[size=10pt]I think it is low as compared to other coins for these reasons:[/size]
[b]
- Smaller Block Chain & Sync[/b] The Peercoin block chain remains much smaller than most coins as a result of the 0.01 transaction fee. As a result, opening up your client and re-syncing to the network doesn’t take as long after it has been offline for several days. So people leave it offline.
2. Quick Transfers / Storing Wealth Most people aren’t constantly in their wallets moving coins around so they leave their wallets closed most of the time. By design, this isn’t a coin for buying/selling products, it is for storing wealth. When they do open a wallet to move wealth they sync to the network quickly, and make a single transfer move to/from an exchange and close their wallet. So they show up on the network, stay 10 minutes, and then disappear for a week or two.
3. Minter in 0.3 / No Live Stats Since proof-of-stake is kind of cumbersome and the current GUI wallet has no bells and whistles (and the locked wallet 0.3 transfer coin issue), people aren’t actively minting. This will change in 0.4 and future wallets if we give enough “live” feedback and progress about the minter while it’s working, and it’s progress… As a result, 0.3 people aren’t encouraged to leave it online
This last one, #3 is the issue we really need to be paying attention to with wallet development. It will encourage more wallets to be left online, and part of the network. If the minter can relay back what’s happening on the network to the wallet client every time the user pushes an “update minting stats” button, that would encourage them to leave the wallet online more often.
Initially I had thought that the minter stats should continually and automatically update on the gui wallet, but that will consume cpu cycles, and if the user is away from their computer, that would be a waste of processing power to provide that… But if they push an “update minting stats” button on the wallet, it could then talk to ppcoind and get the latest incremental counter statistics, etc.
People like stats. Including current block numbers, block minting attempts / vs successes, transactions to be included in next block, etc, etc. whatever stuff we can provide might help.
So let’s just focus on #3 above. This will encourage more people to keep their wallets live and on the network, so they can actively watch it humming away minting.