Someone with more knowledge about this care to comment, what does it mean and is it move in right direction?
The main change IMHO seems to be under Taking the Coin Age out of the equation. This addresses an issue Peercoin has already addressed, but in another way. Peercoin capped coin age at 90 days, as far as the probability to mint is concerned. Blackcoin is just doing away with age.
I can see two issues.
First, it completely screws small owners. When you are a small owner, accumulating coin age enables you to mitigate your lack of coins and get a decent chance of minting. With Blackcoin V2, this mitigation is no longer possible. Small owners might never mint.
Second, it makes a sustained 51% attack possible. In Peercoin, if you do one, you have to spend resources (coin age) that can only be replenished over time. While you burn yours, the rest of the network builds up more until it can counter you. With Blackcoin V2, you don’t have to spend anything anymore: if you have a majority of coins in the first place, then you will have even more after minting.
Its a joke to call these protocol changes PoS 2.0!
I agree with arkanaprotego that there are huge disadvantages if you take coindays out of the equation. While it is true that an attacker can collect coindays and thereby get better probabilities to doublespend, you get the following big disadvantage:
If you do not care about coindays, the security of the main chain is weakened. If some coins are offline for, lets say, 30 days, than the ‘minting power of these 30 days’ is lost. Instead, in Peercoin these stakes still contribute to the security of the main chain, since these stacks collected some age and thus are more likely to find a next block. As a result in Peercoin more coins are needed to perform a sustained 51% attack.
Another thing they want to change is the stake modifier. Peercoin protocol calculates every 6 hours a new the stake modifier. This stake modifier is used to calculate the final hash. In Peercoin clients have to use the stake modifier, which is created after the block, which contains the transaction of an input. Blackcoin wants to choose the last stake modifier of the whole blockchain.
This prevents an attacker from estimating, when he will find a block. But on the other side this gives an attacker the opportunity to influence the stack modifier over and over again, until it may fit his needs.
Under the bottom line the protocol changes have pros and cons. I think Sunny King considered all these pro and cons and made the right decisions!
As Sunny himself said…
I think this is more a marketing effort than a real change. The novice coin users and investors will not care about
security and other stuff. they will only see only the v2 trademark ;D
and this would be enough to sent their money
[quote=“seki, post:5, topic:2596”]I think this is more a marketing effort than a real change. The novice coin users and investors will not care about
security and other stuff. they will only see only the v2 trademark ;D
and this would be enough to sent their money[/quote]
Yes, proposal is wrong way to go I think, they will soon after go to POS v3.0 :
It is indeed about marketing, most people won’t have a clue what the proposal is about, but it is better than v1.0 (probably referring to Peercoin) so must be good. Sunny’s quote is very true, but hard to consume for the masses just betting on a coin which goes up on the leader board for the next week. If it goes wrong, they jump to something else with the latest marketing trick.
I think Sunny’s latest offer to have an article in a Crypto magazine (run by Dogecoin) is a good one. Hope that generates some attention. At the same time we have to up our marketing efforts.
Shameless plug: Just check out the opportunities to earn some PPC by putting forward a marketing proposal and apply for funding: http://www.peercointalk.org/index.php?board=66.0 or http://peer4commit.com/projects/96
Check this thread on Reddit. There is a response in the last post to the criticism in this thread about PoS 2.0.
http://www.reddit.com/r/peercoin/comments/2dpskz/peercoin_and_blackcoin_on_the_same_boat/cjrutfk
Also, I received this response on Facebook to Sunny’s latest weekly update…
Blackcoin is minting like crazy compared to PPC. I've held both wallets started on the same day and I still haven't staked a thing in PPC because it's not been 30 days yet. Kind of a buzz-kill compared to other choices in the digital marketplace. Maybe reward/stake sooner?
[quote=“Sentinelrv, post:7, topic:2596”]Check this thread on Reddit. There is a response in the last post to the criticism in this thread about PoS 2.0.
http://www.reddit.com/r/peercoin/comments/2dpskz/peercoin_and_blackcoin_on_the_same_boat/cjrutfk
Also, I received this response on Facebook to Sunny’s latest weekly update…
Blackcoin is minting like crazy compared to PPC. I've held both wallets started on the same day and I still haven't staked a thing in PPC because it's not been 30 days yet. Kind of a buzz-kill compared to other choices in the digital marketplace. Maybe reward/stake sooner?[/quote] The increased coinage sounds nice for participation but increases the risk of a double spend attack with massive amounts of coinage saved over time. Therefore Peercoin did get a cap after I believe v0.2. Blackcoin is going for a different risk vs difficulty model, which is interesting to see how that holds over the next year or so.
The other reason that people have more success with minting might be the lower participation (difficulty) on the Blackcoin network. Our difficulty has never as high as it is now, so we will hear more people not being able to mint for longer times. I do notice the higher difficulty as my wallet is also minting less blocks on average in the last few months.