I’ve been asking a few questions from the perspective of someone new to Crypto - hoping to see more of Primecoin unravel into factual usable information.
The highlights we have uncovered or that are included:
* Cap on Primecoin some approximation of 50million to 1billion
* Primecoin is ASIC unfriendly/hostile making it a more 'fair coin'
* Primecoin deal with transactions at a much faster rate
- This point COULD be a great factor in 'real market' usage, but there doesn't seem to be any major vendor/merchant interests? (Would be nice to improve coin)
* Highly innovative - Primecoin seeks new Primes to help science - it may use energy, but it creates uses from that energy above Primecoin alone
* Primecoin is much less deflationary over Bitcoin
- This point gives new comers a fairly equal chance to buy without high rates
- This point also strengthens the fact that Primecoin's potential for day to day stability and usability are far improved over other coins.
* For the techies - Cloud mining potential
This is what we’ve brought to the surface on that thread thus far. Sebs - you’ve been helpful as hell in getting things to the surface on that side, so thank you.
I feel it is also necessary to have open source pool software with an open source miner for Primecoin. (jhPrimeMiner, at least recent versions are closed source and so is rapidprime. No pool’s source is available)
And there we have it. This is what people care about and should be marketed as such. I’m sure there are people that have already delved into these issues, but we would need to know how full proof this asic-resistant claim is before we put it out there with marketing. What is it exactly that Vertcoin and Primecoin do differently to make them asic-resistant and which coin is superior in that area and why. We need to know the answers to these questions if we want to go this route.
Also, I’m thinking it might be time to get Lightning to finish making the Primecoin logo files. It seems that the main Primecoin website and subreddit have settled on the design Lightning made for me. If it’s the generally accepted version of the logo, I think it might be time to have him finish these files and put out the high quality versions. We could also include the logo at the top of the forum.
Have you all read the Primecoin whitepaper? - economically it is intentionally designed to mimic the rarity of Gold, not be spent day to day. That is why there are fewer than 5 Million primecoins now and the rate of money supply grow will not go higher.
XPM is a great success for what it was designed to do. XPM was meant to prove that non sha256 non scrypt other algorithms could back cryptocoins, and subsequent coins like Quark pushed that idea further as well. Strategically, now that many coins are competing with different varied algorithms, there is a higher chance a coin better than bitcoin can emerge. Thus primecoin was a success, and I tip my hat to Sunny King for pushing the global crypto community forward.
This is one of those “on the surface” ideologies that make sense until you dig a little deeper.
(Not saying you), but the common misconception that ASIC’s are bad, and that they make it difficult for some one with a regular computer to mine coins.
ASIC’s or any specialized hardware is a good thing.
The reason is simple:
Mining that prefers a standard computer, without specialized hardware investment is EXTREMELY popular with botnet owners, who only need to steal tiny resources off a huge number of infected computers.
This is true yesterday, today, and tomorrow. It’s not going to change any time soon.
Now unless you have some ASIC’s hooked up to your computer, with Bitcoin’s difficulty rate, even with a 30,000 infected computer botnet mining with CPU and GPU cycles, it simply isn’t worth it to mine Bitcoin anymore.
Instead these botnet owners are mining Litecoin, and Primecoin, and other coins. These are coins that can mine in the background, with a low priority process, but make use of the entire memory region of the computer, being careful not to hit the disk swap often.
I have no doubt in my mind that Primecoin’s price kept dwindling because botnet owners were mining the hell out of it, and selling it for cheap. Even multi-algo currencies will fall victim to this problem.
When an innocent person’s computer slows down, they figure it’s Microsoft looking for more updates, or their antivirus scanner, or some other process. Rarely do they realize their computer is mining cpu and gpu capable algorithms.
So what about all the poorer majority who can’t/don’t want to make an investment into specialized mining hardware? Well then, buy your coins. The market has already shown us that buying your coins instead of trying to mine them, gives much greater rewards over time. The return on only a small investment for mining hardware rarely pays off anyway.
I own a few block erupters and that’s it. I make 25 cents every 3 days. I do it as a fun hobby.
Every one worries about a 51% attack with cryptocurrency. I’ll tell you, it’s not going to come from pools as much as it will from secret mining operations anyway.
This includes something like a massive botnet owner…
…or THIS GUY (youtube at 01:50 and again at 03:10 on the timeline).
These two groups of people don’t need pools to create a 51% attack if they don’t want to… They can simply setup their own private pool and find their own blocks.
I expect a debate from people about what I’ve written, but I can further qualify why I feel this way.
By the way, I am still proud of Primecoin, I really am, and I’m not saying it can’t succeed, because it can. Just right now Peercoin is doing better and that’s okay too.
The question is should we focus on both Peercoin and Primecoin, or by focusing on another cryptocurrency we just make it more complicated and waste time.
I linked results in this thread that show Primecoin and Peercoin are both in the top 3 cryptos for positivity among Twitter comments. Both have high brand equity, just low brand awareness.
Primecoin, I thought, was suppose to be the day to day coin.
iheartcryptocoin quotes the white paper as Primecoin being a mimic of gold - which kind of confuses the situation further.
Do we have 2 savings coins? In which case Peercoin, to me would seem the better route.
Or do we truly have 2 different coins that have distinctly different purposes? These confusions need to be made clear, plain as day clear.
Once we’re sure we are past these small road bumps, I’d say that the proper branding will do the rest.
[quote=“David, post:25, topic:2039”]I linked results in this thread that show Primecoin and Peercoin are both in the top 3 cryptos for positivity among Twitter comments. Both have high brand equity, just low brand awareness.[/quote]Agreed. I’ve seen this at conferences. Everyone who knows about Peercoin and Primecoin like them, but not many people know about Peercoin and Primecoin.
Of course botnets are a problem, but I tried to formulate a way to make Primecoin more attractive to potential adopters and not why Primecoin is bad. Botnets are an issue for many coins, including Bitcoin in the early days, but they tend to become less prevalent the more a coin matures, since the ration normal miners vs. botnets goes down. Bit of chicken and egg problem.
ASCIs are not bad per se, that’s why I tried to emphasize that Primecoin ASICs are likely to be multi-use and could be applied to other purposes after mining becomes uneconomical. In contrast to SHA256 ASICs, which have little other use except maybe as a mobile radiators after one or two years in service. That’s quite wasteful in my opinion. Again, this is a sales pitch, I’m trying to convince people why Primecoin is good (maybe a bit exaggerating here and there). Please correct me when you see inconsistencies. In the short-term, I also hope that we can develop a GPU miner to help alleviate the botnet issue and attract disenfranchised Litecoin miners.
I just would like to stress that I don’t see Primecoin as drawing away resources from Peercoin development, it’s not a zero-sum game. Instead, we have the unique chance to build a strong and interlinked ecosystem, something that no other altcoin team has.
I think development could be fairly organic, if we address the following steps:
1. Launch Prime4Commit website & development fund
2. Fork mycelium mobile wallet for XPM (should be fairly easy with bounty)
3. Continue developing GPU miner (?)
4. Refer to Primecoin on Peercoin website, and vice versa. Cross-marketing
[quote=“Drummel, post:26, topic:2039”]I guess I have some minor confusion.
Peercoin was suppose to be the savings coin.
Primecoin, I thought, was suppose to be the day to day coin.
iheartcryptocoin quotes the white paper as Primecoin being a mimic of gold - which kind of confuses the situation further.
Do we have 2 savings coins? In which case Peercoin, to me would seem the better route.
Or do we truly have 2 different coins that have distinctly different purposes? These confusions need to be made clear, plain as day clear.
Once we’re sure we are past these small road bumps, I’d say that the proper branding will do the rest.[/quote]
This is what I don’t understand. Irritant just got done telling me via email that he thought Primecoin also had a fixed transaction fee of 0.01 XPM / kb, which would make it unsuitable for day to day microtransactions, the same as Peercoin. Is this true? What would be the point of this?
[quote=“iheartcryptocoin, post:22, topic:2039”]Have you all read the Primecoin whitepaper? - economically it is intentionally designed to mimic the rarity of Gold, not be spent day to day. That is why there are fewer than 5 Million primecoins now and the rate of money supply grow will not go higher.
XPM is a great success for what it was designed to do. XPM was meant to prove that non sha256 non scrypt other algorithms could back cryptocoins, and subsequent coins like Quark pushed that idea further as well. Strategically, now that many coins are competing with different varied algorithms, there is a higher chance a coin better than bitcoin can emerge. Thus primecoin was a success, and I tip my hat to Sunny King for pushing the global crypto community forward. [/quote]
Blush* no i havent had a chance to look the whitepaper over yet. i should do that.
did another poster just write that primecoin is less deflationary, and more likely to stay stable because of more coins getting mined more often? if so that seems to conflict with the idea that it’s supposed to mimic the rarity of gold, because gold is very limited, is it not?
also, bitcoin is marketed as a spending currency, and I once read that Bitcoin’s inflation rate is supposed to mimic gold as well. trying to make a cryptocoin’s supply enter the market like gold doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t supposed to be a spending currency.
golds not, but thats because nobody wants to carry around a little postal scale and tools to make change with… crypto is fungible, so that’s a non issue.
i guess step 1 is to educate ourselves (my first step is to educate myself better at least). primecoin does seem to be in a kind of limbo doesn’t it?
i think the fact that there’s a peercoin logo at the top of the screen and not a primecoin logo, and the fact that nobodies really sure about it’s intended purpose or how it’s supposed to relate to peercoin speaks to the fact that primecoin is kind of being neglected (from a marketing perspective). not that we’re all super-humans capable of doing everything at once… but this is a valid point. we should figure out where we’re going with primecoin.
as for primecoin fixed transaction fee, if it’s really more inflationary like somebody who posted in this thread says, then that matters less because it will be harder to drive up the price.
guess ive got some research to do finding out how primecoin stakcs up against vertcoin.
this post from seb is where I got the idea that primecoin is more inflationary than your average coin:
[quote=“ppcman, post:23, topic:2039”]ASIC’s or any specialized hardware is a good thing.
The reason is simple:
Mining that prefers a standard computer, without specialized hardware investment is EXTREMELY popular with botnet owners, who only need to steal tiny resources off a huge number of infected computers.[/quote]
ASIC is a good thing if top of the line (in terms of power efficiency) ASICs can be owned by the masses. Before that happens ASIC hash power will be very concentrated. So far only a few groups of people have enough capital/connections to make economically successful ASIC miners. Block erupters are not going to compete with them. Not many people would run against large efficient ASIC farms as a hobby.
The situation is similar with botnets. Most peole cannot compete with botnets to make profit. Botnets are not capital intensive to create, so they put a down pressure on prices at exchanges. I think they are more distributed than ASICs.
In the very long term when most coins have been mined for most kinds of coin people can imagine, mining will be only for collecting transaction fees. The successfulness of a coin will be judged only by the robustness of the network because issues such as transaction speed and size of block chains have all found technical solutions. I think CPU coins will have an advantage then because it costs virtually nothing in time or money to create a node.
[quote=“mhps, post:32, topic:2039”]ASIC is a good thing if top of the line (in terms of power efficiency) ASICs can be owned by the masses. Before that happens ASIC hash power will be very concentrated. So far only a few groups of people have enough capital/connections to make economically successful ASIC miners. Block erupters are not going to compete with them. Not many people would run against large efficient ASIC farms as a hobby.
The situation is similar with botnets. Most peole cannot compete with botnets to make profit. Botnets are not capital intensive to create, so they put a down pressure on prices at exchanges. I think they are more distributed than ASICs.[/quote]
I find this rule of thumb to be mostly be true:
Some one that has plunked down several thousand (or tens of thousands) of dollars on ASIC mining hardware “in general” is often going to be a more legitimate user, with “skin in the game” who wants to genuinely mine a coin to reap the benefits of doing so… (or creating a genuine business model and sharing the profits with investors, etc)
I also find this rule of thumb to mostly be true:
Some one who is a botnet master, who has purposely infected tens of thousands of zombie machines, in order to install his background cpu-miner, often doesn’t have much “skin in the game”. In addition, they could care less whether these miners mine coin genuinely, or if they create blockchain forks for double spending, or what ever evil things they can do…
So based on these two “mostly true” rule-of-thumb scenarios…
It is better to choose the less evil of having more ASIC / expensive investors mining the greatest part of the networks, because in general, they are going to have a lot more honest intentions than botnet owners who are a greater evil.
Doing the reverse, is much worse in my opinon, and that’s why I suggest ASIC’s are better than cpu / gpu coins while botnets exist on such a large scale like they do…
Still don’t think I’m right?
Read this article. I just found it after seeing if I could prove my point with some googling at the end of this post. I didn’t have to look far…
Told you. ASIC’s / Peercoin already beat Primecoin for this very reason. Botnets steal cpu power, sell Primecoin earned, and then trade for Bitcoin which totally kills the XPM value.
Assuming we all see that there is value in Primecoin as a network and I think there can be we should go with a plan.
I think Sebsebzen posted an excellent plan going forward, which I like to repeat as it were almost literally my thoughts.
Still like to understand SK’s view on how he thinks if and how both coins would best complement each other (see my question in SK question thread).
I just would like to stress that I don’t see Primecoin as drawing away resources from Peercoin development, it’s not a zero-sum game. Instead, we have the unique chance to build a strong and interlinked ecosystem, something that no other altcoin team has.
I think development could be fairly organic, if we address the following steps:
Launch Prime4Commit website & development fund
Fork mycelium mobile wallet for XPM (should be fairly easy with bounty)
Continue developing GPU miner (?)
Refer to Primecoin on Peercoin website, and vice versa. Cross-marketing
The only plan I can see, is also add Proof-of-stake to Primecoin, so that minting keeps up the network inbetween PoW block creations. In addition, it encourages people to hold Primecoin longer. Finally, have a greater percentage of annual interest per year, even if it means you have to increase the total max circulation.
Open to other suggestions on how to improve Primecoin to make it unattractive to mine-and-dump botnets.
ppcman, I’m not sure about adding PoS to Primecoin retroactively, but I also have been wondering why nobody has tried to combine prime algorithm with PoS in a new coin. NovaCoin combined PoS with Scrypt, basically just by copy and pasting Sunny’s code.
The only plan I can see, is also add Proof-of-stake to Primecoin, so that minting keeps up the network inbetween PoW block creations. In addition, it encourages people to hold Primecoin longer. Finally, have a greater percentage of annual interest per year, even if it means you have to increase the total max circulation.
Open to other suggestions on how to improve Primecoin to make it unattractive to mine-and-dump botnets.[/quote]
I’m on the fence, but I tend to disagree with your view about what is worse. Botnets or super miners. Although I don’t like botnets and agree with you that they have nothing at stake, they are providing distributed infrastructure which is good for the network. I struggle with the ethics around it though. Mining non ASIC-resistant coins requires more and more specialised and expensive equipments and will therefore centralise by nature which is not good for the network. It will also become out of reach for most people, while as CPU coins will probably always be in reach (assuming the resistance to ASICs holds) and more likely to sustain distribution by nature.
So that’s why I think there is value in Primecoin (among other similar competitors) and we should execute the plan I referred to to start with. I will also emphasize the uniqueness of us having two altcoins in one basket. I think we underestimate the opportunities here, but more clear positioning, marketing and research how the coins could best complement each other is still required.
