Back in May 2015, I published a book based on Peercoin’s first year history. I have published 20 more books based on other cryptocurrencies since that time. I am keen to know whether the Peercoin community would like me to write an updated version of the book that covers events from inception to 2018/19. If yes, please leave a comment in this thread.
I have been a full-time author since Spring 2018. I rely on donations to support the work I do in the cryptocurrency space. In order to proceed with an updated (2012-2019) Peercoin history book, I require sufficient funding. I seek an initial US$2,000 before I begin.
Peercoin’s selling point is longevity - a new history book would fit perfectly with that. So if you take that task up again, that would be fantastic.
I was thinking of writing such a book myself a year ago, but never really got the time - and won’t get the time for the foreseeable future.
I will donate $500, i.e. an equivalent value in Bitcoin/Peercoin to be held by the foundation in escrow. Just send me a PM once everything is worked out.
I’m curious to know what you will write about. There was a large time span that is probably just best forgotten. 2014/2015 saw the collapse of the bubble. Sunny King stopped developing for a while so nothing was being done. NuBits launched, which overall had a negative impact on our community.
It was not until 2016 that a new team formed and started taking over Sunny’s development responsibilities. Peerchemist became Project Leader and introduced his idea of PeerAssets to increase chain usage. Then in 2018 we formed the foundation and things really started taking off from there. We’re currently in the middle of catching Peercoin up to BTC 0.16.3 and SegWit, which will be released with v0.8 this year.
So a lot of the really positive things did not start until more recently.
A history book should describe the ups and downs. It is great to have it ended on an up, isn’t it?
Happy to be part of the multisig if required. Perhaps we can open a Peer4commit project for the funding or are channeling things like this through the Foundation anyway?
Oh yeah, not suggesting he ignore anything at all. I’m just saying those were difficult times, something I wish I could forget. They shouldn’t be avoided in a history book though.
I am pleased to announce that I have begun researching content for the updated Peercoin history book. I will update the community about the progress made on this thread.
Members of the community can help fund the book by donating to the following PPC Multi-sig wallet address:
After that Sunny started posting individual update threads. These threads go from #103 to #217. After that the new team took over the updates and reset the count. Currently they go from #1 to #24. All these threads can be found in this board here…
If you’re going to cover the stuff about Peershares and NuBits, you should look up threads by Jordan Lee, who was the project leader of Nu. This project started in the Peercoin forum and unfortunately was responsible for sucking away a lot of our community members and developer talent that existed in 2014. The NuBits project eventually died after their dollar peg collapsed in 2016.
Out of all this, Jordan Lee was responsible for having the Peerunity wallet created, which was a community client that existed alongside the core client that Sunny maintained. Peerunity featured a number of upgraded features, including a button to decrypt the wallet for minting, a theme change that included graphics and colors, etc… It was generally a better user experience, so we encouraged users to download it instead of the core client. Eventually though, after the new team took over we merged all the features from Peerunity into the core client, so there only existed one main wallet again.
After your first book was released and the community got quiet for a couple years after the NuBits launch, much of the discussion actually took place in the chat box that existed on the previous forum software. Unfortunately, the backup doesn’t seem to be working anymore…
The newer team first started forming from those chat discussions in 2016. There are forum threads also from that time period, but a great deal of discussion also took place in that chat, which is inaccessible.
Fortunately, we started up https://peercoin.chat/ in the same year I believe. This chat should go all the way back to 2016. The only channels I would suggest looking into are General and #Development. There’s a lot of filler discussion in General, but you can look for posts by team members such as myself, Peerchemist, Saeveritt, Hrobeers and Nagalim.
In 2017 we switched to the Discourse forum software, which we’re currently using. If you look at threads before this year, you may find that certain posts may be broken. On the previous software, people were able to use multiple quotes in a single post. When we converted the old forum database to Discourse, many of the quote boxes in posts were erased, so it may be difficult to understand who certain people are replying to. Other than that, all threads should still be there going back to the beginning of the forum.
We also have Telegram and Discord channels in case you want to look at those. Discord is the most recent. Telegram was made a little after we started peercoin.chat.
Anyway, I just wanted to make you aware of all this in case it helps your research. It may also be helpful to look up the post histories of our main team members. Hrobeers was also a core developer at the start of the new team, but is no longer in that list.
UPDATE: I have researched content for the period 9th November 2015 to the current month. Preliminary chapters have been structured (9 chapters for this time period). Please help fund the book by donating to the following multi-sig wallet address:
I have collected together relevant posts on this forum. I was a long arduous task, but am glad it has been done. I will use Sunny King’s weekly updates to structure the initial chapters (12th Aug 2012 to 8th Nov 2015). I have noticed that history was quiet from November 2014 to November 2015.
I anticipate I will have draft chapters ready by the end of this month. Please support the project by donating to PPC wallet address:
For the last week or so, I have been extremely busy researching content for the book. I have structured 17 preliminary chapters (please see link above).
Today, I have begun to write the first draft. Please check the content for any errors or missing history. Please ignore grammar and spelling for the moment
If you like the progress I have made so far, please help by donating to the PPC multi-sig wallet address:
Looks good. The chapters are a bit too much focused on the versioning of the official Peercoin client. But you can still soften that focus.
And I know you like to stay neutral, but there should be a full chapter (No. 7 or 8) that focuses on the reasons for the downslide of Peercoin from being one of the top coins to where it is now. Partly this was caused by the shifting focus of the crypto community to the “2.0 projects”, but there were also self-inflicted problems within the Peercoin community:
-too much reliance on Sunny king to develop the core client all by himself
-disappearance of the user “Justabitoftime”, who caused lots of steam in late 2013, but then disappeared
-Brain drain caused by the Nubits project, which later failed
Some other things that are missing:
-the discussion around cold minting and Sigmike’s proposal, which is still sitting on Github
-the Indicium project
-your own Peercoin book “History of the first year”
and minor things:
-the launch of the very first Peercoin video in 2013: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjL2AgCQDJ0
-the purchase of peercoin.org in 2017 or so. I think it was a single community member to donate a few thousand dollar, maybe superppc, not sure
-mention Peer4commit
I hope this helps a bit. There is probably lots more to add.
Chapter 9 should be called “Accidental blockchain fork and switch to version 0.5 protocol”.
Chapter 10 and 11 should focus on how the new Peercoin team evolved. First inofficially, with the start of new projects (Peerassets, Peerkeeper, Indicium), new forum and new chat software, and occasional Peercoin newsletters. Then in early 2017 officially, when the new team published official updates instead of Sunny king, and used titels like project leader, developers, community manager etc.
Somebody from the team might want to help a bit to describe how everything evolved.
I am just Peercoin enthusiast and observer myself.
The reader of the book should be able to recognize that Peercoin is an open source project, which depends on the work of volunteers. And in a decentralized project, key figures evolve who typically do a lot of work for the project and have some influence (lets avoid the word “authority”). In the case of Peercoin, I think everybody will agree that the two most important key figures besides the founder are Peerchemist and SentinelRV. This should become clear when reading the book. Not to confound this with any kind of glorification, which I am sure neither of the two wishes.
