We Need a Website Quote that Defends Peercoin as Being More Secure than Pure PoS

General
1

So apparently we’re receiving some competition from NXT as their market cap is approaching Peercoin. Maybe it’s just a temporary spike, but I think we should have something on the website that defends us against them and other pure proof-of-stake coins. They’re marketing pure proof-of-stake as being better than Peercoin’s hybrid Pow/PoS design. Is this true though? On the Peercoin subreddit, Jensen98 posted the following quote, explaining that the hybrid design makes Peercoin more secure than a pure PoS coin like NXT…

[quote=" jensen98"]A PoW/PoS hybrid system is more secure. Think of it as a balance of powers.

Here’s how Peercoin works: Peercoin is a hybrid system of PoW/PoS…and this combination is what is presently the most secure. If you look at Peercoin’s blockchain, the proportion of PoW blocks to PoS blocks doesn’t change much over the long-run (it does fluctuate quite a bit from day to day though due to it’s design). But here is what’s important…If you are trying to mess with Peercoin’s blockchain by controlling say 51% of the hashrate, it may be possible to attack the network 2 or 3 times, and then you would be stuck, and the attack would fail to work; this is because PoS blocks will come in and interrupt your attack and there is no way you can guess what the next block is going to be (again the randomness is part of the design).

Peercoin’s hybrid system is also better than a full PoS system because a full PoS system is open to the same sort of attack if you control all the majority of coin age. Again, if you controlled the majority of coin age in Peercoin you might be able to carry out an attack or 2, but you would not be able to keep on attacking this way either because along would come other PoS blocks you do not control as well as PoW blocks, and these would stop your attacks.

To really attack Peercoin, you need to control the majority of hashpower + the majority of coin age, which is much more costly than just one or the other. No perpetual attack on either front can really be carried out on Peercoin, so this is why Peercoin is superior.[/quote]

What we need to do is verify that this claim is true. If it is true, then we need to create an easy to understand quote that explains this to new people and place it on the website under the FAQ section. This needs to be done NOW before people start trying to claim that our hybrid design is somehow inferior. If Peercoin’s hybrid design really is more secure than pure PoS, then we should be putting this out there so people don’t get persuaded by false advertising from our competitors.

So in short, we first need to verify this is true. Then we need to design a quote for the website that is easy to understand for people new to Peercoin.

2

Unless people feel that quote above is well written enough to explain the issue to people. What do you all think?

3

I think too many people take coinmarketcap.com too seriously. It rates Dogecoin as one of the major upcoming competing currencies, and we all know that is dogecoin will probably always be a popular joke coin.

In the top right corner of their site, they have a switchable link to turn mineable on / off

Try it with only mineable coins:

http://coinmarketcap.com/mineable.html

NXT disappears quite quickly.

Proof-of-work initially is important to fairly distribute new coins during the first year or so of launching a new coin. We know how Peercoins were created based on proof-of-work, and then held by proof-of-stake afterwards. This gave everyone a fair chance at obtaining PPC.

NXT Initial Stake Holders might have hidden their true holdings by transferring them to multiple wallets.

Since NXT didn’t have proof-of-work for initial coin creation, we have to assume that the initial stake holders and coin giveaways, etc, were all fair. We have to assume that NXT coins were distributed to strangers and legitimate investors. We also have to assume that the majority of NXT holders to date, are assumed to be people who legitimately bought the currency on exchanges for actual value and not given to friends and family. We also have to assume that transfers of NXT from wallet to wallet, are in fact different people, and not a bunch of coins held by the same group of people who have “spread out the load” with different wallet addresses. Doing so, would artificially inflate NXT, and we assume that no one involved in the creation of NXT would want to artificially inflate its value, right?

So if we assume that the distribution of NXT is indeed fair, then we should assume it hasn’t been pumped. We should also assume that multiple wallet addresses are different people, even though there is no way to prove that…

I prefer the hybrid approach that Peercoin used when it launched. It basically made it “provably fair” for the initial creation of the coins and distribution of wealth. Too bad NXT can’t say the same thing.

To really put NXT in perspective, a purely PoS coin, couldn’t the following artificial inflation work?

John and Jane are brother/sister

John has 25000 NXT. He wants to give 12500 to his sister Jane, because they are family.

Instead of just transferring it to her, he tells Jane, we can artificially inflate the value of the currency by doing this, it is going to cost us 0.2% of an exchange fee to buy and 0.2% of an exchange fee sell, but the perceived value on coinmarketcap.com will be worth it. This way we can show the trading volume and the price.

So John lists 12500 NXT for sale on exchange XYZ at 0.10 USD = $1250

Within seconds, Jane buys $1,250 USD of NXT (from John basically) at that price.

There is a combined 0.4% exchange fee for this transaction, which is $5 for both sides of the transaction.

Guess what happens?

John now has 12500 NXT, Jane now has 12500 NXT, they paid an exchange $5 to “show the transaction”

coinmarketcap.com reports the transfer, oh look, NXT just traded at 0.10 USD in the amount of 1,250 coins! However, the NXT coins stayed in the same family, and brother and sister have colluded together to artificially inflate the true value of the coin.

Now. Think of this same situation again, but this time it isn’t John and Jane. Because John can do this himself, through two different wallets, and two different exchange accounts.

In fact, all initial NXT take holders could be teaming together to pump up the majority of the initial coins through a bunch of fake wallets, and all suckers who invested legitimately in NXT are just there for the ride until they decide it’s time to dump.

Peercoin’s method of purposely having proof-of-work as part of its launch stops this from happening while the coin is young. Once again, Sunny King thought of this when he came out with Proof-of-stake. He knew what type of abuses a single proof-of-stake system could cause.

[b]NXT = most probably a scam coin.

We’ll find out in 1-3 years, won’t we?
[/b]

4

Honestly, I struggle with the value of PoW in the long term being of the opinion that PoS is the future. The only reason, it is there is for a more fair coin distribution (and possibly some people who like to invest in hardware to mine coins for some profit and some fun).

In another recent thread about NXT propaganda, there has already been some discussion about the value of PoW in Peercoin. The result is that PoW doesn’t provide much protection for a unlikely and very expensive 51% PoS attack. If someone can afford that then buying some mining equipment for 51% PoW attack is relatively minor. Unfortunately the only protection against such an attack are the checkpoints as PPC have now which e.g. NXT doesn’t have as far as I understand, but not all code has been analysed or open-sourced yet.

PoS does provide a better protection than 100% PoW, so that’s why we already ahead of most of the altcoins.
And I read on Reddit that 82% of the coins are generated by PoS and growing (info from blockchain).

If I look at NXT now, there are some interesting developments but it is still very immature, I suspect we will have some more issues and trial and error in the next months. Sounds very beta to me and not ready to keep a lot of money in the wallet securely. There seems to be a lack of checking on transactions and I see lot’s of orphaned and unconfirmed transactions and heard a few exchange owners complaining about something related to checks on transactions.

So I would more differentiate on security as a product, proven versus unproven than the advantage of PoW in Peercoin. You might still play with it in the marketing as some fun factor for the techos.
The other one is quality control. I think we have a developer who overthinks and test new development thoroughly before it’s added to the core. With NXT you see people adding stuff almost on the fly and let the community have a go. Maybe nice for the techos and interesting as a playground for new developments, but I wouldn’t have large amount of money into it.

Just my 0.02 PPC

5

Found this on the NXT forums which proves my earlier point about the problems with a strictly PoS coin (without PoW)

Basically the bag holders there are squabbling with one another about:

a) What if all the huge stake holders liquidate their coins? The price will go down to 0.01 cents!

b) Another person answers back, don’t worry, they won’t sell them that fast (he hopes)

c) Another person talks about fake coinmarketcaps in the same thread, using Ripple as an example.
“95%+ of the coins held by one organization, that’s why they have their downright fraudulent market cap (look at the volume)”

Here’s the thread, read and enjoy.

NXT bag holders freaking out about the Initial Stake holders

https://nextcoin.org/index.php?topic=2210.0

Looks like Peercoin’s hybrid PoS + PoW model still works much better. People will figure that Peercoin is much safer than the rest of these novelty coins who have inherent flaws.

6

Another analogy which came to mind. One with cars is always popular.

Peercoin is like the Toyota from Monday to Saturday, trusted and reliable and therefore used as a work horse for the long holidays and the daily work. Can still look nice and interesting features can be added in the interior.
NXT is like the oldtimer for the Sunday afternoon, good fun for hobby and to show off, but not very reliable for daily use and lot’s of work under the hood.

Maybe someone can improve this idea

7

[quote=“Cybnate, post:6, topic:1833”]Peercoin is like the Toyota from Monday to Saturday, trusted and reliable and therefore […]
[…]
Maybe someone can improve this idea[/quote]

Maybe use Honda for your example instead.

www.sunnykinghonda.com

…and no, there is no relation. :slight_smile:

8

LOL or sunnykingford.com

9

I recommend we do NOT downplay pure PoS. NXT’s real problems are not in this aspect. PoS is one of peercoin’s brand making fundamentals so better not to downplay it.

The rescue here again is gold. Gold needs to be mined and has a potentially infinite supply. Peercoin is more like gold than any other cryptocurrencies.

As to NXT, I think it has tons of issues, from its questionable security to their exaggerated propaganda. But pure PoS model is probably NOT one of them. Also better avoid the “fairness” discussion because it is largely subjective and will not have an objective answer.

NXT people obviously focus on marketing instead of polishing their product. They choose java becuz this is a cheap way to convince average people their product is not a copy of bitcoin. They also didn’t give peercoin enough credit for introducing the ground breaking PoS mechanism into the cryptocurrency world. They are making a hype. I personally think it is a not bad chance to propagate the PoS idea. The clever thing is to emphasize the security issue as the same time. Security is the most important topic for money and here the untested code has a hard time to convince people. In the long run, when people get familiar with PoS, they will choose the most secure one.

I notice NXT people begin to use another strategy, namely differentiate NXT from peercoin by claiming NXT is for trading while peercoin is for saving. If they are clever, I think they will avoid direct competition with peercoin too.

10

Hey guys,

I just wanted to share my thoughts about nxt. First off, I can’t seem to find who the developers of the coin are*, which leaves me with a bad impression. Secondly, the nxt coin doesn’t really offer anything special at the moment (the alias system was already invented by NMC). They “PLAN” on adding a bunch of features, like currency/asset exchange (curious to see how they address the ‘someone has to go first’ problem), arbitrary messages, distributed computing and file storage, and some other ideas. Planning something and executing are two completely different things. If they can pull it off, then good for them, but until then, nxt isn’t that special (to me anyways). With that said, I don’t think we should be giving nxt this much attention.

Note: I’m not trying to bash nxt, it’s just that I don’t understand what the hype is about.

*if someone can provide to a link to the developers page that would be great (if there is one).

Cheers.

11

I noticed this as well. At least they’re giving us some promotion by doing so.

12

I also think PPC community should not do that much emphasis in this issue.

In my opinion, Nxt’s main problem is the fixed “coin supply”. That’s what I see as the main long-term advantage of Peercoin.

Well, certainly at a first glance fixed coin-supply does not look like a problem, but I think it is. Things with such a extreme scarcity will lead to pump-and-dump / boom-bust cycles and so to a high volatility.

The mechanism is like this: Upside movements will lead fast to generalized buy panics, because stakeholders in this situation will not sell as they think they can get more, and there are no “fresh coins” from mining (or PoS coin generation) to mitigate the scarceness. We have seen it yesterday, I must confess I benefited a bit from it as I hold some Nxt :wink: The price exploded from 0.00004 BTC to 0.00016 in one day - it multiplied almost by four.

But in a weak moment exactly the opposite can happen: Price going down fastly when stakeholders begin to take profits, leading into a panic sell. As there is no solid market for mined or minted fresh coins, bid depth will tend to be weaker in Nxt than in a coin with supply increase, and so also crashes and bear markets will tend to be “deeper”.

In short: Nxt will be forever as volatile as a stock - PPC can be forever as stable as a real currency, when the first speculative waves are over.

It’s only a hypothesis, so perhaps it’s not a valid quote for the website :slight_smile:

13

I agree with this 100%

a good tagline could be

PeerCoin, [POS+POW] Hybrids are stronger

or

Hybrids > Monoculture
PeerCoin, [POS+POW]> NXT [POS] or BTC [POW]

or
Hybrids are stronger
PeerCoin [POS+POW] > NXT[POS] || BTC [POW]

or

One hand tied behind your back? POS(NXT) or POW (BTC)?
Double the fist! use PeerCoin POS + POW