[ANN] [PPC] PPCoin Released! - First Long-Term Energy-Efficient Crypto-Currency

[Sunny King]

There seems to be lots of confusion regarding whether ppcoin is more inflationary than bitcoin. So I have updated the wiki FAQ section on money supply to be (hopefully) easier to understand for new users. As I have already indicated in the design paper, we recognize the importance of scarcity in a free-market currency. No we do not subscribe to Keynesian economics. I generally agree with Satoshi's view in this matter, and I also recognize the immutability of minting model of a serious cryptocurrency.

Is there a cap on total money supply like Bitcoin's 21 million?

Unlike bitcoin, ppcoin does not have a fixed money supply cap. However this does not mean that ppcoin is significantly more inflationary than Bitcoin. The minting design attempts to better mimick gold than Bitcoin does in our opinion. Gold does not have a known money supply cap either, but we know it's reliably scarce. For many years annual inflation of gold is around 1-3%. In ppcoin there are two types of minting, proof-of-work and proof-of-stake. The proof-of-work minting rate is regulated by Moore's Law, which dictates that our ability in proof-of-work grows exponentially. We are aware that Moore's Law eventually has to end, but by that time inflation in ppcoin is likely already approaching gold's level. The proof-of-stake minting introduces at most 1% annual inflation. Meanwhile ppcoin's transaction fees are destroyed to counterbalance these inflationary forces. So overall ppcoin's minting design is still a very low future-inflation design comparable to Bitcoin.

There is a 2-billion coin max value in the source code, however that is only used for consistency checking and is not meant to be part of the minting design.

Since 0.2 release a 'moneysupply' stat is included in the getinfo output so everyone can see how many coins are in the market.

[1713530422]

1713530422

[1713530422]

1713530422

[1713530422]

1713530422

[jjiimm_64]

There seems to be lots of confusion regarding whether ppcoin is more inflationary than bitcoin. So I have updated the wiki FAQ section on money supply to be (hopefully) easier to understand for new users. As I have already indicated in the design paper, we recognize the importance of scarcity in a free-market currency. No we do not subscribe to Keynesian economics. I generally agree with Satoshi's view in this matter, and I also recognize the immutability of minting model of a serious cryptocurrency.

Is there a cap on total money supply like Bitcoin's 21 million?

Unlike bitcoin, ppcoin does not have a fixed money supply cap. However this does not mean that ppcoin is significantly more inflationary than Bitcoin. The minting design attempts to better mimick gold than Bitcoin does in our opinion. Gold does not have a known money supply cap either, but we know it's reliably scarce. For many years annual inflation of gold is around 1-3%. In ppcoin there are two types of minting, proof-of-work and proof-of-stake. The proof-of-work minting rate is regulated by Moore's Law, which dictates that our ability in proof-of-work grows exponentially. We are aware that Moore's Law eventually has to end, but by that time inflation in ppcoin is likely already approaching gold's level. The proof-of-stake minting introduces at most 1% annual inflation. Meanwhile ppcoin's transaction fees are destroyed to counterbalance these inflationary forces. So overall ppcoin's minting design is still a very low future-inflation design comparable to Bitcoin.

There is a 2-billion coin max value in the source code, however that is only used for consistency checking and is not meant to be part of the minting design.

Since 0.2 release a 'moneysupply' stat is included in the getinfo output so everyone can see how many coins are in the market.

Sunny,
 Thank you for this, i was about to dig up this exact info...however. do you have an estimate of approx number of coins that will be in circulation at x year?

[Neverest]

Hi Sunny,

thanks for the explanation. You might have missed it in my other remarks above, but are you aware that the current client (wallet) seems to have a CPU leak?
Not sure if I am the only one, but after opening it takes over 60+% of CPU (would probably be more if I did not have other things running as total goes to 100%).

It overtakes running Scrypt mining, crippling it and other processes, so I have to close the wallet.

Thanks!

[Sunny King]

Hi Sunny,

thanks for the explanation. You might have missed it in my other remarks above, but are you aware that the current client (wallet) seems to have a CPU leak?
Not sure if I am the only one, but after opening it takes over 60+% of CPU (would probably be more if I did not have other things running as total goes to 100%).

It overtakes running Scrypt mining, crippling it and other processes, so I have to close the wallet.

Thanks!

I have noticed reports of intermittent occurrence of this problem. Is your client consuming single core or multiple core cpu utilization?

[Sunny King]

Sunny,
 Thank you for this, i was about to dig up this exact info...however. do you have an estimate of approx number of coins that will be in circulation at x year?

It's not gonna be reliable because it also depends on market adoption of ppcoin. You can estimate via the proof-of-work minting formula if you have a guessed difficulty growth model of ppcoin.

block subsidy = 9999 / difficulty**0.25

[TheSeven]

Sunny King, do you have any plans to introduce new stuff from bitcoin 0.8 i.e. getblocktemplate, getrawtransaction etc ?

Yes bitcoin 0.8 features are planned for next release.

You might want to have a look at my git forks:
https://github.com/TheSeven/ppcoin
https://github.com/TheSeven/stratum-mining

At the first glance they seem to be functional, however they aren't yet thoroughly tested. I've sucessfully mined testnet blocks using Stratum.
Intelftw is working on a pool frontend right now, so that we hopefully have a pool without insane fees again soon.

A p2pool port is in the works (and hopefully mostly done), with one major issue remaining: The fact that the first txout in the coinbase needs to be a compressed pubkey one. Might make most sense to avoid that by always sending one satoshi to a hardwired donation address.

[TheSeven]

Hey, does anyone know how I can unlock my PPCoin wallet so that I can generate POS without jeopardising my wallet (So that a my balance can't just be emptied)

Also, Sunny, any chance you can make a locked wallet generate POS without unlocking a wallet (Kinda of like how you can solo mine coins with Bitcoin without having to unlock the wallet file)

Thanks

Add a 'true' at the end of walletpassphrase command:

ppcoind walletpassphrase <your_passphrase> <unlock_time_duration_in_seconds> true

In this 'mint-only' unlock mode, one cannot send transactions but can mint blocks (including both proof-of-work and proof-of-stake).

It's more secure than the general unlock mode but less secure than a locked wallet.

From a technical point of view:
I understand that the private keys are required for proof of stake mining anyway. But why do you sign the block header with the first coinbase txout key? What's the point in doing that?

[TheSeven]

Sunny (or others): I just downloaded the PPCoin wallet from Sourceforge and installed it.


(1) At the bottom is a warning:

WARNING: Checkpoint is too old. Wait for block chain to download , or notify developers of the issue.

Consider yourself notified!
I have 1 active connection, and the icon at the bottom right corner (rotating arrows), indicate that I am downloading/synching, but when mousing over, it stays at 00.00% done, o blocks, even after 30 minutes.
I am currently mining BTC (GPU) and LTC (CPU) successfully.

What should I do to fix this?

(2): How would I mine PPCoin on Windows 7-64? Can I mine while mining BTC and LTC at the same time (not considering GPU/CPU limits, but possible software interactions as they share the same codebase?)

Thanks!

ps: Under options it mentions "Start Bitcoin on window system startup", you might want to change that to PPcoin?

It seems like both DNS seed nodes are dead. One isn't reachable at all, and the other one connects, but neither provides blocks nor node addresses. I had to help several users bootstrap their nodes on IRC today.
Sunny, do you control these two nodes? Or where are they?

For the time being: If this happens, run ppcoind with -connect=seednodes.no-ip.org to get a working seed node.

[dreamwatcher]

Sunny (or others): I just downloaded the PPCoin wallet from Sourceforge and installed it.


(1) At the bottom is a warning:

WARNING: Checkpoint is too old. Wait for block chain to download , or notify developers of the issue.

Consider yourself notified!
I have 1 active connection, and the icon at the bottom right corner (rotating arrows), indicate that I am downloading/synching, but when mousing over, it stays at 00.00% done, o blocks, even after 30 minutes.
I am currently mining BTC (GPU) and LTC (CPU) successfully.

What should I do to fix this?

(2): How would I mine PPCoin on Windows 7-64? Can I mine while mining BTC and LTC at the same time (not considering GPU/CPU limits, but possible software interactions as they share the same codebase?)

Thanks!

ps: Under options it mentions "Start Bitcoin on window system startup", you might want to change that to PPcoin?

It seems like both DNS seed nodes are dead. One isn't reachable at all, and the other one connects, but neither provides blocks nor node addresses. I had to help several users bootstrap their nodes on IRC today.
Sunny, do you control these two nodes? Or where are they?

For the time being: If this happens, run ppcoind with -connect=seednodes.no-ip.org to get a working seed node.

One can also add the cryptocoinexplorer.com IP address as a node to look for:

addnode=84.200.84.74

I do not restrict the number of connections, so one can almost always connect.

[Sunny King]

A p2pool port is in the works (and hopefully mostly done), with one major issue remaining: The fact that the first txout in the coinbase needs to be a compressed pubkey one. Might make most sense to avoid that by always sending one satoshi to a hardwired donation address.

p2pool support requires coinbase protocol change and there might be other unforeseen impacts not known right now. I am currently against implementing it. So please consider suspending p2pool development for now.

[Sunny King]

Thanks guys, I think seed node is sick right now. I will update the dns to include your working nodes.

If you are having trouble connecting to any node use the workaround of TheSeven and dreamwatcher.

[Sunny King]

dns updated to include dreamwatcher and TheSeven's nodes. Thanks guys!

[matauc12]

Sunny King, do you have any plans to introduce new stuff from bitcoin 0.8 i.e. getblocktemplate, getrawtransaction etc ?

Yes bitcoin 0.8 features are planned for next release.

You might want to have a look at my git forks:
https://github.com/TheSeven/ppcoin
https://github.com/TheSeven/stratum-mining

At the first glance they seem to be functional, however they aren't yet thoroughly tested. I've sucessfully mined testnet blocks using Stratum.
Intelftw is working on a pool frontend right now, so that we hopefully have a pool without insane fees again soon.

A p2pool port is in the works (and hopefully mostly done), with one major issue remaining: The fact that the first txout in the coinbase needs to be a compressed pubkey one. Might make most sense to avoid that by always sending one satoshi to a hardwired donation address.

+1 for stratum merge!

[Sunny King]

From a technical point of view:
I understand that the private keys are required for proof of stake mining anyway. But why do you sign the block header with the first coinbase txout key? What's the point in doing that?

That might have been unnecessary, although I haven't put too much thought into it. But I don't think that would be changed now unless it's absolutely important.

[Neverest]

Hi Sunny,

thanks for the explanation. You might have missed it in my other remarks above, but are you aware that the current client (wallet) seems to have a CPU leak?
Not sure if I am the only one, but after opening it takes over 60+% of CPU (would probably be more if I did not have other things running as total goes to 100%).

It overtakes running Scrypt mining, crippling it and other processes, so I have to close the wallet.

Thanks!

I have noticed reports of intermittent occurrence of this problem. Is your client consuming single core or multiple core cpu utilization?

I assume multiple core, else it could not get over 12.5% (Intel I7 2600k, 4-core/8threads). It has been doing the same on every try. Not sure what it is doing as the blockchain is synched and I am not mining PPC?

[Sunny King]

I assume multiple core, else it could not get over 12.5% (Intel I7 2600k, 4-core/8threads). It has been doing the same on every try. Not sure what it is doing as the blockchain is synched and I am not mining PPC?

Are you sure cpu mining wasn't turned on by accident? Like 'gen=1' set in ppcoin.conf?

[A_Free_Man]

Could someone explain how this whole stake/mint process works? Especially with a locked wallet(which I'm still trying to unlock).

[Sunny King]

Could someone explain how this whole stake/mint process works? Especially with a locked wallet(which I'm still trying to unlock).

You can unlock by running qt with '-server' (or server=1 in ppcoin.conf) and then unlock from command line. In the future there would be a gui option to do this without needing command line access.

[Keninishna]

Sunny King, do you have any plans to introduce new stuff from bitcoin 0.8 i.e. getblocktemplate, getrawtransaction etc ?

Yes bitcoin 0.8 features are planned for next release.

You might want to have a look at my git forks:
https://github.com/TheSeven/ppcoin
https://github.com/TheSeven/stratum-mining

At the first glance they seem to be functional, however they aren't yet thoroughly tested. I've sucessfully mined testnet blocks using Stratum.
Intelftw is working on a pool frontend right now, so that we hopefully have a pool without insane fees again soon.

A p2pool port is in the works (and hopefully mostly done), with one major issue remaining: The fact that the first txout in the coinbase needs to be a compressed pubkey one. Might make most sense to avoid that by always sending one satoshi to a hardwired donation address.

I'm giving your git fork a try, except I'm getting this error when running stratum:

http://pastebin.com/CrZ1hXE4

Altho its still running I have not tried mining on it yet.

[TheSeven]

dns updated to include dreamwatcher and TheSeven's nodes. Thanks guys!

Please note that my node does not have a static IP, which is why I used that no-ip address.