Peercoin Conference Presentation (Last Updated: 05/28/14)

[size=18pt]Peercoin Conference Presentation:[/size]

Last Updated: 05/28/14

1. Conference Presentation:

[size=14pt]Examples:[/size]

Any idea how long he is expected to present for? We should try to avoid having a large amount of slides.

Also are we sticking with PowerPoint? I would vote against Prezi anyway… it can be quite polarizing.

I’m not sure. I gave him the link to this thread, so hopefully he reads it. What would be the average time you think we should plan for, 15-30 minutes?

We should probably make separate presentations for Peercoin, Peershares and Primecoin and not combine all the information into one. As an example, Peercoin and Peershares could be covered and Primecoin could be skipped in case there’s not enough time to cover everything. If all 3 are combined into one presentation, the presenter will have no choice but to cover everything. If you separate them, once one presentation is over, you could just start the next one. Extra details that aren’t hugely important can be used to run the clock out if there’s extra time. These extra detail slides should probably be put toward the end of each presentation (but before the conclusion) and would be optional depending on the remaining time.

I have no experience with making presentations though, so feel free to disagree. These are just my opinions. I think each presentation should begin with the first slide showing the coin/text logos with either the light or dark background, these for example…

[b]http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y17/Sentinelrv/Other-Images/logotextdarkbg2.png~original[/b]

[b]http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y17/Sentinelrv/Other-Images/Peershares-DarkBackground.png~original[/b]

We could maybe add in some extra info like the website and forum address. Then it would transition to the intro and the rest of the presentation.

That sounds about right. So maybe we should aim for 10-15 slides max.

What do you think of this design? It reminds of the design Apple use for their presentation, and since we are already using their font… :wink:

http://pastelink.me/dl/66f4be

I agree that Primecoin probably should be separate from the Peercoin/Peershare presentation.

I can’t view it for some reason on my work computer. I’ll have to check it out later tonight.

Oh sorry here it is on imgur instead:

http://imgur.com/a/eb5dt

Just my thoughts on it. I do think that having a coin that is optimized energy-wise is great, but I feel that emphasizing this in the reducing CO2 way might be a little overbearing for some. I think it should be more of a side note for now. What I think we should be pushing is the Hybrid PoS/PoW aspect, more protection against 51% attack, and the inflation vs. deflation aspect. I think the energy efficiency is a good point but can be better emphasized in the near future when Bitcoin gets unbearable energy-wise. (In my mind most people are not worried with the energy consumption right now and we should not be trying convince people of something they don’t care about at this moment. Again, I am not saying it is unimportant but I feel that most people are more worried about making cryptocurrencies more secure and more widely accepted.)

What also might be another thing to emphasize is the “Tragedy of the Commons” aspect in regards to the mining and show how minting can keep block generation more decentralized and fair. (Also try to sneak some debunking of the “rich get richer while the poor get screwed” fallacy i.e. talk about how everyone who mints has the opportunity to gain 1% of their holding in interest.)

I personally feel the fundamentals is what got Peercoin as far as it has and the myths are the only things holding us back.

[quote=“Hibero, post:7, topic:1760”][…]
I do think that having a coin that is optimized energy-wise is great, but I feel that emphasizing this in the reducing CO2 way might be a little overbearing for some. I think it should be more of a side note for now. What I think we should be pushing is the Hybrid PoS/PoW aspect, more protection against 51% attack, and the inflation vs. deflation aspect.
[…]
What also might be another thing to emphasize is the “Tragedy of the Commons” aspect in regards to the mining and show how minting can keep block generation more decentralized and fair.
[…][/quote]

I think emphasizing its energy-efficiency is simply not enough because being energy-efficient is essentially debatable as it is the “price” for keeping the network safe.
But the reasons for being energy-efficient and the consequences of it are worth talking about.
It is energy efficient, because PoS needs only little CPU power (runs minting on my RaPi with < 20% CPU load).
That PoS process secures the network AND helps keeping the decentralization (in difference to the centralization occuring to Bitcoin).
PoS helps preventing the “Tragedy of the commons”.
You can (once there are client applications) let Peercoin PoS minting run on your smartphone.
So you can have a secured network without paying a high price for electricity!

The raised security level by having a hybrid process (PoS/PoW), 2 separate processes which secure the network (independently!) is important.

The quite fair Peercoin distribution, mainly provided by the PoW process until now, solves the initial distribution problem for “PoS only” coins.

I think another aspect could be the inflationary model.
It is well-known that PoS generates roughly 1% annual interest.
But it is not as widely known that the PoW coinbase reward decreases rapidly as the PoW hash rate grows (coinbaseReward = 9999/diff^1/4).
It is not widely known that the majority of blocks are PoS blocks.
If you add it up with the tx fee of 0.01 PPC/kB that is destroyed (it is important to pronounce the “per kB” part as it is a minimum fee, which can exceed 0.01 per tx easily!) you find out, that there will be either an equilibrium between created and destroyed Peercoins or at least a very low inflation rate (which is not bad, in difference to hyper inflation!).

The tx fee prevents Peercoin from being used for micro transactions. That keeps the block chain size low (still under 300 MB with > 100,000 blocks and roughly 1.5 years runtime) and the amount of data transfer to keep the block chain in sync low. Another thing that is good for keeping the level of decentralization high.

Inflation of Peercoin compared to Bitcoin: http://cointrader.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/ppcbtcinflation.png (taken from http://cointrader.org/peercoin-proof-of-stake-and-bitcoin)

Mentioning Peershares is a great deal. As Peershares has decided to be a Peercoin piggyback the “development centralization” of Peercoin will rapidly decrease. And Peershares development is likely to boost the development speed of Peercoin (as stated by the devs) as well.
It is remarkable that the Peershares development has been funded with coins worth hundreds of thousands of USD!
This way the Peercoin development is funded indirectly.
This is what makes it more and more believable that Peercoin can become a backbone currency.
Peercoin development is indirectly supported by Peershares, because it’s needed by Peershares - because it utilzes Peercoins as backbone!

I think peershares should definitely be mentioned. The concept was very vague to me (I’m a techie, but not a programmer nor an economist), until r00tsical’s post here: http://www.peercointalk.org/index.php?topic=2332.msg18944#msg18944
This answer by Jordan Lee is very clear and understandable, exactly what you need for explaining the concept in a a few minutes.

Another strong point to mention regarding Peercoin would be the small blockchain size, which ensures a long and complete transaction history. This makes the coin even more interesting for the financial market.

This was posted on the subreddit…

[quote=“tomatoesrfun”]Hi, I think this is a great idea. Thank you for getting the discussion started. I don’t have a peercointalk user account, so I will reply here. I liked the proposed presentation at a first pass from River333.

In his slide about why does energy efficiency matter, I think that there should be a comparative graph showing the cost per transaction for bitcoin or peercoin. I have the link for the cost for a bit coin transactions here, but I have to figure out how it is calculated to get the same data for peercoins.

I also think that on the presentation they should discuss the 1% per year block reward for minting blocks. I had mentioned my feelings about the idea of calling this interest, and I think that we should stay away from that name (just one guy’s opinion). I think that it is a minting block reward. This should be in “what is proof of stake” section.

Finally, I think that a “ongoing work” slide should be added, and this should have a list of things that we’re actually working towards. I don’t actually know what should go in this section, aside from an impending 0.4 release, but perhaps something like “more video user guides!” Or more specific details of what the features in the 0.4 release is going to entail. Like bringing it up to the bitcoin 0.8 release, and so on.

I’m afraid I can’t comment too much on the section for peershares, because I’m not really that familiar with the topic (peershares = good!). Perhaps the person leading the subject could help design a few slides? Or someone working on the project? Subject matter experts always make the best slides.

I do think that we need to know how much time there is available for the presentation (if it exists). Question for community: “How long are typical bitcoin conference presentations? 5 Min? 30 min?”

I do make presentations as part of my job on a very regular basis. So I’m used to knowing things like: There is definitely going to be a presentation, the presentation is going to be X minutes long, there is going to be Y number of people present. It seems unusual to me that Irritant said that he probably is going to the conference and he may need to give a presentation or speech. I think he should be intimately involved in doing this presentation, because making a presentation when you aren’t familiar with the content never goes as well as when you know the content inside and out. I don’t actually know him and I’m sure he would do a good job I’m just stressing the importance of doing so. This isn’t a knock against him in any way - I think it’s great a presentation about Peercoin can be made.[/quote]

Ok so I have added some basic material to the slides based on the comments above.

If you just want to view it: http://imgur.com/a/zdctH

PowerPoint File: http://pastelink.me/dl/8e3bee
Please make any edits you want to this and reupload your own version.

What I think we need to do next:

  1. Find some graphs/charts/images that we think are important to add to the presentation. There is currently too much text.

  2. Figure out how we should phrase the material.

  3. Decide whether to add/remove any slides. I added one that could show market cap etc. but feel free to disagree on this.

  4. Find out how long he is expected to present for so we can have the optimal amount of slides.

  5. Make a presentation for Primecoin. I am not very knowledgeable about that though so someone else is probably better suited for that.

  6. Finish the presentations as soon as possible to give him time to become familiar with the material.

These are just my opinions though so feel free to suggest different styles/material or whatever.

I’m not too fond of the green background. I understand Peercoin is supposed to be a green technology, but we convey that with the use of the leaf in both logos. I think this is probably too much. Can we use something similar to the light background we use for the official logos…

The light grayish background color looks more professional to me than using all that green. You would need to take out that big white spot though. Also, if you used a similar background, I think you should just go with this as your opening slide…

I think making the opening slide vertical like this, rather than horizontal looks much better. It fills up more space and is easier to see. The same should be done with the Peershares slide.

Agreed with Sentinel on the light background. White space is your friend in presentations to people, use of colors should just be for accents.

Download links for the PowerPoint files so everyone can make any changes they want:

Gray background: http://www.mediafire.com/download/504oc2edcn4iiai/PeercoinPresentationGray.pptx

earthmoonsun’s white-with-logo background: http://www.mediafire.com/download/9l9grvh4quuquvm/Peercoin_Presentation.pptx

I didn’t remove the white spot in the gray background but this should give you an idea of how it looks. It shouldn’t be too hard to remove if someone wants to, but bear in mind that if this is being shown on a projector then I doubt anyone is even going to notice.

I would appreciate some feedback on the actual content of the slides, as that is probably the most important thing at this stage.

The gray one looks awesome in my opinion. Could you place them in one of those easy to view imgur slideshows like you did with the others? I didn’t have powerpoint, so I had to download it to view these. It would make it easier for others to view them. If you do that, I’ll try to see if I can get some more feedback on the content.

Presentation looks good. My favourite is the blockchain size comparison.

I do think slide #7 needs to have the word “F*CKING” have a blur out in the middle of the word. Especially since it is so close to the word “God”. I know we’re just reporting here, but at the same time, when it is up on the big screen, that word is going to detract from what the speaker is talking about.

Any time you put the word F*cking on a large screen, it’s not a good thing to do in a public place.

Gray: http://imgur.com/a/VJAfx
earthmoonsun’s: http://imgur.com/a/ogsl1

As a side note, hmtyrant on reddit suggested using the website slid.es to create the presentation as it is “more flexible (html) and visually more appealing”. I’ve never used it personally though, and it looks like you have to pay to make it available offline (which would be important at a conference just in case). It could be an option though if someone who has experience with it is willing to transfer the content over.

[quote=“ppcman, post:16, topic:1760”]Presentation looks good. My favourite is the blockchain size comparison.

I do think slide #7 needs to have the word “F*CKING” have a blur out in the middle of the word. Especially since it is so close to the word “God”. I know we’re just reporting here, but at the same time, when it is up on the big screen, that word is going to detract from what the speaker is talking about.

Any time you put the word F*cking on a large screen, it’s not a good thing to do in a public place.[/quote]

I think there were other images which didn’t include that particular post if you would prefer. I’ll take a look now.

Although at the same time, that post does help to show how significant the threat of the 51% attack is :wink:

Looks much better with the grey background.
Agree with some points made here.
Don’t stress the CO2 part. It’s nice and all, but not a key point really.
Focus on PoS and talk about the coin in general, its devoted community and its reliable price.
PPC is here to stay. The community are constantly trying to make it succeed. It isn’t in competition with LTC, rather its built on the basis of LTC with some touched up features. PPC works alongside what LTC has to offer, and together with LTC, it is the most secure long term scrypt crypto there is.
Stress how its a community coin.
Include the huge bounties there are to show the commitment in pushing the coin forward and all the ways the coin has developed.

Let us know if you need more.
Don’t get too technical. If there’s too much information, it’ll likely cause people to lose interest.

[quote=“AT101ET, post:19, topic:1760”]Looks much better with the grey background.
Agree with some points made here.
Don’t stress the CO2 part. It’s nice and all, but not a key point really.
Focus on PoS and talk about the coin in general, its devoted community and its reliable price.
PPC is here to stay. The community are constantly trying to make it succeed. It isn’t in competition with LTC, rather its built on the basis of LTC with some touched up features. PPC works alongside what LTC has to offer, and together with LTC, it is the most secure long term scrypt crypto there is.
Stress how its a community coin.
Include the huge bounties there are to show the commitment in pushing the coin forward and all the ways the coin has developed.

Let us know if you need more.
Don’t get too technical. If there’s too much information, it’ll likely cause people to lose interest.[/quote]

Regarding not stressing the CO2 part, do you feel there is currently too much on it in the presentation? There is only one slide out of twelve, and I purposely put it towards the end and gave it a reasonably neutral title, allowing the audience to come to their own conclusion.

Maybe I can add something extra about bounties and non-competitive community in the “Ongoing Progress” slide. The basic points are already there though so maybe the extra details can be given by the presenter instead, so the slides don’t get too cluttered.

I agree. If anyone can think of anything good then I’ll put it in.