So I’m new to peercoin and cryptocurrency in general, but I have some questions and concerns, first off, this forum seems dead. The price of bitcoin is going up but peercoin seems frozen or falling. So my question is this, what’s being done that might address this? Or is everyone just waiting for the price of bitcoin to pull up the price of this coin? Not trying to be negative, i’m new, and just don’t understand what’s going on. I have read the last few months of the devs updates, but it seems to just repeat the same information, something, vrs5 I think, is in testing. I don’t know what that means. I have been reading a lot of threads on this forum over the last week to find answers but it only created more questions in my mind.
It seems like there was lots of mining pools for this coin only a year ago, and lots of activity on this forum, but now it seems nothing but tumbleweed. Then there is the post from that guy in charge of marketing that says he is bored and leaving. Should I just convert my ppc to bpc and repoint my antminers at antpool? The trend towards centralization of Bitcoin is what pushed me to find a stable altcoin, and peercoin from what I read seems to have addressed all of bitcoins flaws. But will centralization even be a problem in my lifetime?
Those videos on the main site is what ultimately convinced me to choose peercoin, but after reading the market forum I found out the guy was paid to make them. Where I thought it was a honest review it turns out it was a paid marketing campaign. The current situation is making me nervous and while I can afford to loose all the money I have invested, I’d rather not. I’m not trying to trash this coin, I want it to succeed considering I have a stake, just wondering if I am the only nervous or maybe i’m just being paranoid. Also, what is going on? What’s the plan? Thoughts?
Peercoiners seem to be very laid back and seem to demand a solid cryptocurrency.
Here’s how I see it:
Slow development means consistency.
Emergency updates are still done.
Trading volume is good, but quite centralized (BTC-E). Price still correlates to Bitcoin.
I actually like Peercoin for not being so hasty. I’m also active in the Nu and Storj community and I can hardly keep up with the pace.
Compared to those forums, Peercointalk is soothing to me
Indeed, there hasn’t been much activity lately, but we also had the Holidays. I’m with Peercoin since late 2013 and it had its ups and downs.
Most of us are waiting for 0.5 (and eventually 0.6) to get Peercoin catching up. Development has always been slow and I consider that a good thing for a backbone currency, but lately it has been very slow. Partially because a lot of the resources have been going into B&C exchange and Nu being the new and flash thing. That includes my own time. At the end of the day a coin needs a handful of every day active people, that seems to be lacking lately.
Having said that the developer Sunnyking indicated that at least 0.5 is near and I hope it brings back a few people, but more will be required to get Peercoin vibrant again.
Hope it will get a bit of love once B&C have been up and running. I still think it is a good PoS coin and I don’t think it will go away anytime soon, especially not as long as Bitcoin doesn’t make the changes they need to make to survive. I don’t see another PoS coin taking the lead that soon though. They are facing the same challenges as Peercoin, you will need an active and committed community. Just paying people to do that and throwing a lot of money to marketing is not sustainable imo. e.g. Neucoin is trying for a while, we will see…
The developer updates you’ve been reading about are from Sunny King, the person who originally invented proof-of-stake. He is anonymous, similar to Satoshi Nakamoto. He has been working on v0.5 and v0.6 of Peercoin over the last 1.5 years. Nobody knows his situation, but yes it has taken this long to release the next Peercoin upgrades. The purpose of these upgrades are to help catch us up to the Bitcoin protocol’s development, which unfortunately far outpaces us. It will also add some Peercoin specific features like making it so Peerapps can be created on our network, cold minting, which allows minting Peercoin safely from cold storage and hopefully removing centralized checkpoints so people outside our community will no longer have a reason to avoid us.
First, I believe you must be referring to what I said in chat. I didn’t say I was bored and leaving. I said that since early 2013 I’ve lived very frugally, only paying out for monthly bills and a tiny amount of fun/entertainment money so I don’t get bored. The rest of my money gets invested into crypto. I was only commenting on how I’m able to invest so much money into crypto.
Second, you’re correct in your observation that it is dead here. There are several reasons for this. Sunny King’s development pace is extremely slow for some unknown reason. It also doesn’t seem that he makes an effort to put a team together to speed up development. He’s rather a one man operation and takes his time. Another reason is because the various Peershares DAOs/DACs have sucked all the active people and talent out of this community. NuBits was the first and B&C Exchange was the second. These two projects took most of our development and marketing resources here. Both are decentralized businesses capable of earning profit through share increases and dividends: NuBits provides price stable pegs to real world currencies and B&C is a decentralized exchange.
Most of the Peercoin community moved to these two projects, but I don’t think that necessarily means they left Peercoin completely. For example Nu is setup to distribute dividends in Peercoin and B&C will most likely also have this feature at some point. A recent poll revealed that NuShareholders still very much want Peercoin to remain their dividend choice, meaning that even though they spend most of their time at other projects like B&C and Nu, they still support Peercoin.
I also haven’t been that active around here and spend most of my time at the Nu forum. This doesn’t mean I have abandoned Peercoin though. I imagine many PPC supporters are taking the same approach as me. You see, I understand that Peercoin is not meant to be used as a daily transactional currency like NuBits is. Peercoin is designed to replicate gold and its main job is to be a decentralized place to store value long-term. (Read here for a much longer explanation). Bitcoin started out with the goal of daily transaction currency, (without all the blockchain safety protections) and are now starting to realize they should have taken Peercoin’s route instead. Peercoin by comparison focused from the very beginning on decentralization/security and long-term store of value.
This means that Peercoin is in a prime position to take over should Bitcoin’s PoW fail like many here believe it will. Peercoin is a backup for Bitcoin should PoW prove to become unsustainable later down the road. Because of this, Peercoin is a long-term bet that PoW consensus will fail in time. This also means that the only development that is important is for Sunny King to make sure he’s caught up with Bitcoin’s protocol development. There is no great need here to constantly innovate. If PoW does fail, then all the Bitcoin developers will have a similar crypto that they can move all their apps and services to. Because of this, I think most Peercoin supporters realize that the only thing that can be done is to sit and wait and let Sunny King attempt to catch the protocol up to the current version. There isn’t much to do here because of this, so they simply hold their Peercoin and wait, participating in other projects like Nu and B&C that offer profit potential. And in the future if their prediction of Bitcoin failing because of PoW comes true, hopefully Peercoin will be ready for the attention its going to get.
This is at least my mindset about it and why I have taken a relaxed approach toward working inside this community. I’m simply waiting for the inevitable to happen. Of course, it’s always possible that we could all be wrong and PoW will be just fine. In that case, many of us are invested in Nu and are currently actively working on that. Peercoin is a long-term bet that PoW will fail. Peercoin can only succeed if this happens. Nu on the other hand can succeed right now, so if you can’t play the waiting game here, try joining us at Nu where things are very active. I myself have invested in both.
We hired Chronos to make those videos for our website yes, but that doesn’t mean he’s not a Peercoin supporter. He is and like many of us, is currently working on outside projects like Bitshares and Nu.
I can understand being nervous because it appears nothing is happening. The plan as far as I understand it is simply to keep in alignment with Bitcoin’s development (currently behind though) and wait to see if our prediction of Bitcoin’s failing comes true. I think most of us here realize that if Bitcoin ends up succeeding with no problems, then Peercoin doesn’t have a chance anyway. If it does though, then the Peercoin blockchain needs to be ready and in alignment when people start to make the switch to PoS. If you can’t stomach taking an educated bet like this and waiting for something that might not happen, it would probably be better if you tried looking into price stable cryptos like Nu instead. As I said, most of our 2 communities are filled with the same people, except Nu is much much more active since it’s not waiting for Bitcoin to fail. Its price stability gives it an advantage over Bitcoin, allowing it the possibility to succeed now.
I don’t think that most current Nu ressources have ever worked on Peercoin code besides sigmike. And most sigmike’s work has never been merged in Peercoin master (thinking about about code sync with bitcoin core 0.8.0 and cold minting to name a few).
I doesn’t feel it is a ressources problem but rather a leadership or governance problem, most people are being discouraged of working on Peercoin.
FYI we are waiting for v0.5 release that will implement dynamic stake modifier to fix a preprogrammed long range attack vector.
In my opinion the only solution for Peercoin to stay in the game is to keep in pace with Bitcoin in order to be the main “PoS” Bitcoin and be ready in case of PoW failure as just said [member=890]Sentinelrv[/member].
BTW Bitcoin is becoming more and more a backbone currency by itself and most transactions will move offchains with lightning network or Open Transactions like solutions in a near future.
Neucoin is dedicated to microtransactions and not backbone currency like Peercoin, so they will most likely fail because of this. You need to be stable in price to succeed at that like Nu, although Jordan doesn’t care about microtransactions and says there is no profit in it.
I think your assessment is not completely right, but reflects a lot of the feelings people in this community have.
If you look around, you’ll realize that there’s a general depression in the crypto coin sphere.
Have a look at the so much wow Dogecoin for example that was famous for the good mood and optimism.
Declining price is something people have a hard time to dela with - especially if they hold what’s going down.
A great feature of Percoin is that it can be sustained so easily that the price per PPC is not relevant for the security.
Peercoin’s development is slow, but Peercoin is safe and sound.
There are amazing projects like @mably’s Peercoin Go implementation.
Compared to some other coins Peercoin is slow. Compared to other coins it’s safe, sustainable, enduring.
What post are you referring to?
Centralization already IS a problem for Bitcoin, albeit one that is largely ignored.
Mining pools which quite early posed centralization issues for Bitcoin were a lesser problem, as long as miners could successfully solo mine.
These times are gone since mid of 2011.
From mid of 2011 on centralization went forward with insane speed leading to mining data centres which are nothing else but the centralization of mining in the hands of people who can afford it (financial centraliazation) and who operate the data centres where it’s cheap to do so (geographical centralization).
Here’s some more information about the security issues this last step of centralization created: Reddit - Dive into anything
Peercoin once was “inspired” by a campaign lead by “John Manglaviti”. In that time Peercoin was close to falling victim to a pump&dump scheme.
I’m not even sure whether it was only close to it; maybe it even fell victim.
The Peercoin community learned from that - at least I hope it did.
If you are looking for a coin where you can make a quick buck, you are dead wrong here.
If you are here, because of the future potential, you are right.
With Peercoin 0.5 @emeth’s PeerApps work on the Peercoin blockchain.
This won’t be the last utility for Peercoin.
Sooner or later Peercoin will profit from off-chain transaction projects that are made for Bitcoin.
The major advantage of Peercoin is the sustainability. It will be here in years from now.
I wouldn’t dare to say that for Bitcoin.
The next coinbase reward halving will be “interesting”.
I will buy more PPC as soon as I have some spare money.
I believe Sunny King. However, I am disappointed in SK’s performance in the past year. It will greatly encourage investors if Sunny King can contribute more time to develop Peercoin’s applications.
OP, you’re right in all points, but I don’t think it’s all bad. Hear me out.
Seeing that PPC is trading and trending independent of Bitcoin tells me that it is coming out of its shadow. Too many alt coins trade not on their own merits, but in the shadow of Bitcoin. We need to see more trading independent of what other cryptos do. Unfortunately they crypto community by and large is motivated by the wrong trading reasons (making a quick buck).
Secondly, this lack of activity to me is a lack of brigading. Bitcoin just seems to be too envangelical overall. If you take to Reddit and post objectively negative opinions, you can expect to be downvoted quickly. Euphoria is quick to rise from insignificant and mundane reasons. By and large there’s a lot of wishful thinking and let’s not kid ourselves, people are hoping to catch the next wave to thousands of dollars on pennies invested.
I want to see more independence in Peercoin. My one outstanding concern is that good ideas aren’t guaranteed to take off just because they’re good. Good ideas can die a slow death, the death of lack of interest, lack of foresight, or other reasons.
We shouldn’t worry about trading. We should focus efforts on opportunities for adoption. I don’t know what the right answer is, but I do know that trading is a result of a mixture of actual and speculated usefulness.
Been reading everyone’s replies and it would take all day to respond to each one. I just wanted to to make clear where I’m coming from. I’m brand new to this coin and this community, two weeks ago I had never heard of peercoin. Since I’m new there are a lot of things I don’t know or understand. Everything I do know is from reading this forum over the last few weeks and reading old news articles around the web as well as other forums. And I have been reading a lot, 60 or more hours in the last two weeks. The post I made was me giving my perspective as a newcomer, I’m in no way saying that I am 100% right, I can only express my perception on the information I have. Also I want to point out I’m not in this for a quick return or to become rich, I fully understand the risk I’m taking and have not put in anymore then I can afford to lose. In fact my biggest investment was 2 antminer s3 units which I’m currently running at a loss of about $5 a month which i’m ok with right now. It’s a risk, but a risk I don’t mind taking as I can afford it, i’m in this for the long haul.
What is frustrating to me is that even with all the reading I did, I still don’t really have a full grasp of what the plan is, if any, to keep this coin going. I’ve read a lot of people’s opinions and those opinions very. I guess all that reading on other forums about dead coins and scam coins combined with the visible slowdown of activity here has me wondering where this coin might be going. I am however enjoying this discussion, and I hope to see more debate like this in the future. It’s comforting to see that many people seem to be passionate about the future of this coin.
May I suggest that some form of roadmap be added to peercoin.net? Indeed, it is not obvious to newcomers, or even people who have been following Peercoin what the plan is going forward. If a roadmap was added I’d suggest having a separate page for it in the menu so it’s easy to find.
I was looking at the website just now and under the Developers page it states that cold minting will be available in v0.5, though it’s been rescheduled for v0.6, and this has already been mentioned: https://github.com/super3/peercoin.net/issues/226 Who’s primarily looking after the website right now? [member=1]FuzzyBear[/member] , [member=626]sandakersmann[/member] ?
There’s been no commits to the ppcoin develop branch since last year, and as far as I know there has been a hiatus since then. Clearly the lack of development is an issue and maybe the problems lies in having a clear direction, a clear list of things that need to be done and recruitment of willing developers and testers.
I’ll tell you one thing that needs to be done. A new version of Peerunity needs to be released which includes this theme that we finished back in January. Ever since Jordan and the Nu team left, Peerunity development has been at a standstill. We should at least make the client look nice, since the change has been ready for almost an entire year.
Also, we have no development roadmap because Sunny doesn’t speak to us about these things. Who knew it was going to take 1.5 years to release v0.5? The only time I ever really find anything out is when I send him emails. It shouldn’t have to be this way.
Yeah things have been pretty slow for Peercoin. I’d love to redo the entire website, but I don’t have the time to not do it at cost. I think the only way to move Peercoin forward is to put it into usable things like games. Give something for people to do with their Peercoin rather than just sit on it. Also getting some marketing aspects together and getting Peercoin in the news to promote adoption.
