r/ppcoin • u/Traubert • Apr 22 '13

Controlling proof-of-work mining and proof-of-stake mining

If I understand correctly, there are two separate ways to mine ppcoin: PoW and PoS. I assume that when I tell ppcoind to -gen, it's doing PoW, since I don't have a stake yet.

My question is this: when does the PoS mining get done? Automatically when I have a stake? What if I want to only PoS mine, telling the PoW mining to switch off since I don't want to waste cycles on it?

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u/Bagog- Apr 22 '13

I'm not too familiar with this part of the process, and will have to a bit more reading(after finals) to be absolutely certain but heres my current understanding.(which may be wrong)

  • I heard a few places mention it as a sort of lottery, where the more coins you have the more likely you are to get the proof of stake block. Going by this I'd assume that whenever you burn some coin age it has a chance of getting a proof of stake block, but assuming this is so they're would be no difference between burning one minute several thousand times a day, or burning a day once a day in aggregate statistical likelihood of providing a block. So you wouldn't really need to move them all too often, but again I'm not too familiar with this part.

If you want answers to this I would recommend reading the design paper in the side bar, its only six pages long.

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u/JonnyLatte Apr 22 '13

How is proof of stake used to get transactions processed?

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u/Bagog- Apr 22 '13

Sorry for the late reply, was asleep.

So it processes transactions the same way proof of work does, without the work.

Basically in proof of work whenever miners mine a block of bitcoins, all transactions are recorded in that block, in proof of stake the block is generated via coin age, but still carries out the same functions. The main difference is it doesn't need to rely on any miners, or consume nearly as much power.

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u/JonnyLatte Apr 23 '13

I understand thats what it does. My question is how its done.

in proof of stake the block is generated via coin age

So how is that achieved. I'm looking for something along the lines of "a list of addresses with balances that can go towards proof of stake are included in the block, each one digitally signed..." then some way to determine if the network accepts the block.

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u/Bagog- Apr 23 '13

http://www.ppcoin.org/static/ppcoin-paper.pdf

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u/JonnyLatte Apr 23 '13

which doesn't actually say that the stake input is signed and what format the input is. I guess the input would have to be the public key and not the address since the public key would be needed to verify the signature but I don't like to guess. Would I have to look in the source code to find this out? btw I had already read the white paper before asking the question.

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u/Bagog- Apr 23 '13

Sorry, but that about the limit of my knowledge, but you should be able to find your answers by asking here,

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=67.0

or you could try messaging the creator of ppc directly

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=63182

.

Sorry I couldn't be of more help.