It's great that counterparty is adding contract support sometime soon. Counterparty technology has promise, but it has fundamental differences compared to ethereum.<p>Running contracts on a layer on top of bitcoin vs an idependent blockchain like ethereum is a very different experience.<p>It will take time to figure out what sort of model wins out- Let's all hope the best technology wins.
IMO Counterparty is (still) the most underated technology in the crypto space. Since it utilizes the same addresses and Blockchain as Bitcoin, it has just as many users as does Bitcoin. The protocol is clearly tackling all the features that Ethereum has promised, and it works <i>today</i>. It's a fair comparison to suggest that Counterparty is to Bitcoin, what css is to html. They work together
One thing that concerns me is that every node needs to run every contract. Computers that are connecting to the network for the first time and doing full verification will have many, many contracts to compute. Catching up could take significantly longer than it already does.