PPCoin, abbreviated as PPC, is named after the concept of Peer-to-Peer currency, hence the translation to Peercoin. PPC was launched in August 2012 by the same development team behind Primecoin (XPM), a testament to their strong technical capabilities recognized within the industry. PPC utilizes the SHA256 algorithm with improvements and optimizations over Bitcoin (BTC). Its most significant contribution is the introduction of the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) interest system, which prevents deflation. Many subsequent altcoins have emulated this concept. PPC generates a new block every 10 minutes, initially producing 2070 PPC per block, but at the time of writing, the block reward has dropped to around 250 PPC. PPC is a popular altcoin, with about 20 times more miners than Terracoin (TRC) and approximately one-sixtieth the number of Bitcoin miners. As of October 12, 2013, each PPC is worth around 2.4 yuan. The price of PPC has risen by over 100% in the past month, capturing attention.

Project Features

1. Efficient and Secure
Peercoin (PPC) first went live in 2012, making it one of the earliest pioneering blockchains. A key innovation of Peercoin is its invention of Proof-of-Stake (PoS), an alternative consensus protocol to Bitcoins Proof-of-Work (PoW).

PoW blockchains are protected by proving the consumption of expensive finite resources (electricity). PoS replaces this costly security protocol by using an alternate scarce resource (time).

Due to the cost-effective nature of PoS based on time-consensus rules, Peercoin enables any internet-connected computer to participate in securing the blockchain. This efficiency enhances Peercoin by increasing the number of security providers and ensuring long-term maintainability.

2. User Governance
In Peercoin, coin owners (stakeholders) are the ones who influence the network, generate new blocks, and protect the chain. Peercoin stakeholders collectively own the blockchain and collaboratively decide its future through protocol voting.

Voting occurs through a process called Proof-of-Stake minting, done in the same way that Peercoin is secured. Stakeholders participate in minting by simply installing the Peercoin version they support, loading PPC into their wallets, and holding them during the occasional selection process by the Peercoin protocol to mint the next block in the chain. Each minted block rewards stakeholders with new PPC and votes.

This makes Peercoin the first blockchain able to allow its protocol rules to be directly managed by its users, making the network more decentralized, democratic, and easy for people worldwide to secure.

3. Building Add-On Layers
Given the immutable nature of blockchains and the permanent storage of all recorded data, chain bloat can become an upgrade issue at higher levels of usage, harming the networks security and scalability.

To preserve the trustless security of the blockchain and ensure its ability to scale to global usage levels, Peercoin’s inventors customized the blockchain and its economics to serve the specific role of a base-layer settlement network.

This role focuses Peercoin’s development on modularity, keeping the protocol simple and secure with as few features as possible while maintaining the blockchain as a stable foundation on which an arbitrary number of add-on layers can be built.

4. Fair Distribution
Cryptocurrencies must have a sufficiently broad distribution to ensure that the total coin supply is not concentrated in too few hands.

However, blockchains operating purely on PoS face a problem because there is no straightforward method to fairly distribute the initial token supply. In pure PoS blockchain networks, the entire coin supply is typically created by the project founders, who then choose which individuals hold stakes. This distribution method often ends up with a highly centralized coin supply network.

To address this issue, Peercoin uses PoS to ensure network security and PoW for distribution. PoW miners are rewarded with newly generated PPC from the network. These newly mined PPC are sold by miners on exchanges for profit and purchased by new stakeholders who can use them for minting blocks by participating in the PoS consensus.

While PoS directly provides security, PoW indirectly strengthens the network’s decentralization by distributing PPC widely among new potential miners.

5. Reliable Store of Value
Efficiency, sustainability, user governance, scalability through modularity, and fair distribution. All these qualities combined form a blockchain network with a long-term focus primarily dedicated to maximizing decentralization.

This primary focus aims to maintain Peercoin’s trustless, immutable, and uncensorable nature, ensuring that it can always be relied upon to fulfill its core role as a distributed mechanism for securely storing all types of value.

This value can be any form, from fiat wealth stored in PPC to data stored on-chain in the form of tokens, records, or contracts. Regardless of the type of value stored, Peercoin is built with fundamental principles in mind to always ensure your data remains secure.

Related Links:
https://docs.peercoin.net/#/frequently-asked-questions