Interesting post from http://www.reddit.com/r/peercoin/comments/28y84s/isues_with_proofofwork/:
“…There are on average about 52000 blocks per year. If the userbase grows, then it could take years or even lifetimes to get a single block. It could become as bad as solo-mining Bitcoin. So it would be nice to have a P2Pool-like system for PoS.”
What would it take to enable a peer-to-peer minting pool in Peercoin?
i don’t understand, is a PoS pool really useful?
i mean ppc has a standard 1% inflation through PoS. if a wallet has 100 ppc,it will get 1 ppc/year eventually.
you mean that this wallet can wait years before gets any pos reward? then the pool could be useful 
Yes, it means that the wallet wouldn’t be able to mint and receive its 1%. A P2Pool, in theory, could distribute partial rewards for trying to mint, but not succeeding. It seems impossible, from a technical perspective, but I wanted to get the community’s thoughts on it.
this is about PoW mining, and p2pool. Don’t know if it has to do with PoS, or if p2poolPoS even is possible
In v0.4 there is a protocol change required for p2pool support. p2pool is still not yet supported until v0.4 protocol switch completes in May. After that it’s up to the market to decide whether and when to get p2pool running. Due to proof-of-stake security design of peercoin, concentration of mining pools poses no threat to network integrity.[/quote]
P2Pool is a specific protocol for subdividing POW that would not provide any benefit to POS minting whatsoever.
However, I do think there is at least ideological value in seeing Peercoin POW P2Pools up and running. I would be more than happy to host a node for this purpose, but I haven’t yet been able to figure out how to adapt the configuration files myself. I started a thread on this topic a few days ago in General Discussion but it has not received any replies. :-\
The problem with the opportunity to mint for small holders is something I started discussing when I came aboard. I never got an entirely satisfying answer. The best still is that it sounded ok when wallets with higher stakes, have higher chances.
From a network perspective it doesn’t matter much whether there are 52000 minters or 100000 minters based on the 52000 block a year. So as long as we accept that small wallet holders practically can’t mint, we are fine.
However, you will loose the 1% reward incentive for new small walletholders, which might over time reduce the inflow of new money and hurt the network in the longer time.
This has been recognised in a few recent threads looking to increase rewards for smaller wallets by winning the transaction fees of that block they got to mint. In this case the chance remains low, but chance on a higher reward. This might work as most people do like lotteries, even if very irrational with a close to zero chance of winning. It is not perfect though.
So inevitably mint pooling will become attractive to a certain group of users to increase their chance to mint a block. This will eventually happen when the rewards become high enough and the risks acceptable (cold locking and multi-sig will reduce the risks). That is how banks work today. So the only way to resist that to some extent is to increase chances (more blocks?) or increase individual rewards or a combination of both.
When I mentioned a P2Pool-like system for PoS, I didn’t really mean something based on the same principle, as it wouldn’t work. People can poolmint and solomint at the same time, which is not possible with PoW. The result is that you can get both shares in P2Pool and whole block rewards from solo minting. It doesn’t work.
I merely meant to say it would be nice to have decentralized pools.
But I was thinking of two other things:
[ul][li]Paying interests at any transaction, not only on coinstake transactions, since CDD contribute to security, regardless of whether they are in a coinstake transaction or a regular one. The issue is that it disincentivizes block minting, as it doesn’t provide any additional rewards. It is not a big issues as long as most remaining minters are honest nodes and include transactions into the blocks they generate.[/li]
[li]Some kind of coinjoin for coinstakes: the protocol must support that many inputs can be combined as a coinstake kernel. A pool server centralizes partial coinstake transactions from its members, and groups them until the total coinstake transaction scores above the PoS target. The issue is that the pool gets to choose which transactions to include in its block. Pools could be prevented from mining on a fork though, if the partial coinstake transactions embed a reference to the last known block.[/li][/ul]
I think it is crucial to address the problem of interest distribution, because small holders are more likely to move coins before they can use them to mint a block and earn interests, thus destroying coin-days while earning no reward at all. Thus, if only large holders get to earn a 1% interest, it effectively means that small holders must bear a 1% inflation, and the associated loss of purchasing power.