Counterparty News (2014)

CPNEWS (200 divisible tokens) was the last of my three 2014 financial experiments after the JPJA ebook and the JPBULL/JPBEAR bitcoin options.

I made a blog, counterpartynews.com, with current events from the Counterparty ecosystem. Contributors received CPNEWS tokens at a pre-defined monthly schedule.

“100 CPNEWS to be distributed monthly the first year. 50 monthly the second year, and so on. Content creators will share 90 CPNEWS, while 10 are reserved for bounties.

50% of revenues will be paid out as monthly dividends to holders of CPNEWS. The other half goes to salaries / commissions.”

I wanted to show how tokens can make it possible for multiple individuals to cooperate on a startup without any funding. Anyone who shares the vision, have some spare time and willing to do some work, can participate.

The token guarantees transparent payouts, makes enforcement binary (either all or none get paid fairly) and enables a second hand DEX market.

The project lasted from September to December 2014. Unfortunately the experiment failed. I did not attract any contributors, thus discontinued the project. I donated the .com domain.

Only 200 tokens were ever distributed, from which 191 went back to me. A forum user who tipped me of an interesting conference call was rewarded 9 tokens.

From the bright side, thanks to Counterparty News, several of the earliest Counterparty projects are documented. Much is preserved by Wayback Machine. I’ve collected screenshots and original forum announcements in JP_VINTAGE_TOKENS.zip.

Another important source is Value-of-XCP.pdf which describes CPNEWS on pages 4-5. It was notarized in October 2014 through a Counterparty broadcast. The below image is copied from the pdf (a colored frame is added to make the downsized icon distinguishable).

Sources

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