#Addendum post
Some have taken my post below the wrong way, so please make sure you read the whole thing. You may want to read the original first and then come back to this addendum after. For starters, Sunny has not abandoned Peercoin, even though he hasn’t posted recently. I clearly stated within the text below that he is currently working on v0.6. He told us this just last month in a meeting we had. He is currently on the verge of starting testing.
Some have also misunderstood, thinking that Sunny doesn’t care about Peercoin. It’s not that he doesn’t care about Peercoin (he does). It’s that the entire community perceives Sunny to be the leader of this project, when he really isn’t. It is obvious through Sunny’s behavior over the years (which I describe below) that he has not actively taken the role of leader for himself, and I don’t think he ever intended for people to think of him in this capacity.
Unfortunately, because of his status as founder of the network, everyone mistakenly believes he is supposed to be the one actively leading the project. This mistaken belief causes people to be extremely disappointed when they don’t see Sunny out there being active and working with the community to come up with new solutions. Because people believe Sunny is supposed to be the leader doing all these things, they have it in their mind that he is not taking his leadership role seriously enough and that his lack of communication and participation in the community is acting as a huge roadblock to progress, leading to our network being left behind and surpassed by others.
The truth of the matter is that Sunny is much more like a mysterious figure who just keeps an eye on the core protocol and never had any intention of actively leading the project. He is just a community member who happens to be the inventor of the protocol. That is all, and I believe that is what people here need to start realizing. If you’re looking for leadership and a vision for this project to follow, you should start looking elsewhere. And as I’ve stated, there are active developers such as @peerchemist that have been leading for a while now. Everyone should take more notice of what they’re doing to help this project.
#Original Post
I am having trouble figuring out why everyone in this community is always looking toward @Sunny_King to lead us. To me, Sunny has made it abundantly clear that he has no desire to lead this project/community or to improve the tech beyond what it currently is and push it forward. I have dealt with him first hand for years, as well as others in meetings over the past year and this is the impression that we get. It almost seems like a hobby to him, rather than a mission of utmost importance like it is to all of us.
His total lack of communication with the community gives this away. People always want to make excuses for this by saying he must be off in secret innovating and designing grand plans for Peercoin’s future, yet nothing ever materializes. That is because he’s really not working on any secret groundbreaking tech related to Peercoin. From what we see, he has no ultimate plan. Sunny can disagree here with me this if he likes, but this is the impression that we all get based on the meetings we’ve had with him in the past year.
He’s most likely working his normal job and coding on the side only when he has time available. Why else did it take him two whole years to release v0.4 and another year to release v0.5 and yet another year to release v0.6, which isn’t even out yet? Keeping up with Bitcoin’s progress is the boring part of development, so disinterest on his part is probably also a likely factor, besides lack of available time for coding.
Practically every other network has surpassed our tech during this time while we all remained helpless waiting and hoping Sunny was working on something big. It took @hrobeers coming to our community last year and making us realize how utterly dependent we were as a community on a single person who barely took the time to communicate with us. Sure, Sunny does weekly updates, but most of his updates over the past year have left something to be desired, talking not about what he was personally working on and his progress with the next protocol upgrade, but instead about what everyone else in the community was working on. Lately his updates have been so inconsistent that the new dev team has had to start releasing its own updates.
And this doesn’t even include the fact that he makes absolutely no effort to reach out to his own community to discuss things that actually matter. He doesn’t answer questions on his weekly updates. He doesn’t work with us to come up with a development roadmap. He doesn’t talk or ask us questions about how we could improve the protocol. He doesn’t talk publicly with us in chat. He has never come to the community about trying to find more developers to speed up development, (we had to bring it up). He shows up when there is a technical problem with the network and to post a community update and quickly leaves. The previous excuses were that he was too busy working on Peercoin to communicate with us, but based on my experience with him, I don’t think this holds water. I feel the more likely cause is that he is just not interested enough anymore beyond keeping up with Bitcoin.
Sunny is the founder and creator of proof-of-stake technology. That makes him very important, however he is not an all knowing god like many people in this community make him out to be. He is not a grand mastermind behind the scenes plotting Peercoin’s ascension. He is not infallible. He is a great coder who also had a great idea and worked to put it into production. We found out through our private meetings with him that some of the design choices for Peercoin were not based on some grand design or vision like people always think, but were instead chosen because they were simpler to implement at the time, a prime example being the 0.01 PPC per kb transaction fee. People need to stop idolizing Sunny and making him out to be all these things he’s not, as if he has this huge influence and is directing all development behind the scenes, because that’s not the case at all. I was personally guilty of all of the above for a long time and probably contributed greatly toward this view people have of him, but I have since woken up upon having spent more time talking with him.
You want a leader? You want somebody with a vision for Peercoin, a plan and the will to make it happen? Look no further than @peerchemist. Over the past year he has been working hard to design a new vision for Peercoin and he’s been implementing it as we go along with help from other developers like @hrobeers and @saeveritt. He has been doing all of this and developing tools sometimes without any comment or a word of thanks from anyone in this community. Just read my longer post here and threads like this just to see how much thought has been put into this new direction…
@JordanLee of Nu was the single worst thing to ever happen to this community. He developed Peershares and NuBits within this community on purpose. After releasing Nu, he basically sucked Peercoin’s community dry of all active developers and contributors and funneled them into an unsustainable project which was built on shaky financials from the start and inevitably collapsed, taking with it everyone’s investment. It also put the idea in people’s minds through Peershares that Peercoin was never meant to actually succeed itself, but instead acted as an example network or a display of the potential of PoS tech. In other words, he created the mindset that Peercoin was only invented in order to deliver us Peershares like Nu and B&C Exchange.
The whole purpose of Peershares was to break our larger community down to smaller communities that supported separate individual networks with diverse protocols and business models. All Peershares networks required splitting away from the mother network, Peercoin.
PeerAssets on the other hand is about building a new ecosystem directly tied to Peercoin. It is not about breaking apart and working separately in separate bubbles. It is about coming together and building a united ecosystem. This is possible because PeerAssets draw their security and stability from the Peercoin network, giving everyone a common interest to support the main chain and the overall ecosystem. In return, the PeerAssets themselves help Peercoin through destroying lots of Peercoin transaction fees and through the advertising of Peercoin/PeerAssets through new DACs built on top of the chain.
@peerchemist has even figured out a way to reattach separate Peershares networks like Nu/B&C/Augeas back to Peercoin, reducing operational costs of Peershare based networks by using Peercoin for security. Think of PeerAssets as a simpler protocol for building DACs on top of Peercoin’s chain. Peershares on the other hand are for blockchains that require heavy customization not possible with PeerAssets. It should be possible in the future using @peerchemist’s idea for Peershares to attach to the main network and act as Peercoin sidechains, something I have dubbed Peerchains.
With Peerchains, separate, heavily customized individual networks would be possible (that are still linked to Peercoin) and would help prevent the Peercoin blockchain size from increasing astronomically while also drawing its security from the main network. Just like PeerAssets, this would mean that shares no longer need to be properly distributed, because an uneven share distribution would no longer have an impact on the security of each Peerchain network. It would only impact things like voting and distributing dividends. The Peercoin network itself and all of its holders would benefit directly from this through the destruction of PPC. So in the end we would have a simpler solution for assets and DACs with PeerAssets and a more advanced customizable solution with Peerchains, with both being covered under the security of the main Peercoin chain.
So again, Sunny invented this network, but I’m sure we can all see that he has made little to no effort to lead us or explain any vision he has for the future of the network. No development roadmap exists. He barely communicates with anyone in the community and we are the ones who need to call meetings with him if we want to get anything done. I’m not trying to humiliate Sunny in public or anything. I’m simply stating that he is better at some things than others and that we should have other people doing the long-term strategizing. I believe Sunny is at his best when he is working on the code. He continues to work on v0.6 in order to move us closer to Bitcoin and will be opening up development to the public once it’s released. That is the area I believe he specializes in and he is very valuable to the network for things like this, since he knows the code inside and out. We shouldn’t rely on him to do anything other than that.
Though when it comes to the vision and direction the network is moving in as well as the politics of the overall crypto scene, @peerchemist has shown me over the last year that he knows what he is talking about. I’ll be honest here. If it was not for him stepping up with his leadership over the past year, as well as @hrobeers and @saeveritt, I would most likely have sold all of my Peercoin by now and divested completely from crypto, however they have given me renewed hope for this network and are working every day to give Peercoin a second chance. All the work I have done in completely rebranding Peercoin is because I have absolute faith in their efforts. I think everyone in this community needs to consider fully backing them by supporting them with donations and active participation. They are currently the only ones here striving to make Peercoin great again, but they need help and support from everyone here in this community!