke and other Bitcoin Core Devs, please rethink your decision of OP_RETURN, thanks!

Wow, that almost seems like a complete reversal of your previous statements.  But whatever brought it about, thank you!  This seems like a good plan, and I'm sure something that we XCP supporters can live with!

Luke's suggestion seems reasonable. However, the second step in the immediate plan is quite difficult, if not impossible. How can we persuade the operators of BtcGuild, GHash.IO, and Discus Fish to accept the patch? Moreover, there are around 30% of the hashing power belong to 'Unknown'. Who to contact for these miners?   Most likely the Eligius is only one can apply the patch since it is run by Luke himself, but Eligius only have around 14% of the shares. (according to http://blockchain.info/pools)

More practical way is
1. Write Bitcoin Core patch to whitelist 80-byte OP_RETURN-based Counterparty transactions.
2. contact major mining pools and request them to apply this patch, and open merge request with mainline Bitcoin Core.
3. Use OP_RETURN for data <= 40 bytes. Keep using CheckMultiSig for data > 40 bytes, until more than 60% (GHash.IO + BTCGuild + Eligius + Discus Fish) of hashing rate accepts that patch, and then use addnode to get it relayed to miners. Otherwise, just wait until the new core with the counterparty patch is out (Personally I think the latter, although difficult, has higher chance to be successful).

I believe the main operators are as reluctant to take the counterparty patch as they will take other patches to filter CheckMultiSig. Therefore, everything will be fine if the official core accepts the counterparty patch before accepting the filtering CheckMultiSig patch.

However, I still think try to encode the transactions in a more efficient way is still the best option now. I believe that, most transactions, if not all, can be encoded with 40 bytes.

Can PhantomPhreak please remove this and any other FUD that aims to lower the price so that individuals can buy cheap XCP?

For anyone who understands the situation, it is quite clear that Counterparty is in no "danger"  (PhantomPhreak himself said so); this all sounds much scarier than it is.

Of course, PhantomPhreak should delete my quotation of this post, as well.

Stop trying to profit off of the conflict going on.
Counterparty is in no danger of folding.
Big risk holding XCP my ass ><
This coin has one of the brightest futures of any protocol out there.

On an unrelated note, I've created a new theme for the Counterparty GUI. Some users said the other ones  were too flashy and nice so they wanted something more plain and boring. Ok I'm paraphrasing but here it is:




The themes are pretty much done but JahPowerBit is a bit swamped this week so he doesn't have time to finalize (optimize) my code.
Still working away though.
The theme selection system is working great. Everything else is finished.
Fixed all the bugs I could find.

Really?

The price for a revolutionary new protocol that opens up countless opportunities in the world of business and finance should be a lot lower?

Are you delusional or are you just trying to get cheap XCP?

The only reason the price has gone down is because the market is so small any one person selling their original stake of one bitcoin is enough to drop the price down.
It doesn't mean the price is actually down.

That should be posted in the sigs of every comment regarding this issue.