Maybe first video is a “trip down memory lane” for chronos, would be a good intro and could heavily stress the fact that it’s the same coin with a vibrant community and getting better every day.
Thank you for the ideas and feedback. This is a great starting point. Let me take some time to look over the materials and put together a more concrete proposal.
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The content on the home page is also good to check out. It can be combined with the university text. Also if for some reason you think 5 videos is not enough to do it justice then please feel free to let us know. I imagine it’s difficult to know the exact timing until you get further into the content.
We’ve broken this out into five proposed videos. You can think of these topic areas, at a high level, as:
- Launch
- Security
- Benefits
- Economics
- Legacy
Outlines below.
Peercoin, Chapter 1: An Honest Launch (the launch of POS)
- Launch History. Launched in 2012, fair release. No premine, no dev tax, no ICO, open source.
- Initial Distribution. The problem of how to distribute a new coin. Proof of Work used for coin distribution, not security.
- Value Proposition. What makes Peercoin unique? First Proof of Stake coin, introducing a revolutionary security model.
Peercoin, Chapter 2: Proof of Stake Security (the security of POS)
- Coin age, not electricity, as the scarce resource.
- Details: 30 days to mint, 90 days to mature. Prevents attacker from stockpiling coin age.
- Attackers must own Peercoin, which means they would damage their own investment.
- Can Proof of Stake really work? Peercoin, as the world’s oldest such blockchain, is a thriving example of its success.
Peercoin, Chapter 3: Green Crypto (the benefits of POS)
- Efficient & Sustainable. POW uses x% of the world’s electricity. Peercoin uses almost none in comparison, just enough to run your computer.
- Global Security. POW security is drawn to the areas with the cheapest electricity, which creates centralization risks.
- Price Independent Security. POW security depends on a high price to survive. No matter where the price of Peercoin goes, security stays at 100%.
- User Governance. The users own the network, not the miners.
Peercoin, Chapter 4: Blockchain Economics (the economics of POS)
- Scarcity. Unbounded supply is not infinite supply. 1% minting reward, declining mining reward. Inflation rate inversely correlated with mining power. As mining efficiency improves, inflation falls, approaching 1%. Today’s inflation is just 2.5%.
- Deflation through Transaction Fees, 0.01 PPC per kilobyte. More scarcity!
- Debunking “Rich get richer”
Peercoin Chapter 5: Built to Last (the legacy of POS)
- Scalability through efficient security.
- Security not dependent on transaction fees
- Peercoin as a backbone cryptocurrency.
- References to website, forums, community.
Post any feedback below, especially if there’s something missing above that you think should be covered. After this looks good, we’ll write up the video scripts and post them separately, for another round of approvals.
By the way, do we have a source for historic inflation rates, back to 2013? The site https://peerchain.net is no longer available, which had some really useful stats.
Also, what’s the current position on cold minting? Should this be included?
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Thanks Chronos. I’ll check this out when I get a free moment.
For network stats:
PoS difficulty is how chainweight is chosen. You are correct that the 90-day maturity effectively caps the attacker. You can still stockpile coin age, it just doesn’t help you attack the chain at all.
Maybe it would be best to compare using something like this: Peercoin, proud not to be an ICO. The PoW is more than just running your computer, ASICs are still involved, but the energy usage is something like 10,000x less and is done by essentially using the leftover ASICs from Bitcoin because they share a hashing algorithm.
Security depends on PoS difficulty. Higher difficulty = more secure. It’s just that PoS difficulty is not connected to price anywhere near as closely as PoW difficulty is.
Maybe a reference here to PeerAssets, or https://perpera.peercoin.net/ (Perpera Web Client v0.1)
Perhaps we need to enumerate the ways in which being the first POS coin makes Peercoin superior.
On the home page of peercoin.net there is a section of text called Fair Distribution. Will you be talking about the things discussed in there or only our initial distribution? For example, in that text I mention about the problem of properly distributing a pure PoS coin. Then I go on to explain that Peercoin features both PoS (security) and PoW (distribution). And finally I explain how PoW provides security indirectly by spreading newly produced coins to new owners who are potential security providers that can start minting with those coins. This has the affect of slowly decentralizing the blockchain over time by getting more coins into the hands of new owners.
I don’t know how you want to explain some of that because at this point I believe you don’t introduce PoS until the value proposition section right after this. Maybe it might make sense to talk only about the launch, and then move some of this info to another more appropriate chapter.
I would personally introduce this as time first, which is a more relatable word to people. Then the concept of coinage can be explained after.
For this, I would like you to stress what exactly 2012 means for people who might not know. You can say for example that at the time your video was recorded, Peercoin had been securely running for almost 7 years, which shows its reliability. Also stress that it is also the 4th oldest crypto project that is still actively developed, behind only projects like Bitcoin and Litecoin (Namecoin as the 3rd in case you want to mention that). Mentioning this gives people the idea that it really was launched in the beginning. The fact it has been running securely for so long lends it credibility.
For this part, I would like you to explain what is meant by sustainability. In the Efficient Security section of the home page I have this quote…
This is really what sustainability means. Because time is part of the security protocol, Peercoin nodes can be run at low cost on any device. Low cost security means people can always affordably run a node. That leads to long-term security, since it can always be provided. Also because it’s inexpensive, greater numbers of people can run block producing nodes, which further decentralizes security. It’s ok if you need to mention some of this later in the chapter. I just wanted to make sure I put it here.
Some of us have started calling this Adaptive Inflation, because it adapts to the market, whether it is inflation from PoS, dynamic inflation from PoW or deflation with the destruction of transaction fees. The specific amount is dependent on the actions of users of the network. I just did not add the term to Peercoin University yet, but I probably will in the future.
Maybe mention the benefit of a fixed transaction fee here. In bitcoin the necessary fee jumps around depending on how full blocks are. With Peercoin the fee is fixed, which means people will always be able to calculate the exact fee which is needed for their transactions. This provides for a better user experience as people don’t need to guess the correct fee to use.
Can you please tell me what this means to you?
Backbone currency was originally a term by Sunny from one of his old community interviews. In my opinion it is equivalent to base layer, which is used in the Bitcoin community. The Trustless Base Layer text from the home page sums up this idea…
So the backbone/base layer idea is to keep the blockchain protocol simple and build most extra functionality on top using different layers. These top layers (such as the Lightning Network) also allow for scalability of transactions beyond what the blockchain is capable of handling by itself.
I think there should be one more part at the end of this, the idea of Peercoin being designed as a great store of value (not in the sense that PPC as currency holds its value, but instead from a security standpoint). I also emphasized this on the home page here…
The basic idea here is that because Peercoin is built to last (because it is designed to maintain its trustless nature and decentralized security over time), the blockchain is the perfect tool to be used for securely storing value. That value can be monetary or data.
For example Perpera allows you to store a hash of a document (check the new tutorial video) in a permanent way that can be referenced later on for auditing purposes. This tool utilizes Peercoin in a way that takes advantage of the blockchain’s immutability.
100 years from now this data will still be available as it was recorded into the Peercoin blockchain. And it will still be available to reference because Peercoin is secured efficiently and inexpensively, which allows the chain to be sustained indefinitely. This is as opposed to Bitcoin where we don’t know for sure if transaction fees will be enough to sustain the chain’s security in the long-term.
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Hi, Chronos
Good to meet you again, a few comments.
“Initial Distribution”.
I think this also needs to encompass ongoing distribution. As I understand it, the importance of POW mining to Peercoin will decline over time, but it won’t disappear entirely, meaning there will always be new coins sold into the market by miners, thus decentralising supply away from those staking. This is why a combined POS/POW system is necessary, rather than POS-only.
(note: I wrote the above before Sentinel left his own comments, and I notice he makes a similar point).
“User Governance. The users own the network, not the miners.”
Yes, but can we precede this with an explanation of the conflict of interests between miners and coinholders. Peercoin coinholders being responsible for the coin’s security and governance eliminates this conflict, and is a big selling point of POS over POW.
Debunking “Rich get richer”
My feeling is that this is unnecessary; we give far too much credence to this concern. In any event, expanding on the point above (regarding ongoing distribution) will address this by implication.
“Peercoin as a backbone cryptocurrency”.
“Backbone cryptocurrency” has given way to Peercoin as a “base layer”. This concept is the one which I find most difficult with, and it will be great if we can find a way to explain this.
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Cold minting has gone through several iterations. We actually recently had a meeting on this topic. Nagalim posted the result here. Upgrading the network to the latest BTC is the primary focus right now, but we’re still discussing the issue in the background. It might be best to ignore it for now until a final decision is made.
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I’m not sure. This is a widespread myth about PoS that is used by lots of people as an argument against it. From my understanding, the problem does in fact exist in some implementations of PoS, but not with Peercoin. That is something I covered in Peercoin University. The fact that we are not subject to this makes it an advantage of ours that should be featured. I’m open to feedback though.
I think this is because some POS coins have 20%+ staking rewards, meaning those with large holdings who are able to stake continuously get a wildly increasing share of the supply. Peercoin avoids this with the 1% staking reward. I think this should be explained in the video, and it will address “rich get richer” by implication - but I don’t think the phrase “rich get richer” itself should appear.
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General public has been reading nonsense about how PoS works for past 7 years. Also many new kids don’t even know about our “flavor” of the PoS as the arguments against PoS that are usually presented to them are about hypothetical PoS protocols (like whatever Ethereum is to use) and/or dPoS schemas like EOS which do suffer from perceived issues indeed (cartelization, rich get richer).
I believe it’s worth to explain how Peercoin got around those problems.
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It is very likely that it will get included.
I think there is another way this happens also though. I remember Sunny was originally thinking about changing Peercoin’s PoS algorithm in favor of something else that would help boost minter participation (but at the same time it would slightly elevate the rich get richer issue). I can’t remember exactly what it was though. I believe Nu ended up using it. @Nagalim do you know what I’m referring to?
Anyway, the point is there are a number of implementations that cause this. Too high of a mint reward. What I was trying to think of above. Peerchemist’s mention of dPoS and cartelization. There’s probably no need to mention all these different cases as it would take up too much time. Simply saying the issue exists with various PoS implementations and explaining how Peercoin was able to solve it should suffice.
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Nu did a fixed PoS block reward, and essentially forced minters to stake grind. The result is extreme bloat of the UTXO table and very high fees for minters to transact with their holdings.
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That’s the same thing blackcoin did, and 50 of its forks.
@Chronos, so what is the next step? Creating an adjusted outline or moving to scripts? I’m interested what you think about the feedback given so far. I think we’ve covered all the major points except for the one below…
My only remaining question is what you meant by this. I can tell you what I think is meant, but I’m not sure if it lines up with what you were thinking.
Scalability means greater numbers of transactions at quicker speeds, basically increasing the capacity of the blockchain. At Bitcoin and Peercoin this is done through layer 2 extensions to the base layer blockchain. As I talked about in Peercoin University though, the people helping to run these layer 2 networks do collect fees as an incentive to operate these networks.
We’re not sure how this will impact Bitcoin yet as it would mean that miners and layer 2 networks will compete with each other for fees. If fees are pulled away from miners who rely on them for revenue to continue operations, it may impact Bitcoin’s security level. Whether this is a real concern I think is something that needs to be measured over time.
Regardless of how this affects Bitcoin though, PoS at Peercoin is efficient, which means security providers are not dependent on earning revenue from transaction fees. In fact Peercoin minters do not collect transaction fees at all (they are burned), so they do not compete with layer 2 networks. As a result, there is no threat to Peercoin’s security model and it can naturally coexist together with layer 2 networks in a way that Bitcoin may not be able to.
Effectively, that means scalability is made possible with layer 2 networks through efficient security of the base layer. Is this what you meant by that phrase?
To answer your question, @Sentinelrv, I think the potential layer1/layer2 tension in bitcoin’s future is too far afield to be worth mentioning in a Peercoin series. Let me put some thought into this.
Do you all think Perpera should be mentioned in the final video?
Fantastic feedback in this thread. Thank you. Next step for me is to integrate it, with the outlines, into complete scripts for further feedback. I’ll post them in this thread as they become ready.