As I understand, Peercoin and its cryptocurrency brethren all depend on one very important factor, the blockchain, in order to remain in a decentralized state. However, in only a few years Bitcoin’s blockchain has become difficult to distribute, resulting in more and more “light” clients that use Bitcoin but don’t actually function as nodes for the network, leading to a network that looks less and less distributed over time (taking adoption into account). Does Peercoin or any other coin take this factor into consideration with the future in mind? In only a few years Bitcoin’s blockchain could become more and more popular, resulting in it closing in on it’s maximum blockchain addition of 144 MB a day, about 52 GB a year. Assuming Bitcoin never increases its blockchain data limit, the blockchain could still reach over a TB in the years to come.
While data storage is becoming exponentially cheaper and more efficient over time, the Internet and computer technology in most of the world is still relatively poor. How will cryptocurrencies still remain to be widely decentralized via the blockchain while requiring all full nodes have a storage drive devoted entirely to storing a coin’s blockchain data and having a large bandwidth allocation to receive and transmit?
With PPC network running for 490 days so far, the thin block chain of PPC (260M, ~16G@BTC and ~2.2G@LTC) is the potential benefits secured by fixed transaction fee.
Imagine most smartphone has the capability to run a local PPC client as PoS miner.
PPC got the potential to be the most decentralized and secure cryptocurrency.
Btw. block no. 100,000 has been passed today and the block chain still has a size of less than 300 MB (278 MB if I’m correct). The growth rate might increase once Peercoin gets adopted more widely, but the fixed transaction fee per kB is a strong incentive to transfer Peercoins deliberately.
It’s incentivized to keep the block chain small in size and just like redlee said, this allows e.g. smartphones to run Peercoin clients.
They offer both enough computational power to take part in the PoS process and enough bandwidth to keep the block chain in sync.
That would be another problem for bloated block chains - not only the initial synchronization takes a lot of time, but keeping them in sync requires a sufficient bandwidth.
Chapeau, Peercoin!
Based on the information on http://bitinfocharts.com/ppcoin/ and if my math didn’t fail me.
coins 2014/12/31 2015/12/31 2016/12/31
bitcoin 22,382 26,126 29,880
litecoin 3,985 5,217 6,453
peercoin 432 614 797
namecoin 2,923 3,713 4,504
dogecoin 16,686 32,382 48,122
feathercoin 1,250 1,981 2,715
NVC 343 524 706
TRC 543 812 1,082
unit is MB.
Block chain size can be solved with pruning.
Small block chain of peercoin suggests that peercoin is not useful / popular as other coins. It’s easy to have block chain minimal just ban any transaction.
I think ideal for peercoin would be to have as much transactions as network is able to process. Smart transaction fee could maintain ideal network load.
[quote=“petar87, post:6, topic:1185”]Small block chain of peercoin suggests that peercoin is not useful / popular as other coins. It’s easy to have block chain minimal just ban any transaction.
I think ideal for peercoin would be to have as much transactions as network is able to process. Smart transaction fee could maintain ideal network load.[/quote]
PPC is almost always in the top 5 for volume in USD. Coins with 1/10th the volume and 1/5th the lifespan like Quark have a chain-size 4x bigger. I don’t think PPC’s small blockchain is bad.
Can you explain what pruning is, and why it would be beneficial for PPC to process ‘useless’ transactions just because it can?
The volumes you are referring to are volumes on the exchange, not on the peercoin network.
If you look at the number of transactions on the network you’ll find that Peercoin is not in the Top 5.
Pruning is same as making up the balance at financial year end. You close the book with all the details from last year and only take the balance forward into the new year. By archiving last year’s book, you can still trace old transactions if you want to. Technically it is more complicated though, but the same principle applies as I understand
What if nodes that no longer can download the blockchain could take advantage of those that still can (until advances in technology restore them that capability)? Here is a proposal that would allow this temporary centralization (attention to Reply #2):
I’m keeping an eye on the mini block chain work. Even with the small footprint of Peercoin’s block, getting it smaller (in a safe and secure manner) is a good thing.
Why network not to service more customers if it can?
Way how to increase number of transactions is to lower transaction fee, that would be beneficial for peercoin, and with time fee would adjust to fend off high network load.
Agree with that. Hello we’re in 2019 and blockchain size is only 2.9 Gigabytes. Bitcoin is already at 200 and more.
I know this post is from 2013, I actually wanted to dig a bit into history of it. It’s great to see how it evolve.
For PoS on smartphone I think we will slowly but surely getting there.
