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.
