I'm not saying your wrong, I really don't know the answer, but can you elaborate on why cold minting would matter when other projects use cold forging? How is cold minting a differentiator? Or do you mean that even if it is not unique, it will still give PPC more attractive features which will therefore increase the price? Maybe I don't understand the technology of cold minting, so I want to make sure I'm following correctly.
As far as I know, Peercoin's cold minting system is unique in that it doesn't provide incentives for the formation of pools. "Pools" - nodes that allow other coin holders to mint with their node - are possible, but the pool operator cannot move the rewards, so there is no way to form a "variance reduction pool". That means that it won't be attractive to mint at a big pool, because you only get rewards when
your address "finds a block", not when the pool as a whole finds a block (and divides the rewards to minters). Thus, the only advantage of pools is that you haven't to bother about having the client online 24/7, but the coinage-based reward discourages that anyway.
Big pools are generally seen as a threat to the PoS security model, as they could accumulate enough stake for a successful attack. One of the reasons cold minting wasn't implemented earlier was the fear of pools forming, until sigmike found the solution.
There was an altcoin (a PPC clone, obviously
) that tried something similar a couple of weeks ago but with some OP_RETURN magic and mandatory fees for pools (I don't remember its name
). I think Peercoin's solution is more elegant.
Much more important than "uniqueness", however, is that cold minting would allow to increase the security of Peercoin. Proof of stake currencies can only be secure if a large percentage of the coins are participating in minting,
without forming big pools (see above). The current cold minting design would very likely increase this percentage significantly.
