Decentralized Persistence

The Peercoin ecosystem includes a variety of relevant actors, including developments pursued by the Foundation, the community, volunteers, and on-chain movement. These efforts have been at times disparate and at times coordinated, providing a hybrid decentralized/centralized approach to building new capability for the movement. With this in mind, it is something of a wonder that the vision of where we go from here is so coherent. The Request For Comments (RFC) process through which new developments are vetted was originated with a concept of separating the timestamp from the coinstake, but we can even go back further than this. The first truly controversial update for Peercoin that never made it into the stack was a form of “cold minting” that adjusted the concept of signatures to include “mint keys” versus “spend keys”. With the Tardigrade v0.11 update finally removing the transaction timestamp and the Anisoptera v0.13 taproot upgrade, the ecosystem is finally in a place to deploy an extended stack of layer 2 solutions that will solve a wide array of challenges identified since these early controversial conversations about the future of Peercoin.

The Peercoin mobile wallet is a fully functional app that supplements the reference desktop client to provide unfettered access to on- and off-chain signatures and transactions wherever you are. In the continual Peercoin spirit of efficiency, compact multi-signature addresses through “Schnorr” algorithms are being integrated into the mobile wallet to allow for complex networking between users. The foreseen benefits here include non-controversial solutions to cold minting, pooled minting, higher address security, multi-participant organization with actionable representatives, responsive cross-chain bridges, and extensive possibilities in off-chain smart contracts. For example, oracle-based contract fulfillment can be done with pseudo-anonymous addresses that are identical to traditional single-signature transaction addresses and take similarly small data-usage footprints on-chain. Due to the simplified fee model that Peercoin has touted since inception, this allows for third-party websites to interact with the chain as a true settlement layer, while providing a user experience centered around the mobile app.

These capabilities have been a long time coming and have been miraculously in-line with the 12-year history of Peercoin development across multiple developers and internal movements. Empirically, this is the right approach to the fundamental question of “what is the use of cryptocurrency?” by providing an immutable record that is self-sufficient and can be efficiently included in a development stack. The originating drive of Peercoin to be energy efficient spawned a continuous presence of self-governance that has evolved convergently through twelve years of activity to provide broadly accessible performance and a platform for decentralized innovation.