PeerAssets will have a very nice side effect. It’ll reward continuous minters!
Every PA txn sends 0.01PPC to a P2TH address from which the private key is publicly known.
This means that very greedy node will try to claim these coins, which is a good thing as it cleans up the UTXO table for all nodes (reducing full node RAM usage)!
However, if every node tries to do it, only one will succeed. And who will succeed? The one creating the block!
Long story short, PeerAssets will reward continuous minting!
Can you explain why continuous minting is a good thing? I thought leaving your client on only does something when it’s your likely time to mint a block, so leaving it on at any other time would do nothing. Is that wrong or is there something I’m overlooking?
I believe it encourages continuous minting because by continually minting you’re going to be signing more blocks when compared to only coming online every so often to get your ~1% per year. Why does this matter? This gives minters the opportunity to claim the rewards via cleaning up the unspent transaction outputs left over from P2TH. http://hrobeers.be/papers/P2TH.pdf
P2TH is important because it allows for the efficient query-ability of PeerAssets transactions.
As PeerAssets picks up there will be more claimable PPC. Each PeerAssets transaction is accompanied with P2TH of 0.01 PPC in vout[0], paid to an address used for querying, which becomes available for anyone to claim having the importable private key for that address.
Continuous minting is important as it stabilizes the bock timing.
If you ever wondered why bitcoin’s block timing is much more stable than peercoin’s, the reason is that bitcoin’s hashrate is very stable while peercoin’s minting power spikes periodically when large holders come online to mint.
Large holders typically have a big amount of smaller UTXOs that will mint during a short period each month. Having all these UTXOs minting all the time, would distribute their block creation more evenly and therefore stabilize the block timings.
It would also make the blockchain more secure as the difficulty’s lower bound would be higher.
Continuous minting should be rewarded, PeerAssets will help a bit
This means then that when using PeerAssets it will cost at least 0.02 PPC? 0.01 for the Peercoin transaction fee, and at least 0.01 PPC for the tagged address? Is the 0.01 PPC for PeerAssets arbitrary and can be any value?
This is a question of core protocol. There is currently special exemptions for the 0 PPC vout, and these protocol rules will likely be reworked in view of PeerAssets. The 0.01 PPC number is taken to be the same as the fee, which is somewhat arbitrary but also very much in the ballpark of the right answer. One could say that the most important thing here is that we pick a rule and keep consistent with it.
