The exchanges on which Bitcoin stocks are traded have had regulatory and internal problems, and thus far have had difficulty staying open. As a result, some Bitcoin stocks have stopped trading altogether, while others have turned to roundabout methods to continue trading: for example, conducting trades through email and forum threads, and manually keeping track of who owns what quantity of a stock manually. For shareholders this last point is especially important, because the percentage of shares owned by an individual determines the percentage of a company’s dividends that he receives.
With Counterparty, users can issue stocks and pay dividends in BTC or XCP to shareholders, automatically and trustlessly. The shareholders do not even need to run a Counterparty client: having distributed the shares of a stock, stock issuers merely need to specify:
- Which asset they are paying dividends on
- What asset they are paying dividends in BTC or XCP
- The quantity of dividends to be paid per share
The Counterparty protocol does all of the work and shareholders will receive BTC or XCP as they normally do.