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.
Bitcore is a cryptocurrency that is a hybrid fork of Bitcoin. Although hard forks are heard of, a lot of people only know of Bitcoin hard forks such as Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin Gold; instead, a few people know of Bitcore or hybrid forks. Using Bitcoin’s source code and technology, Bitcore created a new blockchain altogether; it made sure that the blockchain size is smaller, the scalability is better. Furthermore, block times are faster than Bitcoin’s while making mining ASIC resistant as well. Bitcore is not that different from Bitcoin as of now. In fact, it is rather inferior to Bitcoin and most other cryptocurrencies; it has no utility at the time of writing this. It’s only an investment prospect for those who believe the coin will kick on soon and reach great heights. The reason why one would want to invest in Bitcore is that of its unique practices. Bitcore created a new blockchain on November 2, 2017. It took a snapshot of the Bitcoin transaction and created 5 million transactions to fill all the public addresses belonging to people owning 0.01 BTC or more. The funding ratio is 0.5 BTX: 1.0 BTC, but if you had bitcoins at the time of the snapshot, then you can request your share of BTX at a 1:1 conversion until October 30. Bitcore is the first cryptocurrency to be a hybrid fork. But it is more than just a hybrid fork. It has tried to improve on Bitcoin and solve the issues that plague it. For instance, Bitcore uses timetravel10 consensus algorithm which is resistant to ASICs. This means that centralization of mining power is not possible as the playfield is levelled and everyone has an equal opportunity more or less. Moreover, Bitcore has 10 MB Segwit enabled blocks that make the network capable of handling 17.6 billion transactions a year or 48 million transactions per day. Bitcore is a cryptocurrency that has a lot of promise but nothing to show for as of now. Those investing in it believe that it will grow into a major force soon. But even after weekly airdrops, the user base is limited. Handling 46 million transactions per day won’t matter if there aren’t many people to use it. The development team’s efforts will go a long way into ensuring that more people start using BTX. A wallet that is on the way can help change things a little; however, Bitcore’s long-term future might depend on whether it can offer something different or not.