[IDEA] A Sustainable Funding Mechanism for Counterparty

In this post, I’m going to introduce a largely unexplored and WAY underappreciated avenue for achieving sustainable, ongoing, and full-time Counterparty development.

The solution is quite simply to bribe Decred stakeminers.

Here is the idea:

Instead of doing a Proof of Burn event, or an ICO, or moving Counterparty to a new blockchain, we go to the Decred blockchain and automatically reward stakeminers with some XCP-like token. To make this easy, we’ll call this hypothetical token “ANTE”.

When this idea is done, Decred stakeminers will be able to open their wallets where stake rewards have been received, and find ANTE tokens there when a Counterparty-like metalayer service is deployed next to a Decred full node.

To reiterate, starting from the Decred genesis block, all Decred accounts rewarded with DCR from stake mining, are also rewarded with ANTE tokens. So we’re essentially paying Decred stakeminers in a speculative token.

This is interesting for the following reasons:

  1. Stakeminers outrank PoW miners in the Decred system, so bribing them with ANTE on a consistent basis will go a very long way assuming ANTE gains market value, and
  2. ANTE will gain market value should the Decred stakeholders approve funding for the effort

Decred stakeminers profit from this arrangement, in that their passive income stream from staking is significantly enhanced.

Counterparty stakeholders profit from this arrangement, in that we get full time developers.

I’m bringing this idea to the Counterparty community first because I feel like if the community acts in unison, our voice for funding proposals gets significantly more credible, ie we already have developers in our community with proven track records, and some would surely be open to taking payment in DCR especially if it meant raising XCP from the dead on Polo.