Now that Peerunity supports v0.5, we are ready to send out a mass newsletter using the forum email list and the one people sign up for on Peercoin.net. Besides mentioning the mandatory upgrades that people need to make, what other news items should we include in the newsletter?
No content suggestions? Peerbox v0.5 just released, so I can include something about that. Anything else?
How about some thing mentioning historical price stability. Chain size vs us and Bitcoin, etc, etc.
One of the benefits is that some people who get the newsletter might have smaller peercoin positions than they once did, and when they receive it, they might take another look at increasing their investment.
Some times we need to point out the obvious. 
Also, does github tell us how many Peercoin forks there are? ie: over XX number of altcoins have forked Peercoin source since its inception. We should be a little more popular than we are…
If you can write something about those topics then I can probably include them, but you’d need to do it soon, probably today.
I don’t do financial analysis and price forecasts. That’s not my thing.
In this short time, you might want to gleen the forums for statements people have made in public, and use that as quotes.
For instance, look at this bitcointalk post, it speaks a mouthful:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1404088.0
Invested $2000 in peercoin 11 months ago - Just realised i got a 110% ROI
March 19, 2016, 02:08:52 PM
11 months ago i bought $2000 worth of peercoin as a long term investment. At this time peercoin was selling at $0.22 so i thought it would be a good time to buy in. I bought the ppc put them in a wallet and didn't really monitor the price. I was recently going over my portfolio and you can imagine my surprise when i realised my peercoins had more than doubled in value. The current exchange rate for 1 peercoin is currently $0.47 by the way.The lesson to be learned here is that long term investments can sometimes pay off better than short ones. Back when i bought into ppc people were saying that ppc was dead and would crash to $0.05 in a month - it ended up doing the opposite and increased its value by more than 100% over a year.
I am considering putting more into ppc, who knows maybe in 12 months time ppc will be $10 each lol.
Some thing like that post could make it into the newsletter. Once you post some thing in public, on the internet, it’s a free for all. Just give credit to bitcointalk where it was found.
Since it is also viewable with out logging into bitcointalk, there is no terms of use to repost it.
Remind people about the Peercoin book?
Here’s my why I like peercoin as a store of value:
- having peercoins incentivize owners not to move them but keep them at one place in order to gain coin age. The main reason to move them is to collect them into one bigger unspent output for a bigger coinage. Currencies such as nubits or dash are a better fit for payments.
- this, combined with the 0.1 per kb fee makes peercoin the smallest blockchain on the block.
- peercoin is not instamined. It uses mining as a the distribution method. So far 1.5% of peercoins are minted by coin owners, the rest is fairly mined.
- you dont have to keep the wallet up and running 24/7 for minting if you dont want to. Use findstake 4 times a year and you are good to go. :
bonus reason: unlike bitcoin, miners have no say in anything
I have written the intro to the newsletter. Everything under the intro will be news items like the upgrade, Peerunity release, peerbox, etc… I need feedback on the intro though. It took me a while to write, so I hope I don’t need to make many changes. I wanted to get across to people why we’re so much better than Bitcoin and all the things we are still capable of that bitcoin isn’t. I added in some stuff about possibly porting some features from Nu. It’s just an example that shows we can do these things where Bitcoin holders would be reliant on miners in order to change. I personally think the additions would be good ideas, so I wanted to throw them out there. Note: I didn’t feel comfortable talking about price and people making money investing. I’d rather talk about the fundamentals.
This email newsletter is a last minute reminder to all Peercoin holders that they need to upgrade their client to v0.5 before the protocol switches, as well as a rundown of some of the things that have been going on in the community recently.Proof of stake consensus has been seeing a surge of interest lately. Even the developers for Ethereum have made known their interest in eventually switching over from proof of work to proof of stake. As the original crypto to introduce a working implementation, Peercoin still stands to this day as a testament and the main example to the efficacy of proof of stake consensus. Sunny King had much forethought when he originally designed it and many people are still only coming to realize the numerous problems that it solves.
As Bitcoin and proof of work go through one stuggle after another, Peercoin’s true strengths shine through. As we speak, Bitcoin’s block reward halving is approaching closer, which will put many miners out of commission, further centralizing the network. Sunny King however designed Peercoin without these abrupt reward halvings. Instead, the block reward adjusts upward and downward based on the hashing power being put toward the network. Small miners losing profitability with Bitcoin mining will try to stay profitable by transitioning their hashing power over to Peercoin. As a result, Peercoin’s inflation rate will continue to decrease, making Peercoin more and more scarce over time. So far 98.5% (22,740,325) of all Peercoins are distributed to miners and merely 1.5% (341,888) to minters. The number of mined Peercoins will start to drop further as hashing power crosses over from Bitcoin to Peercoin.
Unlike Bitcoin however, a decreasing block reward will not harm Peercoin’s network security. Sunny King designed Peercoin as a hybrid system, meaning proof of stake minting is used for security of the network while proof of work mining is used solely for distribution of new Peercoins. Using proof of work for the continual distribution of new coins gives Peercoin an advantage over pure proof of stake systems, which often suffer from poor manual distribution. Proof of work in Peercoin ensures that coins are distributed widely to as many people as possible without the centralizing effects and security concerns that plague the Bitcoin network. The hybrid design offers Peercoin the best of both worlds in terms of security and distribution.
Making sure that Peercoins are distributed to as many people as possible is very important for the decentralization of the network. One of Bitcoin’s major flaws is that control over the network is given to miners, rather than the users of the network who hold Bitcoin. The increasing costs and decreasing rewards of competing in the Bitcoin mining market has led to a dwindling number of miners and a centralizing effect among those who provide security for the Bitcoin network. As time goes on, control over Bitcoin’s future and security is falling into the hands of fewer and fewer people. This opens up Bitcoin as a prime target for attack or abuse through government intervention and regulation. Another drawback is that miners and everyday users of Bitcoin may not share the same interests or vision for the future of the network, in the end putting each other at odds with the users feeling powerless and not in control.
Peercoin doesn’t have these problems by design. The owners of the network and thus the ones who control its future and handle its security are the Peercoin holders themselves. Since the owners and users of the Peercoin network are one and the same, interests are perfectly aligned. This leads to much less conflict and argument about the direction and purpose of the network. I’m sure many of you have grown tired of the arguments and endless debates on block size and clogged up mempool that take place in the Bitcoin community. If Peercoin holders wanted to increase the block size, we wouldn’t need to appeal to miners. We could simply do it ourselves by minting on a forked chain.
When it all comes down to it though, when Sunny King originally developed Peercoin, he had a very specific long-term vision, that of a network designed for maximum decentralization and security. Peercoin’s underlying purpose is to provide the ability to store value in an inexpensive to maintain crypto network which prioritizes security, decentralization and scarcity over speed, low fees and transaction volume. This is the definition of a backbone currency, according to Sunny King. The block size debate taking place in the Bitcoin community is ultimately about whether Bitcoin should focus on decentralization and security or sacrifice it all in order to become a payment network capable of competing with the likes of Visa. With Peercoin, Sunny specifically designed it to focus on the former, rather than the latter, a network that maintains a high degree of decentralization, maintains a high level of security, but not necessarily providing high volume of transactions.
The fixed 0.01 PPC/kb fee ensures that transaction spam and blockchain bloat are prevented. As we speak, Peercoin’s blockchain is only around 321 megabytes in size after over three and a half years of operation, compared with Bitcoin’s blockchain, which is now over 66 gigabytes. Peercoin can work with off-chain networks like Open Transactions or the Lightning Network to provide a solution for instant micropayments, at the same time preserving its fundamentals as a backbone currency. While Bitcoin and other cryptos fall victim to blockchain bloat and centralization attempting in vain to become payment networks for microtransactions, Peercoin will continue to focus on creating the most decentralized and secure network possible for storing value.
Edit: I removed these two paragraphs to be respectful to those who might not want to hear about Nu. The newsletter should be solely about Peercoin. I’ll leave the paragraphs below because I still think they’re good ideas.
Taking it even further, in future versions of the Peercoin protocol we will most likely borrow the motion system invented and used daily by our friends at NuBits, which would allow all Peercoin holders to vote and quickly come to consensus on important and divisive issues. A system such as this would enable decentralized governance and decision making in Peercoin. The motion system has allowed our friends at NuBits to quickly make decisions on major issues, which has allowed them to evolve their network at an unparalleled rate of speed. Proof of stake alone is able to support a decentralized decision making and governance system such as this, thus making it compatible with Peercoin. Bitcoin is incompatible with a system like this due to the very nature of proof of work, thus leaving Bitcoin holders at the mercy of arguments and endless debates, a very slow rate of change and an inability to come to consensus on major decisions.Another potential but more controversial addition would be the porting of Nu’s custodial grant feature, which would allow Peercoin holders to vote to create grants of new Peercoins. This would give Peercoin holders the ability to create grants to pay various bills as well as the members of Peercoin’s core development team without needing to rely on 3rd parties or donations from people or organizations who may have ulterior motives and want to offer money in exchange for influence in development of the network. Porting of Nu’s custodial grant system would make sure that Peercoin holders remain in control of development and that outside money has no influence on Peercoin’s protocol changes.
Sentinelrv, that is a very thoughtful post. I am appreciative of all the time it must have taken to organize such an article. Nice work.
And, my only critic would be the mention of a future feature. Steve Jobs wouldn’t mention a feature unless it was on the product. Hypotheticals are rarely persuasive, IMO. Just a thought.
Maybe something like, “We continue to make adjustments to our protocols which favor innovation, borrowing ideas from our parters at NU, which will enrich desirability and sustainability of our core platform (POS). The innovations we have planned are diligently considered, as we are not in this to win the pump of the month, but steer forward with the best intentions of aiming for the long term future.”
Peerchemist convinced me to remove mentions of Nu. It really should be solely about Peercoin, and the newsletter can work without those two paragraphs.
It is not so much about removing the paragraph to be respectful to those who do not want to hear about Nu. It is also that Peercoin does not need motions, as minters can choose to fork the chain whenever they please according to their opinion on some subject, block size for example. Peercoin is not an organization nor company - it is a currency.
This debate does not belong in this topic, and should not be presented in the newsletter. Also, I think it is best to focus on things we already have implemented and which are proved to work. Avoid using “taking it further” or “another potential”, we have stuff that is already here.
It is worth a mention that so far 98.5%(22740325) of all peercoins are distributed to miners and merely 1.5%(341888) to minters.
It will be usefully for peercoin community to begin activate!
Added