Original announcement by Ben on PeercoinTalk.org located here.The Peershares development team is proud to announce the formal release of the Peershares template demonstration network (version 0.1.0)!
What is Peershares?Peershares are an inexpensive and decentralized ledger to be used by individuals, businesses, and organizations for tracking share ownership and distributing dividends in an automated fashion. Shares can be transferred and held just like other cryptocurrency units, such as peercoins or bitcoins.
Using Peershares, individuals, businesses, or organizations of any size could raise funding through an initial offering without depending on a third party such as a stock exchange. While trading shares through exchanges will be useful to provide liquidity, Peershares can be traded on any number of exchanges just as Peercoins can.
Each business using Peershares will have their own blockchain that is independent of all others. Blockchains can be secured cheaply and easily using Peercoin's proof-of-stake, once the initial (issuer-controlled) quantity of shares have been generated using proof-of-work.
Issuers can distribute dividends as Peercoins, which can then be held by the investors, or if they would prefer, can then take those dividends and convert them to another cryptocurrency or fiat through their preferred exchange. Being distributed, a share issuer is not vulnerable to the failure of single stock exchange.
Most importantly, Peershares are accessible by anyone. The template is open-source, and free to download and customize.
How does it work?The client binaries in this release are intended to demonstrate the integration of a single Peershares offering's test network with the official Peercoin test network. This version of Peershares (0.1.0) is compatible with version 0.4 of the Peercoin network protocol.
If you intend to use the Peershares template for your own offering, you will need to customize the code and compile your own binaries and establish your own network! If you would like to learn how to do this, please review the
setup instructions on the Peershares wiki.
Important! The client binaries included in this release (and all subsequent releases) have had their "RealNet" intentionally disabled. If you do not include the configuration file,
peershares.conf, the client will close with an error when you try to launch it.
To connect to the Peershares template test network:
1.
Download the Peershares client binary for your operating system.
2. Launch the client; it will quickly fail, but at the same time it will have created the directory where the application's data files will be stored.
3. Create a text file called
peershares.conf with the information needed to connect to the testnet. You will need to change the values for rpcuser and rpcpassword to something that only you know. After you've entered the content, save the file.
testnet=1
rpcuser=changeme
rpcpassword=changeme
addnode=54.255.142.16
addnode=54.72.105.68
addnode=54.207.53.43
addnode=54.81.120.250
4. Move the newly created peershares.conf file to the Peershares application data directory. This will be different depending on which operating system you use:
- For Linux systems: ~/.peershares/
- For Windows systems: C:\Users\<YOUR_USER_NAME>\AppData\Roaming\Peershares
- For OS X: ~/Library/Application\ Support/Peershares/
5. Launch the Peershares application. This time, it will connect to the official Testnet and synchronize with the block chain.
6. To receive a distribution of testnet shares, please follow these
instructions.
What's next for Peershares?The Peershares development team is heavily involved in their own implementation (
NuBits) built on top of the Peershares framework at this time, so we're limiting our public-facing development on the Peershares project for the near-future. However, because we're actively building on top of the Peershares template, we're always making improvements. These improvements will, in many cases, find their way back into the Peershares template codebase.
We're committed to addressing any issues uncovered by others who use the template, so please do not hesitate to submit reports for anything that you discover.
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