ppcman is now officially retired and this is my final signoff from the internet forever under this name.
Open letter to all communities:
I think there is great technology behind Peercoin, many forks of it, and the entire concept of Proof of Stake.
Thanks goes to Sunny King for proving it could work, and all the time and effort he spent on it.
Thanks goes to Sentinelrv -- always was a key player in the Peercoin community. See forum link
Thanks goes to Fuzzybear -- I have a great amount of respect for that person for what he did in the birth years of Peercoin running communities. I would always work with that person any time.
Thanks goes to
-- of beyondbitcoin for setting up a Peercoin channel on mumble and supporting this community.
Thanks goes to
- a personal friend -- for helping promote Peercoin and organizing the developer hangout Sep 3, 2017 recording on mumble and uploaded to youtube.
As a community member of Peercoin for many years, I found that I was needed less and less as time went on. My last major contribution to Peercoin was the Peercoin 4th year celebration August 2016, to prove the concept could work.
(Unfortunately Peercoin missed its 5th year celebration in 2017, and now the 6th year celebration in 2018).
Not only did we rotate banner ads on coinmarketcap in 2016, we also got a lot of interested people who forgot completely about Peercoin and fired up their wallets and got re-interested in the project.
I had encouraged Peercoin devs to consider creating a discord channel initially. I see they eventually followed that advice and created one on discord, so you can find them there too.
I still plan to hold peercoin long term. The purpose of this final signoff shouldn't be seen as a negative event. For every person that steps away, it gives a new person an opportunity to step in.
I realized I wasn't doing much of a service over the last 6 months by not actively giving updates.. mostly because the project seems to have been morphing into some thing newer with the addition of PeerAssets.
It was a great moment of my life being involved with Peercoin... and I thank every one for supporting me over the years.
I was never part of the official development team. I was never part of the official marketing team. I chose to promote Peercoin in a decentralized manner, as one single person. That is the true way that decentralized communities should operate most of the time. :)
A few things I learned:
decentralized communities should never attempt donation funding. It simply does not work as well as it should. You end up getting large single donations on rare occasions by people with specific interests who want to guide direction. In between donations, you struggle. In such a fast moving industry, you need funding ready to go when you need it, in a reserve.
decentralized communities need to open their development to anyone interested. Be wary of developers who contribute their time and effort unpaid. They could be finding unique ways to recover their return on investment, whether it be building their resume, disclosing things privately to people, or taking investment opportunities on their own. All developers should be funded and paid for, in some way, by the blockchain itself, so their motives for contributing can transparently be seen. In the event one developer is lax in their duties, the funding present can be used to pay someone newer who performs better and more timely.
the same thing that goes for non-donation funding for developers, is even more true with marketing and promotion. From the beginning, part of the design of a blockchain needs to incorporate on going funding and promotion to keep people interested in the project and obtain more adoption. Build it and they will come was a phrase used in a movie. That is not true in cryptocurrency. You can build it, but very few will come, unless you are actively promoting and marketing its existence all the time. (Not just when you have some thing new to announce.)
Coinmarketcap is overused as an indicator for popularity and proof of good technology for coins and tokens. Great technology can exist, like Peercoin, but because Peercoin limits the number of coins in existence, its coinmarketcap rating suffers. Crypto users are going to have to get better at realizing these deficiencies and demand coin/token rating tools for the crypto industry to improve.
It seems easier to create your own coin, than it is to build synergy with an existing one. That is not the best way to do things, because all you end up doing is fragmenting the industry even more. Peercoin's blockchain can do so much more, and I believe we have yet to see the best applications arise.
Thank you for taking the time to read my departing words. Please unfollow this account. There will be no more updates from ppcman.
I wish every one the best, in all crypto currency projects going forward.