[PPC] [XPM] Peercoin/Primecoin Weekly Updates

[Sunny King]

Weekly Update #146

• Peercoin Chinese Community and 8BTC forum jointly organize the "Cryptocurrency and PoS" essay contest: https://www.peercointalk.org/index.php?topic=4156.0
• B&C exchange project has reached 80% of its funding goal, according to nubits team.

Have fun!

[Sunny King]

Weekly Update #147

• B&C exchange funding goal is reportedly 89% reached.
• Aside from B&C's own blockshare and blockcredit, the exchange plans to support peercoin, nubits, nushares together with bitcoin and a few other popular cryptocurrencies.
• Upon user request, walletnotify should be included in the planned next peercoin release.

Have fun!

[Sunny King]

Weekly Update #148

• B&C funding has reached 100%, congratulations to Jordan and the nubits team! This is another significant event in DAO's, eyes are on the team to pull this important project off.
• B&C shares still for sale, so one still has a chance to better support its development.

Have fun!

[Sunny King]

Weekly Update #149

• Nubits experienced a minor blockchain fork event last week, a fix has been released with mandatory upgrade v1.2.0. See notice here:https://discuss.nubits.com/t/critical-nu-network-fork-experienced-at-block-407-740/2276/17
• snakie has open sourced http://peerchain.net to the community with repo at https://github.com/snakie/peerchain (https://www.reddit.com/r/peercoin/comments/3b7uua/open_sourced_peerchainnet/)

Have fun!

[Sunny King]

Weekly Update #150

• With the recent transaction volume on bitcoin network, I would like to discuss the transaction fee policy of peercoin/primecoin. I have always felt that the transaction fee design of bitcoin is overly complex, so peercoin/primecoin simplified it quite a bit, so users could have easier understanding of the policy. However, the deeper issue with bitcoin's technology is that, due to the nature of the decentralization technology, it's inherently a rather expensive settlement network. This means it's more suitable to act as a backbone network for financial systems, rather than to compete with centralized payment networks on volume and cost. This isn't obvious when bitcoin userbase is still limited, but the situation will get more and more obvious as its popularity grows.
• Originally bitcoin's transaction fee was defaulted to 0.01BTC. In fact I think this original default value was quite good, it beats having an overly complicated system in my opinion. Think about it, at current valuation it's still only one tenth the cost of bank wire networks. To prematurely increase the scale of the network, to compete against networks such as paypal or credit cards, would cause a significant loss of decentralization which by the way is what bitcoin technology and philosophy is all about. It appears that bitcoin developers are not guarding the fundamental principles with enough vigilance.
• In such spirit both peercoin/primecoin set default transaction fee to a required 0.01 coin per KB of data, in a simplified and effective fee policy from old bitcoin. The situation in bitcoin is closedly watched, the current fee policy in peercoin/primecoin likely would remain in place when upgrading to latest bitcoin codebase in the future.

Have fun!

[Sunny King]

Weekly Update #151

• Since I mentioned the topic of transaction fees last week, l should mention the exact kind of simplification of fee policy in peercoin/primecoin. As I explained last week, blockchain technology is not well suited as an ultra high volume transaction processing system, thus we want to discourage tiny payments such as a fragment of cent, also known as 'dust' in bitcoin. Bitcoin charges additional fees for these dust transactions. In peercoin and primecoin, each transaction output must have a value at least 0.01. For the next release of peercoin, the output value can also be 0 to accommodate data transactions. But still, dust is not allowed, you either have an output value greater than or equal to 0.01 or a value of 0.
• Another simplification is that we don't allow no-fee transactions, so the default 0.01 per KB fee is a requirement, not an option as in bitcoin. This eliminates the complication for user to understand the tradeoff between no-fee and quality of service.
• Some might question the consistency of the approach as we move to allow data transaction in peercoin's next release. Data transaction is simply a mechanism to allow user to explicitly declare extra data in the transaction, otherwise user could still stuff data into transaction in obscure ways. In principle transaction fee is the only cost associated with blockchain space usage.

Have fun!

[Sunny King]

Weekly Update #152

• There is an interesting article written by Ray on proof-of-work: https://www.peercointalk.org/index.php?topic=4200.0
• Some of our users are still having trouble understanding the way wallet works: https://www.peercointalk.org/index.php?topic=4199.0. I would say this is not the user's fault, as I always thought the way the 'change address' works in bitcoin wallet is very inconvenient, especially with a brain wallet. Bitcoin introduced this mechanism to obfuscate the sending graph on blockchain, so it's a purely privacy feature. However it's more natural for users to associate balance toward fixed addresses. That's also why a feature was added to peercoin that I call 'avatar mode', where it disables the privacy feature and returns the change back to the sending address. Though it's still a development feature with peercoin. The latest peerunity release should support this mode.

Have fun!

[Sunny King]

Weekly Update #153

• It has been reported that some exchanges running the latest master branch have run into a bug that always sends the change output back to the input address (like in the avatar mode, but should not be the default behavior), which is causing the exchange software problems. This issue only affects the recent master branch of peercoin, not affecting official v0.4.0 release. If you build your own binaries from the latest master branch due to feature requirements, please consider update to the latest with the fix as soon as possible. See https://www.peercointalk.org/index.php?topic=4208

Have fun!

[Sunny King]

Weekly Update #154

• Tyke's book 'Peercoin history of first year' in the print: https://www.peercointalk.org/index.php?topic=3870.105
• Emeth resumes his work on Peerapp project and his recent thoughts on the use of identification system: https://www.peercointalk.org/index.php?topic=4203.0

Have fun!

[Sunny King]

Weekly Update #155

• Walletnotify feature is now supported in peercoin's master branch. Please give it a try if you needed this feature.

Have fun!

[Sunny King]

Weekly Update #156

• Happy birthday peercoin!
• It's been a bit slow last few months. We plan to speed up peercoin development for the next months. Stay tuned.

Have fun!

[Sunny King]

Weekly Update #157

• There appears to be a competing protocol team in the bitcoin community, known as bitcoin-xt. The situation is new to bitcoin. We are watching the situation closely.
• B&C exchange team has launched their website with a teaser wallet client: https://bcexchange.org/

Have fun!

[Sunny King]

Weekly Update #158

• Faucet Box has a nice collection of faucets for both Peercoin and Primecoin: https://faucetbox.com/en/list/PPC, https://faucetbox.com/en/list/XPM
• Tentative schedule of peercoin v0.5 for next couple weeks:
• Week 1: Code complete, review
• Week 2: Review and testing
• Week 3: Release candidate and testnet deployment

Have fun!

[Sunny King]

Weekly Update #159

• MatthewLM has released 3.0 version of Peercoin Android Wallet: https://www.peercointalk.org/index.php?topic=3331.msg40733#msg40733
• Notable new features in the Android wallet release:
• Shapeshift support to pay in other cryptocurrencies
• Specify trusted server list in settings

Have fun!

[Sunny King]

Weekly Update #160

• Peercoin v0.5 protocol is under review this week. The protocol adjustment includes:
• Allow transaction output to have zero value, a requirement to support data transaction usage such as peermessage.
• Protocol adjustment to improve security.
• Expect further review and testing the following week.

Have fun!

[Sunny King]

Weekly Update #161

• Holy transaction has announced support for peercoin exchange. Together with shapeshift.io, these represent a new breed of 'accountless' exchanges with greater respect to privacy. Of course, Nubit's team's B&C is eagerly anticipated as well.
• Peercoin v0.5 protocol is under further review and testing this week.

Have fun!

[Sunny King]

Weekly Update #162

• Nubits reaches 1-year milestone of successfully maintaining dollar pegging. Even though it is different from cryptocurrencies for it lacks cryptocurrency's independent inflation model, still it's a good bridge between fiat and cryptocurrency, with similar high degree of privacy features of cryptocurrency as well. Congratulations!
• Peercoin v0.5 protocol still in review and testing this week. Stay tuned.

Have fun!

[Sunny King]

Weekly Update #163

• Reports have surfaced that Cryptsy is now under investigation by US federal agencies. Although we object to any criminal activity alledgedly happening within that exchange operation, it would appear that the targets are all exchanges dealing with cryptocurrencies. Maybe the real goal is to eventually cut the link between cryptocurrency and fiat?
• Cryptsy was one of the exchanges trading both peercoin and primecoin. Our users be advised.

Take care!

[Sunny King]

Weekly Update #164

• Peercoin v0.5 protocol is still under testing this week. Stay tuned.

Have fun!

[Sunny King]

Weekly Update #165

• Peercoin v0.5 is getting ready for testnet deployment. Expecting release candidate some time next week.
• A tentative schedule for testnet deployment:
• Week 1: Release candidate build for testnet deployment.
• Week 2: Testnet protocol switch. There shall be at least a few days windows to upgrade on the testnet after candidate build is released.
• Please note this is planned testnet deployment intended for devs and testing nodes. This does not affect mainnet operations and typical users.

Have fun!