Latest coin coming out of candy factory called “Decred” seems to have restarted the talk about making the cryptocurrency network a form of a DAO. Where token holders are shareholders an can vote for inflation rates, protocol changes, percentage of block rewards which go to support developers and so on…
So basically Peercoin but with something like motions as seen in Peershare instances.
This continues on the trend already started by Darkcoin (now called Dash) which also has some form of decentralized governance and motions. And they call themselves the “first DAO” as well. It’s true, ask anyone.
It seems that market is once again realizing that socio-economic model of pure PoW cryptocurrency networks does not look too well in the long term and is looking for alternatives.
What is your opinion regarding Peercoin with this new market trend? Do we get left out again because we don’t tell anyone what we are?
I am following Decred since the start, basically because I am a fancier of staking.
Decred will soon hardfork to introduce hardfork-voting, that’s correct. Decred has in its initial design been prepared already to include this feature later on.
I have no real opinion about the pros and cons of hardfork-voting itself, i.e. if cryptocurrencies should be DAOs or not. Only time will tell. Not being a DAO like Bitcoin might also have advantages, greater immutability could make a coin more trustworthy.
In Decred, five randomly selected stakers “vote” on each PoW block, i.e. they determine whether the PoW block is valid or not. As far as I know, a block needs 3 out of 5 votes to be valid. This is designed so that miners can only hardfork Decred if the stakeminers agree with the majority of their votes. So the vote directly determines what happens with the blockchain. Whereas in Dash, the votes are just informal and miners have the last say, as far as I know. I might be wrong, I have never used Dash and don’t hold any.
Also, Decred has a much more honest team than Dash. In Dash, 2 out of now 7 million coins were instamined. In Decred, there was an airdrop and a dev-premine, both of which were announced long before the launch of the chain. In both Decred and Dash, 10% of the block reward goes to a development fund.
With regards to the PoS design itself, I like Peercoin better than Decred. In Decred, the staking reward is decreasing with time, like the PoW reward, which doesn’t make sense in my opinion. In the year 2040 or so, stakers will only receive a portion of the transaction fees, nothing else. But that could be changed with a hard fork of course. Another problem in the current staking design of Decred is that stakers compete against each other for buying tickets, which results in all stakers paying very high transaction fees to miners to buy staking tickets. So while stakers in theory get 30% of the blocks rewards, it’s only about 20-25% in reality. But I think that will sooner or later be corrected in a hardfork.
I did not talk about Decred specifically. I do not know much about Decred, I’ve just noticed that governance is new hype in the making. Even Charlie Lee is twitter-pumping Decred due to “governance”.
So this thread was only to warn the community about the trend and try to get people to start speaking about Peercoin in this aspect. Peercoin has “governance” by design and can be viewed as DA organization (DAO).
This was just a guess, I’ve presumed it has something like that.
All cryptocurrencies are DAOs by definition, just some are governed by delegates (miners) and some are governed more directly by stakeholders (all PoS coins).
So what I wanted so say is that Decred brings nothing new to the table. It has all already been seen with Peercoin. Even motions have first been seen in Peercoin related Peershare-based projects like NuNet and B&C.
Peercoin stakers vote for the protocol at the same time they mint a block, Peercoin can be hardforked whenever stakers choose to do so - thus protocol changes are democratic and “governed” by vocal majority.
Governance comes with the PoS, batteries included.