Primecoin Prerelease

Marketplace Primecoin
21

[quote=“irritant”]from a marketing point of view it is genius, people talking about the coin created by the creator of ppcoin, people who haven’t heard about ppcoin will learn about it, and to show the skills of the developer(s) that it is possible to really make something new instead of just copy/paste, from technical point of view … still have to wait and see, it could have faster transaction confirms but I don’t know, and maybe other cool features (namecoin kind of stuff?)
so, can this daughter currency have a daughter forum on its parents currency forum?

:)[/quote]

Well, this is pretty true…as a marketing move its pretty good.

I’m not totally sold on the idea, I’ll admit it…however, Sunny has earned my trust and I’ve come to realize that he actually thinks through his moves like a master chess player up to 8 moves in advance…its really quite refreshing in many ways as its so uncommon for people to do that…all I’m saying is that I’ll support this coin as well, even if I don’t totally get it because Sunny, without exception, has known what he’s doing in the past. I see no reason to think that has changed here.

I’m having trouble understanding the move for a coin that Sunny has stated himself believes will fail in ~five years, so I’m just going to assume that there is some play that I’m not seeing clearly here. If its just a project to generate revenue faster (ie a year or so) for holders I get it, then those funds could go to the development of PPC overall…meaning time for Sunny to do it. I just know, as do most other PPC backers that a few million five years from now is a hell of a lot better than a few thousand in a few months. I’m thinking Sunny has to realize that as well.

Note: Its not a blind zealotry type of faith I have in Sunny, its just that I think he’s been right enough in the past to grant him this one.

22

I never said primecoin would fail in 5 years, what I mean is that it should give us a better overall grip at the market in the next 5 years. It is designed to last longer, as long as bitcoin and litecoin that is. I would not say this is sort of ‘WMD’ to bitcoin’s dominance, that would be arrogant for me to say and I have too much respect for Satoshi and the current bitcoin development team. It’s really a tool to help us position against litecoin, which now has a too strong momentum for ppcoin to challenge by itself alone in the short term. If primecoin is successful, it could demonstrate the limitation of pure proof-of-work systems and help to level the playground faster.

The thing that perplex me somewhat is that, there are many decent developers and other talents around, but at this point most of them just want to start their own clone coin. I hope this is just a transient fad because of the recent success of litecoin, and later on people would realize it’s more fruitful to just take a stake in a good coin and join an existing capable development team. For example, talents like Robert (dreamwatcher currently running explorer and leading JKC), and like Peter Bushnell (currently leading FTC who seems to be good at marketing and management), and many others who are capable of doing apps like basic auction site, escrow, games etc that think they can clone a coin and then leverage their app skill on it. In my opinion if the app is that good you don’t need to start a coin, you can just support most popular coins out there already and become a market leader for that particular app.

I believe as we approach 100 altcoins competing in the market soon the attitude in the market would change a bit, then we would be able to see more talents interested in joining ppcoin/primecoin team.

23

I couldnt agree more with sunny’s last statement. I have had to defend PPC and POS in the cryptsy trollbox a few too many times. People dont understand it. It may be like others have said. Ahead of its time.

I have been doing a lot of work to educate the newbies about POS. It seems it may be working… to a degree. I am pretty sure my promotion of bitgem and POS is leading to the these new coins using NVC as a base. And cloning from there. Sadly the only reason they are doing this is 51% resistance, They can not see the benefits beyond that. I fear they dont have a firm grasp on the code and wont be able to maintain it. Bitgem offers little innovation but it is a maintained fork which is more than can be said for others. Which is why I have supported it over most of the new ltc clones. I am using it as a gateway to teach PoS as well as I know it. Giving them an opportunity to get in early, play around with it make some money and then look at PPC or hell NVC if they want scrypt so much

I have put together an overly simplified explanation for the new guys. Please understand my knowledge of POS is the best i have been able to gaiin and am 100% open for suggestions to fixes. changes https://cryptocointalk.com/blog/4/entry-19-what-is-proof-of-stake-how-do-i-mint-pos-blocks-work-in-progress/

It seems most newcomers these days are blinded by the clone coin pandemic that has been happening recently. Calling clones “Innovative”. They dont look past these for innovation because they were not mining at 0 difficulty. There is no reason the things they are doing could not be done with an existing coin. The developers are not even maintaining the code anymore on most of them. But rather working on promotion or cloning btc services for their coin. Network security is a secong hand priority to them. There is no need for a new coin for every new service they are offering. If the developers of some of these coins joined a team like PPC or even BTC I think there efforts would go much further. The need for POS will become more evident in the coming years I feel as though I am still getting in early with PPC.

I just wish newcomers would base their investments on the future of crypto rather than what the pumpers told them

24

Ok i’ll add a whole primecoin section to this forum as well then and as far as I see it yes primecoin should support PPCoin … I have a lot of questions so i’ll post them in the new forum section once i have created it, and i guess that another domain i should grab and point to here
primecointalk.com and primecointalk.org so any donations to the funding of this would be greatly appreciated :slight_smile: addys in signature.

25

After studying some information about POW/POS, there’s a concern comes to me: Is it possible for a POW based coin switch to POS based?

According to Sunny’s view, POS will stand up and challenge POW in 3-5 years, when the advantage of POS and disadvantage of POW become much more obvious than they are now. However, for those powerful coins like BTC or LTC, they have lots of resource, especially in skilled developers. Only if it is technical possible, there is plenty of time and resource for them to overcome the critical disadvantages in themselves. For example, they may introduce POS blocks into its chain, become some kind of hybrid design just like PPC now, and eventually switch to POS based.

If things go that way, POS and energy efficiency may win at last, but not PPC.

26

[quote=“xjabc, post:25, topic:168”]After studying some information about POW/POS, there’s a concern comes to me: Is it possible for a POW based coin switch to POS based?

For example, they may introduce POS blocks into its chain, become some kind of hybrid design just like PPC now, and eventually switch to POS based.

If things go that way, POS and energy efficiency may win at last, but not PPC.[/quote]

Bitcoin itself cannot do this because 21,000,000 is the essential lynchpin of bitcoin. However it would theoretically be possible to transfer the value of bitcoins to a POS chain via proof of burn. This is something that will be ticklish to achieve well from an economic perspective though relatively easy technically.

27

Daniel at The Mises Circle recently published a good article on proof-of-work that mentions ppcoin. He also thinks that bitcoin can easily adopt proof-of-stake if needed. As pointed out by calian there is some tough restriction preventing bitcoin from doing that. Suppose we even get to the point that bitcoin or litecoin developers were considering adoption of proof-of-stake, it would already put us at great advantage in the market.

  1. It’s an acknowledgement to the superiority of our technology in the market, of course we are going to take advantage of it in marketing.
  2. They probably will try to use a less advanced version to avoid breaking their inflation model, and compromising energy efficiency.
  3. If they copy us and make big changes to their system, first it’s going to be very costly for them, and also hard for bitcoin community to reach consensus on this, moving confidence from their side to us in the market.
  4. bitcoin developers are competent enough to attempt such a change, I am not sure other coin developers are even capable of managing a change of this magnitude properly.

I wouldn’t worry too much about this right now, the first step is to get our networks into good enough shape so we can take advantage when opportunity shows up. This is why I had to move primecoin release ahead of ppcoin v0.4, time to market is so important now. Every month of delay for primecoin would put it at significantly greater disadvantage against litecoin/feathercoin etc.

28

We should not underestimate the political issues that would arise. Whatever the specific nature of the problem that will cause Bitcoin to consider a solution such as changing to PoS, there are sure to be numerous solutions discussed. Changing to PoS will be but one of many solutions proposed.

The choice of solutions is likely to drive political disputes within the bitcoin community. Different groups will benefit more or less from the different solutions. Consensus will be difficult to reach. There will be surely be uncertainty and delay. There will likely be a compromise solution that may not be optimal. Such is the nature of politics.

29

[quote=“Sunny King, post:9, topic:168”]People tend to think about security in terms of hashrate, but in fact the real number to look at is mining income. That’s why the coinchoose mining market share pie chart is important, indicating the shift in market since last year (bitcoin share dropped from 95% to 75%).

As bitcoin loses mining market share, the supporting hardware business (SHA-256 ASIC) would also lose speed of growth due to lack of money in it. Of course this is relative to each currency’s market capitalization.

The hashrate doesn’t need to drop for security to be lowered, because it’s the cost of attack that’s the measurement of security, and it’s a relative comparison between the competing currencies. There are already people claiming litecoin is more secure than bitcoin. But there is a grain of truth in it, based on the mining market share, bitcoin is now only 3~4 times more secure and dropping.

[quote=“irritant”]I don’t understand exactly how this will reduce bitcoin’s mining share. It does not compete with bitcoin mining hardware, because it is different kind of PoW right (first only cpu, later maybe gpu, and who is still mining bitcoins with cpus) ? (Same with Litecoin, they only eat away the gpu’s of bitcoin’s mining share because they use scrypt, but since there are asics… )

I understand how it would reduce the 51% security if bitcoin miners switched to an alt coin, but not with different algorithm and first cpu only? I guess I must be missing something[/quote][/quote]

Why would there be lack of money in it? ASICminer will continue to produce and sell ASICs. Bitcoin is in a slump because BFL may go out of business. I think your judgment with PPcoin was a correct gamble on the difficulty algorithm mainly because you were correct to predict ASICS/Moore’s law.

But how will that apply to Primecoin? How will Primecoin threaten Bitcoin? I doubt it can. I do think it can compete with Litecoin but so could PPC so I don’t know what possible advantage Primecoin will have unless it’s just much more profitable to mine and then yeah I’ll agree it could work.

I think you’re correct, the more profitable the coin is to mine the more secure it will be because people will all choose to mine it. But I don’t see why Primecoin will be so much more profitable to mine even if it produced prime numbers, I just don’t know enough to determine that I should quit mining PPC and mine Primecoin. You’re going to have to convince miners who mine PPC to switch over and support Primecoin.

And if it’s CPU mining then we have the Amazon EC2 problem, and guys with server racks with hundreds of CPUs who will basically make it unfair from the start unless we can somehow prevent this? I can see this centralizing real fast.

30

After sleeping about it… I’m still not a fan of the idea to release a second coin. Mainly this is because there are tons of work to do to get PPC userfriendly. And this is, what is needed to get mor people into PPC. I doubt primecoin will help PPC.

However, I decided to support primecoin with my CPUs andy I trust Sunny here even if I still do not fully understand the need of primecoin.

Since I have never mined for a coin in such an early state: How will mining work? Will it be integrated in the Wallet? Or will there be a dedicated mining software? Will there be a tutorial prerelease?

Cheers
Muto

31

[quote=“MUTO, post:30, topic:168”]After sleeping about it… I’m still not a fan of the idea to release a second coin. Mainly this is because there are tons of work to do to get PPC userfriendly. And this is, what is needed to get mor people into PPC. I doubt primecoin will help PPC.

However, I decided to support primecoin with my CPUs andy I trust Sunny here even if I still do not fully understand the need of primecoin.

Since I have never mined for a coin in such an early state: How will mining work? Will it be integrated in the Wallet? Or will there be a dedicated mining software? Will there be a tutorial prerelease?

Cheers
Muto[/quote]

Mining usually released in the client itself… though as this is completely different to any other mining… will need Sunny to confirm what he plans to release…

Hopefully we will see a thread start on here first for the setup and mining and client release :slight_smile:

I am going to move this topic now to the Primecoin section.

32

Let me explain a bit more here. Primecoin is an important strategic move directly targeted toward the developing bitcoin/litecoin duopoly. Currently ppcoin does not have enough strength to weaken this trend by itself. Even though now ppcoin has many forks, the total PoS market share is about 0.3%, while litecoin’s market share is over 5%.

The issue is that even though a large section of the market is now uncertain about bitcoin’s continued monopoly due to the rise of litecoin, most folks are still convinced that proof-of-work is going to continue domination, likely in the form of bitcoin/litecoin duopoly.

I believe this thesis is not correct. Litecoin’s success was not purely due to its marketing prowess or development capability (from a technical standpoint it’s a copycat coin, nothing original by itself as its scrypt implementation was copied from Tenebrix/Artfortz), it’s mainly because it has the right property at the right time in the market.

So it dawns on me that it’s in fact a weakness in pure proof-of-work systems in general, that their dominant positions will inevitably weaken. Litecoin’s rise is closely linked to two major events, bitcoin’s first halving last year and bitcoin’s mining specialization this year. This point will become more clear when litcoin halves in about two years and bitcoin halves again in about three years.

But the market needs a little push here, without the technology of primecoin, I don’t see any of the new hashcash variations challenging this duopoly mentality any time soon. If primecoin is successful, there will be new types of proof-of-work designed by other developers following primecoin’s footstep, breaking the myth that a SHA-256/scrypt duopoly should last.

How does it help ppcoin? Once people are over their obsession of the unrealistic promises of proof-of-work, they will start looking at the alternatives more seriously. Also, the users of primecoin will gradually be acquainted with ppcoin technology and this helps ppcoin to gain audience.

The design of prime proof-of-work in primecoin is a small feat by itself. Smart people are asking me how it is designed, it will be revealed in due time with a design paper. This is because designing a prime proof-of-work for cryptocurrency is not an easy task, in fact designing any non-hashcash proof-of-work is probably not easy, and that’s why hashcash remained the only type of proof-of-work in cryptocurrency for over 4 years.

  1. amazon ec2. In my experience, the market price of a cpu coin is typically below the cost of renting ec2 computing units for mining, so it is generally not profitable for miners to do so. But of course there are exceptions, at time of steep rise of market price of the coin it would be profitable. primecoin has 1 minute block spacing, so it should be able to accommodate up to a couple thousand miners without the help of pools.

  2. how will mining work initially? it’s the same with bitcoin’s built-in cpu miner, you just open the client, go to debug window, type in command ‘set generate true’. Or you can add ‘gen=1’ to configurations.

33

Sunny’s above post contains much foresight, vision and truth imho. We can expect nothing less from such a great dev.

I’ve been floating between a few coins since returning to what is now very much a crypto-currency scene. I’m dedicating hashing power from some new USB Block Erupters to PPCoin and I’m very much looking forward to the release of the innovative Primecoin, that I’m also looking to mine with a x6 (dual core) i7 machine fully overclocked.

Those concerned that Primecoin will cause PPCoin to lose traction should be reassured by the fact that I for one have become increasingly interested in PPCoin due to the upcoming release of Primecoin.

In addition to the above I’m going to be adding PPCoin and Primecoin links to my free web proxy homepages, mainly for donation and advertising purposes, although to also generate some extra interest outside of the non-crypto-currency IT community.

See: proxy.primeoptic.net and xeronet.primeoptic.net (links and pools to be added soon) the primeoptic name is pure coincidence btw. ;D

Anyway Proof-of-Stake and much innovation FTW ! 8)

(I’m BitcoinFX on bitcointalk.org)

34

I think Sunny’s strategy is sound

The new prime hash system, will force a wedge into the LTC/BTC dupopoly, and provide a bridge to PPC.

Further No other coin system has this tandem approach were XPM is a bridge to PPC. This is going to be hard for single house coins to combat. BTC not LTC DEV’s can really say here is a road map to the future in this way, they can’t go an develop another coin. If anything BTC and LTC may have to adopt PPC features in the future.

The only thing that may be required is Sunny some how make his DEV team a bit larger…I’m not sure who if anyone else is in it at the moment…maybe Fuzzy Bear of forum and Marketing…

Having seen the work SK has been able to do on other coins, leads me to relive he has spare capacity, and that is why he has been able to develop XPM.

SK obviously dreams in cryto C++ code by now, and so is bursting with ideas and innovation.

35

I am really getting worried about the future of crypto these days. I have been defending sunny king on the trollboxs lately.

All the new comers to crypto seem to think since developers like Sunny King that are not pushing out “services” left and right they are “lazy”. I have tried to point out the fact that these copy/ paste coins need the services because that is all they have. They are stealing developers away from the innovation. I hope there is a correction soon. They just dont get it

Sunny king’s earlier post was dead correect. These new coins are taking devs away.

They have an idea for a service and they create a new coin. Instead of putting it behind something with a future

One of their valid arguments seems to be the ppc website. I may look into working with someone to “update” it if anyone would be interested. Messgage me here or bitcointalk if you would like me to. Same username

A simple update with most of the info from the bitcoin website with a few more explanations of PoS might attract more attention

36

Now that would just open a can of worms.

37

I don’t think a pre-release to anyone is a good idea. Although an easy to follow, step by step, set up and mining guide for ppcoiners would be ok.

I will mine if there is an easy guide to cpu mining, I haven’t ever cpu mined or solo mined.

38

[quote=“urubu, post:37, topic:168”]I don’t think a pre-release to anyone is a good idea. Although an easy to follow, step by step, set up and mining guide for ppcoiners would be ok.

I will mine if there is an easy guide to cpu mining, I haven’t ever cpu mined or solo mined.[/quote]
I will be round the whole day of the 7th july (planned release day) and if no guide, i’ll write one up in the first few mins and post on here (for windows and Linux (Ubuntu) users) if sunnyking does not provide guide, but usually it very simple (just set gen=1 in .conf file on client)

FuzzyBear

39

Cool Sunny, you and all the team look like making an intense and good job.
I am looking forward which results will bring this new step.