The Peercoin network activated in 2012 and is one of the first cryptocurrencies to ever be released. It is responsible for inventing proof-of-stake consensus, which makes it the first efficient and sustainable public blockchain technology. Peercoin was inspired by bitcoin, and it shares much of the source code and technical implementation of bitcoin. The Peercoin source code is distributed under the MIT/X11 software license. Unlike bitcoin, Namecoin, and Litecoin, Peercoin does not have a hard limit on the number of possible coins, but is designed to eventually attain an annual inflation rate of 1%. There is a deflationary aspect to Peercoin as the transaction fee of 0.01 PPC/kb paid to the network is destroyed. This feature, along with increased energy efficiency, aim to allow for greater long-term scalability. With the same encryption algorithm as Bitcoin (SHA-256), Peercoin is 100 times more energy efficient. Transactions in the Peercoin network are faster and cheaper. If there were not fierce competition on the cryptocurrency market, Peercoin would probably have long since become one of the most important cryptocurrencies. But in 2014 and 2015, however, there were many other interesting innovations in the cryptocurrency market that outperformed peercoin in a number of important properties. In contrast to DASH, Peercoin could not offer anonymity and the transactions in Dogecoin were even faster and cheaper than those of Peercoin. PoS technology ceased to be an advantage of peercoin and PoS continued to spread to other cryptocurrencies. The interest of the users drew it to the side of the minings on the CPUs and GPUs, then to the side of the Smart Contracts and PPC began to get a little forgotten. The Peercoin Team believes that adapting blockchains for wide scale use only through on-chain transactions will negatively affect the decentralization level and security of the network over time, therefore we choose to develop the Peercoin blockchain as a base layer settlement network with a sole focus on securing all forms of value recorded into the chain. This can be accomplished through Peercoin's philosophy of preserving and maximizing decentralization (which increases security) by developing the majority of features and technologies on top of the blockchain, rather than directly into the blockchain protocol itself. Thus the Peercoin Team focuses on developing second layer protocols and sub-networks that can interact with the base layer blockchain to adapt it for wide scale use and improve functionality such as tokens, smart contracts and high speed low cost transaction processing. In this way, Peercoin will act as a secure and censorship resistant base layer for the future blockchain connected world.
Bytecoin is the first cryptocurrency created with CryptoNote technology. Bytecoin allows users to make absolutely anonymous money transfers through the CryptoNote algorithm. CryptoNote uses CryptoNote ring signatures to provide anonymous transactions and allows you to sign a message on behalf of a group. The signature only proves the message was created by someone from the group, but all the possible signers are indistinguishable from each other. Even if outgoing transactions are untraceable, everyone may still be able to see the payments received and thus determine one's income. By using a variation of the Diffie-Hellman exchange protocol, a receiver has multiple unique one-time addresses derived from his single public key. After funds are sent to these addresses they can only be redeemed by the receiver; and it would be impossible to cross-link these payments. As a primarily peer-to-peer (p2p) payment system, Bytecoin has many of the same use-cases as Bitcoin. Created in 2012, Bytecoin is one of the earliest developed cryptocurrencies. Until recently, the team behind the coin has kept themselves anonymous. Now, though, they’ve opened up multiple communication channels, removed some layers of anonymity, and even built several local communities. Bitcoin’s PoW consensus algorithm heavily favors miners that use powerful GPU and ASIC machines over those trying to mine with CPUs. This causes the network to centralize around the more powerful miners. Bytecoin attempts to close the gap between these two classes of miners with a new algorithm, Egalitarian Proof-of-Work (PoW). Egalitarian PoW uses a version of skrypt, a proof of work function similar to the hashcash function used by Bitcoin. The difference between the two is that scrypt isn’t memory bound. Because of this, you can produce highly efficient CPU mining rigs. GPUs will always be about 10 times more effective, though. The Bytecoin project has been fairly fractured since its inception in July 2012. Previously, several isolated teams worked on the project without seemingly communicating with each other. This led to numerous forks and versions of the coin. In July 2017, the team decided to change their image and provide more transparency to the community. The team still remains pseudo-anonymous by only providing names and headshots on their webpage – no bios or social media links. But, it’s tough to expect more from a project that’s focused on privacy. The team has been busy at work refactoring their code and are planning to release a new public API on February 6, 2018. They’ll also be entering the Asian, Middle East, and African markets throughout 2018.