Hello.
At first I would like to apologize for my English - it’s not my first language, and chaotic sentences - I’m still editing this post, as I’m thinking over it.
As I know, I’m venturing into waters, that maybe I shouldn’t be touching, as it was carved design ‘in-stone’, but I would like to step in nonetheless .
I don’t have strong opinions on either of the options, I’m not a proponent of a change - I’m here just to hear opinions about it.
What I think that would make the change beneficial is:
- the fair distribution is already in place - there is 7 years of ongoing PoW distribution - so coins are distributed into the hands of enough people interested - although it could be extended to for example 10 years
- switching to PoS now is much more easier, because coins are distributed and thus attacks such as Nothing-at-stake aren’t really feasible or possible
- miners make inflation of Peercoin higher - instead of max 1%, it’s between 2,5-3% constantly - although it’s small, it’s still 2,5-3x higher than with pure PoS model
- miners dump their coins onto the market - making market pressure on the market - which for Peercoin is quite shaky currently (without major exchange that was BTC-E/WEX)
- current mechanism of PoW rewards are depending on difficulty in the network and have variable block reward - thus providing miners with unreliable system, where they don’t know how much they will mine - less miners are really incentived to do it
- it’s not “eco-friendly” - which was mainly value propostition for Peercoin for long time
- more stable block generation times and possibility for shorter block generation times (and thus having more capacity “on-chain”, besides making “blocks bigger”) - which is just theoretical as for now, there is only 100-400 txs per day.
I think argument, about mining it instead of buying from the market, when there is a pump/cornering market have really lost it’s sense - miners can switch between coins with the same algos in matters of seconds/minutes, and there are so much ASIC miners for Bitcoin, that it really doesn’t make sense anymore - the difficulty and network hashrate would spike immediately, if PPC would start to appreciate in rapid way.
- it’s not really an argument, but some people on peercoin forum, and in other resources were inidicating that there will be “final” switch to pure PoS, somewhere in the future - I was always interested why they thought about it, when there wasn’t any decision towards it.
What are the advantages of current model? I think they are important:
- miners stabilizes market (dump their coins when market is high, according to @peerchemist buy coins when it’s low - I’m not really sure, about this, but it’s possible looking into the example of pure “dead” coin, which is Primecoin - but I think here also makes a difference that it’s still listed on quite popular and liquid altcoin exchange - Poloniex - which makes up for the traders and speculators - if it was delisted from there, Primecoin would be really “dead” in terms of market activity, price and capitalization). Although as I say there are example, that are countering it. I think that main thing that is floating coin around and make it “live” - it’s the liquidity - and this is first provided by the exchanges, which are liquid (for example: Binance - although there is wash-trading, as far as I have investigated this exchange, Bittrex, Poloniex, Kraken, Bitstamp)
- it provides entropy and thus secure better blockchain and native asset
- it’s set “in-stone” design that was crafted and made 7+ years ago
- interested miners can take part in the development - making protocol updates and other/new functionalities better - increasing decentralization of the ‘team’ (although with current model of rewards based on difficulty/hashrate - there aren’t really a lot hobbyist miners, because it’s too unpredictable to calculate profit, and pro-miners are usually just switching coins over, where is more profit) - actually maybe this a good case to think about merge mining? Just a thought, because hashrate, entropy should vastly increase then, and rewards would drop down - thus lowering monetary inflation
- better distribution over years - still ongoing, without back-stage deals, ‘private sales’, ICOs, IPOs etc. which improves transparency
As from the typical speculator-investor (more of speculator, as cryptocurrencies are speculative assets, unfortuntely that’s main objective for Peercoin, and other altcoins, but I wanted to include some “fundamental” data also) perspective, I see that they would like to have:
- low/none inflation or deflation of the asset they are buying into
- no group/s that can dump coins and can posses large amount of it (miners)
- protocol that is evolving and developing over a time, with increased usage
- at least 2-3 liquid exchanges
- “handy” liquidity (in the span of 1% of order book, if not possible than in the span of at least 10% span) - to be at least 100K USD (calculated from BTC or other coins/“stablecoins”)
These points are a little altered by miners, even tho it’s much better than in other cryptocurrencies.
If you have more points, please provide it, so I can add to the proper sides.
PS. Merged mining is a good proposition IMO -
It’s losing some freedom in terms of miners (although they are now switching coins as it’s sha256).
But as a reward it’s getting plugged into large pool of BTC/BCH/BSV hashrate.
Although I don’t know how hard would it be with current PoW/PoS, maybe it’s the main problem?
I’m not a developer, I think it would be interesting to see if it’s even possible.