With PoS blockchain networks N@S can become problematic in case of a chain-split (forking).
For example, we get ourselves in chain-split over Segwit with Peercoin OG as the hostile splinter chain. Now, all the minters have equal stake on both of chains, and have no real incentives to “pick a winner” as minting on both chains is perfectly viable. Naturally, the selection of the “real Peercoin” will come down to exchanges and miners. Real Peercoin will become any chain which is adopted by exchanges and the chain on which miners remain active.
However in this scenario splinter chain can continue living indefinitely without any community support, users and real development. Which can be confusing to community, exchanges, miners and businesses using the chain. It can be dragged out in megabytes of forum discussions and twitter flame wars.
This is actually the most important aspect of Nothing-at-stake problem, inability to easily pick the real chain in case of the chain split.
Which made me think that if minters can claim the transaction fees, they will resort to support the chain with more transactions and in time their support for the lesser chain will diminish.
What you are describing is a feature not a bug. You are describing a scenario in which both chains have a legitimate reason to survive, and so they do. I don’t see any problem with that.
If i fork bitcoin and start mining, it’s the same existential quandry. In practice, the client implementation sorts this out just fine for the user. Organizations like Peercoin Foundation help users pick the client implementation, and thereby what is ‘peercoin’ as opposed to ‘peercoin og’ or what have you.
It requires a non-trivial amount of real world resources (CPU (even minting eats up some cycles and heats up my computer), disk space, network, ASICs, servers, electricity, not least of which is human attention and time) to support any chain. So, to be perfectly honest, I don’t see the problem you’re describing.
How have projects like Ethereum / Ethereum Classic, Bitcoin Core / Bitcoin Cash resolved their contentious hard forks? Odds are good the answer you’re looking for might be found in those case studies.
The most likely scenario from my point of view is that I’ll keep running whatever code’s in the github peercoin/peercoin repository because I don’t see the rebase onto Bitcoin Core as a terrible idea at the moment and, afaik, it’s @peerchemist 's call as the current Project Lead. So, like many other projects / forks (Bitcoin Air? Bitcoin Prime?), I’ll likely wish Peercoin OG “happy travels” and keep doing what I was doing before and ignore it. At worst, I’ll end up selling coins on the fork I don’t care about but that’s as much time as I have to spare for this stuff
Burning the transaction fees to benefit all participants is still a beautiful and elegant idea in my opinion. Wouldn’t want to mess with that parameter
You are very right about coin burning being a very novel idea that Peercoin pursued right from the start. The cool thing about this community is that we try to discuss many options before we go down a path. At the very least, this post sparked debate. As you can see from the other team members, this idea was unlikely to be supported by the rest of the network and was more just peerchemist spitballing. It likely should have been kept to less public channels.
This year has been the year of picking up where Sunny left off. In December of last year we hard forked for the first time without Sunny watching over it. Since then, we have formed a legal Foundation and had long in depth conversations with powerful outcomes about how development works in this community and what developments we will strive for. It is of course still a work in progress, but the only place Peercoin has lost its super powers are on the beloved coinmarketcap rankings. Forgive me if i fail to see the damsel in distress.
