Meet Sunny King: Peercoin 4th Anniversary Celebration!

Peercoin's 4th anniversary is coming up very shortly and we're holding a celebration with different events to help mark the occasion...

Phase 0: CoinDesk Interview with Sunny King & the Peercoin Team CoinDesk approached us to write an article about the effect Bitcoin's halving had on Peercoin's PoW difficulty and the resulting drop in mining reward. CoinDesk did this interview with Sunny King and the Peercoin team in preparation for writing the main article. You can find the interview here. Phase 1: Mumble RADIO SHOW: Featuring Peercoin and hrobeers We'll be kicking off the event on Friday August 19th of the Beyond Bitcoin mumble radio talk show. This begins at 7am Pacific / 10am Eastern / 2pm UTC. hrobeers will be our primary speaker, who will discuss the latest developments on his project PeerKeeper. If you've never used mumble before, see this post by @intelliguy on steemit. After the next speakers finish their segments, we'll continue the "aftershow" on the Beyond Bitcoin mumble, which will probably last up to an additional 1-3 hours. In attendance will be Sentinelrv, Chronos, ppcman, and more. Sunny King is aware of the event, and will be making an appearance during the aftershow discussion via text chat.

- Steemit Announcement on Sunny King's Attendance

Phase 2: Two Day Rocket Chat "Drop in and Talk" Both Aug 19 & 20 For the duration of the celebration until August 20th, we'll be making extra use of our new Rocket Chat channel, which is available here: http://chat.peerbox.me . So in the event you do not attend the 1 to 3 hour mumble show, you can talk to other people in our live chatroom after the show concludes. Special thanks to Peerchemist for running this free service. We will discuss historical achievements, current developments, and what's coming in the near future. Phase 3: Win 100 Peercoins (or more!) by uploading a photo! All Peercointalk members are encouraged to take photos, or make memes, and upload them to this special thread: Peercoin 4th Anniversary PHOTO CONTEST . You can win 100 free peercoins for your contribution if selected as the winner!

The Rebirth of Peercoin

Peercoin has been going through a transitional phase lately. This rebirth is only in its beginning stages however. Ever since the v0.5 release of the reference client several months ago, we have seen a team of developers slowly start to form around Peercoin. This team consists of Peerchemist, hrobeers and Saeveritt, all of them with their own individual projects that are dedicated to improving and taking the Peercoin blockchain to the next level. These projects consist of Peerbox, PeerAssets, PeerKeeper, PARS and Peercoin Wisdom. Some of these projects are already released, while some of them are brand new and still in development, but they will all play a part in opening up Peercoin to new innovation and use cases as well as ease of use. You can see an example of the new Peercoin team coming together recently with Sunny King to answer questions from CoinDesk.



Funding Will Speed up Innovation & Improve Value

While a great development team seems to be forming around Peercoin, one major thing is still lacking which could greatly increase their speed of progress and that's project funding. Because Peercoin went through a long period of lack of innovation while other projects soaked up the spotlight, funding for development has slowed to a trickle and isn't what it used to be. However, now that we have a dedicated team that is trying to bring things to Peercoin like the creation of DAOs and DACs on the blockchain and possibly even things like data sharing and smart contracts later in the future, large holders of Peercoin should really consider donating funds to the team behind the projects that are currently being worked on.



Funding the developers that are responsible for the most promising projects that are supporting Peercoin is the best way to see your investment grow. Without proper funding, it will be a struggle for our developers to bring Peercoin up to speed with the rest of the crypto world. With proper funding however, motivation and the speed of innovation and development will be increased, meaning Peercoin will become more useful to more people at a faster rate, increasing the value of your investment. Please don't wait for others to chip in, because they're most likely waiting on you as well. Help Peercoin achieve greatness now while there is still a team dedicated to making it happen. Here are a list of projects that our team is currently working on, along with their Peer4commit donation pages. Please consider donating to the projects you feel would bring Peercoin the most value...

PeerAssets

PeerAssets is a simple blockchain agnostic protocol which enables peers to issue and transact with assets. PeerAsset protocol based assets can be utilized to represent any type of asset like bonds or equity. This allows the creation of DAOs and DACs on the Peercoin blockchain, complete with dividend functionality as well as shareholder voting.



PeerAssets has been described as Peershares done right. Peershares was another initiative in our community, except it allowed the creation of highly customized blockchains that were external to Peercoin. Two examples are NuBits and the yet to be released B&C Exchange. However, Peershares based blockchains do nothing to support the Peercoin network itself. PeerAssets do support Peercoin, as they reside on top of Peercoin's blockchain and Peercoins are required in order to pay the fees for transacting with the assets. Peercoin is burned by creating assets, sending them, voting and DAOs will need to purchase Peercoin in order to distribute dividends. All of this creates demand for Peercoin.



It is also incredibly easy to distribute PeerAssets. With Peershares, you need to take great care in share distribution, or else someone could end up with 51% of the network and attack it. In the case you need to raise money and you can only find a couple of large investors to support your new business, you would be unable to accept their money because the distribution isn't fair and secure enough. With PeerAssets distribution doesn't impact security, since the security of your assets is already taken care of by the Peercoin network. Even if one investor were to purchase 60% of your company's assets, security would not be threatened. The only thing you would need to worry about in this case is whether the large investor knew what they were doing, because they would now have majority ownership of your company and could influence its direction through decentralized voting.



Another large advantage over Peershares is that PeerAssets will be very easy to use and create. Peershares networks can be difficult to setup and even once they are live, financial and development resources need to be expended in order to keep the blockchain updated, which can be costly. Since PeerAssets reside on the Peercoin blockchain, asset holders don't need to worry about the upkeep of the blockchain, because the developers of Peercoin will take care of it. They can simply hitch a ride on a public blockchain and help reduce Peercoin's inflation through the burning of transaction fees.



If you believe PeerAssets would bring great value to Peercoin, help support its development by reading the whitepaper and then donating funds to the project. Imagine thousands of DAOs all existing on Peercoin's blockchain and tens of thousands of people buying Peercoin in order to distribute dividends and pay transaction fees. That would greatly increase the value and use of the Peercoin blockchain, but the only way we will see it is if large Peercoin holders help contribute funds toward its development...



- Announcement Thread -

- Donation Page - https://peer4commit.com/projects/178



PeerKeeper

PeerAssets is a simple blockchain agnostic protocol which enables peers to issue and transact with assets. PeerAsset protocol based assets can be utilized to represent any type of asset like bonds or equity. This allows the creation of DAOs and DACs on the Peercoin blockchain, complete with dividend functionality as well as shareholder voting.PeerAssets has been described as Peershares done right. Peershares was another initiative in our community, except it allowed the creation of highly customized blockchains that were external to Peercoin. Two examples are NuBits and the yet to be released B&C Exchange. However, Peershares based blockchains do nothing to support the Peercoin network itself. PeerAssets do support Peercoin, as they reside on top of Peercoin's blockchain and Peercoins are required in order to pay the fees for transacting with the assets. Peercoin is burned by creating assets, sending them, voting and DAOs will need to purchase Peercoin in order to distribute dividends. All of this creates demand for Peercoin.It is also incredibly easy to distribute PeerAssets. With Peershares, you need to take great care in share distribution, or else someone could end up with 51% of the network and attack it. In the case you need to raise money and you can only find a couple of large investors to support your new business, you would be unable to accept their money because the distribution isn't fair and secure enough. With PeerAssets distribution doesn't impact security, since the security of your assets is already taken care of by the Peercoin network. Even if one investor were to purchase 60% of your company's assets, security would not be threatened. The only thing you would need to worry about in this case is whether the large investor knew what they were doing, because they would now have majority ownership of your company and could influence its direction through decentralized voting.Another large advantage over Peershares is that PeerAssets will be very easy to use and create. Peershares networks can be difficult to setup and even once they are live, financial and development resources need to be expended in order to keep the blockchain updated, which can be costly. Since PeerAssets reside on the Peercoin blockchain, asset holders don't need to worry about the upkeep of the blockchain, because the developers of Peercoin will take care of it. They can simply hitch a ride on a public blockchain and help reduce Peercoin's inflation through the burning of transaction fees.If you believe PeerAssets would bring great value to Peercoin, help support its development by reading the whitepaper and then donating funds to the project. Imagine thousands of DAOs all existing on Peercoin's blockchain and tens of thousands of people buying Peercoin in order to distribute dividends and pay transaction fees. That would greatly increase the value and use of the Peercoin blockchain, but the only way we will see it is if large Peercoin holders help contribute funds toward its development...- Announcement Thread - https://www.peercointalk.org/index.php?topic=4566.0

PeerKeeper will be one of those most advanced web wallets developed yet and it's being released for Peercoin. If you've ever wanted to be able to easily mint with your Peercoins, but don't have the time to figure out how to install and use the reference client or Peerunity, you're in luck! PeerKeeper allows you to mint with your Peercoins straight from your web browser, and even on your Android or iPhone. Check out the features below... A thin client PPC wallet that is able to mint in browser.

Creates addresses using BIP32 HD wallets, based on a single locked key that can be bookmarked.

Stores no unencrypted private keys on disk.

Private keys are never communicated over the internet.

Includes a PeerAssets implementation.

Values convention over configuration. Coin control is done in savings accounts out of the box.

Savings accounts use hardened keys (see BIP32) for extra security.

Checking accounts will never mint and therefore never lock your funds.

Can run as a chrome/firefox app.

Can run as a desktop app using electron http://electron.atom.io/ .

. Can run from a local folder.

Can be ported to native iOS and Android using react-native https://facebook.github.io/react-native/ .

Uses standard block explorers for all functionality except for getting stake modifiers.

Should never hard fork from the reference client.

Can mint on your phone! - Announcement Thread -

- Donation Page - https://peer4commit.com/projects/179



PARS (Peercoin Advanced Relay Subnet

The Peercoin Advanced Relay Subnet (PARS) is a subnet of the Peercoin network that can mint non-standard transactions without forking the Peercoin chain.



How does it work?

The current protocol allows any valid script to be included in the chain. However, it does only relay a limited set of standard transaction types. This means that non-standard transactions won't be relayed by the network and have very little chance to make it into the chain. This is where PARS steps in. PARS is a set of nodes that relay and mint more types of transactions. This means that every time a block is minted by a PARS node, the current set of non-standard transactions relayed in the PARS is flushed into the chain. The more minting power joins the PARS network, the faster we can get non-standard transactions in the chain.



Why?

The beauty of Peercoin is that you don't need to control a mining pool to get a block in the chain. This allows for experimentation with the non-standard transaction types without massive investments and without compromising the security or stability of the main chain. This simply can't be achieved on a pure PoW network without controlling a significant mining pool.



Security

The reason not all transactions are relayed is that the script system can be used to DoS attack the network. To be on the safe side, Peercoin (just like bitcoin) whitelists a limited set of known transaction types that are known to have no DoS vulnerabilities. The PARS also uses whitelisting but will upon request enable non-standard transactions with only limited review. This allows for rapid development, but makes it more vulnerable to DoS attacks. Since the PARS is a subnet of the Peercoin network, only the PARS will be affected in case of such a DoS attack, but the Peercoin network will just continue to operate as it doesn't relay the DoS transaction. DoS attacks on the PARS should be encouraged to show vulnerabilities in specific transaction types.



What it is not

The PARS is not a soft fork of Peercoin, nor does it try to replace the standard client. The PARS shall always obey the Peercoin protocol, and should never control more minting power than needed for effective experimentation.



How does it benefit Peercoin?

As this concept is made possible due to the blessing of PoS, we can attract people exploring Bitcoin's script system. As txn types get explored in the PARS, we might consider accepting them in the reference client after in depth testing. This might convince new innovations to build on our chain instead of going back to their home chain. The increased activity on our chain burns txn fees and therefore lowers our inflation. Welcoming experimentation can benefit our currency thanks to the genius of burned txn fees.



- Announcement Thread -

- Donation Page - https://peer4commit.com/projects/184



Peercoin Wisdom

Community member Saeveritt has introduced us to a website he is building called PeercoinWisdom.com. The following is his introductory announcement...



"The aim and scope of Peercoinwisdom.com (PPCW) focuses on increasing public exposure of community driven projects and technical articles pertaining to Peercoin itself. In order to expand dialog between community developers, researchers and the public, PPCW will become a resource of technical information for the crypto-community to familiarize itself with.



The main focal point for this project is set towards the Peer Review section. In this section will reside articles pertaining but not limited to technical project proposals, comprehensive financial analysis and tutorials, market simulations utilizing blockchain data, declarations of new DAOs, DACs, assets and more. Anyone willing to can submit text to be peer reviewed publicly and if well received by the community will subsequently be published to the PPCW Journal. It is in this journal where work in less narrowly defined or inter-disciplinary fields may be discovered among its contemporaries. The academic quality of publicly available information is priority but by no means prevents the publication of invalid research. In this regard, community researchers and developers wishing to be apart of the publishing process will be provided Publishing Keys to help ensure quality articles are chosen.



Future and potential resources provided by PPCW consist of but are not limited to a block explorer, PSA (Peercoin Simple Assets) web client, and financial market data accompanied with charts covering multiple exchanges. An initial outline of the website can be found at the following address



If you have any questions, comments, or concerns please feel free to discuss them. Site development is open to anyone in the community wishing to be involved."



- Announcement Thread -

- Donation Page - https://peer4commit.com/projects/168



Peerbox

In April, Peerchemist also revamped Peerbox and continues to make improvements to it. Here is his announcement about it...



I've named this version "0.5" to associate with Peercoin 0.5 which was released recently and to reflect the amount changes since last 0.24.2 release. Peerbox is no longer independent Operating System, now it is designed to be addon for Debian.



This new architecture enables stability, ease of installation and use and ease of maintenance while some security features are lost. However I will try to make up for lost security over time. I keep my eyes on linux 4.5 which should work on Raspberry Pi without need for special patches, which will hopefully enable me to maintain my own kernel package with grsec patches.



What is most important, new Peerbox enables even less technology savvy people to use it - as it features graphical user interface for the first time and so it enables users to continue with their familiar Peercoin experience on dedicated Peerbox machine. Users can now transform their Raspberry to Peerbox in minutes and not lose any of Raspberry functionality they are used to. Their Raspberry can remain operating as media center, Bitcoin miner or torrent machine while behaving as full Peercoin node or minting Peercoins. I hope you all will enjoy this release and some new Peerboxes will spring up to strengthen Peercoin network.



- Support Thread -

- Donation Page - https://peer4commit.com/projects/92 PeerKeeper will be one of those most advanced web wallets developed yet and it's being released for Peercoin. If you've ever wanted to be able to easily mint with your Peercoins, but don't have the time to figure out how to install and use the reference client or Peerunity, you're in luck! PeerKeeper allows you to mint with your Peercoins straight from your web browser, and even on your Android or iPhone. Check out the features below...- Announcement Thread - https://www.peercointalk.org/index.php?topic=4583.0 Theis a subnet of the Peercoin network that can mint non-standard transactions without forking the Peercoin chain.The current protocol allows any valid script to be included in the chain. However, it does only relay a limited set of standard transaction types. This means that non-standard transactions won't be relayed by the network and have very little chance to make it into the chain. This is where PARS steps in. PARS is a set of nodes that relay and mint more types of transactions. This means that every time a block is minted by a PARS node, the current set of non-standard transactions relayed in the PARS is flushed into the chain. The more minting power joins the PARS network, the faster we can get non-standard transactions in the chain.The beauty of Peercoin is that you don't need to control a mining pool to get a block in the chain. This allows for experimentation with the non-standard transaction types without massive investments and without compromising the security or stability of the main chain. This simply can't be achieved on a pure PoW network without controlling a significant mining pool.The reason not all transactions are relayed is that the script system can be used to DoS attack the network. To be on the safe side, Peercoin (just like bitcoin) whitelists a limited set of known transaction types that are known to have no DoS vulnerabilities. The PARS also uses whitelisting but will upon request enable non-standard transactions with only limited review. This allows for rapid development, but makes it more vulnerable to DoS attacks. Since the PARS is a subnet of the Peercoin network, only the PARS will be affected in case of such a DoS attack, but the Peercoin network will just continue to operate as it doesn't relay the DoS transaction. DoS attacks on the PARS should be encouraged to show vulnerabilities in specific transaction types.The PARS is not a soft fork of Peercoin, nor does it try to replace the standard client. The PARS shall always obey the Peercoin protocol, and should never control more minting power than needed for effective experimentation.As this concept is made possible due to the blessing of PoS, we can attract people exploring Bitcoin's script system. As txn types get explored in the PARS, we might consider accepting them in the reference client after in depth testing. This might convince new innovations to build on our chain instead of going back to their home chain. The increased activity on our chain burns txn fees and therefore lowers our inflation. Welcoming experimentation can benefit our currency thanks to the genius of burned txn fees.- Announcement Thread - https://www.peercointalk.org/index.php?topic=4684.0 Community member Saeveritt has introduced us to a website he is building called PeercoinWisdom.com. The following is his introductory announcement..."The aim and scope of Peercoinwisdom.com (PPCW) focuses on increasing public exposure of community driven projects and technical articles pertaining to Peercoin itself. In order to expand dialog between community developers, researchers and the public, PPCW will become a resource of technical information for the crypto-community to familiarize itself with.The main focal point for this project is set towards the Peer Review section. In this section will reside articles pertaining but not limited to technical project proposals, comprehensive financial analysis and tutorials, market simulations utilizing blockchain data, declarations of new DAOs, DACs, assets and more. Anyone willing to can submit text to be peer reviewed publicly and if well received by the community will subsequently be published to the PPCW Journal. It is in this journal where work in less narrowly defined or inter-disciplinary fields may be discovered among its contemporaries. The academic quality of publicly available information is priority but by no means prevents the publication of invalid research. In this regard, community researchers and developers wishing to be apart of the publishing process will be provided Publishing Keys to help ensure quality articles are chosen.Future and potential resources provided by PPCW consist of but are not limited to a block explorer, PSA (Peercoin Simple Assets) web client, and financial market data accompanied with charts covering multiple exchanges. An initial outline of the website can be found at the following address http://www.peercoinwisdom.com If you have any questions, comments, or concerns please feel free to discuss them. Site development is open to anyone in the community wishing to be involved."- Announcement Thread - https://www.peercointalk.org/index.php?topic=4471.0 In April, Peerchemist also revamped Peerbox and continues to make improvements to it. Here is his announcement about it...I've named this version "0.5" to associate with Peercoin 0.5 which was released recently and to reflect the amount changes since last 0.24.2 release. Peerbox is no longer independent Operating System, now it is designed to be addon for Debian.This new architecture enables stability, ease of installation and use and ease of maintenance while some security features are lost. However I will try to make up for lost security over time. I keep my eyes on linux 4.5 which should work on Raspberry Pi without need for special patches, which will hopefully enable me to maintain my own kernel package with grsec patches.What is most important, new Peerbox enables even less technology savvy people to use it - as it features graphical user interface for the first time and so it enables users to continue with their familiar Peercoin experience on dedicated Peerbox machine. Users can now transform their Raspberry to Peerbox in minutes and not lose any of Raspberry functionality they are used to. Their Raspberry can remain operating as media center, Bitcoin miner or torrent machine while behaving as full Peercoin node or minting Peercoins. I hope you all will enjoy this release and some new Peerboxes will spring up to strengthen Peercoin network.- Support Thread - https://www.peercointalk.org/index.php?topic=4468.0