Actually, there is a thing where a big cryptocurrency is inherently bad at, and this is the blocksize limit. In the last days the soft blocksize limit in btc has been reached and people are slowly starting to freakout, see this two threads of many:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/soft-block-size-limit-reached-action-required-by-you-149668https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/economically-unspendable-outputs-a-problem-on-the-radar-150493This is already delaying transactions in the bitcoin network and the problem will continue to grow. Bitcoin is in a trap by design, from now on transaction fees will continue to grow in order to do a fast transaction. Bitcoin can't just fix this issue as in the future they need the fees to satisfy miners. On the other hand high transaction fees are contrary to the intention of bitcoin.
I see this as a huge chance for ppcoin as with pos fees are not needed to prevent >50% attacks in the future. As I understand it fees are only needed so that know one can dos the network for cheap.
I dont have much time now, I will outline some thoughts I have on how PPCoin could propose a good solution to this dilemma later or tomorrow. First of all I have a question, what is the current soft and hardcoded blocksize limit in PPCoin?
Best regards,
hamlet
Hi hamlet I am glad you brought this up.
First some bad news already pointed out by Jutarul above that as a bitcoin fork we have the same problem if ppcoin network gets popular enough. It's true ppcoin's transaction fee is not used to secure against double spending as in bitcoin's case, however that's only a problem for bitcoin long term (as in 20 years later). As you can see currently the most urgent problem for bitcoin is the block size limit, which would already bid up the transaction fees.
The nature of this problem is inherent with bitcoin's design. I have pointed out earlier in a different thread that block size limit is closely linked to the size of the block chain. They are like two sides of a coin. The modern PC and ISP speed can actually handle much more tps (transactions per second) than the current block size limit allows (you might need ssd and for miners also symmetric internet connection but they are both gradually getting there), but once the limit is raised, the block chain size could also deal enough pain to discourage new nodes to join the network. For me I would favor a plan to first be able to 'roll' the block chain before raising block size limit.
In the interim bitcoin's transaction fees would be bid up, of course there would be plenty of complaints because it lowers bitcoin's competitiveness against other payment networks, including altcoins. We will be able to observe the quality of service behavior originally designed for this scenario, like nodes dropping low fee transactions from memory pool and one has to resend transactions and so on. Bitcoin nodes by default try to send transaction with no fee. Those transactions would already see some pain. I have noticed this before ppcoin's release so ppcoin always requires transaction fee, so users won't be misled into believing that you can use it without paying fees.
As Jutarul pointed out, I am more flexible regarding the issue of hard fork, so we can certainly try more things than bitcoin. Meanwhile I will closely watch the decisions made on bitcoin's side.