S16 E22: J-Dog on Counterparty & Bitcoin Tokens

0:48Vlad CosteaHello there, and welcome to the Bitcoin Takeover Podcast. This is Season 16, Episode 22, and we are live with Jeremy, better known as J-Dog. This episode is sponsored by SideShift.ai, LayerTwo Labs, Citrea, Bitcoin.com News, Noones.com, and Hodling.ch. J-Dog, this is the name that usually uses all around everything that concerns Counterparty, is sort of a legend in this field. Under his stewardship of the Counterparty protocol, we have seen the rise of Rare Pepes. We have seen Pepe Cash being a top 100 coin on CoinMarketCap.

1:25We have seen the resurgence of Pepe in 2021 during the NFT mania. And I guess I'm not exactly sure what happened because I've interviewed Adam Krellenstein on the previous episode. I think that was Season 16, Episode 14. He made some claims that there was some drama involved in Counterparty. And we're here to set the record straight, so it's good to have you, J-Dog.

1:52J-DogOh, good. Thank you. Yeah, there's always drama in Counterparty, but most people try to keep it respectful and keep it behind the scenes so it doesn't spill outwards.

2:07Vlad CosteaIt's really interesting because basically there are three founders of the Counterparty protocol on Bitcoin. All of them left at one point and you're the one who took over the repository and has been maintaining it for eight years or something?

2:23J-DogIt's kind of like that, yeah. There were three co-founders and they wrote the protocol, Adam writing the majority of it. And then after about a year, year and a half, they kind of left the protocol to start up Symbiont and go off and do their own thing. And there were other developers around like Devon Weller and John Villar and Robby, who was a co-founder. He was still around as well. So there were still people around for a number of years that were maintaining the code base and adding features and stuff.

2:59I was just kind of a supporting character that wrote FreeWallet and XChain and just playing around with the tokens and the platform.

3:11Vlad CosteaFor people who are not aware, how would you describe Counterparty?

3:17J-DogIt's a token platform that rides on top of Bitcoin. So in the same way that you can have some Bitcoin in your wallet and send it back and forth, Counterparty is a token platform where you can create words, a unique word and have ownership of that word and then issue supply for that token and send it back and forth much the same way that you can with Bitcoin. It's like a playground to play around with what you can do on Bitcoin and other blockchains other than just store a value, create a token and send it back and forth.

3:51Vlad CosteaYeah, I think it goes back to colored coins, which were proposed back in 2012. And there was just this idea that you can distinguish between, I guess, coins that were used on Silk Road and the ones that are legit. I think that was the original idea. And then after the 2013 bull market, people started thinking that they can use Bitcoin in different ways, too. It was no longer just about BTC, the asset. It was also this idea that the Bitcoin network can do much more. So a bunch of guys got together.

4:24There was Mastercoin, which became the Omni Layer. That one is a bit more corporate and it issued the first version of Tether, USDT on Bitcoin. I've also interviewed David A. Johnston, who is a founder of that protocol, and it was interesting to see his takes. He's always just curious about what's new and sort of forgets about his old sandboxes. But there is also Counterparty, which I think is much more community driven. For the creation of Counterparty, there was actually a burn event where a bunch of Bitcoin was sent to a burn address.

5:01It can never, ever get recovered. And that's how we got the XCP token, which stands for Counterparty. And that one is used for issuing assets using the OP_RETURN function. And what's really fascinating about Counterparty is that it's so simple. It's a simple design. You have Bitcoin transactions, you send OP_RETURN data within these Bitcoin transactions, and you just build from there. You build marketplaces, you build protocols that read the meaning behind these assets, and you just open the free market to see if there's any value in this.

5:42J-DogYeah, no, Adam did a good job of writing a whole bunch of features like the decentralized exchange where users can swap tokens in a decentralized way without having to have a centralized exchange. And yeah, it has really been a good playground for experimenting with what you can do on Bitcoin other than store a value and sending coins back and forth.

6:06Vlad CosteaSo I've got to be honest, of all the Counterparty wallets that I've ever tried, and I did try a few of them, like Counterwallet, which is a bit obsolete. There is also the one by Joe Looney. What's it called? Freeport... Rare Pepe Wallet.

6:06J-DogRare Pepe Wallet, yeah.

6:06Vlad CosteaBut of all of them, I still prefer FreeWallet. And I know that Adam told me that he has a new fancy one that works on your browser and stuff that I should try. I haven't. I still like FreeWallet.

6:40But you guys claim that Counterparty was forked or something?

6:49J-DogYeah, it's not really a matter of opinion. I mean, technically, software forks every time there's a new version that comes out. And it's just generally everybody in the community kind of chooses to ignore the old version and be like, oh, this new version is better. And so everybody's just going to use this new version. And so the old version just kind of goes away and nobody supports it. And with the fork that happened, there was some features that were working for a long time, like, well, specifically dispensers and the ability to, let me rewind.

7:30John and I created dispensers. One of the problems with using tokens and selling tokens for Bitcoin on Counterparty was that you had to use the DEX, the decentralized exchange. And since you can't escrow Bitcoin, you needed to do this funky thing where you'd list an order and wait for somebody else to match an order. And then within 20 blocks, you had to send Bitcoin. And so there was really less than ideal. And so John and I got together and kind of talked about, like, how can we make this like a fire and forget type thing where I have a token, I want to sell it for Bitcoin.

8:06I don't have to leave a wallet open or do some janky transaction stuff to get it to be a sell. So that's when we created this dispensers, which are, for lack of a better term, they're vending machines. You create a vending machine, put tokens into it, see how much you want to charge for a token, and then people send Bitcoin directly to that address associated with the dispenser. And it spits tokens out. And in the very beginning, you could only set up on one address. And, you know, over a few years, there was multiple improvements and iterations where people were like, well, wait a minute, I want to set up Bitcoin or I want to set up dispensers on different addresses.

8:44And it costs too much, like, for me to have to send Bitcoin and a token to a brand new address and then create the address from there. So it was like three transactions. So John and I wrote what's called the origin functionality, basically a way to say, I want to create a dispenser and you can create it on an address as long as that address has no history, no Bitcoin history or a Counterparty history associated with it. And so that was, you know, people went from having to do three transactions to one transaction.

9:14We also added the ability for them to close the dispenser and return the tokens back to the main address that opened it. So it made managing and selling tokens very easy. One transaction to open somewhere else, one transaction to close and bring all your, so two transactions instead of six. And also dispensers had the ability to onboard a lot of users to Counterparty by working with any Bitcoin transaction. You didn't have to have a specific Counterparty wallet to use a dispenser. You could just be like, oh, I want a Rare Pepe.

9:46Here, let me send some Bitcoin to this address and it will automatically spit it back to you. And so it was a great way to kind of introduce people to Counterparty without having to make them jump through hoops to download a custom wallet. Now, fast forward to the fork. I handed control back over of Counterparty to Adam when he came back after 10 years. And I won't get into all the particulars, but you're asking specifically about the fork. There was some functionality which they removed, which is the ability to create dispensers on a different address.

10:21So now we went back from being able to do things with one transaction and manage things easily to three transactions. And the main thing was they called it a bug for the ability for anybody to send Bitcoin to a dispenser from a non-Counterparty address. And so they removed that ability. They said, well, now if you want to use dispensers, you have to download a Counterparty wallet beforehand. You already have to kind of know about Counterparty and want to use it before you can use any of the functionality.

10:53And so getting back to the fork, what happened is they removed some of those features and I was telling them for a long time, like, look, I'm glad you're back. Let's improve some stuff. Let's add some new features, but don't break this stuff. People use this stuff. And from my opinion, Adam came back in with his ideas of what was best for Counterparty. And he had a few people, you know, like just you're back after 10 years. That's awesome. We'll do whatever you want. And they kind of just backed his idea without really, in my opinion, thinking through the ramifications of it.

11:32And so when he actually pushed this thing out the door, well, in addition to them, like not really doing, again, my opinion, I'm stating as fact. But not really doing a great amount of testing on it, They worked for like a year to like renovate and improve things and make it faster. But then when they pushed it out the door, then immediately it crashed like two blocks after the new features activated. And then over the course of the next two weeks, there were like 15 different releases.

12:00We're like, oh, crap, we'll fix this. Push that out the door. Oh, it broke again. Let's push this out of the door. And so there was community outrage where people were saying like, look, these dispensers are not working the way that I want. And I have to pay a lot more Bitcoin to manage this stuff. It's not as easy as it used to be. And, you know, and so basically a lot of users were saying, we want things the way they were. We want to go back to the way things were.

12:27And at that time, I was doing my best. I knew that Adam was putting out a new version, and I was doing everything I could to support it all the way along, all the way up until we launched. And then even after it launched, my wallet, FreeWallet, only supported the latest version of Counterparty. But after two weeks of downtime and the ledgers diverging and users saying, we're not happy with this, I decided to give the users what they wanted and decided, okay, well, I'm going to run the old version and the new version and let users decide which version they would like to use.

12:59And so I created Counterparty Classic and FreeWallet Classic to allow users to use the old functionality of Counterparty.

13:10Vlad CosteaSo are you saying that dispensers that you open using FreeWallet are not accessible by using the wallet by Adam?

13:21J-DogThey are accessible by using the wallet from Adam. There are essentially two Bitcoin wallets, or excuse me, two Counterparty wallets, which are FreeWallet and Adam's wallet. If you want to, if you're a new person and you want to like, oh, I want to buy something from a dispenser, you go to the website, you see that you want to buy something and you open up any wallet other than FreeWallet or Horizon, you can't buy from dispensers anymore. You have, you're basically sending Bitcoin and you don't get anything in return.

13:53So the change was making it from any Bitcoin wallet in the space, being able to send to an activated dispenser and get a token back to only being able to buy from dispensers from Counterparty approved wallets, which is two of them, Horizon and FreeWallet. Oh, and I'm sorry, and there's Rare Pepe, there's rarepepewallet.com, don't want to forget about Joe's wallet.

14:20Vlad CosteaYeah, to me, it's very weird that this community is fighting so much. And I think recently there was some FUD, which I think for like the 100th time Counterparty was declared dead for some reason.

14:35J-DogYeah, that's always, that's always dying and being revitalized.

14:41Vlad CosteaCan you explain what happened more recently? Last week we spoke, we were supposed to have this interview. I don't know exactly why we delayed it, but you said that the timing is perfect because there's some ongoing FUD.

14:55J-DogWell, it's just been like, it's nothing new. It's been ongoing ever since the fork happened. Like essentially when all the new version was released and users were upset about, you know, hey, there's different transactions, there were users losing money. Users who were using dispensers the way they were always using them in the past, sending Bitcoin to dispensers and not getting a token back on one chain and they were getting them back on another. So when I decided, hey, this is less than ideal, I want to at the very least show both versions of the ledger and write a wallet, you know, which was pretty easy, FreeWallet Classic to show both, to allow users to interact with the different ledgers.

15:40That's when Adam essentially blocked me from Counterparty. He went to counterparty.io and made it like, hey, FreeWallet went from like, hey, everybody uses this wallet. It's the best wallet and whatnot to, this is a scary wallet. You can lose your funds if you use it because they support a fork. Same thing with TokenScan. It went from the preferred wallet to, oh no, this is a bad, bad actor. And it kind of goes back to, and this is my opinion, ever since Adam has come back to the space, he's wanted to have his own explorer and his own wallet and he actually suggested a few times like, oh, you can just shut your stuff down, don't worry about it.

16:17And I'm here for the community. To me, that's unfathomable. You need to have something to show people what's going on. But it kind of played into his narrative like, oh, well, this is another way to kind of usher people over to my tools by calling his tools scary. So, I try not to play it too much into the, you know, Adam versus Jeremy. He's in control. I handed everything back over to him. He's going to go do what he wants and build what he feels is best and the Counterparty users are along for the ride.

16:49So, I kind of, I'm going to maintain the tools because even though he's in charge, like 90% of the ecosystem still uses TokenScan and FreeWallet and depend on me to like keep that stuff working. So, I've kind of stepped back from Counterparty. And as far as the development goes, I'll keep running the stuff to keep users happy. But my focus is elsewhere, building my own platform, XChain platform.

17:19Vlad CosteaThat's interesting. You just call it XChain. But at the same time, it's TokenScan. I'm getting a bit confused here because for the longest time, in order to find the blockchain explorer that shows Counterparty assets, I went to xchain.io. But now it seems like it got rebranded or redirected to TokenScan.

17:40J-DogYes. Yeah. So, for all time, it was the block explorer was essentially called XChain. And rewind about two years ago, before Adam came back, there was some kerfuffle with these guys that created STAMPs and they were kind of not using the blockchain in the most ideal way. So, I wrote a system for them, like a spec saying, if you want to build on Counterparty, build features faster than the core development goes, here's how you can do it. And that was called BTNS, broadcast token naming system. It was essentially like a spec for a whole new naming system with similar features to Counterparty.

18:21And I had lots of fun building that. But I built it and kind of had it all running, but it was an experiment and I put it to the side. And then fast forward six months or so and Adam comes back and I was running everything. It was too much for me. So, I was happy to have Adam come back and hand it over control and said, here you go, just don't change this and this, which he wound up doing anyway. So, XChain, at that time, when I handed control back over to Adam a year ago, I knew I wanted to build on broadcast token naming system and take it from proof of concept to a full multi-chain protocol, because I feel like that's where it's going.

19:06Counterparty is bound to one blockchain at a time like Bitcoin. The token system I built, layers, the indexer and whatnot, I've separated the encoder, decoder and the logic so it can sit and write. It sits on top of many blockchains, because the next thing I think is everybody wants to play with this cross-chain swapping stuff. So, getting back to your question about XChain, a year ago, year and a half ago now, I started a company called Dankest, Javier and I and my friend Ernest did.

19:39And I transferred or sold the xchain.io properties, the asset name, the patent or the trademark and the domain name over to Dankest knowing that I'm going to build a platform. XChain is the perfect name for this, but I don't want to confuse anybody by like, hey, now it's a Counterparty explorer and then one day it's something else. So, I needed a long runway of time where it would be clear that XChain is going to become something else. And so, that's when TokenScan came into play.

20:10Hey, XChain has been sold. It's going to become something else. Now use TokenScan. And it's been over a year that all the traffic has migrated to TokenScan as the Counterparty explorer. So, now xchain.io is free to be used for the explorer and services for the new upcoming XChain platform.

20:31Vlad CosteaI guess part of the reason why Counterparty didn't take off in the early days was that it was a bit hindered by the concerns of Bitcoin Core developers. And there was the so-called OP_RETURN wars. Were you around at the time? Do you have any stories about this?

20:49J-DogI actually took a roundabout way to get into Counterparty. I was in the Bitcoin space at the time, but Bitcoin was kind of boring to me. I didn't really see like buying and selling it was not what interested me. And so, I started mining Dogecoin on day one. And then when Dogeparty, which was a fork of Counterparty, came around, I was like, oh, here's something I can do with my Dogecoin. Buy tokens and sell them and play around. And then the Dogeparty guys didn't really plan ahead too much and maintain the platform.

21:23So, it died pretty quickly. And then I was left with like all these tools that essentially worked for a token system that was copied off of Counterparty. So, then I came over to Counterparty. So, I arrived about six to nine months later, but been around enough to, yes, the OP_RETURN wars. It was Counterparty launching and using OP_RETURN. And then the core developers being like, whoa, this is not how you're supposed to use Bitcoin. This is spam. We don't want to allow this. And I can't remember if it was exactly if OP_RETURN was 80 bytes and they were going to shrink it to 40 or if it was 40 and they had a proposal to make it 80 bytes and then they said no.

22:04But either way, it was clear they were trying to neuter Bitcoin in such a way that it would make it more difficult for Counterparty to exist. I always point, Adam, you know, Counterparty was a great tool that was built with multiple encoding methods. So, OP_RETURN is the most optimum way to do it. But there's other ways. You can use multisig and whatnot. So, essentially Adam was like, look, we're asking permission. We're asking for you guys nicely to work with us. But at the end of the day, we don't need your permission.

22:37We can do it. It will cost a bit more. It will be a bit clunkier. But Counterparty is going to exist. This experimentation is going to happen regardless of if you neuter OP_RETURN or not. We have other methods. So, that was kind of the OP_RETURN wars. And that was also kind of the birth of Ethereum. Vitalik was a Counterparty community member at the time, like way back in the day. And he kind of saw how the core developers of Bitcoin were anti-experimentation and were really kind of draconian.

23:10And they were like, no, this is the use case for Bitcoin. Store value and that's it. We won't support anything else. And so, he kind of like saw, I can't really build an experiment on Bitcoin. So, I got to go build something else. And so, in my opinion, that's one of the reasons why he started up Ethereum, was to be able to kind of experiment and play around with something.

23:34Vlad CosteaI know that ever since the early days, there was this talk that Counterparty is going to get smart contracts and a virtual machine and stuff. That never really happened, as far as I know. But that's what Ethereum turned out to be.

23:34J-DogYeah.

23:34Vlad CosteaDo you believe that if Counterparty was more developed and there was more, I guess, money involved in building it, Ethereum could be obsolete since day one?

24:04J-DogI think they're different mindsets. And to be clear, when the Ethereum virtual machine came out, Adam spent, I don't know how long, a couple of days or a few hours or whatever. And he basically had the Ethereum virtual machine set up and running on Counterparty. And we were about ready. I think he set it up, but it took a while for us to all agree, are we going to go forward with this or not? Because as soon as we pushed this out the door, we're forever bound to the Ethereum virtual machine.

24:36And that was right around the time that the Ethereum DAO hack happened. And funny enough, the birth of Ethereum Classic and Ethereum. And so I think I was a Counterparty Foundation member at the time then. I wasn't really working on the code too much. But we all kind of voted like, no, this is too unstable. We really don't. We could do this, but we're not really that interested in risking the stability of everything we built on this Ethereum virtual machine. And from my perspective, I want a virtual machine in Counterparty and in XChain platform as well, but not like you see with Ethereum.

25:24With Ethereum's smart contracts, the smart contract author has to be a security expert in everything. And one simple mistake or one oversight, you lose everything. It could blow up. You could lose access to the funds. All sorts of bad things can happen because you have total control in the smart contract. And with Counterparty for a number of years, John and I had always kind of envisioned a non-Turing-complete virtual machine where you can write code and do whatever you want in the smart contract, compile it from JavaScript to bytecode.

25:57But then when it came time for the rubber to actually meet the road, you could only use the tried and true features of Counterparty. Like you can have all this logic, but at the end of the day, everything boils down to, is it a send? Is it a broadcast? Is it a setting up a dispenser? So it would kind of balance the, you have a lot more functionality that you could allow developers to write their own contracts. But you also, they don't have to be security experts in everything because at the end of the day, they're relying on the features that have been around for many, many years and that have been working flawlessly.

26:36Vlad CosteaYeah, it could be cool to add some features, but at the same time, you can argue that the dispenser is the OG smart contract. You lock the token in a contract and then if anyone wants to get one of these tokens, they have to pay the amount displayed in Bitcoin. It shouldn't be more complicated than this. Well, it could be for, I guess, automated payments of dividends or stuff like this. I know that Counterparty were super ambitious for its time. It had a betting market, it had a way for people to collect dividends from their tokens.

27:14It had a very advanced way for companies to exist on the Bitcoin blockchain. So they distribute their shares. And I think Samurai Wallet actually did that. They had a Counterparty token and that's a way in which they symbolically transferred shares to investors.

27:36J-DogYeah, yeah. In the early days, Counterparty was more heavily focused on like, this is the new stock market, like for financial things. And then, you know, as the market kind of went elsewhere, it kind of was left in the hands of a whole bunch of people that would love the platform and it turned into something totally different. Same functionality, but it's used for memeing and Rare Pepe coining and, you know, all sorts of fun stuff. Not necessarily financial. You could do the financial stuff, but I would say it's more focused on NFTs and experimentation now than financial aspects.

28:12Vlad CosteaYou mentioned that the Bitcoin Core developers did not like the OP_RETURN data and they said it's spam. But as far as I know, there is another concern that if a Counterparty asset like, let's say, the Nakamoto Pepe or the Homer Simpson Pepe, I think that one is also very expensive. If that one gets sent in a block transaction, it can be much more expensive than the block reward itself and thus might give miners the incentive to double spend that or try to reorg the blockchain because of that asset.

28:46J-DogYeah, this is true. If the block is worth more than the rewards, then it changes the incentives, similar to what we were seeing a year or two ago with Ordinals. You know, people just cram in a whole bunch of transactions into the blocks and, you know, some people are saying, no, we don't want to mine those blocks like Luke Dashjr and whatnot. And, you know, their fees paid on the blocks were far outweighed the block rewards.

29:20Vlad CosteaIt's interesting, but at the same time, it's permissionless fun and you're building something, even though it started out with a pretty corporate idea on how it can be used and ended up being mostly used for memes, as you said. And there are so many legendary collections like Spells of Genesis, like Rare Pepe. And later on, we had the Fake Rares, which was like this resurgence of the Pepe during the peak of the NFT mania. And there was also one with Chinese or Korean girls, if I'm not mistaken.

29:56I don't know exactly.

29:57J-DogYeah, BitGirls.

29:57Vlad CosteaYeah.

30:00J-DogThat was through the exchange Zaif.jp, which is still, I believe they're still around. Yeah, they ran some TV promotion thing with television commercials and vote on these girls and they created cards and they distributed them out. And those are actually pretty hard to get your hands on now.

30:17Vlad CosteaYeah, that was so ahead of its time. Yeah. Like, think about it, just a few years later, maybe this became more of a popular idea on Ethereum. But doing this on Bitcoin so early on, I think it was like 2015 or something.

30:36Yeah. What would you say is part of your top 10? I know people send you a lot of tokens and a lot of their creations and you have quite a collection. And what are some of the assets that you have and you're really proud of them?

30:56J-DogI mean, I got a lot of Rare Pepes. Everybody has like, everybody has Rare Pepes. I mean, I'm proud of my collection there. But I also, I really like collecting stuff. Well, I collect stuff for the artwork, not for the value. And I like the story behind a lot of this stuff. So some of these things I didn't even collect until after the project is already dead and gone. But one thing I spent my time collecting a few years ago, because I think they're really going to have value and they're fun, was Penisium.

31:27They were, you know, penis-based tokens. All the artwork was, you know, dick-related.

31:37And so, yeah, I've collected some of those. Funny enough, I don't really have any, many Spells of Genesis cards.

31:49Vlad CosteaI think there was also Sarutobi or something that basically enabled you to have features in a video game.

31:57J-DogYeah, Sarutobi Island. I think Christian developed that. I think he said he made me an NPC in one of them. And yeah, there's so much experimentation going on really early on in Counterparty. Again, with Christian, he had an app called, I think it was through IndieSquare, but it was called Takara, which was where you could take a token and like drop it anywhere in the world geographically. And people could, you know, use their phone to go to that location, prove they were there, and pick up a token.

32:34So that's how some of the, a good portion of the early Rare Pepes were distributed. Somebody would be like, okay, I'm dropping this in the middle of India, go pick it up. But over time, because the technology was so new, you know, it didn't take very long for, you know, a year or so for people to figure out, oh, I can just GPS spoof where I'm at and then go collect all these things without actually traveling to the location. So I think that's why the app went away.

33:01It got shut down because you couldn't really prove that you were there at the location. Kind of lost the point.

33:07Vlad CosteaThat sounds to me like Pokémon Go, which in 2016 was all the rage. Everyone was playing it.

33:07J-DogOh yes.

33:07Vlad CosteaAnd there were still GPS spoofing, but I think the company behind the project had some ways to prevent that.

33:23J-DogYeah, I think, I believe that Christian relaunched Takara a year or so ago. And I think it's out there now still. But he added some additional component, which is like, you have to, you know, be in that location, you know, turn your head to the right and look down and, you know, tell me what, something that would prove that you're there. I haven't downloaded it to check it out, but I believe I heard that it was back out there and being used again. And I know my friend Exer, he's created a similar thing for Dogecoin.

33:56I think it's Dogeparty Maps or something like that, where it's same exact concept. Drop a token on a map somewhere and collect it.

34:06Vlad CosteaSo for people listening to this, who are not aware who we are talking about, that's Christian Moss. He is a video game developer at Core. And he was on the show like three or four years ago, alongside Shaban Shaame and Koji Higashi. And I know that they worked on some pretty cool projects together. So if you're interested in this side of Bitcoin history and Bitcoin art, I think you should give these guys a follow.

34:37J-DogYeah, Koji did a lot of cool stuff with his Coin and Peace cards, as well as I think Memorychain, he was related to that too. There's a lot of really early collections that have some amazing artwork.

34:51Vlad CosteaAnd it's on your node, nerds.

34:57I want to ask you more about what you're currently doing and what you're building, because we spent a bit of time reminiscing about the past, but I got to plug a couple of ads. So let's start with LayerTwo Labs. These guys are trying to build basically a sidechain for every possible use case on Bitcoin. This can be an interesting conversation to have if you believe that Counterparty can move on a Layer 2 or it's forever tied to the base layer and it will become more expensive to transact and possibly more valuable to collectors.

35:31But they're going to have a sidechain that's called BitAssets, and it's going to be sort of a combination between on one hand Namecoin and on the other hand, Ethereum stuff. And you can test it today on the Bitcoin testnet. You go to layer2labs.com/download, and that's where you find the software. And the other sponsor that tries to build the future of Bitcoin is called Citrea, and they have the zero-knowledge rollup that they are building on Bitcoin, which is basically a way to create Layer 2s while retaining some of the security properties of the Bitcoin base layer.

36:09And their goal more specifically is to bring some of the features, financial features that you find in Ethereum DeFi, such as borrowing, lending, and having all of these bank like interfaces, but without the actual bank, without the trusted third party. So you can check out what they're doing at citrea.xyz. And just like LayerTwo Labs, they also have software that you can download and run on the Bitcoin testnet. And I guess we need some sort of soft forks to get activated so these builders can actually ship production code as opposed to just waiting for core developers to allow them to work, which is interesting.

36:53So do you believe that any of the Counterparty stuff can be transacted on a Layer 2 or is Counterparty forever bound to the base layer?

37:10J-DogTo be honest, I don't know enough about the Layer 2. You're talking about Lightning Network and I don't know enough to be able to answer that. Right now, it's currently bound to the base layer. And given how much work it has taken over the past year to just add a couple of features and optimize things, I'm doubtful that Counterparty can evolve to become a Layer 2 scaling solution. But given enough time and money, anything's possible.

37:47Vlad CosteaNow, maybe it would be possible to swap some of the Rare Pepes or whatever off-chain or transfer UTXO ownership without actually sending a Bitcoin transaction. That's something that's called statechains, if I'm not mistaken.

37:47J-DogMm-hmm.

37:47Vlad CosteaYeah, there's already something like this in place, but it's not user friendly and there's not much of a market for it.

38:14J-DogYeah, this is true.

38:20Vlad CosteaSo what do you currently work on? What keeps you busy? Because some people assume that you quit Counterparty.

38:29J-DogNo, I'm always going to be in the space building. And Counterparty was, you know, a big part of my life for a long time. But it's clear things changed and nothing stays the same. And so it's better that I move on to keep doing what I love, which is building. So I kind of said a little bit about what I was doing, which is I had written this proof-of-concept system called BTNS, which was essentially all the features of Counterparty with some improvements. Because there was a lot of stuff that I wanted to put into Counterparty over the years.

39:13But it's a community, or at least it was, a community driven project. And so you got to get consensus. Like you can't just have an idea, throw it into the protocol and say, I'm doing this. You got to have everybody on board or else we see what happens. You get forks, that sometimes just works. So, what I've been building for the past year or so has been taking BTNS, which was a fully working proof of concept token system. It's like basically Counterparty, except it separates with Counterparty the logic of what's valid and not valid.

39:50And the encoder and decoder are all just really tightly integrated, which can make it a real pain in the ass to work on. And so with BTNS, what I did was I separated the encoder and the decoder so that these are just dumb components that you know, you spit some data at it. And then it puts it into a transaction or it decodes a transaction and properly gets a database, basically with strings. And then a logic indexer, which takes those strings and figures out, OK, split these strings up into parameters, figure out, you know, what action is this?

40:25Is this a send? Where are we sending it back and forth? Is this a dispenser? Is this an order? So really BTNS was kind of the proof of concept of separating the encoder decoder and logic. And I used Counterparty broadcasts as kind of a dumb, easy way to encode and decode. And so I could just throw strings at Counterparty and say, encode this and it would encode a broadcast and then I could decode it. But if you're building a, it was proof of concept because it's not a responsible thing to do to build a token layer on top of an existing token layer.

40:59So the last year I have essentially been taking BTNS, which was written in PHP as proof of concept, and porting it over to JavaScript and separating some more components, encoder, decoder, UTXO tracker, all the stuff that will be needed to run a token platform. A node that you can set up, run it, working on Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Dogecoin. And this is one of the big differences between XChain platform and Counterparty. Counterparty rides on one blockchain. And you had talked about, you know, maybe they'll be able to like swap Rare Pepe for something else on another chain using sidechains or something.

41:50With XChain platform, that comes native. XChain platform just basically uses the blockchains as dumb databases to write data to. And so since we've written a standardized logic component, a standard set of rules that all the tokens on the platform live by, it's pretty easy to swap tokens from one platform to another. So you can have a token on Bitcoin and you can have somebody over on Litecoin that says, hey, I want to swap my Litecoin token for somebody's Bitcoin token. And since you're using the same base logic, that's possible.

42:27You can swap between any of the supported tokens. And right now we're just launching with support for Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Dogecoin. But it can very easily, like within a day or so, add another blockchain. It's just a small configuration file, some tweaks to say this is how this blockchain's transactions are encoded and decoded. And then you can add support and you get the benefits of all of this huge token system where you can swap back and forth as well as all the same functionality that Counterparty has.

43:00Vlad CosteaWell, that's interesting. And some people from the community like Cornholio the Great were claiming that you centralized developments around yourself. And that it was increasingly hard to run a Counterparty node.

43:19J-DogThat's what some people are saying. However, I do not share that opinion. If you look at my history, everything has been done through Counterparty improvement proposals, an official process where somebody proposes an idea, the community talks about it, a developer writes up, this is what we want to happen into an official proposal, then the community kind of gets consensus around it, and then it goes into development. When Adam came back, all that got thrown out. All the improvement proposals, everything, essentially was like, nah, this is the old way of doing things.

43:54We don't need community to talk anymore about what's best and what we want. No, we care only about the people who interact on GitHub, the small set of developers who happen to go to this little window of GitHub and say, hey, I think this is great or this is not great. Those are the only opinions that matter in the current version of Counterparty. There is no discussion of features out in the open. So you could say, yeah, I mean, I kind of understand his opinion. It's tough.

44:25Consensus is tough. And if people want to add things or don't like things, getting everybody on board to agree this is a good idea is tough. But that's what we were doing for eight, nine years. Progress is slow. Now it's entirely different. All that thought process of community-driven project, from my opinion, is thrown out the window. And the only people that matter are the people that are smart enough to go on to GitHub and say, hey, I don't like this. And it's not even like they talk about ideas out in the open and then talk about it.

45:00They do whatever the hell they want on GitHub. And if anybody happens to monitor what's going on and happens to object, then they still, from my opinion, they still generally ignore. So if you look at all the activity that's been going on in GitHub in the past year, there's very few with a whole bunch of comments on them. And the ones that had the most activity are like dispensers where a huge portion, at least 50% of the people were saying, this is a bad idea. I don't support this.

45:29Don't do this. What did they do? They did it anyway. So in my opinion, it's no longer a community-driven project that is driven by consensus. It's driven by Adam and the small set of developers that rah rah behind him on GitHub.

45:47Vlad CosteaSo how do you measure consensus or how was it done when you were the main maintainer?

45:52J-DogThat was a difficult thing because there was a lot of stuff that I wanted to get into the protocol that I could have very easily forced into the protocol to get my way, but I never did. And including a really big problem, which was numeric fees or fees on numerics. Like when STAMPs guys came around, they were basically beating the heck out of the system. The system couldn't really handle it that well. And so there was a proposal like, Hey, let's put fees on these to make them pay a small fee for beating on the database.

46:22Just like every other asset in the system pays a XCP fee. And at that time there was like 90, 95% consensus. Consensus is really hard and there's no set path of, Hey, this is how we gather consensus. So you just generally listen to the views of everyone that you interact with. And if the majority of them, the huge majority of them are, yeah, this is a good thing. And you only have one or two people saying, nah, this is horrible. Then you can kind of feel like you have consensus, but even with items where there's, you know, like with the fees thing, even when we, you know, at the time we took a vote via XCP, a vote in polls, a vote with asset.

47:07I mean, we collected like five or six different metrics to say, should we, or should we not add these fees to numerics? And overwhelmingly it was like 80, 90, no, actually it was like 90, 95% people saying yes. And still, I didn't feel that that was enough to push a change forward. So we have, Adam and I have very different views on how you determine consensus. And I feel like my metric is a bit higher in that you got to get everybody on board. And even when it's clear that not everybody's on board and there's a lot of people objecting, Adam feels fine pushing forward with what he feels is best for the protocol.

47:47Which is, it's fine. I handed over control back to him. It's his baby now. He could take it in the direction he wants, but I'm not really seeing the promised land of, you know, what was, what he promised a year and a half ago. Like we're going to do atomic swaps. It's going to onboard all these people. We're going to be able to integrate with Ordinals. It's going to be great. In my opinion, that's not truly thinking outside the box and innovating, it's chasing liquidity and Ordinals.

48:13Oh, the Ordinals money's over there. Let's go over there and copy what they're doing, try to integrate with their ecosystem. So if you look at what they've actually done over the past year, yeah, they've sped up the database and some parsing changed a whole bunch of stuff internally. But features they've actually put out are atomic swaps and numeric sub-assets, the ability to create a sub-asset on numeric, which they demanded like, oh, there's a high demand for this. It's been out since October. It's a total of like 20 that have been created since October.

48:47And if you look at even on their own explorer, because I don't support atomic swaps on my explorer. But if you go to their explorer and you look at the actual number of atomic swaps that have happened since they launched, there's like 30 over a course of like six months. So this feature that they forced on people and saying, this is the way forward, I just feel like they're out of touch with the community. He has a group of developers that are like, yes, this is great.

49:12This is awesome. But Counterparty is a hell of a lot bigger than a small segment of developers. Like that's a cool tool. Let's do that. You got to listen to the larger community who are the users. And I think as time has gone on, it's showing that that's the case because we're not really, I'm not really seeing any kind of adoption and Counterparty's numbers are pretty low.

49:35Vlad CosteaSo in the context of Bitcoin, atomic swap usually means when you're getting funds from Bitcoin into Lightning and from Lightning into Bitcoin or going on the, no, that's a submarine swap. I'm sorry. I got to correct myself. The atomic swap is on the Lightning Network when you swap between different blockchains. So, for example, if you swap assets between Bitcoin and Liquid or Bitcoin and Litecoin or something else, what does atomic swap mean in the context of Bitcoin?

50:08J-DogSo, previously all the Counterparty assets or tokens were bound to an address. And so you would have to have an address to set, you know, the owner of that address would log in and say, I want to send it to this address. So all tokens were address-based and moved around based off of that. Now with their atomic swaps, they add the ability for you to take a token and bind it to a specific UTXO in a transaction. And then what they can do is essentially it's gone from a Counterparty specific thing to like a thing in Bitcoin.

50:46It's no longer a token that only lives in Counterparty. It's a token that has been moved into a UTXO that standardized Bitcoin tools can use. So, atomic swap in their context is moving a token into a UTXO and then that UTXO to a new user, like somebody will swap Bitcoin for, you know, for a token and then detach it to return the item back to their, to the address.

51:18Vlad CosteaOkay, so you're saying that this feature was not very popular among users?

51:26J-DogYeah, you can go look at, I think Horizon, here, let me pull it up. horizon.market. And if you click on atomic swaps, and you go click sales, not people who are like creating swaps, like hopeful of swaps, but actual swaps. If you click on sales, you will see the last sale was March 17, one month ago. So 30 days without any, there might be people saying, hey, it's like setting up a dispenser and getting a sale on a dispenser. You might be setting up a bunch of dispensers, but as far as actual sales happening, there's none.

52:05There was one on March 17, a handful in February, like 15. So and there's, you know, four pages. We're, you know, talking like, maybe a hundred successful times where people have taken a token, moved it to a UTXO, and then detached, sold it to somebody and then detached it back to their, to an address. So from my perspective, no, that's not. That's not very, very good adoption.

52:38Vlad CosteaJust a second. I'm trying to get this on the screen to show.

52:38J-DogSure.

52:42Vlad CosteaWait, I was in the settings of OBS. Oh, I found it. Okay. Sorry for people waiting to see this. I'm just going to make it happen. So, okay, atomic swaps on Horizon. Just going to do them here. I got to move it up to become visible. There we go.

53:14So we can use this to evaluate whether or not these features are popular and, you know, just test your claims because I don't want people to take anything at face value here. Of course, everyone should verify. Yeah, put this in the middle of our video. So what we have here is horizon.market/atomic-swaps.

53:45J-DogYep. And if you click the sales tab up near the top.

53:51Vlad CosteaYeah, someone bought XCP in March.

53:55J-DogYeah, in March. And before that, you know, there are a couple sales, but we're talking, you know, sort of feature that is the new latest and greatest thing. I would expect to see, you know, at least a handful, like maybe one every day. So if you look at dispensers, the thing that they kind of crippled and said, there's still a good amount of use on that. Let me pull up TokenScan and see dispensers or dispenses.

54:30Yeah, two hours ago, there was a swap 11 hours ago, 19 hours ago, a day ago, there was five, two days ago, there was five, three days ago, there was, you know, eight. So again, Counterparty activity is pretty low right now. But if you look at what people are actually using on the system, it's the old stuff. It's dispensers. It's not the new way of doing things.

54:59Vlad CosteaNow I realize why when I presented, so I put this artwork during my interview with Adam. It's called DAVIDPEPEBTC, and it's a drawing by my girlfriend of the statue of David that you can find in Florence holding a Bitcoin instead of the slingshot. And he's a Pepe. So it's pretty cool artwork, but I put this in a dispenser. And now I understand why I got no reaction from Adam at all. And also, I guess no action. Nobody bought any of these. And I put them for like $10 or whatever. Yeah, 20.

55:39J-DogYeah, I noticed he was a little displeased with you saying FreeWallet and pulling up things on TokenScan rather than his explorer.

55:48Vlad CosteaIn reality, this is what I know. And these are the tools with which I'm accustomed and they're open source. They are pretty time tested. I have been planning to try Horizon. It's just that I find it difficult to migrate, you know? Yeah. And the question is, what's going to happen to all the dispensers that were put out there and were not closed? Are they going to get closed by default? Are these assets...

56:16J-DogNo, dispensers on Counterparty, they stay open forever. On XChain platform, I made it so you can set a date where they expire. But on Counterparty, they stay open forever. So if you created a dispenser, excuse me, three, four years ago and walked away from it's still open and selling things. The only difference now is that it went from here's a dispenser where anybody that has Bitcoin in any wallet can buy from your dispenser to now the only people that can buy from your dispenser are the people who specifically download FreeWallet, Rare Pepe Wallet or Horizon Wallet.

56:57So a lot smaller of a fishing net for potential sales.

57:04Vlad CosteaTo me, this Horizon Market looks a lot more like the Ordinals marketplace, and I think it's a good moment to get into this conversation about Ordinals because they came along in 2022, I think, and they were sort of a big deal. People started minting them for the simple reason that they could embed the JPEG or the compressed image, they could put it within the transaction. It was, of course, more expensive, but it was interesting. And for people coming from Ethereum, it was a way to get rid of the previous reliance on IPFS or other data storage solutions.

57:47So this one actually promised to be more permanent and much more secure, and for a while it had a pretty large market. Would you say that the emergence of Ordinals was beneficial or detrimental to Counterparty?

58:09J-DogI would say it was beneficial in that I'm all for anybody creating their own token platform and experimenting with stuff. It did make some people aware of like, oh, this has been done before, not the on-chain embedding of data. I mean, it had been done on Counterparty, but not at scale. So I would say it helped Counterparty to some degree in that it brought a lot more of the Ethereum-focused developers back to being of the mindset like, oh, well, we can do development on Bitcoin.

58:44And I think that's why kind of Ordinals blew up. Not necessarily, yes, it's great. You can encode your image on the blockchain. And initially it was a huge rush of like, I'm going to be the first to do this. But as time has gone on, you know, it's, I lost my train of thought.

59:06Vlad CosteaSo you're talking about people rushing to get a specific number in Ordinals. I also did that. I have some sub 10,000 assets that I created. I actually tried. So I have this collection on Counterparty. It's called Bitcoin Heads. You can still find it on BTCheads.com. And I wanted to get the images of these assets away from Imgur and into Ordinals. So what I did was to basically mint most of them, I think, as Ordinal inscriptions. Cost me a lot of money to do that. A lot of Bitcoin was spent.

59:42And then I could not figure out how to link them. And I do know that right now you can change the description of your Counterparty asset and you type ORD and then you can type, I'm not sure exactly, the description of your ordinal asset. Was it you who built that or was it Adam?

1:00:03J-DogNo, it was me. It was me. And that's not actually a protocol level thing. It was kind of just, back in the day, like a year, two years ago, before the whole kind of rift between some of the Counterparty developers and basically before the fallout between Joe Looney and Sean Leary and some of the other Rare Pepe scientists and I. We all were Rare Pepe scientists, sat in a room, chatted all day long. And Joe was really into Ordinals. He was like, Hey, check it out. I encoded all of the Counterparty code base into an ordinal.

1:00:35Hey, check out what I did, this image stuff. And so he was really excited about Ordinals and he wanted to experiment around with it. And he was like, Hey, if I, you know, we need to be able to tie these two things together. And I had already written, when Counterparty first started, you could take some J... like, you could take and change the asset description to some JSON and have it be pointing to an image and whatnot. But that was very limited. And then over time, like I added, just since I ran the main explorer, added more and more hacks to allow people.

1:01:07Oh, well, if you make your, if you make your description, IMGR slash some special code, then it will show the image from Imgur or IPFS and the transaction hash, which it will get, load, get the file and we basically would, in the explorer, go off and get this image or whatever the data is from a third party service. And so Joe was like, I want to play around with Ordinals some more. Can we show them in the Counterparty explorer? And I was like, yeah, sure. I mean, it's no big deal.

1:01:32Sure. We'll take an ORD as the prefix and then the transaction, I think it was the transaction hash of the inscription or whatnot. And then he built, I believe he built like a really simple tool where it's like, I just threw him the transaction hash. He would go off to the Ordinals network, pull, or, you know, go off on the Bitcoin network, pull whatever the data was and spit it back at me. So it made it really easy to integrate on my explorer.

1:02:01All I did was like, tell people to put ORD on the transaction hash. And then whenever I encountered that, I just passed that along to a URL that Joe had, which would decode it and spit back the image data. And then eventually I wrote all of those little hacks to show images in a standard way. Well, there was a ton of different ways to show data and none of it was really kind of documented. People were like, well, I know if I do this, it works.

1:02:27And at that, so I wanted to like document all the different ways you could get images on tokens and what you could associate it with in a kind of standardized format. And so that's when I wrote CIP 25, Counterparty Improvement Proposal 25, which has since been thrown in the garbage can by Adam, but it's still implemented. And funny enough, it's implemented in big part on his explorer, even though I threw the CIP out. But it's basically includes all those funky descriptions like ORD, IPFS and tells users how they can link image content or content of any kind with the token through the asset description field.

1:03:07Vlad CosteaYou gave me some very bad news. I was not aware that there was a fallout between Sean Leary and Joe Looney. These guys were so...

1:03:15J-DogNo, they're good. They're good with each other. They're still, like, Frick and Frack. It was just me. I'm the toxic core developer, the outlier. Yeah, so that's, yeah. When the, when the core, or when Counterparty core developer or not, yeah. Counterparty core developers came back and I started saying, look, I don't approve of this. Like, you're not listening to the community. But it's kind of personal between Joe and I, and Sean, not so much, like Sean was a good friend. But just how they've reacted in the past year or two to some of this stuff.

1:03:53It's best that we part ways. So about a year and a half ago, I left the Rare Pepe scientists group and kind of stepped down and it's been downhill from there.

1:04:05Vlad CosteaOh, that's sad to hear. Right now, I have on my screen MINSPACEHEAD, which is the head of MikeInSpace. It's the sixth head in my collection. And I want to ask you about the STAMPs because that was another turning point, right? For Counterparty in FreeWallet, you enabled basically people to manage and send, and I'm not sure if also issue some STAMPs and STAMPs are basically the less scalable way of doing Ordinals. In the case of Ordinals, it's still a pretty cool way that is scalable, but in the case of STAMPs, you don't put the data on the witness side of the block.

1:04:49You put it the good old fashioned way. You pay about three or four times more to embed the data, but you have the guarantee of permanence. No node on the network can actually...

1:04:49J-DogIt's unprunable, yeah.

1:04:49Vlad CosteaYeah, it cannot be dropped. And MikeInSpace came up with this. Of course, the idea is not new. Embedding data in Bitcoin has been around for a long time, but there was no market for this. And all of a sudden you had these people inscribing on Bitcoin thinking that it's permanent.

1:05:20And MikeInSpace, I think he played two major roles in this. First of all, he proved to everyone that there's a much worse way to do it than Ordinal inscriptions. So if you complain that Ordinals are spam, just wait until you discover how STAMPs work. And on the other hand, you also raised awareness about the fact that unless there's someone who's running nodes that store all the data, there's a chance that in the future, your Ordinal inscriptions will disappear if there's consensus among users to drop the witness data.

1:05:54J-DogYeah, there's always going to be full archival nodes. So in my opinion, the whole unprunable versus prunable is kind of a silly argument. Yes. Some users will choose to run lightweight nodes, maybe even if 80% choose to run lightweight nodes and prune all the data, you know, prune just... there's still 20, 30%. You know, there's always going to be hardcore maxis who are like, I want all the data regardless. So in my opinion, you're never going to be at risk of losing all of the image data.

1:06:23And yes, STAMPs is very different from Ordinals. Like you were saying, you know, Ordinals stored their data in the witness area where you could, you could prune, but with STAMPs, they store it in the UTXO set, which is, yes, it is, quote unquote, unprunable, but it's also it's heavily abusive to Bitcoin, it explodes the UTXO set. So basically, the UTXO set, for those who don't know, is like, it's all of the Bitcoin that has been moved from one place to another.

1:07:01And it's just kind of sitting up in the it's like the bank account of Bitcoin, you have the history down here, the current balances of everything. And so what they were doing was permanently adding, for lack of a better word, bank accounts to the Bitcoin block to the mempool, not mempool to the UTXO set. And then throwing away the key, like basically burning them and saying, you know, hey, here's a bank account, we'll put some some Bitcoin in it, and we're throwing it away, which that was kind of the turning point with me and STAMPs too.

1:07:34When STAMPs first came out, I was really supportive. I was like, eh, unprunable versus prunable. It was a silly argument, but this will get some relevance on Counterparty. It does bring, you know, some some people to Counterparty. It shows that you can still do some really fun stuff. And I fully supported STAMPs early on, I created a site called TokenStamps, because early on, MikeInSpace had kind of a limited mindset of only numeric assets that are free should be considered STAMPs. And I was like, well, for my opinion, STAMPs is like an encoding method.

1:08:07You're just taking some image data, honking it into Base64 and broadcasting it out there. So you shouldn't limit it to just these small set of, you know, assets. It should be everything. So I created a site called TokenStamps.io in the first month or so, which indexed all STAMPs, not just what Mike was saying was Bitcoin Stamps, but all STAMPs, including ones on named assets and whatnot. But then, you know, as the STAMPs kind of got more and more traction, you know, that's when they kind of, in my opinion, went the wrong way and said, well, in addition to being able to, you know, make our stuff unprunable and put it in the UTXO set, we're going to throw the keys away.

1:08:53I was on board when it's like, yeah, it bloats the blockchain, it bloats the UTXO set, putting your image data in there. But at the end of the day, people can still run a script and go collect that Bitcoin that was sitting in those bank accounts and close those bank accounts out and reduce the UTXO set. But with, you know, Mike and his team, they decided to do key burn, which is essentially creating a bank account in the UTXO set and throwing the key away so it can never be, you know, so permanently makes this UTXO set bigger and bigger, which actually makes Bitcoin more centralized because the blockchain lives on disk space.

1:09:34Like the blockchain itself, you know, you can write it once and forget about it. The UTXO set has to live in memory of every single Bitcoin node. And so for many, many years, you'd be able to run Bitcoin nodes on like Raspberry Pis, like some tiny little thing with just a little bit of memory, like eight gigs of memory. But when you start abusing that UTXO set and making the set of data larger and larger and larger that they have to keep track of, what you wind up doing is making it more difficult for those small miners, or not miners, but those small people running nodes on less good hardware to do that.

1:10:10And so it centralized, from my opinion, it centralizes Bitcoin in that you make it more difficult for people to run nodes because now instead of only needing eight gigs, you need 16 gigs, 32, 64. And if you play it out, it's not scalable. So that was kind of when I turned the corner on STAMPs and was like, I was really supportive of you guys. I mean, I was there in the first 100 STAMPs or so. I mean, I got whole bunches of them sent to me. But when I turned the corner, I was like, look, I can't really be supportive.

1:10:40I'm supportive of this anymore. I sent all of them back. I didn't want anybody to accuse me of like, hey, you collected all these rare STAMPs and then you turned your back on it. So I was like, look, I stand on business. I can't support this anymore because I feel it's abusive. But I don't want anybody to feel I'm taking advantage of them. Here's all these STAMPs. Everybody who sent me a STAMP, I sent them back.

1:11:01Vlad CosteaYeah, I remember MikeInSpace messaged me like a week before he launched STAMPs and said, oh, you should join this movement and blah, blah, blah, especially if you like pixel art. And my collection on Counterparty is not pixel art. I'm not really into that. He was trying to embed these very tiny, of course, it's more expensive to put images on the blockchain. So there has to be a lot of compression. And once you compress files a lot, you're going to end up with pixels that are visible.

1:11:33So there's no clarity. It made sense for him to start collections that are pixelized. But I was just not into that. And then I saw that there was a greater movement that started with people. I think it was sort of a nihilistic moment in Bitcoin history where they said, well, if bloating the UTXO set is going to destroy Bitcoin, then we're just going to do this with memes, that maybe it was never meant to work.

1:12:02J-DogYeah, yeah. I remember that argument like saying that as well. To their credit, you know, even though I didn't agree with the implementation of putting the data in the UTXO and throwing the keys away. The pixel art side of things, and only being able to write a smaller amount of data. So therefore, you had to really write, like you were saying, you had to do pixel art, like it was very, very small. It gave everything kind of a retro 80s, early 80s, 90s feel. And it really did push some cool innovations in like, okay, I can only deal with a small file size.

1:12:45What can I do with this? Oh, crap, there's SVGs, which can be small file size, but I can do vector graphics. And so you saw people really pushing the limits of what you could do graphically with a tiny image or with a tiny amount of data written. And there was some real cool stuff. I think somebody wrote a game that plays, it was a STAMP that's encoded, like I said, SVGs, vector graphics, maybe four or 5K, but it can scale out and look amazing. So to Mike's credit, I don't agree with him on everything, but he did really drive good adoption of creating some creativity and how do you use the small amount of data for the maximum punch.

1:13:31Vlad CosteaYou think there's going to be a future when everything, so Ordinals and STAMPs and Counterparty and even Omni assets like Tether or whatever are all going to be under the same interface and there's interoperability between them?

1:13:53J-DogThat's not to say, because that's kind of what I feel like I'm building with XChain is like a standardized set where you can interoperate with among multiple blockchains, but it's building a new system and expecting people to build their tokens on everything on different blockchains in the new system. As far as all of these separate ecosystems integrating with each other, that's a tough task because there would have to be some higher level framework where they wouldn't have to worry about the details of, oh, I'm going to go moving a token from Counterparty to an ordinal and how the Counterparty developers need to learn the Ordinals encoding method and vice versa, which is where we're at now.

1:14:39Like Adam, Counterparty is like, oh, we want to do Ordinals. So what do they do? Let's copy it. So they kind of figure out how to mesh the gears with each other. I don't think you're going to get much scaling that way. You might get a few features, but I don't think you're going to see mass adoption of being able to swap tokens from one platform to another to another until there's some overlying architecture that makes it really easy for every ecosystem to plug into. Where it's not Counterparty plugging into Omni or whatever.

1:15:13It's Counterparty plugging into something up here that then moves it over to Omni so that they, you know, so that the higher level has done all of the work of integrating with the individual platforms rather than the platforms that are just focused on their own stuff integrating with each other.

1:15:28Vlad CosteaIt's just weird because you have all of these islands that are not connected and there are small communities or even large communities. I think in the case of Ordinals, because there was so much money that was pumped into that protocol and you had VCs investing in collections and you have the Taproot Wizards and you have a bunch of guys who are still making money selling Ordinals. So I think there's a huge market and there's a large potential there. But on the other hand, Counterparty has the history.

1:15:59So if there is a way to unite them in one interface, I know that Emblem Vault or whatever are trying to bridge these assets to Ethereum or other blockchains where it's easier to sell them on marketplaces. And there's also more of a degenerate culture where people trade this. But it would be nice to also have this on Bitcoin somehow to allow people to transcend the whole store of value narrative and just buy art or assets that are part of the Bitcoin history. I think Counterparty and Ordinals and everything else, even BRC-20s, they are representations of the status quo of Bitcoin at a certain point in time.

1:16:44And they're sort of artifacts. When historians of the future will study Bitcoin, I don't think they will look at transactions between people as much as they will look at data that users have put into the blocks and try to understand the meaning behind them. Why people were willing to pay a lot of money, at least in their time when Bitcoin will probably be like a million dollars or more just to put this stupid JPEG on the blockchain to have it immortalized. It's like, I don't know, it's like making graffiti or painting in a cave when you're a caveman or something.

1:17:22It's something that needs significance and interpretation.

1:17:29J-DogYeah, I agree.

1:17:31Vlad CosteaI think Theo Goodman is very good at presenting the argument for this. He was very compelling last year in a presentation that he did in Frankfurt. That's where I met him. And he, as far as I know, organized a lot of these auctions for NFTs on Counterparty. He's responsible for keeping the market alive even beyond the NFT mania. And he was saying that he's very hopeful that in the next few years there's going to be a return and these assets are going to be in demand and people are going to appreciate them much more.

1:18:10Right now, I think the market is moving past the meme coin era and maybe that beyond meme coins, we're going to chase meaning much more. Do you have any opinion about this? Do you like the NFT movement?

1:18:27J-DogI didn't really feel like I was participating in the NFT movement. For a lot of us, we were just... the Rare Pepe scientists and the Rare Pepe people. We were just slapping images on tokens and having fun trading. So that aspect of things and giving them away for free, that aspect of things was really fun. The sense of community that everything created. When I think of NFTs, I know Counterparty has what we call NFTs and whatnot, but I think in my mind, NFTs were Ethereum and their focus was very different.

1:19:07Their focus was VC backed and, hey, we're going to create 10,000 almost identical PFPs and pump them for the maximum amount of money and whatnot versus Counterparty. It was like, hey, check it out. I created a Pepenopolis or a frog on a toilet picture and everybody would laugh. Hey, you want it? Cool. Let's swap it back and forth. So the focus of NFTs, I felt, was more VC money oriented, whereas Counterparty's tokens were, in my mind, more pure. That being said, it was nice that after Ethereum invented NFTs and all of that kind of played out then, and the Emblem Vaults came around and kind of enabled people to buy some of these early things, predated everything that happened on Ethereum.

1:19:58It was nice to see an influx of new users and funds coming into Counterparty. So yeah, I have mixed feelings on NFTs. I'm glad I participated, but a little part in the early beginning.

1:20:15Vlad CosteaI got to plug a couple more sponsors and then I will ask you more about your work on Counterparty. So let's say that someone wants to pay you in stablecoins, but you don't want to hold stablecoins. You don't want to set up a stablecoin wallet and you just want to receive Bitcoin. You tell them, you know, man, I want to get paid in Bitcoin, and they say, no, this is what we have, we have USDT.

1:20:36Just set up Tron, and you don't want to do that. So you go to SideShift.ai. You paste your Bitcoin address in there. You're going to go to a screen where you're being asked to send USDT to a specific address. That's what you send to the party that wants to pay you in stablecoins. And once they do make the payment, you're going to get BTC to your wallet. So you don't have to stress about doing this swap yourself or trying to find a place that accepts USDT.

1:21:06You can get Bitcoin directly to your wallet. Check out SideShift.ai. You can use it for a lot more use cases, but I don't necessarily endorse them. Like, you want to buy the Trump coin? I guess you can do that. You want to buy some Sonic, Obama, Harry Potter, Inu 10? I think that's also available. So yeah, it's there. It doesn't mean that I endorse it. And none of what I'm saying here is financial advice. Don't sue me. And there's also Bitcoin.com news, which is sponsoring the show.

1:21:40I discovered like a few months ago that they finally learned the difference between BTC and BCH, which has been a point of contention for a few years. And I also discovered that they do pretty good journalism and they cover topics from all around the world, which are not as US-centric as they were before. So I tune in sometimes and I read news about gold. I read news about what's happening in Asia or Africa or parts of the world that maybe Bitcoin Magazine does not cover because they're so focused on Trump right now.

1:22:13So check them out. I think they have pretty good news reporting. And it's cool to have Bitcoin.com finally a Bitcoin website and not have this infighting in the community. And maybe that this is also going to happen in Counterparty soon. I don't know. I hope you guys will come to some sort of resolution to your dispute and not deal with forks and whatever. Just unify your vision and build something for users.

1:22:49J-DogYeah. No, there's a reason I haven't, I mean, yes, there's Counterparty Classic and the old version exists, but I have not pushed people towards it. I still have the main version of FreeWallet, still uses the current version of Counterparty. So my intention is not to have two versions of Counterparty and try to be warring against each other and driving people towards my version of Counterparty. I still think everybody should, you know, the majority of people are still on the main Counterparty and which is why, you know, it's the front page of TokenScan and what FreeWallet uses.

1:23:29So as to your hope, we can come back. I think Counterparty Classic will always exist, but I think it will go, you know, eventually not many people are going to use it and my focus will be elsewhere as it is now on XChain. So I hope the best for Counterparty and that Adam figures it out.

1:23:51Vlad CosteaAn hour ago or so we talked about the fact that there was this OP_RETURN war and Bitcoin Core developers were discouraging the existence of Counterparty. It has resisted these attacks. The assets are still alive. The dispensers are still there. People are still collecting some, I guess, tokens that are fond to their hearts or maybe that they bring them back to a certain moment in Bitcoin history when they first started and everything was more exciting. What makes you think that Counterparty still has a future? Because I guess it died a thousand deaths and it had a lot of users coming and going over the years.

1:24:34And what makes you think that it's going to be a winning protocol and it's not going to get killed or worse of all, worst of all, it's not going to fade into obscurity for a decade or longer?

1:24:49J-DogI feel like there's always been, and even recently, like other protocols that have overshadowed Counterparty. So will Counterparty always exist? I think so. I think there's always going to be, even if all the current developers walked away and whatnot, there's always going to be a hardcore group of Counterparty users who will just keep it alive because they love it. And they want to allow people to trade their Rare Pepes and whatnot. And like, kind of like you were saying, some of the work done here was like, you know, the Ten Commandments.

1:25:30I mean, it's really old. You got to go way back, but there's so much historical value in Counterparty. I don't think it's going to go away forever. I think there's so much value stored in these early experiments and tokens that there's always going to be people interested in keeping it alive. And at least at the very minimum, allowing people to buy and sell and swap tokens, all the functionality that it has now, as far as will it be able to explode and, you know, overtake some of these other protocols and become like the de facto standard?

1:26:06I don't see it happening. I mean, maybe it could, but I'm trying to think of the past there. And so far what I've seen is added features that are not really being adopted. Adding a virtual machine would be great, but it's probably going to be one of these drop-in replacement virtual machines like BitVM or something that already exists. And so I don't really see, from my perspective, much true innovation happening in Counterparty in the future. What I see is like chasing the features of what other people have.

1:26:47Like we have this and look what those guys have the liquidity. Let's go try to integrate with them or let's go over here and try to copy the feature that they have with the atomic swaps or whatnot. I'm not seeing too much outside of the box thinking like, you know, with sub-assets and dispensers and some of the features that really helped Counterparty shine on its own. That's not to say that that couldn't happen. But as to your original question, I don't think Counterparty is going away.

1:27:19It's always going to be around. And I think Adam and team, he swore he's back for good, not stepping away again. But if he ever did, you know, there would be other people that would step in and keep it alive.

1:27:36Vlad CosteaWhat I think Adam said when I asked him the same question is that sort of the people doing stuff on chain and putting data on the Bitcoin blockchain have won the culture war in the sense that it's not as taboo anymore. And it's proven that there is a market for it. And now since we have SegWit and Taproot, you can actually insert data at a much lower cost. And it's much more socially acceptable than it was before because of the development of markets.

1:28:10J-DogYeah, this is true.

1:28:10Vlad CosteaI've also asked this question. I'm curious, what's your definition of it? Because for Ordinals, there was this Runes protocol that basically does what Counterparty does with OP_RETURN. And I was going to ask you, what's the difference between a Counterparty asset and a rune?

1:28:32J-DogI can't answer that. I've been so focused on Counterparty over the years, like when I was main lead developer when I didn't even have any time to like play around. It was all the community members like Joe Looney be like, hey, I'm playing with this and I'm playing with this and I get feedback to them. I never dove into Runes. Don't hold any. I have a very few amount of Ordinals that people sent my wallet. I haven't really don't have much experience with playing around with some of those other protocols.

1:28:57Vlad CosteaI've also discovered during our interview that you own 1.8% of the Vlad head supply. I sent 18 cards to you and now they're worth according to the valuation, which I don't think is based on anything but one trade. You own about $122,000 in Vlad head cards.

1:29:21J-DogOh, well, thank you very much.

1:29:21Vlad CosteaNumber one of the Bitcoin Heads collection. Good luck selling it, though. I don't think there are too many people right now.

1:29:31J-DogIf you look at my wallet, you know, I think I'm worth like 16 quadrillion dollars or something. But in reality, those numbers are nowhere near that.

1:29:44Vlad CosteaIt's really funny on Counterparty because the way the price of something gets indexed is that if there's only one trade where maybe the issuer buys from themselves using another wallet, they can basically pump the price. Of course, if there is enough liquidity and demand, they're going to bring down the price and rationalize it to a floor that actually makes sense. But for all of these small cap assets that are just made for fun, I guess it makes sense when you first issue something to also buy one from a dispenser just to prove to people who received it for free that they should not look at it like it's worth nothing.

1:30:23Like they should attribute it some sort of value, say, oh, this is worth like $10. I should hold it or whatever or see if I can sell it to someone else.

1:30:33J-DogYeah, unfortunately, a lot of those low volume coins, you know, scammers have picked up on and most people in the Counterparty community are pretty smart, like how they're not going to buy, you know, spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on something with low liquidity. But we have seen a good amount of scammers who like over the years will create a token, give it like a really high evaluation and try to like sell it to people as that. Or like there's some scammers that went and did that and then airdropped.

1:31:04And it's been going on for like three, four years, airdrop that high value token to holders of XCP in order to drive people to their token to see an asset description which says, hey, log in here at this URL to get your coins or whatever. And it's a fake Counterwallet site. And as soon as somebody enters their 12 word passphrase in, boom, the scammer has access to their wallet. I've done my best in TokenScan to detect those and just not show the asset description.

1:31:36But yeah, there is some downsides to being able to set your own price and trade with yourself in some of those low liquidity situations.

1:31:46Vlad CosteaYeah, but at the same time, it's a pretty nice free market where anyone can come up with names and ideas. Something about which I've been wondering is there any way for... So assets on Counterparty can be named if you pay half of an XCP token, I think. Is there any way to use names maybe that are super old after a while? Because you can basically spam the network and register a lot of these domains and then use them whenever they get popular. But this prevents future users from building something meaningful using that name.

1:32:24You can squat indefinitely on domains. And I was wondering if there is any way for these old domains to get put up for auction or something.

1:32:37J-DogThere has been some talk in the past, I think JP Janssen put up a Counterparty Improvement Proposal before that system was junked that said we should add a way for people to auction off their old asset names. But again, we never reached consensus on integrating it in. So there's lots of great ideas that have been proposed, but never made it into Counterparty. It's worth mentioning that, yeah, there is a lot of squatted assets. That's when I first came to Counterparty. I mean, I started on Dogeparty and registered assets by hand.

1:33:13But when I came to Counterparty, I had learned a lot. And so I ran some scripts that registered like 40,000 asset names. So I own a good amount of them with that exact thinking. I'm squatting on this for some future person, like JP Morgan. I since burned JPM Chase. But like for JP Morgan or whatnot, like I saw the value, you buy it now, and then maybe down the road, you'll be able to sell it for something. And I actually wrote a CoinDaddy asset escrow transfer service for that, where asset owners could like, because there's no way to say, hey, I'm willing to sell this.

1:33:47So I created a service where you can verify your address and list your assets for sale and take anonymous offers to buy and sell off. But getting back to your question about how you give value to these old tokens, that used to be back in the day, you would register a token. You were set forever. Like if you created 1.0 token, divisible or non-divisible, your supply was set forever. And then I think in the first year or two, JP Janssen put forth the Counterparty Improvement Proposal, I think CIP 3, which was like, hey, if the person owns 100% of the supply, they should be able to like reset the supply, like reset it back to zero, destroy whatever.

1:34:30Because a lot of people, myself included, registered asset names with divisible or non-divisible. And when you sell it to somebody, at the time it was divisible. Everybody wanted divisible. Now everybody wants non-divisible. So John and I added... no, it was Javier and I, this was after John passed. We implemented that feature where if you're an asset owner of an asset and you own 100% of the supply, you can essentially reissue the supply and it destroys all the current supply and reissues it.

1:35:03So that gives some of these old squatted asset names a lot more value because now they're not locked into how they were registered 10 years ago. You can use it however the buyer wants.

1:35:15Vlad CosteaOne little quirk that I discovered with Counterparty wallets is, and I think it's not on the wallet side, it's just how the protocol works. First you have to register the asset and then you have to lock the supply in a separate transaction. And I always found this to be sort of an inconvenience because sometimes I just know from the start how much of that token I want to create. So why should I send the second transaction and wait for confirmations just to have that in place?

1:35:48J-DogYeah, that was an annoying thing. And it was mostly, you say it's UI and it is currently a UI thing, but it used to be a protocol level thing. Like you could only issue the token and then the only way to lock the token was to do another issuance and set the description to the word lock. And then it would like, oh, you want to lock it? Now I'll lock it. That's why it used to take two transactions to do it. I think it was Javier and I.

1:36:14Yeah, we were like, this is stupid. You should be able to issue a token, issue the supply, lock it, transfer it to someone, all the functionality that you have to do in separate transactions. You should be able to do it all in a single transaction. So we went into the protocol and made that possible. So on a protocol level, you can issue and lock and transfer ownership and do all of that stuff in one transaction. But the UI tools, like in FreeWallet, everything's kind of broken out separately.

1:36:44And I've never gotten around to like building out the full issue a token and click a box to lock and click a box to transfer, building it all out. So currently it is a UI issue. It used to be a protocol level issue, but Javier and I fixed that.

1:36:59Vlad CosteaRight now I'm looking at FreeWallet. And I know that for a while when you were opening it, you got this message that in order to support development, you could buy a specific token that also eliminated the pop-up message that you're receiving when you're opening the wallet. So if you have that asset in your wallet, I don't recall exactly what it was called. It was sort of a way to finance development. And were you behind that?

1:37:25J-DogYeah, yeah. I love building for building's sake, but, you know, running servers and all this stuff costs money. And I'm never, I mean, I always am running a deficit. I mean, we're hosting five servers to the tune of, you know, tens of thousands of dollars a year on my own dime because I love this stuff and I want to support people. And over the years, I tried to like, Hey, can you guys please donate here? Here's a dispenser to donate. I tried different ways to do funding.

1:37:53And that was one of the things in FreeWallet I tried to annoy with where it was like, Hey, when you open the wallet, it says, please, please donate. And then I think every 15 minutes or so annoying message would pop up like, Hey, try to donate. And if you can, if you can, if you, I think it was XCHAINPEPE, if you bought XCHAINPEPE or FULLACCESS tokens, that annoying thing would go away. But not, you know, most people, like, ignore it and go away, which is fine.

1:38:22And then I finally switched to an automatic donation system. Which is essentially because most people open the wallet and just click, click, click, click, and they don't read anything. Like over the years, I learned nobody really reads anything. 'Cause there were many times where I'd be like, look, you clicked an okay box. It said, you understood that you have to write down your 12-word passphrase. No, I can't restore it for you. You agreed. Like, you can't. So it became clear people don't really read anything. And so I added an automatic donation system which essentially, I think, collects a thousand satoshis per transaction and it's optional.

1:39:00You can configure where you want funds to go to how often or turn it off entirely. But that's the current funding mechanism for FreeWallet. It still doesn't cover my cost, but at least it's some kind of consistent revenue, not revenue, some kind of consistent Bitcoin coming in. Initially it was every single transaction. When you did a transaction, I would tack on an extra output of whatever it was. So that you were donating on every transaction, but that got insane in that it doubled the cost of the transaction 'cause now you have two outputs.

1:39:32So it's a larger transaction. And I had a donation address with like 50,000 outputs. To collect those, you got to spend a lot of the money on fees to collect all those. So now I changed it a few years ago to basically pool the amount. Like every transaction you do, I think it's like 1,000 satoshis. And once you get over some threshold, I think like 25,000 satoshis. Then on that 25th transaction, you know, it tacks an extra output on as a donation output. So that's how I do funding through FreeWallet now.

1:40:10And it's resulted in more consistent Bitcoin coming and still not covering server operating costs and stuff. But it's, you know, when people are saying, why does this not work and how I can't do this, it gives me more motivation. I'm doing this for nothing. All I hear is stress. I'm like, well, at least I'm earning a little something, you know.

1:40:32Vlad CosteaRight now I just opened FreeWallet and it seems like I need to update to the latest version. But in the betting section of the menu, it says that there is a bounty to raise 3000 XCP to fund this feature. Is this still something that you're working on or did you sort of abandon it because only 8% of the funds were sent to build this?

1:40:57J-DogIf it goes around and gets funded, I'll build it. But it's kind of, it's not a focus. Like if somebody came to me one day and was like, Hey, guess what? I funded the betting interface. You know, I'm a man of my word. I'll take two, three weeks aside and build it. The idea here was, oh, I'm looking at it too. Yeah. It says, you know, users who hold the FULLACCESS or XCHAINPEPE tokens will have immediate access to all the features. So yeah, it kind of goes way back to when I was still trying to collect donations.

1:41:27But the idea, and I kind of explained it there, but for your viewers, the idea here was, kind of, Counterparty has a really awesome betting system, where an oracle system and a betting system was used early on, but it hasn't been used in eight, nine years, a long time. But you used to be able to craft a specially crafted JSON file and say, Hey, here's the information on the Super Bowl. Here's the players. You know, here's what you want to bet on and here's the possible outcomes and broadcast it.

1:41:55And then there was another side where you can bet on those. You could say, Hey, here's the thing I want to bet on. And here's how much I want to bet. And it, the protocol actually takes the XCP and, you know, escrows it in the protocol in a trustless way. And when the bet actually, you know, takes place, or when that event happens, like Super Bowl happens and a winner is chosen, the oracle would broadcast out the results. And, you know, the protocol would divvy out the money to the winners and give a small fee to the, to the oracle operators for, you know, setting up, taking the time to do all that.

1:42:29So I knew there was this amazing system that was in Counterparty, but that nobody used. And so this was my idea of, you know, Hey, how can we get some more attention on this and revitalize it? And so if this ever does get funded, the idea is build a really simple point and click interface for people to basically fill out a form. What do you want to bet on? What are the outputs? And when do you want this bet to resolve? And then also on the other side of it, an actual betting side of things.

1:42:59So an interface kind of like Counterwallet had where you could, Counterwallet had the betting side of things, or it would show you what you were betting on, what you could bet on. It didn't have the oracle setup stuff. That was always more technical, creating JSON files and stuff. So that's what this is. If it ever gets funded, I'll take the time to build all of that out and make the betting functionality in Counterparty pretty easy to use.

1:43:18Vlad CosteaI want to provide some live feedback about FreeWallet with some of the features that I thought were a bit cumbersome over the years. I think I started using it in 2021, if I'm not mistaken. Before that, I was not even aware how to use Counterparty. I knew that it's around. I just never really used it. And before that, let me plug the last two ads of this episode, and then I'll go through the features in FreeWallet. So if you are into peer-to-peer trading and you like gift cards or all of these digital assets, basically, that you can swap between users, check out Noones, which is a peer-to-peer marketplace for all of these.

1:44:03And they also have a spot market if you're into trading and the Visa debit card if you want to spend your Bitcoin. And the beauty of the system is that most of the users are coming from Nigeria, from the Middle East, from countries which are usually not on the news, and the CEO of the company, Ray Youssef, is saying that he's trying to empower the Global South. So by trading on Noones with gift cards or whatever you might be interested in, you're not just participating in some sort of Internet marketplace.

1:44:34You're also contributing to making this economy blossom and enabling people from African countries or the Middle East to have access to the financial system. So it's pretty cool. Check out Noones.com. And last but not least, there is Hodling.ch, which is a service from Switzerland. And what they do is provide consultancy for holding your Bitcoins. If you own a lot of BTC or you're part of a company that wants to add BTC to its balance sheet, then you're going to run into this problem of how to secure it.

1:45:11And maybe that it's a bad idea to trust the CEO of the company with this responsibility of holding the coins. So you go to these guys and they're going to listen to you about your particular needs and tell you if you need a multisig, what kind of threshold you should have for your multisig, whether or not you need hardware wallets and where you should keep them to avoid single points of failure or $5 wrench attacks. If you're interested in learning more, check out Hodling.ch. And I've also interviewed the guys and they give some free advice that you can listen to.

1:45:46It's part of season 15. That's episode 40-something. Check it out. And now, J-Dog, let's look at FreeWallet. And I want to tell you exactly the struggles that I've had over the years with it. First of all, it's difficult unless you know exactly what to do for making exchange pairs. I guess it's mostly because everyone who uses Counterparty is just thinking of ways to make more BTC and they don't really think in terms of, oh, I'm going to swap one Vlad head for one Nakamoto Pepe or whatever.

1:46:21So if you want to create a swapping pair, you have to actually type the asset names in the search box. And I had to learn this by asking in the Counterparty chat at one point, because I was not aware how to do this. There are some in these tabs, you find some recommended assets that you can swap, like Worldcoin, Pepe Cash and BitCrystals and XCP, but it's not very intuitive. And I always thought it's just the user experience inconvenience that's happening here. And I wish it could be improved.

1:46:58J-DogNo, I can easily do that. I can add a create exchange market button at the top. And when you click it, type in what you want market you want, and it'll just take you to the market where you can then list an order and stuff.

1:47:13Vlad CosteaRight now you can add market. And I did add one in my wallet, but the only asset that I have is XCP, for which I can trade.

1:47:23J-DogOh, yeah, no, if you want to create a market, you have to type into the search bar, asset number one slash asset number two, and then click the green button to search for it. So the wallet would support any exchange pair, but it only will, if you're typing into the search bar, it's only filtering from the existing pair, from the pairs that exist. And yeah, that can be confusing. Somebody's like, hey, I have a Rare Pepe and I want to swap it for a, you know, a Vlad head.

1:47:56There's no real easy way to figure out how the heck to do that. So that I could, I can add a button at the top that create exchange pair. And yeah, I've added that to my notes here. I'll get to that in the next FreeWallet revision.

1:48:13Vlad CosteaSomething else that I find very hard to understand in FreeWallet is how the fees are working, because I look at the mempool fees or whatever websites that predict what the fee should be like. But I usually pay double that amount because there are more outputs. And even if I choose from the dropdown menu, the high priority fee, sometimes it's stuck. The worst situation was I think it got stuck for like three months when the fees were high. I had to wait for that to get confirmed and I couldn't do any other operation for my wallet in that amount of time.

1:48:48So I had to wait for that one transaction to confirm. Is there any way to boost the transaction fee from FreeWallet?

1:48:58J-DogYou know, there was actually a suggestion from G-Money that was like, Hey, there's this new mempool boost service where you can like send them a few sats and they'll like add it to their mining pool queue to like, when we mine a block, do that. But that seems I can add that, but that seems kind of a roundabout way. I know that count, I believe that Counterparty is getting support for RBF. Which means, you know, you'll be able to, Oh crap, this transaction is too low of a fee.

1:49:29Let me just adjust the transaction up. I'll have to build a, you know, an interface to probably in history or something where you see your pending transaction. You'll be able to like bump the fee and adjust it and rebroadcast the new fee. So there's, yeah, there's two ways to do that. And I can add those. Let me make notes on that real quick.

1:50:00Okay, what else you got?

1:50:05Vlad CosteaWith token descriptions, it's very not intuitive how you should do this. I just... when I first started, I was just pasting the link from Imgur, but there's actually a format for doing that.

1:50:05J-DogYeah.

1:50:05Vlad CosteaAnd I wish there was like a guide or something to explain to you how you should type your description, or maybe just have some automation there where you you choose what type of description you want to have if it's ordinal or link from a JPEG or whatever. And it's going to generate the right format for yourself so you don't have to type it.

1:50:44J-DogSure, yeah, I could do that.

1:50:44Vlad CosteaAnd something else which I found annoying over the years was when you're doing a multi-send. So you're batching a transaction, you have to type the address, you have to type the amount of the asset that you want to send. And you also have to type, I think a description if you want to have that in the transaction.

1:50:44J-DogYeah.

1:50:44Vlad CosteaAnd usually the way that I do it is that I paste the same address and the same amount. For example, let's say that I'm doing an airdrop and I give everyone one Vlad head or whatever.

1:51:20I type the same address and then I get this error that appears on the screen all the time that I repeat the address. But what I'm actually doing is replace addresses one by one.

1:51:33J-DogYeah, I built FreeWallet originally for myself because I didn't like Counterwallet. I was like, well, this is how I want to use Counterparty. And generally when I'm sending MPMA sends or multi sends, I type everything out in a separate text component and then just copy and paste it in there. But yeah, I could see how it's annoying if you're trying to do the editing in that window to have it constantly be telling you you're doing it wrong 50 times. I can add that.

1:52:06And one other thing that was annoying about MPMA or multi sends is if you get the quantity wrong, like with this divisible, it has to be 1.0000. And so there are times where people will be like, oh, I want to send one and they'll put one in there and I wind up sending one satoshi of the item rather than one whole card. And so there's been some suggestions for me to put some asset validation in there. So if somebody puts in one and I detect on the background of this is a divisible asset pops up and like, do you mean 1.0000 or do you mean one satoshi?

1:52:47So I'll be adding that too.

1:52:52Vlad CosteaYeah. And people on mobile have been saying that the UX looks a bit dated, like it's from 2016 or something. So if there was like a refresh of the interface, it would be very nice.

1:53:05J-DogYeah. The plan with that is you're right. It is very 2016 because that's the last time I touched it. I originally I wrote FreeWallet in a... I wrote FreeWallet Mobile, which was, you know, and I supported it on Android and App Store. But those were like nightmares to always jump through all the hoops of the App Store and getting stuff approved and whatnot. So eventually and the framework I built it in kind of became outdated. So eventually I got to the point was like, this is so much of a pain in the ass for me to keep maintaining.

1:53:38So I stopped building on FreeWallet Mobile in like 2016, 2017, like a while ago. And I focused all of my energy on FreeWallet Desktop. But one of the biggest things I hear is we want the mobile version back because it looks very dated. And so my plan with that is I'm writing, my focus is on XChain, but I'm writing, since XChain lives on multiple blockchains, I'm writing a whole new wallet that lives on multiple blockchains with multi-hierarchical seeds. And it will be working on desktop, browser, Chrome, or a Chrome extension and mobile, Android and iOS.

1:54:20So once I have a standard wallet interface kind of written that lives in all of those things, the plan is for me to circle back to FreeWallet and kind of update the code base so that it gets the same treatment where I can update and maintain one code base and then just push a publish button. And it honks it out to the various, you know, App Store and iOS and Android, Google Play Store and all that stuff. So mobile, FreeWallet Mobile is coming, but probably not for six, nine months.

1:54:55Vlad CosteaI've also heard from people when I was trying to onboard them because it was so cool, like three or four years ago, to enable people to discover that you can do much more with Bitcoin than they thought. And I was telling them install FreeWallet, actually wrote, there's an article that I wrote on my website about how to get started with Counterparty and people were getting the wrong FreeWallet. And that was so annoying. Oh, yeah. Because there is another Freewallet, which is multi-coin. I'm not even sure if it's very secure to use that one for anything.

1:55:30J-DogIt's centralized. It's custodial. It's not open source. So and they charge you like a non-users fee. So, yeah, I've got I've heard that complaint a good amount too, that people download the wrong wallet and send their Bitcoin to it and have problems getting it out. So maybe when I do the update, I'll rebrand it to something else.

1:55:56Vlad CosteaWhere do you see Counterparty in, let's say, five to 10 years? Do you still see it as this small community effort to maintain the history of Bitcoin and put some artifacts in it? Or do you think it's going to have this major moment when it's going to be in the spotlight once again?

1:56:18J-DogI think it still has a big moment ahead of it because it has more features. It's the most it's a token platform that has the most features of any of them on Bitcoin. I mean, yes, some of the other token platforms have some of the functionality that Counterparty has, but none of them have all of it. Counterparty is really like the Swiss Army knife of Bitcoin. And so I think as we onboard more and more people to Bitcoin and more and more developers and more and more businesses, and I just want to hit the ground running with like, oh, I want a token system and I want it to do this, and this, and this.

1:56:57Right now, Counterparty is still the most valuable platform out there to do that because it has so many features over and above the small subset of features that the other platforms have.

1:57:12Vlad CosteaWhat would it take for you to build all of this stuff that maybe is required to take Counterparty to the next level? How much money invested in the protocol do you think would really make a difference?

1:57:27J-DogFor me, it's not a money thing, but I think a virtual machine that will allow people to experiment more on their own. Counterparty right now is just a hard-coded set of features, which are great and rock solid, but it's still you have to build a lot of your logic for like Spells of Genesis and other things. You use the Counterparty as the base system, but you have to build a lot of your logic outside of the Counterparty system. So I think the next big thing that Counterparty should focus on is a virtual machine where you allow developers more flexibility while sitting on the hard-coded rails that already exist.

1:58:22And I think that if you don't use a drop-in one, that could take a good amount of time. You know, talking like three to six months of solid coding time by a few different developers to build that. And I hope Adam and team build something like that because I'm building one for Counter... for XChain platform. So we'll see who makes it to market first.

1:58:49Vlad CosteaDo you think it's healthy to have two competing visions for Counterparty or do you believe there's going to be a moment in time when you join forces?

1:59:00J-DogI don't consider myself on the Counterparty team or a member of Counterparty anymore. Yes, I'm a community member. Yes, I run the most of the infrastructure. But I feel like my role is kind of taking a step back and let Adam and team go off and do what they want with it. And I'm focusing on XChain platform, something entirely separate from Counterparty so that we both can pursue our own visions and not be, you know, butting heads and whatnot. So, yeah, that's my take on that.

1:59:40Vlad CosteaDo you have a message for Adam and the rest of the team working on Counterparty right now?

1:59:49J-DogI hope you listen to the community some more and expand your views that the community is not just the small group of people that are in your chat room or on GitHub saying, yes, this is a good proposal or no, that is a bad proposal. I heard a lot of feedback from many, many people, developers and not developers that they don't really like not being included. And that's part of the reason why they're stepping back, not just because of the fork and that confusion, but because they're not really feeling like it's a community-driven project anymore.

2:00:26So I will still wish the best for Counterparty. I still hold a ton of, you know, 1% of the currency and 40,000 plus asset names. I want the best for it, but I really hope you guys focus back on the community, redefine what you consider the community. The community is the users that use it every day, not the small group of developers who rah rah and say, yeah, that will be a great feature.

2:00:53Vlad CosteaThat's interesting. The way in which you are doing it, if I recall correctly, you are spending more time on Telegram talking with people and you're collecting feedback basically from users.

2:01:08J-DogYeah, I've always been heavily involved in Telegram and interacting with the users on a daily basis, which is why I generally have so much community support, just because people are like, I don't know this Adam guy, but I know J-Dog. Anytime I have a question, he's answering it in the telegrams. When does this guy sleep? And I pride myself on that. I'm here building for the community. Yay, I like to build and I'm fulfilling my fantasy of building, but it gives me such joy to build things and see what other people do with it.

2:01:40And so that's why it's always been really important for me to engage with the community on a daily basis and listen, like, is this working? Is this not working? How can it improve? Oh, that's an interesting idea. Maybe we can implement that in the future.

2:01:56Vlad CosteaI appreciate that part of yourself, because when I first started using it, you were one of the most helpful people in the chat. And you're, as you said, I don't know when you sleep or whatever, but you're always answering questions. And I respect that. Thank you. So let me think, is there anything that I haven't asked you about regarding Counterparty, what you think is important?

2:02:28J-DogNo, I mean, we could spend hours and hours on podcasts going through all sorts of little micro dramas and whatnot, but I feel you've given a really good overview of the current state of things and some of the history, showed some of the value of the platform and asked about what's it look like in the future. So no, I feel good about the interview.

2:02:51Vlad CosteaYeah, then I'm happy that I finally got you on the show. I remember, like three years ago or four years ago, I tried to get you on and you were not interested in doing interviews.

2:03:04J-DogYeah, I'm not a very public person. I interact with people on Telegram and stuff, but I'm not, for me, the building has always been about doing stuff behind the scenes for Counterparty. I don't really like to be out and about as the public face of stuff, but as time has gone on, I've gotten more comfortable doing interviews and answering questions. So I'm happy to be here.

2:03:31Vlad CosteaSomething that I forgot to ask you, and I feel like an idiot for asking you so late into the interview. How can you run a Counterparty node? What should the user do if they want to be super nerds who want to keep the whole archive of assets?

2:03:47J-DogIt depends on which version, but at the end of the day, I'll do the official version right now. The official version is counterparty.io. You can go there, click the documentation and it will tell you, essentially, here's the requirements that you need to run a Counterparty node. Here's the three or four commands that you need to run to download a Docker and install it. It's actually pretty simple to do now. The same thing with Counterparty Classic, counterpartyclassic.io. It's a similar thing. You click, excuse me, documentation, how do I run a node?

2:04:28And it's a little bit different format, but it's still like two or three commands. Just, you know, clone this repository and run the command of what you want to install. It takes care of all of it in the background, downloading the Bitcoin blockchain, syncing it, getting all the components connected, same as a Counterparty, current Counterparty core version, just different beliefs in how it should run.

2:04:51Vlad CosteaOkay. Are there any extra hardware requirements compared to a normal Bitcoin Core node?

2:04:59J-DogYes, there are. I mean, just basically more disk space because the Counterparty has a Bitcoin blockchain and the Counterparty database itself is pretty small, like a few gigs. But what takes up a good amount of space is the address indexers. So it's essentially indexing every transaction on Bitcoin and keeping a list of addresses and balances in UTXOs. So that's just like...

2:05:31Vlad CosteaElectrum, I think.

2:05:34J-DogYeah, it's essentially Electrum. And that's one of the differences between Counterparty Classic and Counterparty Core is they said, Ooh, this is a horrible component that takes away disk space, we want to rip it out. So in Counterparty Classic, that component still is there and you run everything within the node. With Counterparty Core, yeah, you save some disk space, but you also outsource that component to Electrum servers or to a third party person. So God forbid anything ever goes down or whatnot, you're relying on a third party versus having everything from, you know, the full stack from head to toe in on your server.

2:06:12Vlad CosteaI do believe that after a certain point, when you create a lot of Counterparty assets, you should look into running the node and maybe not run it 24/7. But just in case something happens to the network, you should have a backup.

2:06:28J-DogYeah, this is true.

2:06:28Vlad CosteaYeah. Jeremy spoke in class today, and I would like to thank you, J-Dog, for being here. Sorry for the bad Pearl Jam reference.

2:06:42J-DogNo, that's all good. I got it.

2:06:42Vlad CosteaYou're part of the right generation to get it.

2:06:42J-DogOh, yes.

2:06:42Vlad CosteaAnd you didn't get any questions from the chat, which I'm surprised just that the background is fire. That was a comment by Jake. And I look forward to seeing what's happening with FreeWallet and Counterparty in general. Classic or Core doesn't matter to me.

2:07:07It's still interesting. It's permissionless. It's cypherpunk and it's a lot of fun. So if you haven't already, I recommend, you know that the mempool is empty. Check out Counterparty, create your first asset and have fun with it. Like you can do so much more with Bitcoin. You have no idea.

2:07:25J-DogYeah, this is true.

2:07:25Vlad CosteaThank you very much, J-Dog.

2:07:25J-DogYeah, thank you.

2:07:25[unclear speaker]: Have a good day. Bye.