Deprecated Intro Thread

[center]
[size=20pt]www.peercoin.net[/size]
[size=14pt]Forum - Twitter - Facebook - Reddit - Wallets - Whitepaper - Release Thread[/size][/center]

[ul][li]What is Peercoin?[/li]
[li]The Problem With Proof-of-Work Based Digital currencies[/li]
[li]Why Proof of Stake Makes Peercoin a Superior Alternative[/li]
[li]Microtransactions & Off-Chain Networks[/li]
[li]Learn More[/li]
[li]Community[/li]
[li]Project Development[/li]
[li]Wallets & Exchanges[/li]
[li]Minting & Mining[/li]
[li]Resources[/li][/ul]

Peercoin (PPC) is a peer-to-peer, decentralized, digital cryptocurrency. It is a payment network without a single point of control or issuing authority (like the US Federal Reserve). Peercoin relies on cryptography and peer-to-peer networking to validate balances and transactions. It is also the first cryptocurrency to use proof-of-stake technology, an energy efficient solution to securing its network, which was invented by Peercoin’s architect, Sunny King.

Bitcoin relies on Mining (Proof-of-Work) to secure its network and validate transactions. Users who mine are rewarded with Bitcoins, thus providing them with an incentive to secure the network. The inherent problem with proof-of-work mining is that it creates a “computational arms race” for more and more powerful hardware dedicated to mining to gain an advantage over others and increase the chances of receiving a reward.

As seen with Bitcoin, this competition shuts out most people from the mining process and pushes control of the network into the hands of those who can afford it. Thus, proof-of work mining has turned Bitcoin from a decentralized network where anyone can participate, into a network that has centralized control into the hands of the few. This is a long term problem for Bitcoin because it increases the risk of a person or entity gaining control of 51% of the mining power, allowing them to attack the network by reversing transactions, blocking confirmations, performing double spends and other attacks which could destroy confidence in Bitcoin. Centralized cryptocurrencies also make easier targets for governments to shut down.

Peercoin was designed by developer and architect Sunny King. Peercoin uses Proof-of-Work solely as a way to distribute coins more fairly, as opposed to an IPO (Initial Public Offering). To maintain the security of the network, Sunny King invented a new mechanism called Proof-of-Stake, which allows people to secure the network using the Peercoins they already hold. While not transacting with your Peercoins, you can hold them in your wallet and engage in a process called “minting,” which secures the network and offers you a 1% annual reward. This encourages saving. Proof-of-stake minting is an energy efficient solution to securing the network, meaning that the entire network can be sustained on low-powered hardware, allowing even basic computers to participate. Equal participation is important because it allows Peercoin to remain as decentralized as possible.

The only way for a person or entity to attack the Peercoin network is for them to acquire 51% of the coins that are minting. In practice, attempting to purchase the amount of coins necessary to carry out an attack would drive the price up to astronomical levels, making it counter-productive for an attacker because they would be forced to put their entire investment at risk.

One other major benefit in a proof-of-stake system is that the owners of the network assets (peercoin holders) are also the ones who control the network, as opposed to Bitcoin where there is a disassociation between those who control the network (miners) and those who own its assets (bitcoin holders). In Peercoin these interests are aligned. Peercoin holders are the ones who control the network.

The main strengths of Peercoin are sustainability, increased security (particularly against the “51% attack”), and its economic properties, which allow it to function as a long-term store of value, or “backbone” currency. In technical terms, Peercoin can be expressed as:

[ul][li]Proof-of-Stake, a sustainable coin generation model where a 1% annual reward is generated on coins held.[/li]
[li]Absence of hard limit on total coins in existence, modeling the supply of natural resources such as gold.[/li]
[li]Presence of 0.01 PPC/kb network transaction fee that is destroyed rather than paid to miners, in order to offset inflation caused by the minting of new coins.[/li]
[li]Transaction fee also limits casual, micro-sized transactions, making Peercoin’s blockchain small and lean, even after almost three years.[/li][/ul]

As mentioned above, one of the purposes of Peercoin’s 0.01 PPC/kb network transaction fee is to eliminate blockchain bloat caused by microtransactions. As a result of microtransactions, Bitcoin’s blockchain has grown massively in size, takes days to download and consumes high amounts of hard drive space. By comparison, Peercoin’s blockchain remains tiny even after almost three years, the download time is quick and the entire blockchain is small enough to fit on mobile devices. This makes Peercoin more manageable than Bitcoin.

Even though the transaction fee has been a positive for Peercoin so far, many people are concerned with the fee heading into the future because it would seemingly prevent Peercoin from being used as a transactional currency. A major part of the story is missing here though. In an interview dated 10/24/13, Sunny explained Peercoin’s design and how it improved upon Bitcoin. Notice the bolded sentence in the quote below:

"Both PPC and XPM are designed to last. PPC is designed with energy efficiency, XPM is designed with energy multiuse. Bitcoin has a long term uncertainty as to whether transaction fees can sustain good enough level of security. Before that the main concern is how to balance transaction volume and transaction fee levels. Currently I get the feeling that bitcoin developers favor very low transaction fees and very high transaction volume, to be competitive against centralized systems (paypal, visa, mastercard etc) in terms of transaction volume, to the point of sacrificing decentralization. This also brings major uncertainties to bitcoin's future.

From my point of view, I think the cryptocurrency movement needs at least one ‘backbone’ currency, or more, that maintains high degree of decentralization, maintains high level of security, but not necessarily providing high volume of transactions. Thinking of savings accounts and gold coins, you don’t transact them at high velocity but they form the backbone of the monetary systems.

Pure proof-of-work systems such as bitcoin is not 100% suitable for this task. This is because transaction fee is not a reliable incentive to sustain network security. If the mining generation amount is kept constant (there have been several such attempts in altcoins) it would work better security-wise but then it would also significantly weaken the scarcity property of the currency. XPM’s inflation model is designed in such a way that it could serve as backbone currency better than bitcoin if needed, because it could maintain high security reliably for longer, with reasonably good scarcity property as well. Of course that’s only from architect’s point of view, whether or not it would be chosen by the market is a whole different matter.

PPC is designed to serve even better as a backbone currency. The proof-of-stake technology in PPC is not only energy efficient; it also maintains high level of security without relying on transaction fee. Thus PPC could be safely designed with strong scarcity property yet serving well as backbone currency. Both PPC and XPM use protocol enforced transaction fees, which reflects my preference that high transaction volume is discouraged in favor of serving as backbone currencies.

Right now if we are talking about micropayments in the US$1 range, both PPC and XPM still handle them with much lower overhead than credit card network. In the long term micropayments should be provided by centralized providers, or a less decentralized network optimized for high capacity transaction processing.

On the other hand there is no promise that minimum transaction fee wouldn’t be adjusted. If processing capacity of personal computers continues to advance at the current pace, both max block size and minimum transaction fee could very well be adjusted at some point. However I do take a very cautious approach to adjusting transaction fees, as opposed to bitcoin devs. The impact to the fitness of the currency as a backbone currency is of great concerns to me."

A decentralized, censorship resistant blockchain is suitable for safe and secure storage of value, while a centralized or less decentralized off-chain solution is better for transactions due to high performance and low fees. Sunny thus designed Peercoin knowing that such off-chain networks would become important in the future.

One example of an off-chain network is Open Transactions, or OT for short. When implemented, OT will allow any size amount of Peercoin to be transacted instantaneously, enabling Peercoin to retain its ability to be used as a transactional currency, even with the 0.01 PPC/kb fee still in place.

Another advantage is that Peercoin will handle its connection to an off-chain network like OT much better than Bitcoin. Bitcoin miners won’t receive the fees from transactions happening within the OT network, which could become problematic for Bitcoin in the future once the block reward lowers. Peercoin on the other hand is perfectly set to handle this potential future due to the low cost of minting.

Peercoin and off-chain networks like OT are perfect for each other. Peercoin provides a decentralized and secure currency while OT provides fast and inexpensive tools to manipulate and exchange Peercoins in everyday life. And Open Transactions is only one example. Peercoin will be able to connect to other high speed off-chain networks as they are developed and released.

As you can see, Peercoin has been carefully designed with the long-term in mind. It was built to last. If you would like to get involved, then please join our community forum at PeercoinTalk.org. There are many projects being worked on. Together, we are working to build the world’s most decentralized and energy efficient cryptocurrency. Come and be a part of something truly revolutionary!

[ul][li]peercoin.net - The official Peercoin website.[/li]
[li]peercointalk.org - The official Peercoin forum.[/li]
[li]peercoin.chat - The official chat room for Peercoin.[/li]
[li]Twitter - Follow Peercoin’s Twitter feed for the latest news.[/li]
[li]Facebook - Get the latest news on Peercoin’s Facebook page.[/li]
[li]Reddit - The official Reddit community for Peercoin.[/li]
[li]Google+ - Peercoin’s Google Plus page.[/li]
[li]YouTube - Watch helpful videos and tutorials about Peercoin.[/li]
[li]Telegram - Peercoin chat service on Telegram.[/li]
[li]IRC Chat - Peercoin chat on Freenode.[/li][/ul]

[ul][li]Video Tutorials - Introductory videos about Peercoin and tutorials.[/li]
[li]Peercoin Wisdom - A resource for technical information and peer review.[/li]
[li]Development - Core development and community projects.[/li]
[li]Media - A collection of articles and interviews about Peercoin.[/li]
[li]Whitepaper - Peercoin whitepaper by Sunny King.[/li]
[li]Myths - Counter-arguments for common Peercoin myths.[/li]
[li]FAQ - Frequently asked questions about Peercoin.[/li]
[li]Wiki - Peercoin’s dedicated wiki on GitHub.[/li][/ul]

[ul][li]PeerAssets - Protocol for issuing and transacting with assets, including features like voting and dividends. [/li]
[li]PeerKeeper - A thin wallet for minting in browser and mobile phones, with built-in PeerAssets support.[/li]
[li]Peerbox - Platform for secure minting and running Peercoin nodes.[/li]
[li]PARS Network - A subnet of the Peercoin network that can mint non-standard transactions without forking the Peercoin.[/li]
[li]PeerScript Labs - A testing grounds for developers to experiment with scripts and smart contracts on Peercoin.[/li]
[li]P2TH - Tagging a txn using a publicly known address allows for rapid parsing of the blockchain.[/li][/ul]

[ul][li]Peerunity (Community Client) - GitHub Page - Community developed wallet with added features.[/li]
[li]Peerunity Tutorial - A video showing basic functionality of an older version of Peerunity.[/li]
[li]Peercoin-QT (Reference Client) - GitHub Page - Basic reference client maintained by Sunny King.[/li]
[li]Android Wallet - A Peercoin wallet for Android phones.[/li]
[li]Paper Wallets - Peercoin paper wallet generator.[/li]
[li] Exchange List - Buy Peercoin at one of the following exchanges.[/li][/ul]

[ul][li]Intro to Minting - Introductory information on Peercoin minting.[/li]
[li]Minting Guide - A complete guide on how to mint with Peercoin.[/li]
[li]Earn 10 Peercoins! - Earn 10 PPC by setting up a Peercoin full node.[/li]
[li]Mining Pools - Choose from a list of various mining pools.[/li][/ul]

[ul][li]Peer4commit.com - Create, fund projects & earn PPC.[/li]
[li]CryptoID Explorer - Peercoin block explorer.[/li]
[li]peercoin.mintr.org - Peercoin block explorer.[/li]
[li]PoS Calculator - Minting profitability calculator.[/li]
[li]FindstakeJS - A tool to predict stakes.[/li]
[li]Vanity Addresses - Personalize your Peercoin address.[/li]
[li]Peercointalk Escrow - Peercointalk escrow service.[/li]
[li]Donate to Peercointalk - Help keep PeercoinTalk running by donating.[/li]
[li]Logo Package - Add Peercoin’s logo to your app or website.[/li][/ul]

FuzzyBear’s FAQ:

Q: What’s the Difference between Peercoin and Bitcoin?

A: Peercoin is a crypto-currency project forked from Bitcoin and we aim to achieve energy-efficiency and keep as much as possible the original Bitcoin’s preferable properties.

Q: What’s Stake or Proof-of-Stake?

A: Stake/Proof-of-Stake is term referring to the use of currency itself (ownership) to achieve certain goals. In Peercoin proof-of-stake is used to provide minting and transaction processing in place of proof-of-work. Please refer to our design paper for details of this approach and our implementation.
The ‘stake’ field in the getinfo output shows the currency amount you currently staked to protect the network. This amount is subject to the holding period of 520-block maturity window before you can use it again (it would return to your balance once matured).

Q: How is it energy-efficient when there is still mining?

A: The energy efficiency we refer to is long-term energy efficiency, as in long term we do not require the use of energy to sustain the network.
Currently proof-of-work remains the most practical way of providing initial minting of a crypto-currency. So we decided to keep it as part of our hybrid design.

Peercoin (now and) in the future has a plethora of miners all over the world because mining is done on layman personal computers (i.e., everyone holding PPC is incentivized to mine for stake because it’s easy to do and a guaranteed increase in personal wealth). This highly decentralized and dispersed group of miners = significantly low chance of manipulations

Q: Why do you need central checkpointing?

A: Decentralization is a hard problem. In our first release we still rely on a centrally broadcasted checkpointing mechanism to fully protect the network. We are actively considering/reviewing proposals to possibly substitute this part of the design and weaken/eliminate central checkpoint in the future to make peercoin approach the level of decentralization of Bitcoin.

Q: When can I start generating proof-of-stake blocks?

A: After 30 days the network would start seeing proof-of-stake blocks. If you have balance ppcoind would automatically try to generate stake for you. If you find a stake the reward is 1 cent per coin-year consumed (can be roughly understood as 1% interest annually). The reward amount is added to your stake amount and is shown together in the ‘stake’ field of getinfo output.

Because stake is withheld from spending for 520 blocks, if you do need to keep your balance around to be spent soon we provided a configuration option ‘reservebalance’ to help you keep your balance from being used by stake. You can add a line ‘reservebalance=10000’ to ppcoin.conf and restart your ppcoind. This way ppcoind would try to keep your balance above 10000 coins when generating stakes.

Q: Can I use encrypted wallet?

A: Yes. Encrypted wallet is supported but there is some difference from Bitcoin. If you use an encrypted wallet you would have to unlock the wallet in order to mint blocks. For user security we added an option to the walletpassphrase RPC command to mint block only. In this unlocked wallet mode, one cannot send transaction through RPC command thus providing additional security to the wallet if hacker gains access via RPC.

Q: Is there a cap on total money supply like Bitcoin’s 21 million?

A: There is no hard cap other than a 2 billion coin max put into the code for now. But that should not be interpreted as an approachable cap, as it might never get anywhere close to that. It should not be considered a hard cap either as it may get lifted but that’s likely not needed in a very very long time. Due to the nature of the mint rate design it’s not possible to predict a final limit as it depends heavily on market participation, as well as the influences between proof-of-stake minting and fee destruction (there may not even be a mathematical limit if minting continues to outpace fee destruction). What we do know is that the proof-of-work minting would slow down exponentially according to Moore’s Law (we are aware that Moore’s Law eventually would stop to apply), and proof-of-stake minting introduces at most 1% annual inflation. So generally speaking it is still a very low future-inflation design comparable to Bitcoin.

In 0.2 release a ‘moneysupply’ stat is included in the getinfo output so everyone can see how many coins are in the market.

Q: What us the math formula used to calculate how many Peercoins will be mined per day given the difficulty and a hasrate?

A: Mint per block is calculated as
9999 / (difficulty ** (1/4))
Then you can derive your expected daily earnings from there.

Q: What is the value of PPC?

A: http://www.peercointalk.org/index.php shows PPC to BTC trading price

This was good but i need more!!!
well… Great Explanation of Peercoin I recommend everyone starts by reading this

Nice job. It looks exhaustive and well-organized at the same time.

Very nice, I like the Peercoin leaf at the beginning of every section, it really has a Peercoin flavour the whole post!

Very Nice repository of information!

Very nicely done Sentinelrv. Really good info there and the package is perfect.

Ok, Fuzzy just fixed the image resizing, so I changed the top banner to the big one. Please let me know if it fits perfectly for your screen size.

Great! This is what pushes Peercoin forward!

I changed the title to help this thread stand out and get some more attention. If anybody thinks it looks stupid, let me know.

Despite the fact that I’ve only been aware of PPC on a personal basis for a few days, it is quickly becoming my favorite alt. Part of that is due to the accumulation of information in this thread. Well done!

I moved FuzzyBear’s FAQ to the 2nd post of this thread, so now there is only one sticky. It might need to be rewritten though. I didn’t read it to see if it was up to date before moving it.

I also added a larger quote from Sunny in the microtransaction section where he clearly explains Peercoin’s design and how it improves upon Bitcoin.

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Hi

I have been running peercoin unity for a while. But now, nomatter what I do I find, running peerunity 0.2.2 thatwhen fully synced the balanc
e is shown as zero.

My transactions are shown, all present and correct, with no transactions taking money out. I have tried -rescan, and I have tried a complete blockchain re-download.

I do not suspect anything nefarious but do wonder what I need to do to fix this?

Any suggestions?

regards,

Have you checked your adresses on a block explorer? Is everything still there?

https://chainz.cryptoid.info/ppc/

Yes, it looks like it. Furthermore my transactions have confirmations. (AS I would expect.)
The address page is blank (empty), and this seems odd - oh no thats sending addresses, I have not sent any.
Receive page shows my receiving addresses.
Wallet show up to date with 16 transactions which are detailed, but the Available, Pending and Maturing Ballences are all zero.

What gives?