Peershares Template Demonstration Network (v0.1.0) Released: Windows/Linux/OS X

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The Peershares development team is proud to announce the formal release of the Peershares template demonstration network (version 0.1.0)!

What is Peershares?

Peershares are an inexpensive and decentralized ledger to be used by individuals, businesses, and organizations for tracking share ownership and distributing dividends in an automated fashion. Shares can be transferred and held just like other cryptocurrency units, such as peercoins or bitcoins.

Using Peershares, individuals, businesses, or organizations of any size could raise funding through an initial offering without depending on a third party such as a stock exchange. While trading shares through exchanges will be useful to provide liquidity, Peershares can be traded on any number of exchanges just as Peercoins can.

Each business using Peershares will have their own blockchain that is independent of all others. Blockchains can be secured cheaply and easily using Peercoin’s proof-of-stake, once the initial (issuer-controlled) quantity of shares have been generated using proof-of-work.

Issuers can distribute dividends as Peercoins, which can then be held by the investors, or if they would prefer, can then take those dividends and convert them to another cryptocurrency or fiat through their preferred exchange. Being distributed, a share issuer is not vulnerable to the failure of single stock exchange.

Most importantly, Peershares are accessible by anyone. The template is open-source, and free to download and customize.

How does it work?

The client binaries in this release are intended to demonstrate the integration of a single Peershares offering’s test network with the official Peercoin test network. This version of Peershares (0.1.0) is compatible with version 0.4 of the Peercoin network protocol.

If you intend to use the Peershares template for your own offering, you will need to customize the code and compile your own binaries and establish your own network! If you would like to learn how to do this, please review the setup instructions on the Peershares wiki.

Important! The client binaries included in this release (and all subsequent releases) have had their “RealNet” intentionally disabled. If you do not include the configuration file, peershares.conf, the client will close with an error when you try to launch it.

To connect to the Peershares template test network:

  1. Download the Peershares client binary for your operating system.
  2. Launch the client; it will quickly fail, but at the same time it will have created the directory where the application’s data files will be stored.
  3. Create a text file called peershares.conf with the information needed to connect to the testnet. You will need to change the values for rpcuser and rpcpassword to something that only you know. After you’ve entered the content, save the file.
testnet=1
rpcuser=changeme
rpcpassword=changeme
addnode=54.255.142.16
addnode=54.72.105.68
addnode=54.207.53.43
addnode=54.81.120.250
  1. Move the newly created peershares.conf file to the Peershares application data directory. This will be different depending on which operating system you use:

[ul][li]For Linux systems: [font=courier]~/.peershares/[/font][/li]
[li]For Windows systems: [font=courier]C:\Users<YOUR_USER_NAME>\AppData\Roaming\Peershares[/font][/li]
[li]For OS X: [font=courier]~/Library/Application\ Support/Peershares/[/font][/li][/ul]

  1. Launch the Peershares application. This time, it will connect to the official Testnet and synchronize with the block chain.
  2. To receive a distribution of testnet shares, please follow these instructions.

What’s next for Peershares?

The Peershares development team is heavily involved in their own implementation (NuBits) built on top of the Peershares framework at this time, so we’re limiting our public-facing development on the Peershares project for the near-future. However, because we’re actively building on top of the Peershares template, we’re always making improvements. These improvements will, in many cases, find their way back into the Peershares template codebase.

We’re committed to addressing any issues uncovered by others who use the template, so please do not hesitate to submit reports for anything that you discover.

Peershares Resources

Website
Source Code
Release Binaries
Whitepaper (word)Whitepaper (pdf)

Peershares Wiki
API Documentation
Support Forum

Is Peershares a new coin?
Each Peershares offering runs on it's own block chain, so it's fair to say that each instance is it's own cryptocurrency, but it would be more accurate to describe each as a unique cryptoasset.
Can I pay out dividends in digital currency other than Peercoin?
The Peershares template is designed to use peercoins as the dividend currency. While it is possible to customize an individual offering to support other digital currencies, it will require making changes to the source code.

To learn more about how Peershares uses peercoins to pay dividends.

Do I have to give up equity to the Peershares team if I use the template?
No. The Peershares template is offered free of charge, under an MIT License. This means that you are free to repurpose the source code for both personal and commercial projects. It permits reuse within proprietary software provided all copies of the licensed software include a copy of the MIT License terms.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

Is it legal for me to raise funds by selling shares to investors?
The Peershares team cannot answer this question for you. Different locations are governed by different rules, and it is the responsibility of the owner of the offering to make sure that they are aware of the legal and financial conditions that apply to them.
I'd like to use the Peershares template to create an offering, but I'm not very technical. Can you do it for me?
Beginning to use Peershares to manage your business’s equity will likely require some technical assistance. Please contact the Peershares team (Peershares at gmail dot com) for details about the services we can offer to support you.

Cross-posted at:

Congratulations!

I am running the 0.1.0 client. It is sync’ed with the network. Current number of block is 5307. (“Estimated total blocks 2653” ? ) There are 4 peers – the ones in the config file.

The demonstration network is probably sparsely populated right now. In reality, there isn’t a lot to see (to be honest, blockchains are pretty boring without a vibrant exchange economy surrounding them), but we wanted people to see that the network is viable, and get a chance to check out the daemon and GUI client.

Great news! Keep up the good work guys, Peercoin is truly evolving!

Guys, make sure to keep the bitcointalk thread bumped. It’s linked above in my other post in this thread.

Congrats Peershares team, some good work delivered.

Just to get a bit more clarity, could any application supporting Peercoin basically accept Peershares by changing identifier and name. Is it documented somewhere what needs to be changed to accept each type of Peershares? What would be the unique ID for each Peershares blockchain? Or is this up to the crypto developers or should we refer people to the Peershares team?

It might be useful information e.g. for exchanges wanting to accept Peershares and setup a trading platform for several Peershares assets. Or for Peer4commit to accept some types of Peershares as a bounty. But I guess Sigmike would be able to do that anyway, it is just meant as an example.

Also wondering does every share has its own number? For example if I issue 1000 shares, they are numbered 1 to 1000 or are they random unique numbers? I wondered about it thinking about what else we can do with Peershares as a blockchain in a box is so powerful. E.g. anyone thought about feasibility to use a Peershares blockchain as a voting mechanism. Distribute the shares to all eligible voters and ask them to send them to sign them with unique number and send share to wallet address A, B or C.

Hmm, maybe I should open a separate thread for this, so just hoping on a short answer here.

Please point differences between Peershares and Swarm on broader forum https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=656413.msg7375537#msg7375537

Wonderful news!

Good!

I’ll see if I can address some of the differences on that thread. I don’t know a lot about Swarm, so I’ll need to research what they are proposing.

Correct; though I qualify that with an obligatory “in theory.” Each Peershares offering will have it’s own genesis block and port, and potentially, it’s own address scheme. For instance, I’m using a Peershares blockchain for private accounting and we’ve customized the initial characters of each address to work more like a stock short-name (e.g. “ABC…”).

If an exchange wanted to offer some organization’s shares, they would be able to do it using the same process they would for adding any block chain-based currency or asset.

Shares are fungible, so there’s no concept of “#123,” just as there isn’t really a way of describing a peercoin as “#234.” When someone owns shares, they really own the private keys to an address that point to a number of shares that live in the block chain.

We can talk more about the ways that an offering could be used, but having fractional ownership in an offering can allow for “sign and vote” functionality. It is only rudimentary thought, and would additional development for a front-end that would make it easier to reconcile votes.

If each implementation has is own blockchain, does that mean the the minting on one doesn’t help secure others? Won’t that spread minting to thin across a vast number of peershare blockchains? As an investor, the security of the block chain of the peershare I choose to invest in would be of great significance. Isn’t there a way to have all the minting on any peershare implementation contribute to the security of all implementations? That would provide great confidence to investors in the security of the peershare. I heard of sidechains but dont fully understand it. Is sidechains the solution to this?

Sorry about the noop questions. I believe in peercoin and looking forward to to start a business using peershsres once I understand it better and feel confident about the security.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I317 using Tapatalk

[quote=“IndigoMan, post:13, topic:2539”]If each implementation has is own blockchain, does that mean the the minting on one doesn’t help secure others? Won’t that spread minting to thin across a vast number of peershare blockchains? As an investor, the security of the block chain of the peershare I choose to invest in would be of great significance. Isn’t there a way to have all the minting on any peershare implementation contribute to the security of all implementations? That would provide great confidence to investors in the security of the peershare. I heard of sidechains but dont fully understand it. Is sidechains the solution to this?

Sorry about the noop questions. I believe in peercoin and looking forward to to start a business using peershsres once I understand it better and feel confident about the security.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I317 using Tapatalk[/quote]

That’s a very good set of questions, so don’t think for a second that you’re asking anything obvious.

As it is currently implemented, each Peershares offering is on it’s own block chain, and shareholders who mint are only securing that chain. Today, because there is no unified wallet that can hold multiple offerings’ block chains, you would need to run each offering, side-by-side, and enable minting on each.

Obviously, this is potentially problematic for long-term adoption of the Peershares template (if the goal is to get people to use them as a true “portfolio”), so it’s something that we have on the roadmap. In fact, the Peerunity project was created to eventually address the need of a conjoined Peercoin / Peershares wallet.

We haven’t (formally) considered any functionality that would allow Peershares offerings to “pool” their minting power. I can see how it would be beneficial to the ecosystem, but I also can envision a number of technical, security, and economic challenges that would arise. That doesn’t mean it’s a non-starter, however, and I’ll bring it up with the team.

For now, because we have no control over how people chose to launch their own Peershares block chain, security is the responsibility of the offer. In many cases, it’s our expectation that a offer would be hesitant to grant a percentage of equity to outside interests that exceeds 51%. The offerer’s reputation and the due diligence of people looking to acquire shares in the offering are very important to the pricing and long-term ROI expectations, so this centralization of block chain resources, while philosophically troubling to some people, should not be a deal breaker.

If you expect that someone’s investment is worth being involved with, it follows that you would also be pre-disposed to believe that they have the best interests of the shareholders in mind, and therefore would protect the network sufficiently with their own equity stake.


If anyone else on the Peershares team would like to add to my analysis, or would like to clarify anything mentioned above, please feel free to jump in.

Pooling minting together has been suggested before with not much discussion outcome. Jordan once mentioned that Peershares scales up nicely but not so well to scale down. Maybe things have changed. It’s good that this topic is picked up again because it’s a practical issue.

Not handing out 51% is not good enough. If you only have 1% shares minting, someone with 1% shares can reliablly 51% your network. Due diligence includes keeping the stakes minting. Well maybe that is a case for letting other to mint for you while your stake is cold locked. I could see share issuers paying commercial “wheel turners” that does decentralized minting for their networks.

Just had a question bother me last night during my sleep… when paying dividends, what if someone’s share was less than 0.1 PPC? Won’t that mean they would not get paid cause the transaction fee is higher than the amount itself? How does peershare handle that? Is there a way to set minimum payment amount for each shareholder?

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I317 using Tapatalk

Only correcting you that the fee is PPC 0.01 instead of PPC 0.1. Your question is still valid, I’m not aware of a minimum setting, but I think common sense would prevail when paying dividends. 0.01 PPC is less than US$0.02 at the moment.

[quote=“IndigoMan, post:16, topic:2539”]Just had a question bother me last night during my sleep… when paying dividends, what if someone’s share was less than 0.1 PPC? Won’t that mean they would not get paid cause the transaction fee is higher than the amount itself? How does peershare handle that? Is there a way to set minimum payment amount for each shareholder?

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I317 using Tapatalk[/quote]

The fee is paid by the person who distributes the dividends, and it’s an extra cost added to the amount that is being distributed.

Peershares minimizes the transaction fee by grouping transactions for those who are receiving dividends. We’re pretty sure that the default is a maximum of 1000 recipients per transaction (it’s been a while since anyone looked at that code), so the fee is not 0.01 PPC per recipient, but a much smaller amount.

To combat the potential vulnerability where someone is generating thousands and thousands of addresses to make the dividend distributor pay an excessive fee, there’s a minimum payout amount. When someone’s balance is under the minimum, the shareholder won’t receive anything, and the amount is distributed among the other shareholders.

In the default Peershares template the minimum payout is set to 0.01 PPC. This can be changed in the configuration, if the offerer would like to modify it (using [font=courier]distributionminpayout[/font]). This can be changed, as the needs of the network change, or, if needed, by the user who is sending out the dividends with an update to their peershares.conf file.

Thank you for clarifying and yes that was a typo with the fee amount :slight_smile:

I’m intrigued by the case when a shareholder’s dividends are less than the set minimum. You said they won’t receive anything and the amount is disrupted to other shareholders. Doesn’t that imply injustice? As a shareholder, I wouldn’t want to forfeit my dividends just because the IPO didn’t make enough profit for my shares’ dividends to be higher than the set minimum. That would be punishing the shareholder. I would want them to accumulate overtime until they’re above the minimum and qualify for payment.

Would love to hear your comments on this Ben.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I317 using Tapatalk

Perhaps, but let’s look at it realistically. If you are holding shares and you’re going to fall under that 0.01 PPC distribution amount, it’s going to be because of two reasons – you hold an extremely small amount of shares, or that dividend payment is very small, comparative to the number of active share holders at the time that the transactions were sent out.

Right now, at the current market rate, if you fall under that point, your dividend would be less than $0.015. Let’s assume that Peercoin does what we all expect it will, and next month it tops out at $10,000/PPC (obviously, right?) – under that pricing, you’d be out $150 for the dividend payment, which sounds a lot higher than it would be, proportionately, at that basis.

Your comment about accruing until you reach the minimum is interesting – unfortunately, unless I’m neglecting something, it doesn’t work on the blockchain. The reason that the dividend isn’t paid out for someone who is getting less than 0.01 PPC is that it’s not beneficial to the network. There’s a cost to maintain the network (data transfer, primarily), and to even store the information that you have a pending payment that’s waiting for more so that it reaches the minimum would end up needing to be put somewhere. In the case of the blockchain, that “somewhere” would need to be in a block…which costs network resources to process.

That may not be the answer that you’re looking for, so if you have a specific scenario in mind, let me know what it is and we can discuss it.