[PPC] [XPM] Peercoin/Primecoin Weekly Updates

[Sunny King]

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!

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[Sunny King]

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!

[Sunny King]

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!

[Sunny King]

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!

[Sunny King]

Weekly Update #70

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

[Sunny King]

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!

[Sunny King]

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!

[Sunny King]

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!

[Sunny King]

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!

[Sunny King]

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!

[Sunny King]

Weekly Update #76

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

Have fun!

[Sunny King]

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!

[Sunny King]

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!

[Sunny King]

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!

[Sunny King]

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!

[Sunny King]

Weekly Update #81

• Peercoin v0.4 release candidate final round of testing has been completed. Release candidate will be cut and build started tomorrow. Expect release candidate this week for distribution. Release schedule is now fixed as following:
• 2014-MAR-24 Peercoin v0.4rc1 release candidate testnet upgrade deadline and testnet protocol switch
• 2014-APR-05 v0.4 release for distribution
• 2014-MAY-05 v0.4 upgrade deadline and network protocol switch
• Peercoin v0.4 release progress can be followed on peercointalk.org.

Have fun

[Sunny King]

Weekly Update #82

• Peercoin v0.4 release candidate has been released. Please refer to the v0.4 schedule announced last week and follow the release status on http://www.peercointalk.org/index.php?topic=2473.0
• Release candidate is for testnet upgrade with deadline on March 24.
• If testnet upgrade goes smooth, main release should be ready around April 5 with upgrade deadline on May 5.
• If you are a service provider of peercoin feel free to test it on testnet.

Have fun!

[Sunny King]

Weekly Update #83

• Peercoin testnet has now been switched to v0.4.0 protocol. Testnet operation will be monitored closely this week. If you run a testnet node and haven't upgraded yet, you would need to redownload blockchain for it to work properly. Please visit peercointalk.org for latest progress at http://www.peercointalk.org/index.php?topic=2473.0

Have fun!

[Sunny King]

Weekly Update #84

• Peercoin v0.4 release is currently on schedule. Visit peercointalk.org for latest progress at http://www.peercointalk.org/index.php?topic=2473.0

Have fun!

[Sunny King]

Weekly Update #85

• Peercoin v0.4.0 released. This is a mandatory upgrade release. Upgrade deadline is May 4th. Please visit peercointalk forum for more information and instructions: http://www.peercointalk.org/index.php?topic=2473.0
• Source code release at https://github.com/ppcoin/ppcoin
• Linux and Windows release builds at https://sourceforge.net/projects/ppcoin/files/0.4.0/
• Instructions for upgrade from v0.3.0 is posted at http://www.peercointalk.org/index.php?topic=2473.0

Have fun!