Weekly Update #80

• Peercoin v0.4 is going through final round of validation. Release candidate will be announced in a few days once all tests complete and build starts. The upgrade schedule will be fixed before release candidate according to what I described last week.
• If you run exchange or mining pool please consider dropping me an email at sunnyking9999@gmail.com to receive updates of peercoin v0.4 upgrade via email. As standard practice upgrade message will be sent to daemons (shown in 'getinfo') and thread posted to forum. But you could also choose to get dev technical support in email. If you think the currently planned 4-week upgrade window for main release is not long enough, please also contact me as soon as possible.
• Mikael has released hp12 client for primecoin. hp series primecoin clients are high performance mining versions of primecoin client, developed and currently maintained by Mikael and used by some pool mining software such as primeminer. Miners can choose to donate to Mikael in hp12 release by explicitly setting a configuration parameter.

Have fun!

Weekly Update #79

• Since peercoin v0.4 is a planned mandatory upgrade, and due to peercoin's popularity it is now supported on so many different exchanges that I have lost count of. It's prudent to take a cautious approach to this release. Here is the proposed release plan:
• Week 1: Peercoin v0.4 release candidate for testnet deployment
• Week 2: Release candidate upgrade window for testnet
• Week 3: Post upgrade testnet validation
• Week 4: Peercoin v0.4 release for mainnet deployment
• Week 5-8: v0.4 release upgrade window
• Week 9: upgrade deadline and v0.4 protocol switch

Have fun!

Weekly Update #78

• I will transfer my primecoin website responsibility to super3 soon. The current website will be moved to a subdomain for backup purpose.
• Peercoin v0.4 is under final development and testing. Since this is a mandatory upgrade release, users would be given ample time to upgrade before a scheduled protocol switch time, which should be at least 4 weeks after release.

Have fun!

Weekly Update #77

• Primecoin network reached a new record last month for 13-primes, a 107 digit Cunningham chain of first kind. This breaks the record held by Primecoin in September last year, a 94 digit Cunningham chain of 2nd kind (https://github.com/primecoin/primecoin/wiki/World-records).
• Riecoin appears to be ready for launch. Riecoin was in development by gatra, initially hyped as a tester of Riemann hypothesis (thus the name) last year. A brief read of the its pre-launch description indicates that the proof-of-work is now a slight variation of Primecoin's proof-of-work, searching for a specific type of prime constellations instead of Cunningham chains. The author of Riecoin compared it with Primecoin, although most of his criticisms of Primecoin are due to lack of a good understanding of Primecoin's design choices. In fact I have described most of them in my Primecoin paper. I certainly welcome other work based on Primecoin however it would be nice for the author to give proper credits.

Have fun!

Weekly Update #76

• Super3: new primecoin website preview: http://primecoin.io/
• I am busy wrapping up peercoin v0.4 release. Stay tuned.

Have fun!

Weekly Update #75

• There will be a change with the release plan of peercoin. I have decided to include a minor protocol change for future p2pool support so the release will become a mandatory upgrade release. There will be at least 4 weeks or more upgrade window provided to users. The previously planned v0.3.1 will become the v0.4.0 release, and the previous v0.4 development would become the v0.5 development.
• So the new v0.4.0 release should be ready soon. I have updated the repo throughout the week and Fuzzy started publishing some test builds. Please report any bugs found to our forum. Remember to always backup wallet before switching to a different wallet client. Also you are recommended to try it out on testnet first.

Have fun!

Weekly Update #74

• Peercoin v0.3.1 should be ready for release in the next couple days. Some high priority features have been ported to v0.3.1 in addition to bug fixes.
• The new feature in v0.3.1 includes debug window rpc console, which allows user issue rpc commands inside the qt client. This simplifies operations such as unlocking wallet for block minting, especially for windows and mac users.
• Another feature ported to v0.3.1 is the RPC API getblocktemplate/submitblock, which is a high priority requirement for mining pools as peercoin mining is now dominated by ASIC devices. If you are operating a peercoin mining pool, please help test the new API with the latest code in repo.
• There is also a slight change to testnet node. Previously testnet node shares default rpc port (9902) with production node. Now testnet node has a separate default rpc port 9904. Testnet node can be run simultaneously with production node, but if you use command line for rpc access make sure you use the -testnet switch to query testnet node.

Have fun!

Weekly Update #73

• Due to the bug affecting Peercoin minters using Qt with minting only unlock mode, I would release a v0.3.1 bug fix builds for these users. No need to upgrade if you don't use this feature.
• Peercoin v0.4 is still under testing. I will push a development branch once testing is complete.
• Check out gpool.net, another relatively new primecoin mining pool. I didn't realize primecoin has a few more forks now

Have fun!

Weekly Update #72

• kactech has been organizing projects for peercoin/primecoin android wallets. This is great effort as I think it is one of the important long term goals as cell phone payment is strategic market for cryptocurrency. Also, wallet app for cell phones can be more user-friendly catering to a wider audience.
• A fix is published for testing for the block minting only unlock mode with Qt (encrypted wallet), see (http://www.peercointalk.org/index.php?topic=1917.0). This is a feature to provide additional user security for minting blocks. The feature is confirmed to not quite work for Qt in v0.3.0. Note this bug has no impact on block chain security.
• If you sent me a private message recently that I haven't been able to get back to you, I will be reviewing my messages (both bitcointalk and peercointalk) during the week.

Have fun!

Weekly Update #71

Review of year

2013 has been a fruitful year for cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin woke up from a relatively uneventful 2012 and its marketcap reaches US$10B for the first time. China becomes one of the major markets for cryptocurrencies. Peercoin achieves 1% of bitcoin marketcap for the first time. Numerous currency networks were started, including primecoin from our team, bringing new innovations in proof-of-work consensus algorithms. Meanwhile, ripple introduces the first built-in exchange in a currency network, and establishes itself as the second most valued currency network after bitcoin.

As the competition heats up, 2014 would be an interesting year to look forward to

Happy New Year!

Weekly Update #70

No report from me this week. Wish everyone a wonderful holiday season

Weekly Update #69

• Primecoin difficulty reaches 10.
• I am trying to work with potential business partners to help further peercoin and primecoin, having been extremely busy last couple weeks. Peercoin development is still ongoing, so please be patient. At this time of the year, there are also quite a bit personal obligations so my response to communications might be slow.
• I sincerely thank all your support of the innovations in peercoin and primecoin. Your support are crucial to the success of peercoin and primecoin projects.

Have fun!

Weekly Update #68

• Jordan has made some good progress with Peershare project.
• John and I have completed an interview with CNBC Asia.
• There have been some discussions regarding transaction fees in PPC/XPM. I have recently explained my philosophy on the issue of transaction fees. But I am happy to see many of our users are interested in debating such subject extensively on the forum. This is part of the open source culture, that anyone interested can offer opinions and insights. As a lead developer I think it is also healthy for me to listen to inputs from community.
• So I would like to give some summary of my thoughts on this matter. The goal of PPC/XPM projects are not to try dominate both store of value and medium of exchange in cryptocurrency. I have mentioned the concept of backbone currency. I feel the attempt to dominate every aspect of money is what drives the adjustment of bitcoin transaction fees, which has seen reduction from 0.01, to 0.0005, and now 0.0001. However in my opinion blockchain data structure has some inherent scalability limitations, so such a goal is probably not wise for a single cryptocurrency. Note currently PPC/XPM still has a lower fee than bitcoin in terms of the real fee value. So there is no need to rush this topic. In fact the minimum fee is enforced in protocol to require a hardfork when changing minimum fee, exactly to encourage long term thinking and careful decision making regarding transaction fees. We should have plenty of time to observe bitcoin's struggle with block chain capacity (in terms of both total blockchain size and throughput/block size), the delicate balance between transaction fee, block chain capacity and user experience. In contrast to bitcoin dev I value decentralization and usability over a lower transaction fee.
• Transaction fee is also an important regulator on the transaction spamming attack, which could potentially significantly reduce network service quality (prolonging confirmation time). So this should also play an important role in the decision making of transaction fees.
• Meanwhile I have never said transaction fees are fixed at 0.01 forever. There are many factors at play, the general hardware performance including network bandwidth, the advances in blockchain data structure etc. These factors should also play important future roles in determine a good minimum fee value.

Have fun!

Weekly Update #67

• btc-e added support of PPC/USD trading this week.
• Combined PPC/XPM market capitalization reached over 100M USD.
• PPC achieves 1% of bitcoin market cap for the first time!
• Community newsletter #5: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=350553.0
• Once PPC v0.4 is reasonably stabilized, I will push a v0.4 branch to the official repository. I am very happy to see interests in PPC development picking up among the community

Have fun!

Weekly Update #66

• Community newsletter #4 here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=341509.0
• PPC breaks 10M difficulty this week.
• Record highs of PPC and XPM price on the markets. XPM reached over 5000 BTC volume today and is back at #5 behind NMC on coinmarketcap.com while PPC maintains its #3 ranking.
• John and me have completed an interview with New York Times this week and it was published today (http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/11/24/in-bitcoins-orbit-rival-virtual-currencies-vie-for-acceptance/?hp). You can find links of most media reports on the PPC and XPM wiki press page on github.
• PPC website has been revamped by a web team lead by super3. I have transferred my responsibility on website to the web team.
• Based on community consensus, we have begun a rebranding effort for PPC from ppcoin to peercoin.
• Sentinelrv has updated the logo resources. I find the logo looking really nice on the BBC program, we must thank Sentinelrv and team again for the logo project!

Have fun!

This is an old topic. I can summarize the major points known about this argument:

Q) Will minters stop processing transactions and cause a degradation of service on transaction processing.

• Transaction processing is cheap at reasonable volume. There is very little incentive to do this.
• I don't view block chain system as the most suitable medium for high volume transaction processing, so transaction fees in PPC serve an important mechanism to control volume on the block chain. This is why transaction fees are currently fixed at 0.01 per KB.
• There were proposals that distribute partial transaction fees to minters but I am not in favor of them at the moment.
• If this truly becomes a problem, the default minting algorithm could possibly be revised to include an adversarial strategy to deter such behavior, for example delaying building on top of a 'cheating' block.
• Demanding fees from users wouldn't be very different from bitcoin, as it's construed as a legitimate action from minters. Only difference is in PPC you would need to ask users to add additional outputs in order to collect the fees yourself, causing bloating. I doubt such strategy would work well for minters though, again PPC is meant to be highly decentralized and not sacrificing decentralization for high volume transaction processing.

Weekly Update #65

• Community newsletter #2 here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=326659.0
• Community newsletter #3 here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=333962.0
• Primecoin has gracefully recovered from a block rate impact event this week due to problems at ypool.net. Block rate about halved after ypool.net went offline, but the difficulty continuously adjusted to the event. Primecoin network has now recovered close to 1 minute block spacing target.
• Primecoin has its first fork named datacoin this week. Of course there are countless PPC forks already I have lost track of them long time ago.
• Bitcoin continues the relentless climb in the exchange markets all over the world, broke $5B USD market cap and marching towards $10B USD market cap. Looking back the entire cryptocurrency community has made huge achievements together. Let's keep working together toward a better future!

Have fun!

Supercomputing does Fermat test on the last number of a candidate chain first, rather than the first number first. This may improve the performance of Fermat test stage of the miner when fractional difficulty is high. After some discussion we agree that it should be considered a mining optimization rather than an exploit.

Weekly Update #64

• John and I have completed a round of interview with coindesk on PPC. An article has been published on coindesk regarding PPC.
• Primecoin difficulty is approaching 10. In July at primecoin's release, the network started at difficulty 7. We have come a long way in a short four months, I have never expected such fast pace of miner improvements and adoption. Difficulty 10 is more than four orders of magnitude more computing intensive than difficulty 7 in primecoin. Current primecoin network difficulty is around 9.975.
• Supercomputing has started working on a gpu (cuda) implementation of primecoin miner. He has reported promising results so far which could make gpu mining competitive for xpm, though currently this project is still under private development.
• I have relocated PPC testnet seed node. PPC testnet resumes operation.
• Don't forget to check out all the different community activities on peercointalk.org!

Have fun!

The difficulty adjustment works like an oscillator at the stepup/stepdown boundary, so the block spacing target is still maintained. For example it could stabilize at probability(difficulty <=9+255/256) = a, probability(difficulty >= 10) = 1-a. This should allow block spacing target to be maintained at 1 minute. Thus the difficulty jump (up/down) at the boundary has no negative effect on the network.