#ppcoin

Third largest cryptocurrency PPCoin moves into spotlight with Vault of Satoshi deal

7 November 2013 | By Danny Bradbury | Coindesk.com

Everyone knows the first person who walked on the moon. Lots of people know the second. But whoever remembers the third?

As the third largest cryptocurrency in the world, peercoin (also know as Peer-to-Peer Coin or PPCoin) is trying to bolster its reputation. It isn’t doing too badly having just been accepted as an official currency by new Canadian exchange Vault of Satoshi. A local face-to-face peercoin exchange is also launching, and efforts are been made to get specialist event organizers to use peercoin as their official currency.

Ian Steadman from Wired UK made good guide to alt currencies that seems to be most popular nowadays.

  Here you have sample of his writing:

For all the Bitcoin hype, it's not hard to see that there's a big problem in how bitcoins are actually used. That comes from Bitcoin being both a currency and a commodity in its current guise. Its rise in value has been the thing to make it famous, but that's also the thing that has undermined its usefulness as a currency. But if you're someone who wants to accept bitcoins as part of a business, then having to update your prices every minute isn't necessarily useful -- nor is the worry that deflation might discourage coins from circulating, or the worry that the whole thing could pop without warning.

Businesses have started accepting Bitcoin, to their credit. There's a whole neighbourhood in Berlin that's seemingly converted on mass, while the range of online services that accept it -- from Wordpress to  OK Cupid -- is now long enough to be essentially pointless in listing, again significant in showing Bitcoin is now a legitimate currency.

We may be entering a new period in how we pay for things online, with Bitcoin as the first example of theory put into practice. Like many new and radical ideas, its implementation has been sketchy, inconsistent, with naysayers decrying it as a scam or a Ponzi scheme, its acolytes proclaiming it a crucial weapon in the liberation of the individual from the corporatist banking system and government regulation of commerce.

This argument sees Bitcoin as to currencies/online markets as Napster was to music piracy. The popularity of Bitcoin might well have put the whole system under an immense amount of stress but the underlying concept is an attractive one -- a cryptographically secure and anonymous currency that doesn't take a cut from transactions (like, say,  Amazon's virtual currency), and which remains independent of any single, central authority.

For many people, the risks -- from fraud, for instance -- are outweighed by the benefits. So let's say you're not convinced by Bitcoin as it is, but you still like Satoshi Nakomoto's idea ("an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party") then there are other alternatives out there. Here are some of the more interesting ones, all forked from the original Bitcoin code.

Recently I wrote about Bitcoin, the most prominent and certainly most talked about virtual currency. Despite the fact that Bitcoin isn't widely used on a population level, it is still used significantly enough to warrant a pseudo-mainstream label. In fact, CNBC even has a Bitcoin "ticker" on their website: HERE. Bitcoin has it's own pros and cons, chief among them is that it is both a currency and a commodity, and is being traded as such, resulting in market-driven price volatility. As the concept of virtual currencies becomes more widely accepted and understood, it is inevitable that more will gradually develop to complement, compete, or supplement the others. This article will shed light on a few of those and discuss their merits and pitfalls. 

Litecoin is perhaps the biggest competitor to Bitcoin, launched in late 2011 with over 17 million Litecoins in circulation worth approximately $62 million. It is currently worth about $3.30/coin. Like Bitcoin, Litecoin has a planned 'hard-capacity' of 84 million coins. In many ways, Litecoin is very similar to Bitcoin, to a point of being identical - which is really the point - they say "Litecoin is the silver to Bitcoin's gold." Put simply, because Litecoin is designed to dictate lower value per unit, it is more amenable to casual, low-value transactions. Due to the cryptographic differences, Litecoin is also quicker in transaction. Another benefit to Litecoin's system is that it employs algorithms that do not become more resource costly to mine in the future - whereas Bitcoin keeps getting more resource-heavy to mine coins. Litecoin would seem to be more like cash, so perhaps Litecoin has out-Bitcoined Bitcoin! Importantly, the premier Bitcoin exchange "Mt. Gox" has indicated plans to add Litecoin to their trading system, improving access. 

Freicoin is a virtual currency that changes the rules quite significantly. Launched in late 2012, with an unknown number in circulation, and an unknown terminal capacity. It is currently worth about $0.06/coin. What Freicoin does very differently is that it introduces the equivalent of a "storage fee"; if you were to store 5,000lbs of silver somewhere, you would be charged for the service, Freicoin charges for stable currency. Effectively, Freicoin is penalizing speculators and encouraging the exchange and transaction of the currency, preventing, or at least discouraging stockpiling. If an individual holds on to Freicoins, they incur a negative interest rate that eats away at the value by about 4.6% annually. Other than this feature, Freicoin works much like Bitcoin and Litecoin - proving that Satoshi's computational model of a virtual currency is a clever one. Interestingly, Freicoin has also created an institution, powered by its own currency to conduct philanthropy and charity.

PPCoin is a less well known and understood virtual currency. Launched in late 2012, the number in circulation, the current market capacity, and the terminal capacity are all unknown. It is thought that PPCoin has no terminal capacity, and that the algorithms dictate a 1% per year increase in supply (roughly). It is currently worth about $0.16/coin. PPCoin gets its name from "Peer-to-Peer." PPCoin approaches virtual currency by addressing a chief issue with Bitcoin: Mining Cost. Because the resource load becomes greater as more Bitcoins are mined, it makes it less feasible for non-specialists to set their machine up as a network-node, thus causing a decrease in network size and cooperative nature - this is a risk. PPCoin solves this by altering the "proof of work" that Bitcoin uses. Bitcoin attaches the proof of work to each block of coins as it is generated, thus assigning ownership rights to the miner. PPCoin uses "proof of stake", which verifies the ownership timeline more carefully. What this means is that it adds a level of non-cryptographic 'encryption' that makes it more difficult for a coin to be counterfeited or tricked. It simply adds a layer of difficult-to-replicate information to validate a transaction.  

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