The massive amount of centralization required to support PPC is surprising.
please explain why "required"? AFAIK these checkpoints are a bootstrap method to protect the nascent chain until the majority of mining power comes from proof of stake...
The biggest problem with it that I see is that its basically impossible for PPC to work without having only a few very large pool miners who are well connected.
Sorry. You lost me right there... can you explain why you think so?
This arrangement reminds me of coins in the past that had trusted nodes who basically controlled the whole network. PPCoin cannot be solo mined because of the centralization caused by the way it targets difficulty.
Again. I am lost.
I just thought I would take some time to respond to one of the posts from the PPCoin thread.
But the difficulty is a running average, correct? IMHO, that may explain the large oscillations we've seen: Someone with huge hashing power hashes for 3-4 days and waits for a few days, for the difficulty to cool down, rinse and repeat. It's rational: In the beginning the huge hashing power is more effective since the difficulty weighting takes into account prior times for lower diff. These leads to a situation where the baseline of miners effectively pays for the efficiency gain in mining of the large entity miner...
This project has massive problems with the way the difficulty is calculated and its showing up in numerous places. Sunny King is doing his best to cover this discussion up, and getting people to remove all references to the code throwing difficulty target errors, but it is happening for anyone not mining in one of the large PPCoin pools.
I am not aware of this. Can you provide references for these "target errors"?
Please know that the scenario you quoted applies to bitcoin as well, albeit on a 2-week fixed schedule. In ppcoin the difficulty adjustment was changed according to the design paper:
"In our design both proof-of-work hash target and proof-of-stake hash target are adjusted continuously rather than Bitcoin’s two-week adjustment interval, to avoid sudden jump in network generation rate."
So ppcoin is actually quicker in counteracting, but also drops off faster.
The large oscillations, or ringing, are also a product of the way the difficulty is calculated. It's unavoidable for this coin.
It's not a function of the coin or the difficulty adjustment, it's rather a function of the strength of the network. Large entity miners can play with the minting rate adjustment. It's unavoidable. The only solution to it is to avoid large entity miners.
The PPCoin is also centralized because of its dependence on checkpoints for proof of stake.
All this required centralization reminds me of a project we all thought was dead. Is PPCoin SolidCoin 4.0?
Have you also noticed that many people involved with past solidcoins had already developed pools and exchanges ready to go for the PPCoin launch?
Has RealSolid not Really retired from developing altcoins? Is PPCoin the next iteration of a SolidCoin? We can't be sure. Please be careful with PPcoin.
The likely reason is that these people are just pioneers and will bootstrap the infrastructure for any cryptocurrency which looks promising.
