$5.00 bounty to the first person who can convince me not to buy ppc (reopened)

[Anon136]

No logical fallacies please, rational arguments only. Bounty to be payed in bitcoin at mtgoxusd at the time of the transaction.

More than anything what I'm looking for is, is there anything broken about the concept of proof of stake? is there anything broken about the implementation of it?

[1715367884]

1715367884

[1715367884]

1715367884

[1715367884]

1715367884

[Brewins]

because you should buy ixcoin instead

[abbeytim]

because the price will go down

148PmRLnHj4K89CcQajhz3dZQt7E66d53W

[bnogal]

it depends on how much, how much % of your savings... etc....

In the other hand, Digital coin is lot cheaper and looks promising too, but harder to buy...

[lopalcar]

Because for me is more or less the same as investing in goldcoin... The first days tha ammount of coins mined was huge compared to the current rates, if I remember well, in the beginings each block had around 5k coins.
It's true that Pos was innovative, but there are coins better distributed with more advantages withouth handling new projects like netcoin or nxt wich will have PoS and many other innovations.
I had 6k wich I mined with a 5970 in two days and I sold when the coins was attacked or sometbing like that at ridiculous price, so maybe my hate to this coin is consequence of this 
I'm sure that if I currently have that 6k my opinion would be different and the same as all holders 

[Anon136]

Because for me is more or less the same as investing in goldcoin... The first days tha ammount of coins mined was huge compared to the current rates, if I remember well, in the beginings each block had around 5k coins.
It's true that Pos was innovative, but there are coins better distributed with more advantages withouth handling new projects like netcoin or nxt wich will have PoS and many other innovations.
I had 6k wich I mined with a 5970 in two days and I sold when the coins was attacked or sometbing like that at ridiculous price, so maybe my hate to this coin is consequence of this 
I'm sure that if I currently have that 6k my opinion would be different and the same as all holders 

unfortunately i convinced myself, but that was a good effort! whats your bitcoin address? ill send you a tip.

[Anon136]

i un-convinced myself. thread reopened  

[markjamrobin]

The price is oscillating, and these all time highs are not steady. The price will likely fall again, before it goes up. Wait till like $500 to buy.

[Sustainable]

Other coins offer better alternatives. The confirmation time is a massive factor, this is the reason for investing in WDC with a 30 sec confirmation time or shorter.

[Anon136]

The price is oscillating, and these all time highs are not steady. The price will likely fall again, before it goes up. Wait till like $500 to buy.

thanks for the input, but im more looking for ways in which the protocol is broken. or the economic implications of it are not as desirable as one might expect.

[Yurizhai]

The price is oscillating, and these all time highs are not steady. The price will likely fall again, before it goes up. Wait till like $500 to buy.

thanks for the input, but im more looking for ways in which the protocol is broken. or the economic implications of it are not as desirable as one might expect.

I've never heard of such a reason. PPC doesn't have a 30 million dollar market cap with a broken concept or implementation. Whether or not it will succeed is something that has to be tested down the line.

[sangaman]

I too would be interested in this. I've thought about it for a while and tried to read up on it and although I'm not convinced the peercoin implementation of POS is robust enough to be viable long term, I'm also not convinced that it isn't or that at least it couldn't be reasonably patched up in the future. I already own a chunk of PPC because I like the concept of POS and have respect for SunnyKing's approach, but despite that I'm still in a "wait and see" mindset.

OP, what made you convince yourself and then unconvince yourself? I'd like the $5 bounty but I don't have an answer as to why you shouldn't buy PPC, my inclination is that you actually should buy it although I'm not 100% confident.

And I'm also not interested in predictions of short-term price movements or advertisements for other cheaper alt-coins. I think long term if PPC proves to be a robust and functional alt-coin it will certainly be worth a lot more than it is now - and would be deserving of the 2nd spot after btc since it presents an original and substantially different approach to decentralized cryptocurrency from bitcoin. If it turns out to have irreconcilable security holes then it will just be an experiment and I don't expect PPC will carry any real value.

[super3]

Its in the #3 spot. The better question is why don't have some some already?

[grubles]

Read the whitepaper and make your own decision.

[Anon136]

Read the whitepaper and make your own decision.

yep, my own decision is that i should probably buy some. i just understand my own limitations, i understand that I'm not omniscient. Spending a measly 5 dollars in order to incent people on these forums to alert me to something i hadnt though of myself seems like a very worth while investment. And if there is someone out there who knows a good reason why i shouldnt, than its a pretty quick and easy 5 dollars for him, he should be happy with the arrangement also. Don't you love markets! so full of win.

[Anon136]

I too would be interested in this. I've thought about it for a while and tried to read up on it and although I'm not convinced the peercoin implementation of POS is robust enough to be viable long term, I'm also not convinced that it isn't or that at least it couldn't be reasonably patched up in the future. I already own a chunk of PPC because I like the concept of POS and have respect for SunnyKing's approach, but despite that I'm still in a "wait and see" mindset.

OP, what made you convince yourself and then unconvince yourself? I'd like the $5 bounty but I don't have an answer as to why you shouldn't buy PPC, my inclination is that you actually should buy it although I'm not 100% confident.

And I'm also not interested in predictions of short-term price movements or advertisements for other cheaper alt-coins. I think long term if PPC proves to be a robust and functional alt-coin it will certainly be worth a lot more than it is now - and would be deserving of the 2nd spot after btc since it presents an original and substantially different approach to decentralized cryptocurrency from bitcoin. If it turns out to have irreconcilable security holes then it will just be an experiment and I don't expect PPC will carry any real value.

yes one thing you definitely got right here is that, if ppc is infact not broken, it definitely deserves to be second place. litecoin does give you a little bit more security in a shorter amount of time, but it doesnt bring enough to the table to compete with bitcoins network effects imo, it doesnt deserve to be anywhere near the top.

[miffman]

There is no hard limit, so it is subject to endless amounts of inflation

[AndrewWilliams]

This is a flawed question.

I cannot convince you NOT to buy PPC, because the truth is you SHOULD buy PPC.

The fundamentals are there; market cap, ranking, low price.

Buy, you won't be sorry.

[romerun]

Like bitcoin, ppc is the original bread and butter of POS, other cheap clones won't be taken seriously.

If you believe that there's a room for alt, this is it.

Other alts are just different algors of POW,  or even cheap param changing.

The reason that you shouldn't buy ppc would be they all shrink against btc growth, better stick with btc.

[jgorham]

At this point BTC has such a large lead in the network effect that the only reason to buy any alt coin is if you think it will outperform Bitcoin. So will PPC outperform BTC? As the main difference is PoS v PoW the question becomes "will Bitcoin's PoW model ever cause risk to its overall adoption?"

Why the answer might be yes: organized 51% attack from a large pool, NSA or other body corrupting ASIC hardware, or a technological advance that obsoletes ASICs but is held by a small party.

The third can be written off at this point as it isn't a risk in any reasonable time frame. The second isn't much risk as most ASIC manufacturing happens outside the US, and is distributed between multiple continents. Could a coordinated group of miners pull off a 51% attack? I suppose they could but I don't think they would due to the fact that they would be killing the goose that lays the golden egg. Even if those miners invested heavily in another coin, destroying BTC at this point would endanger the whole cryptocoin ecosystem. To me PPC isn't a hedge against BTC

[/dev/null]

Don't Buy, because every altcoin's price is linked to BTC somehow.
If BTC wil go UP they will go up, If BTC will go down they will go down, then why not Just invest in bitcoins.

If you are buying them with USD it's ok but still it's not better.

[Snail2]

At this moment the only thing against PPC is the the lack of real world services, however this seems to changing, so I can't convince you .

[lopalcar]

Because for me is more or less the same as investing in goldcoin... The first days tha ammount of coins mined was huge compared to the current rates, if I remember well, in the beginings each block had around 5k coins.
It's true that Pos was innovative, but there are coins better distributed with more advantages withouth handling new projects like netcoin or nxt wich will have PoS and many other innovations.
I had 6k wich I mined with a 5970 in two days and I sold when the coins was attacked or sometbing like that at ridiculous price, so maybe my hate to this coin is consequence of this 
I'm sure that if I currently have that 6k my opinion would be different and the same as all holders 

unfortunately i convinced myself, but that was a good effort! whats your bitcoin address? ill send you a tip.

1J3CcfSaWv5HJeXWs1oSVVSHFsBy99aFmp
thanks 

[pmconrad]

How about this:

Sunny King invented PoS, and in order to test this new concept he created PPC. In other words, PPC is not designed to be a currency. It is designed to be a proof-of-concept implementation of a PoW+PoS cryptocurrency.
This, in turn, is the reason why PPC is not really being used as a currency. It is merely an object of speculation. https://github.com/ppcoin/ppcoin/wiki/List-of-services-on-market lists a meager total of 7 (in words: seven) "Shops, Retail Products and Services", which is absolutely ridiculous in relation the PPC's market cap.

So, if you want to speculate in cryptocoins, buying PPC is as good a choice as any other altcoin. If you want to invest, then leave your fingers off PPC.

Disclaimer: I do hold a few PPC myseld. Merely playing devil's advocate here... :-)

[Yurizhai]

There is no hard limit, so it is subject to endless amounts of inflation

Yet the difficulty level for PoW and 1% inflation rate for PoS will effectively limit how many we will see in our lifetime to a totally reasonable amount.

[PinkPotatos]

one of these threads!

The title of this thread should be. "Marketing my bag of PPC with a bogus demand"

The decision to buy anything is yours in a free market. If you are letting others convince you to buy then you deserve to lose any money you may invest.

The biggest reason not to buy has already been stated.. there are absolutely no merchants for it. Especially not enough to warrant its market cap. On top of that its designed solely for early adopters. In this community that seems to be the way to get people interested though. The fairest coins get forgotten with the exception of BTC but even BTC is highly early adopter rewarding.

[Yurizhai]

one of these threads!

The title of this thread should be. "Marketing my bag of PPC with a bogus demand"

The decision to buy anything is yours in a free market. If you are letting others convince you to buy then you deserve to lose any money you may invest.

The biggest reason not to buy has already been stated.. there are absolutely no merchants for it. Especially not enough to warrant its market cap. On top of that its designed solely for early adopters. In this community that seems to be the way to get people interested though. The fairest coins get forgotten with the exception of BTC but even BTC is highly early adopter rewarding.

I  have to say your arguments aren't really all that relevant. He isn't buying them for use right now, he's deciding on a crypto currency that might be used in the future.. or maybe not even used at all but that he could make money off of. Absolutely no one who isn't delved into cryptocurrencies already knows of Litecoin and it has a 250 million dollar cap, and it's probably made some millionaires.

[BitcoinStriker]

You should Buy PPC.

End of argument.

1E4w3EkiUW4cs5C9gRUKdTJja9KUadAh2X

[cabin]

Con: There is currently no financial incentive for miners to include transactions in a block.

However, I still think it is the most innovative alt around. It also has the lowest inflation rate of all the major alts (and bitcoin) and will have for many years to come.

[sangaman]

This is a flawed question.

I cannot convince you NOT to buy PPC, because the truth is you SHOULD buy PPC.

The fundamentals are there; market cap, ranking, low price.

Buy, you won't be sorry.

Can you explain why the protocol is robust enough to warrant investment? Even tho I'm a PPC owner, I can't really PROVE that it's robust, I just know that with a decent amount of research and time I haven't proved that it's NOT robust.

Can PPC survive off checkpointing? What about the fact that even honest miners have incentive to POS mine an attack chain since POS mining consumes very few resources? How difficult is it to string together multiple POS blocks in a row even with nowhere near 51% of the coins in existence?

I'm playing devil's advocate here, so please humor me.

There is no hard limit, so it is subject to endless amounts of inflation

This one I can debunk myself. The creation of new coins through POW will taper off over time (already far fewer coins are being produced through POW now than a few months ago) until the money supply growth rate due to POW is negligible. As for the money supply growth of up to 1% due to POS mining, this does not result in any loss of purchasing power to the holders of peercoins. Peercoins held in a wallet that is used for POS mining even occasionally won't represent a smaller percentage of the PPC money supply over time (as USD in a bank account represent a smaller percentage of the USD money supply), rather they'll actually represent a slightly larger percentage over time. Not all coins will be used for POS mining so the true money supply growth rate due to POS mining will always be <1%.

As for prices, a 1% rate of growth of money supply is hardly significant or unusual. Bitcoin's money supply will be growing at a rate of >1% for many more years. And the rate of growth of the economy at large will likely be over 1% in the long run so you probably still won't be seeing prices in PPC going up long term, as you'd generally expect with inflation.

[sangaman]

At this point BTC has such a large lead in the network effect that the only reason to buy any alt coin is if you think it will outperform Bitcoin. So will PPC outperform BTC? As the main difference is PoS v PoW the question becomes "will Bitcoin's PoW model ever cause risk to its overall adoption?"

Why the answer might be yes: organized 51% attack from a large pool, NSA or other body corrupting ASIC hardware, or a technological advance that obsoletes ASICs but is held by a small party.

I agree the answer is yes, your answer is one possible reason why but there are also others I see with varying degrees of importance. Overall efficiency and cost effectiveness, yes a POW blockchain is vastly more cost effective than the traditional banking/payment processing system but it still requires a huge amount of computing resources and electricity as compared to a POS blockchain. Providing an incentive for more people to run full nodes and participate in the mining process, anyone with coins can mine without any sort of special hardware and this makes it more decentralized. PPC attackers must attack themselves, you need to get your hands on PPC to launch an attack and if your attack is successful then it causes your PPC to tank in value, thereby devaluing your own assets, which is a good rational disincentive to attack the chain.

Even if BTC proved thoroughly resistant to a 51% attack in the future, I would still see legitimate reasons to use PPC instead.

I'm talking myself into buying more PPC at this point but I'm still not convinced that it could really survive long-term.

[tacotime]

It will make me richer.

[PinkPotatos]

one of these threads!

The title of this thread should be. "Marketing my bag of PPC with a bogus demand"

The decision to buy anything is yours in a free market. If you are letting others convince you to buy then you deserve to lose any money you may invest.

The biggest reason not to buy has already been stated.. there are absolutely no merchants for it. Especially not enough to warrant its market cap. On top of that its designed solely for early adopters. In this community that seems to be the way to get people interested though. The fairest coins get forgotten with the exception of BTC but even BTC is highly early adopter rewarding.

I  have to say your arguments aren't really all that relevant. He isn't buying them for use right now, he's deciding on a crypto currency that might be used in the future.. or maybe not even used at all but that he could make money off of. Absolutely no one who isn't delved into cryptocurrencies already knows of Litecoin and it has a 250 million dollar cap, and it's probably made some millionaires.

He isnt deciding anything because he has already decided. This is a shill post to make his decision to buy PPC seem like a good one because no one can convince him not too.

[Anon136]

one of these threads!

The title of this thread should be. "Marketing my bag of PPC with a bogus demand"

The decision to buy anything is yours in a free market. If you are letting others convince you to buy then you deserve to lose any money you may invest.

The biggest reason not to buy has already been stated.. there are absolutely no merchants for it. Especially not enough to warrant its market cap. On top of that its designed solely for early adopters. In this community that seems to be the way to get people interested though. The fairest coins get forgotten with the exception of BTC but even BTC is highly early adopter rewarding.

you are wrong. there is truthfully nothing up my sleeve. i do not own a single ppc.

[Anon136]

Con: There is currently no financial incentive for miners to include transactions in a block.

However, I still think it is the most innovative alt around. It also has the lowest inflation rate of all the major alts (and bitcoin) and will have for many years to come.

is there financial incentive for proof of stake block creators?

[PinkPotatos]

one of these threads!

The title of this thread should be. "Marketing my bag of PPC with a bogus demand"

The decision to buy anything is yours in a free market. If you are letting others convince you to buy then you deserve to lose any money you may invest.

The biggest reason not to buy has already been stated.. there are absolutely no merchants for it. Especially not enough to warrant its market cap. On top of that its designed solely for early adopters. In this community that seems to be the way to get people interested though. The fairest coins get forgotten with the exception of BTC but even BTC is highly early adopter rewarding.

you are wrong. there is truthfully nothing up my sleeve. i do not own a single ppc.

Of course someone with an agenda would say this.

[sangaman]

is there financial incentive for proof of stake block creators?

I think there is, POS miners have an incentive to preserve the value of their stake. Attacking the chain by not including transactions damages the value of their stake. I don't think there's any energy or computing power cost associated with including transactions in a block, and if there is it's extremely minimal.

you are wrong. there is truthfully nothing up my sleeve. i do not own a single ppc.

Of course someone with an agenda would say this.

He isnt deciding anything because he has already decided. This is a shill post to make his decision to buy PPC seem like a good one because no one can convince him not too.

Regardless of whether or not there is something up his sleeve, this discussion is relevant. If people can prove why PPC is flawed or doom to failure long term, then they're doing OP and other potential investors a favor by discouraging them from investing in a cryptocurrency that will ultimately prove worthless. If PPC actually can live up to its expectations, then there's real value to be had in a successful POS implementation and both investors and the cryptocurrency economy could benefit from it.

[Anon136]

is there financial incentive for proof of stake block creators?

I think there is, POS miners have an incentive to preserve the value of their stake. Attacking the chain by not including transactions damages the value of their stake. I don't think there's any energy or computing power cost associated with including transactions in a block, and if there is it's extremely minimal.

Why would including fewer transactions decrease the value of their stake?

[tacotime]

Regardless of whether or not there is something up his sleeve, this discussion is relevant. If people can prove why PPC is flawed or doom to failure long term, then they're doing OP and other potential investors a favor by discouraging them from investing in a cryptocurrency that will ultimately prove worthless. If PPC actually can live up to its expectations, then there's real value to be had in a successful POS implementation and both investors and the cryptocurrency economy could benefit from it.

I don't want to go into a lot of details, but there are a lot of weird things about PPC that I haven't liked.

- The per-block difficulty adjustment algorithm encourages DDoSing of pools, because doing so results immediately in a lower difficulty and higher rewards
- There was a stake burn-in vulnerability a while ago that Jutarul published, and SK subsequently "fixed", but he's always refused to go into great detail about how the fix works and what vulnerabilities might still be present that allow you to spam/double spend with PoS blocks
- SK's code in general is nebulous
- Fees are destroyed, negating incentive to include transactions in blocks.  Even in Bitcoin, you have people submitting empty blocks because their chance of being orphaned is less.  SK's response is the same as when you complain about any feature in his chain that might break it: "I don't think it's a problem, but if it is a problem, I'll fix it once other people break it."
- Even Gavin called PeerCoin's design "half-baked"

Quote from: Sunny King on February 19, 2013, 03:52:16 AM

If you ask Gavin about his position on this matter he likely would have to tell you the same thing.

... or not.  There's a difference between "unfixed vulnerabilities" and "half-baked design."

I think big decisions that affect the fundamentals of the design should be discussed in the open (see the current Bitcoin debate over raising the block size limit).

- Not really a negative, but the current reward algorithm will result in the supply output being cut 16 fold because of the 1000 fold increase in speed and efficiency of newer ASICs; it's expected that in the beginning of next year PPC reward per PoW block will be about ~15 coins.  This is why the value of the currency is going up, but it's terrible for volatility.
- Stake block generation is erratic and stake blocks all have trust scores that are different and based on the cumulative coin age; no one knows exactly when a transaction is validated by PoS blocks or if this system will be easy to game for a double spend if you have a large supply of coins.  PoW blocks have almost zero trust if I'm recalling right, so the hands of the network is in the PoS miners (except in the exchanges that simply ignore PoS blocks for deposit and use PoW confirmations) but no one ones how secure this method will be against double spend.

You can rest assured that if there is a theoretical problem, SK will dismiss it, and then if it actually is a problem and someone exploits it, SK will release a patch out of nowhere to keep the chain going.  But what happens if he suddenly disappears?  I'm heavily invested in PPC because I know with the crazyass reward algorithm the price will probably explode in the next 6 months, but I don't feel like I have long term confidence in the chain.

[sangaman]

Why would including fewer transactions decrease the value of their stake?

My reasoning is that if potential users see PPC as often having delayed confirmation times because POS miners often don't include transactions in their blocks, they would be less willing to accept and use PPC. I expect this would decrease the value of PPC, which would then decrease the value of the coins held by the POS miners.

The overarching principle is that any successful attack on peercoin will decrease the value of the coins. Therefore there's an incentive even for selfish miners to include transactions in blocks (as ignoring transactions is a form of an attack) even though they don't get to keep any of the fees. There's somewhat of a similar situation with bitcoin, even if you have enough mining power to be able to execute double-spends or maybe even a 51% attack, there's a disincentive to do that because it hurts the value of your mining hardware and the value of your future block rewards. Someone who holds a ton of mining power stands to earn a ton of money through honest mining, attacking bitcoin and causing the value of bitcoins to tank hurts his own bottom line.

While it certainly is nice to have defense from rational, self-interested actors, not everyone is rational and there may be some people who want to attack cryptocurrencies even if hurts their bottom line. PPC is no exception. So I'd feel more comfortable knowing that it's not easy to pull off any sort of significant attack on PPC regardless of where the incentives lie.

[FrictionlessCoin]

There is one reason, and only one reason why you should not buy PPC.

The reason is NMC.

NMC is fast becoming the third most liquid coin and possibly could even become the 2nd (besting LTC).

NMC is a SHA256 coin that is merged mined with BTC.

So, as miners mine BTC they can use their cycles to also mine MNC.

If MNC rises in price, the miners have a choice to either merge mine MNC or mine PPC.  They cannot mine both.

In the same way, you cannot mine PPC and BTC at the same time.

Therefore, the market will choose NMC over PPC because the switching costs are too high.

Furthermore, there are less NNC coins in the market than PPC, this gives it also potential for a higher price.

Please send bounty to my NMC address:   N3CmwySiWWcm3LChmXAakVirw9ssfvZwyV

[cabin]

Con: There is currently no financial incentive for miners to include transactions in a block.

However, I still think it is the most innovative alt around. It also has the lowest inflation rate of all the major alts (and bitcoin) and will have for many years to come.

is there financial incentive for proof of stake block creators?

Yes, you get a 1% return for minting a stake block. The issue is how many transactions you include in it. There is a belief among pool operators that empty or small blocks propagate faster than full 1MB blocks and thus your chance of being orphaned is reduced if you include few transactions. It also makes prioritizing transactions more difficult since a miner doesn't really care what fee you set. It is by no means an urgent issue now... but something to keep an eye on.

[cunicula]

How about this:

Sunny King invented PoS, and in order to test this new concept he created PPC. In other words, PPC is not designed to be a currency. It is designed to be a proof-of-concept implementation of a PoW+PoS cryptocurrency.
This, in turn, is the reason why PPC is not really being used as a currency. It is merely an object of speculation. https://github.com/ppcoin/ppcoin/wiki/List-of-services-on-market lists a meager total of 7 (in words: seven) "Shops, Retail Products and Services", which is absolutely ridiculous in relation the PPC's market cap.

So, if you want to speculate in cryptocoins, buying PPC is as good a choice as any other altcoin. If you want to invest, then leave your fingers off PPC.

Disclaimer: I do hold a few PPC myseld. Merely playing devil's advocate here... :-)

Not true. Concept of PoS predates Sunny King (and me too). I first proposed using coin-age to determine PoS mining power (and also wrote the PoS wiki article on this and other issues) months before Sunny even started work on PPC and ~a year before PPC's release.

I think the major question is not whether PoS is worthwhile, but instead whether we will see better implementations of PoS in the future.

If someone doesn't offer a technical reason, then ignore them. If they say, invest in X because others are doing so or have done so, then ignore them.
The way to make money through long-term investing is by evaluating underlying potential.

Takeaway: For now invest in PPCoin, but keep an eye out for new PoS alternatives.

[sangaman]

Tacotime, those are some legitimate concerns, some of which I was aware of and some of which I was not. I did not know that including transactions in blocks increased the chance of being orphaned, that is certainly a concern. Perhaps the protocol could be modified so that miners keep at least a part of each transaction fee? I realize that this isn't likely to change unless SK buys into it, but then again it's open sourced and theoretically anyone could make this change and people would use the new fork if it has apparent advantages.

I too wish that the patch to Jut's vulnerability was more well understood and I wish the code and functionality overall was easier to understand. Partly it's my own fault, I have a CS background and could probably make sense of the code if I spent enough time on it, but it would be nicer if SK could explain it better himself since he wrote the code and understands it best.

So yes, PPC is far from perfect now, but as I said earlier I don't see why it can't be reasonably patched up to address the concerns you listed. I don't have sky high expectations for a first-of-its-kind cryptocurrency approach that's only a bit over a year old, but I do think it needs to be improved or explained more clearly before it can be considered more than experimental. Anyone could fork the PPC protocol, or start a new POS cryptocurrency that actually improves on PPC's weak spots rather than just clone old PPC code and replace SHA with scrypt, but that takes a decent amount of work and expertise.

[Anon136]

Why would including fewer transactions decrease the value of their stake?

My reasoning is that if potential users see PPC as often having delayed confirmation times because POS miners often don't include transactions in their blocks, they would be less willing to accept and use PPC. I expect this would decrease the value of PPC, which would then decrease the value of the coins held by the POS miners.

The overarching principle is that any successful attack on peercoin will decrease the value of the coins. Therefore there's an incentive even for selfish miners to include transactions in blocks (as ignoring transactions is a form of an attack) even though they don't get to keep any of the fees. There's somewhat of a similar situation with bitcoin, even if you have enough mining power to be able to execute double-spends or maybe even a 51% attack, there's a disincentive to do that because it hurts the value of your mining hardware and the value of your future block rewards. Someone who holds a ton of mining power stands to earn a ton of money through honest mining, attacking bitcoin and causing the value of bitcoins to tank hurts his own bottom line.

While it certainly is nice to have defense from rational, self-interested actors, not everyone is rational and there may be some people who want to attack cryptocurrencies even if hurts their bottom line. PPC is no exception. So I'd feel more comfortable knowing that it's not easy to pull off any sort of significant attack on PPC regardless of where the incentives lie.

wow thanks for taking the time to write such a detailed post. I think there is a market failure problem here though. Its true that an individual stake block minter has incentive to want his coins to remain valuable, the only problem is that his choice would have a immeasurably small impact on the over all value of the coin. The costs and benefits of his actions would not be internalized to him, but rather distrubuted evenly across every participant in the network. i fear that if there is even a modest internalized benefit to not including transactions, such as even slightly smaller orphan rate, i fear that minters would tend towards not including transactions.

[Anon136]

How about this:

Sunny King invented PoS, and in order to test this new concept he created PPC. In other words, PPC is not designed to be a currency. It is designed to be a proof-of-concept implementation of a PoW+PoS cryptocurrency.
This, in turn, is the reason why PPC is not really being used as a currency. It is merely an object of speculation. https://github.com/ppcoin/ppcoin/wiki/List-of-services-on-market lists a meager total of 7 (in words: seven) "Shops, Retail Products and Services", which is absolutely ridiculous in relation the PPC's market cap.

So, if you want to speculate in cryptocoins, buying PPC is as good a choice as any other altcoin. If you want to invest, then leave your fingers off PPC.

Disclaimer: I do hold a few PPC myseld. Merely playing devil's advocate here... :-)

Not true. Concept of PoS predates Sunny King (and me too). I first proposed using coin-age to determine PoS mining power (and also wrote the PoS wiki article on this and other issues) months before Sunny even started work on PPC and ~a year before PPC's release.

I think the major question is not whether PoS is worthwhile, but instead whether we will see better implementations of PoS in the future.

If someone doesn't offer a technical reason, then ignore them. If they say, invest in X because others are doing so or have done so, then ignore them.
The way to make money through long-term investing is by evaluating underlying potential.

Takeaway: For now invest in PPCoin, but keep an eye out for new PoS alternatives.

hey cunicula, this is a bit off topic but this is my thread, i wonder if you would be interested in taking a quick look at, and weighing in on, a proposal i wrote up last night. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=343923

[d5000]

My biggest concern about PPC is the small core development team, essentially, until now nearly all the dev work is done by Sunny King himself. In my opinion that's the main reason for most concerns tacotime has mentioned.

But in the PPC community there are some new devs showing up slowly. So I hope that this problem will be solved soon.

[romerun]

Well sounds like SK is a nazi programmer, nothing wrong with that, too much debating on grey issues is what makes things go nowhere, I actually prefer his approach on if you think it's a problem, then try to break, I'll fix it. But it I would be nice to expand PPC team beyond one man operation.

[sangaman]

Why would including fewer transactions decrease the value of their stake?

My reasoning is that if potential users see PPC as often having delayed confirmation times because POS miners often don't include transactions in their blocks, they would be less willing to accept and use PPC. I expect this would decrease the value of PPC, which would then decrease the value of the coins held by the POS miners.

The overarching principle is that any successful attack on peercoin will decrease the value of the coins. Therefore there's an incentive even for selfish miners to include transactions in blocks (as ignoring transactions is a form of an attack) even though they don't get to keep any of the fees. There's somewhat of a similar situation with bitcoin, even if you have enough mining power to be able to execute double-spends or maybe even a 51% attack, there's a disincentive to do that because it hurts the value of your mining hardware and the value of your future block rewards. Someone who holds a ton of mining power stands to earn a ton of money through honest mining, attacking bitcoin and causing the value of bitcoins to tank hurts his own bottom line.

While it certainly is nice to have defense from rational, self-interested actors, not everyone is rational and there may be some people who want to attack cryptocurrencies even if hurts their bottom line. PPC is no exception. So I'd feel more comfortable knowing that it's not easy to pull off any sort of significant attack on PPC regardless of where the incentives lie.

wow thanks for taking the time to write such a detailed post. I think there is a market failure problem here though. Its true that an individual stake block minter has incentive to want his coins to remain valuable, the only problem is that his choice would have a immeasurably small impact on the over all value of the coin. The costs and benefits of his actions would not be internalized to him, but rather distrubuted evenly across every participant in the network. i fear that if there is even a modest internalized benefit to not including transactions, such as even slightly smaller orphan rate, i fear that minters would tend towards not including transactions.

Yes the downside of not including transactions is distributed among all holders of coins, not just the person mining that block, but it's still something. Something is more than nothing, there has to be a non-negligible downside to including transactions for people to deviate from the default behavior. If including transactions in blocks does indeed increase orphan chances then perhaps that's something, I'm not sure.

I mine POS and don't think twice about including transactions, not to mention the fact that it would take work to modify the default behavior of the client to NOT include transactions. Even with an orphaned POS block, the downside of that is much lower than the downside of an orphaned POW block. In an orphaned POW block, your work is completely wasted and you start from square 1 for the next block you attempt to create. If your POS block is orphaned, your coin-age still exists, and the "work" you lost to create that block is minimal.

[tacotime]

I mine POS and don't think twice about including transactions, not to mention the fact that it would take work to modify the default behavior of the client to NOT include transactions. Even with an orphaned POS block, the downside of that is much lower than the downside of an orphaned POW block. In an orphaned POW block, your work is completely wasted and you start from square 1 for the next block you attempt to create. If your POS block is orphaned, your coin-age still exists, and the "work" you lost to create that block is minimal.

It's less of an issue because of this, yeah; the bigger danger is collusion and forced fees if an entity amasses a large quantity of stake.

[Anon136]

I mine POS and don't think twice about including transactions, not to mention the fact that it would take work to modify the default behavior of the client to NOT include transactions. Even with an orphaned POS block, the downside of that is much lower than the downside of an orphaned POW block. In an orphaned POW block, your work is completely wasted and you start from square 1 for the next block you attempt to create. If your POS block is orphaned, your coin-age still exists, and the "work" you lost to create that block is minimal.

It's less of an issue because of this, yeah; the bigger danger is collusion and forced fees if an entity amasses a large quantity of stake.

i also think the bigger risk is not from someone who wants to profit directly from a doublespend, but someone who hold an even more significant stake in accompanying crypto. think USD or BTC.