I’m sorry that you’ve had trouble staking due to trading, but staking is not meant to be a mechanism for profit. It merely exists to provide stakeholders with an incentive to produce new blocks. The network doesn’t need every coin to stake in order to be secure, so naturally some will choose to let their coins sit and stake while others will use them, trade them, or invest with them.
Increasing the staking reward will only exacerbate the problem for people who don’t stake. Read this.
I also disagree that Peercoin has an identity crisis. I think it used to have an identity crisis, but over time we’ve gained a much better understanding of Peercoin.
In the early years for example we used to advertise staking rewards on the website as one of the main benefits of using the network. I believe this was a mistake. As mentioned above, staking is merely necessary for security. We never should have placed such a huge focus on earning rewards or interest.
I think the updated text of peercoin.net does a much better job of explaining Peercoin’s identity and purpose. It’s a cryptocurrency network with efficient security. Because of this it is inexpensive to operate and security can be sustained indefinitely.
This allows the Peercoin network to be relied upon as a mechanism to securely store value over time (longer than other networks with costly security protocols), whether that value is fiat wealth stored in PPC or a document or some other data stored as a hash on the blockchain like Perpera allows us to do now.
The point is that in 100 years, the data stored on the Peercoin blockchain will still be secure because that security can be provided cheaply. I can’t be as confident that Bitcoin will remain secure due to how costly it is to maintain. Peercoin gives peace of mind that your data will always remain reliably secure and available in the future.
What we need to do is continue to expand the uses of the Peercoin blockchain like what we’ve done with Perpera and PeerAssets.
I actually recently wrote an updated short description for Peercoin that we will be using from now on…