I know the logo has the leaf branding and the website mentions “Sustainable cryptocurrency” but should there be more explicit and prominent marketing for the energy efficiency of Peercoin? For me it seems to be the primary selling point.
I hear all the time from people that they don’t like Bitcoin because of the amount of energy it requires and then they dismiss cryptocurrency altogether because of it. There are arguments that Bitcoin mining is done in areas where energy is cheap and tends to use more renewable sources, but it’s still the case that the energy consumption is very large and that energy could be used elsewhere. There are also large resources that go into mining equipment.
Wouldn’t it make sense to promote Peercoin as a more efficient and eco-friendly alternative? A move to remove PoW altogether would perhaps help to sell that message.
The main point here is that Peercoin’s security is efficient/sustainable, not the overall chain, at least at this moment. That security comes only from PoS. PoW is not needed to secure the chain, however we choose to keep it as part of the protocol for now only because it is helping to create a fairer distribution of coins, which will make security more decentralized in the long-term. The more spread out our coin distribution is, the more decentralized our security is, since Peercoin’s security comes from the coin owners. At some point we may have consensus to remove it though.
I have been thinking the same as you though on creating a greater focus on Peercoin’s green aspects. It is a much simpler marketing message that has the potential to break through to the average person, much simpler than some of the complicated technical stuff that is trying to be marketed like governance, decentralization, and trustless settlement.
The term “Green” is also an increasingly popular marketing term. I’ve been thinking about how we can integrate it into our current messaging. We use the words efficient and sustainable a lot, but what about using something like “Green Security.” I think it carries a similar meaning, don’t you think?
We could then target any promotional efforts toward green focused communities to get them on board as a solution to Bitcoin’s energy waste.
Under the sustainable security section of Peercoin’s home page, I think maybe we should also focus less on the technical aspects of how PoS works and more on how it is green and saves energy, simple messaging for the first time viewer.
“Sustainable cryptocurrency for a trustless future”
This kind of has a double meaning though. Not only does it sustainable because it uses less energy, but it’s also sustainable because Peercoin continuously rewards block producers through a never ending block reward. Bitcoin could possibly be unsustainable because their block reward for miners will end and transition to transaction fees. It has always been a question whether or not fees would be enough to sustain the costs of miners.
So we could change the slogan to…
“Green cryptocurrency for a trustless future”
But if we do that it will lose the double meaning. It can also be argued whether this double meaning is even worth it to keep, given how complicated the meaning behind it is.
You could also drop “trustless” and change to this…
“Green cryptocurrency for a sustainable future”
By adding in sustainable there, it focuses the slogan solely on the green aspect of Peercoin. It is a much simpler message for people to understand, especially since trustless can be a vague word to people.
I do prefer this slogan. “Trustless” is something that people already associate with Bitcoin, so I think it’s better to focus on how Peercoin is set apart.
For a while now I’ve been wanting to improve the content of Peercoin’s home page. You can see my current attempts in the sidebar of our new Reddit design. Just hover over the titles and you’ll see the info pop out. Only thing I’m not very satisfied with is the “Efficient & Sustainable Security” section because it is too similar to what currently exists.
It brings a new focus on Peercoin’s economic model as well. Continuous limited inflation vs fixed supply of Bitcoin.
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