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

[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

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[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.