Simple question: What makes blackcoin substantially and essentially diffferent from peercoin, novacoin and mintcoin?
Assuming this is a legitimate question and not a trolling attempt.
Peercoin and Novacoin are a hyrbid of proof of work and proof of stake. Blackcoin is proof of stake only making it more environmentally friendly.
Mintcoin is similar to Blackcoin except it's premined and the proof of stake rate of interest is 20% rather than Blackcoin's 1%. 20% interest rate is too high for various reasons discussed already.
It's more than technical specifications that make a coin though. Otherwise Litecoin would have the same market cap as Bitcoin. It's also community support and the quality of the dev team (blackcoin has a great one as demonstrated by the blackcoin multicoin concept being pioneered).
I am not troling. I am beeing a potential investors understanding his investments and asking questions for that purpose.
So...
Where does the POS code come from? I assume it is based on PPC?
There was a reason (security reasons) why PPC does not rely on POS completely and not that quick. Did Mintcion/Blackcoin overcome this?
I'm not a coin dev so can't answer that with authority. I read someone else say on here that the Blackcoin code is using a modified version of PPCoin's staking algorithm. However I don't know how accurate that statement is (he seemed to know what he was talking about but I lack the knowledge to verify it).
Sunny the PPC dev brilliant though he is has always been vague about PPC and it's security issues.
Understood. To my knowledge, Sunny King sorted the matter out already over a month ago. To wit:
The protocol upgrade in 0.3.0 includes a new algorithm to derive proof-of-stake hash modifier, the entity that scrambles computation for stake owners, which replaces the current proof-of-stake difficulty used as modifier in 0.2 protocol. The design was started late September last year, when I first began to realize the issues with using difficulty as modifier. Honorary mention also goes to Jutarul, who independently discovered and verified an issue with using difficulty as modifier and published on bitcointalk in December last year, while successfully executed a demo attack on the block chain. Other changes in the protocol include starting hash weight from 0 at the 30-day mininum age, and requirement that coinstake timestamp must equal block timestamp. Overall 0.3 protocol should significantly strengthen the proof-of-stake protection and resolve the current known vulnerabilities.
My sincere appreciation to co-contributors of 0.3.0 release:
Robert VanHazinga of Hartland PC (dreamwatcher) for the vanitygen compatibility fix
Jutarul for demonstrating stake generation vulnerability
EskimoBob for reporting issue fixed in 0.3.0