There are a number of differences between the two projects. I'll list a few, however, you will have to spend a lot of time researching on your own to ensure you know everything there is to know.
If you have specific questions with regards to Counterparty specifically, I can very likely answer all of those for you.
- Counterparty has a working product, Ethereum does not. Here is
a chart that shows some of Counterparty's functionality. If Ethereum was on there, they would have nothing.
- Counterparty did not raise funds. Everything that Counterparty has accomplished has been through donations of the founders and community. This is cool from an ideological standpoint and also avoids the "did you have an illegal IPO?" question when the laws catch up with the technology.
- Ethereum has five founders (after one left the project) and 30+ employees who will not be paid for the first time with the money that is being raised. The only way Counterparty founders can be paid or make money is to make the platform a success and have the price of XCP rise. There is not a safety net for XCP founders, they are exactly equal to every single investor in XCP.
- XCP is slightly deflationary and Ether has 255 annual inflation.
- XCP cannot be mined, Ether can.
- Counterparty resides on the bitcoin blockchain, the most secure option available when it comes to blockchain technology. Ethereum is building something (that does not exist yet) on a blockchain that also has to be created and secured and tested and so on. That's going to take forever.
- Seems likely Counterparty is going to have the first offering of a cryptoequity that has some weight behind it via Overstock.
Article.
EDIT: XCP did not really lose 70% of its value. After the burn period was over, the only way to get XCP was from people who had burned bitcoins. That meant there was a period of time where people needed to find the price. At the beginning though, there was no real market as there is now.
EDIT2:: Yes, the main goal of the two projects is similar, but there are some key differences. Counterparty will have probably 80% of the functionalities of Ethereum because Ethereum will be turing complete. For complex derivatives and stuff people will write scripts to create them. For the more everyday stuff, which still has multitrillion dollar market caps, Counterparty will do nicely.
Last edited by Bitcoin boom; 08-06-2014 at 04:23 PM.
Reason: I'm heavily invested in XCP