Weekly Update #63

• New 12-primes record by primecoin: block #239833, 110 digit length 12 Cunningham chain of 1st kind.
• Community newsletter #1 published: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=321355
• rpool.net back online at 15% xpm mining. ypool.net accounts for about 50% of xpm mining.
• The Amsterdam bitcoin conference this coming week is cancelled due to lack of attendance. Although there are many more conferences coming up around the world. So stay tuned for our future participation.

Have fun!

Weekly Update #62

• Vault of Satoshi (previously Toronto Bitcoin Exchange) now supports PPC trading.
• I have completed a round of interview with John Manglaviti based on community member questions.
• Thijs van den Berg will present PPC and XPM technology in Bitcoin Conference in Amsterdam early next month.
• PPC website has been updated. Thanks Super3 and web team!
• Both beeeeer.org and rpool.net pools were under DDoS attack. At the moment rpool appears to be restored, beeeeer.org would reopen later by xolokram.
• Lots of activities on our forum. Feel free to participate! Fill out survey (http://www.peercointalk.org/index.php?topic=715).

Have fun

Weekly Update #61

• Recent new records in primecoin network: 10-primes: 146 digit 1CC type at block 182690; 12-primes: 103 digit TWN type at block 212935.
• Primecoin trading added to Coinmkt.com. Coinmkt now trades both PPC and XPM against USD.
• RPool.net, the 3rd primecoin mining pool rises quickly in the last two weeks and now accounts for about 20% of primecoin blocks. RPool pays coins in generation transaction (coinbase) letting coins mature in miner's own wallet, similar to Eligius pool of bitcoin.
• Effort is underway on ppcointalk.org for contributors to focus on different areas in marketing and development for PPC/XPM, everyone is welcome to participate.

Have fun!

Weekly Update #60

• xpm reached top 5 in marketcap ranking on coinmarketcap.com.
• btc-e added xpm trading support.
• During the litecoin reddit event on Sunday, both coblee and wtogami claim that xpm is centralized and that I could shut it down if I am forced to. I am quite disappointed at the intellectual dishonesty of these supposedly respectable figures in altcoins. It's quite questionable whether this is only due to their ignorance of the way checkpoints work in xpm, as that has been public knowledge for quite some time. In xpm users must explicitly issue command to enforce checkpoint, I cannot single-handedly shutdown xpm network nor force a reorganization of the block chain. The decentralization level of xpm is basically the same as bitcoin or litecoin.
  
  Moreover, ppc would also gradually transition to this operation mode of checkpoint. Even before that happens, I cannot arbitrarily shutdown ppc network either. The checkpoint system in ppc and xpm also builds in consistency check to protect network if checkpoint key is compromised. Overall the defense mechanism is much more effective against sustained 51% attack and is a great asset to help small altcoin networks.
  
  I sincerely hope altcoin developers could compete honestly and fairly, keeping in mind the philosophy behind cryptocurrency movement, how else could we achieve the goal together without moral backbone?

Trade cautiously and have fun!

Great project! Kudos to maco and the media team Looking forward to seeing more recognition of Primecoin.

Weekly Update #59

• Cryptsy opens XPM Markets section. XPM can now be traded directly with LTC and a few newly released altcoins.
• PPC briefly touched $10M market cap, consolidating the lead over NMC as the 3rd in market cap behind BTC and LTC. Trading volume has been impressive last few days. PPC proof-of-work difficulty breaks 6 million and block reward drops under 200. The current annual inflation rate of PPC is approaching that of BTC.
• PPC v0.4 has been making progress but it still needs some more work. Hopefully the merge with bitcoin v0.8 would be code complete this week and testing can be started. On the other hand, I am evaluating the cold-locked transaction feature proposed several months ago, it may get implemented into v0.4 if things go smooth. This feature allows PPC users to run hot wallet minting stake without the risk of losing the coins due to compromised system. This feature is particularly important for operators with public wallet such as exchanges.

Trade with caution and have fun!

Nice! Thanks for the strong support from Cryptsy team!

Weekly Update #58

• New primecoin mining pools have been opened recently. Beeeeer.org have been gaining popularity. And this week a new Chinese pool called RPool opened business. Together with yPool there are over 12k workers mining in the pools.
• PPC difficulty is now over 3 million and inflation rate continues to drop due to rapid deployment of ASIC miners.
• I am very happy to see more and more users joining the communities of PPC and XPM, contributing ideas to help further development of the networks and services to cryptocurrency market in general.

Have fun!

Nice. Please note there is a 0.01 minimum value protocol requirement for each transaction output. This discourages dust so it could cause scalability barrier for this type of practice on block chain.

Edit: Ah I see now that sub 0.01 payments are delayed and accounted for by the pool. So there is no scalability limit to thousands of users.

Weekly Update #57

• Due to technical issues and planned shutdown of momentovps, our seed nodes have been impacted. Migration of seed node from momentovps has been completed.
• mcxNow begins PPC trading.

Have fun!

I have updated post 2~4 with the recent records.

Thanks Dirk

Try this addnode set:
http://www.ppcointalk.org/index.php?topic=398.0

I have seen those too. It just means the Fermat remainder is small, also evidence that the remainder distribution excluding 1 is still not uniform.

Weekly Update #56

• Mikael released hp11 with further xpm miner improvements.
• mtrlt opencl miner released to public testing.
• 13-primes found at block 159217, press release at https://github.com/primecoin/primecoin/wiki/Primecoin-Reaches-13-primes-Milestone
• Sean's outpost, a spirited charity for helping the less fortunate now accepts PPC and XPM donations. Thanks to Jason for the excellent work and good luck to Project Satoshi Forest! http://seansoutpost.com/

Have fun!

https://github.com/primecoin/primecoin/wiki/Primecoin-Reaches-13-primes-Milestone


September 16th, 2013

For immediate release

On September 10th, only two months after Primecoin started its operation, it achieved yet another important milestone with a record-shattering 13-primes.

The record prime chain is found at block 159217, with a 94-digit Cunningham chain of 2nd kind as its proof-of-work. The new world record has already been confirmed by Jens Kruse Andersen, the maintainer of world's simultaneous primes record book. Primecoin now holds 4 out of the 21 existing world records in simultaneous primes, namely the 10-primes, 11-primes, 12-primes and 13-primes records, while the old-time favorite distributed computing network GIMPS (Great Internet Mersenne Primes Search) holds the 1-prime record with its 17-million digit Mersenne prime discovered in January of this year.

Primecoin network launched on July 7th, with an unique proof-of-work system designed around searching for prime number chains, known as the Cunningham chains and bi-twin chains. It introduces the first proof-of-work system for cryptocurrency with scientific computing value. Number theorists have been searching for prime number chains and formations for many years before Primecoin. Dr. Dirk Augustin, an expert on Cunningham chains and notable record holder of 5 out of the 21 world records, from 5-primes through 9-primes, enthusiastically congratulated Primecoin's breakthrough after its launch. 'I am very glad to see that the Primecoin project increased the interest in searching for prime chains, something I am doing now for over 10 years,' says Dr. Augustin.

The new 13-primes record came early as a bit of surprise, according to Sunny King, the architect and lead developer of Primecoin project. Originally it's estimated that it could arrive around the end of the year. However the network got a bit lucky. The new record almost doubles the length of previous record, a prime tuplet found by Roger Thompson earlier this year.

Interestingly, someone has yet to claim to be the discoverer of the world record. As a cryptocurrency network similar to Bitcoin, Primecoin also offers strong protection of privacy. The 'miners', users that searches for the prime proof-of-work for the network, are often incentivized by the currency value alone. Primecoin is currently mined by CPUs of many thousands of personal computers around the world, in contrast to Bitcoin, which saw a swift shift from GPU mining into ASIC mining this year.

As a cryptocurrency network, Primecoin natually provides incentive to the development of prime searching software and continued improvements to prime searching techniques. Although a 14-primes record would seem out of reach to Primecoin network for many years at current pace, with further advancement of its mining software, it could once again arrive earlier than expected.

13-primes has been conquered!

block: 159217
chain: 2CC0d
origin: 2157379196749861922279323942438489646066518556204460081290289105121926523847387 648204577131520
primorial form: 1075675072070019538039769718844817846011572546711177146887584296472384435455501 6704*31#

Didn't expect this to occur this fast, I was expecting by the end of the year.

Cheers! 

(I will update the record posts when I get around to it )

Weekly Update #55

• Dan Roseman published a good introduction to primecoin on Let's Talk Bitcoin (http://letstalkbitcoin.com/primecoin-primer/)
• Crypto-trade begins PPC/USD trading.
• Primecoin difficulty remains steady at around 9.86. PPCoin difficulty is now around 1.5M.
• Mikael's XPM charts page at http://muuttuja.org/primecoin-dev/charts/
• PPC v0.4 requires some more time. I expect code to be completed in 1~2 weeks, then followed by a couple more weeks of testing before release.

Have fun!

Dan Roseman just published a beautiful article introducing primecoin:

http://letstalkbitcoin.com/primecoin-primer/

Unless you think gold is for keynsians too.

Seriously it is designed this way for good reasons. Scarcity is enforced by Moore's Law. Check PPC's inflation rate, it is now much lower than LTC. In the first four years both PPC and XPM have stronger scarcity model than BTC. For the long term they still simulate gold better, without the uncertainties surrounding the long term security prospects of BTC's scarcity model.

Add 'server=1' to ppcoin.conf and restart ppcoin-qt