Peercoin vs. Excel
Everyone knows that if you are looking to speculate you invest in GME, AMC, tulips, and Bitcoin, in that order, but if you’re looking for a functional, sustainable cryptocurrency you use Peercoin. What they don’t know is when to use Peercoin as opposed to traditional databases or even just spreadsheet functions like in Excel. Let’s try to put aside all the flash and get down to what kind of applications could actually be useful when implemented on Peercoin.
The first question you must ask is “is a centralized entity or server necessary to accomplish this goal?” If you answer no to this, then there is a pretty good chance that Peercoin has something to offer in the way of redundancy and trust. The next question is whether a central entity or server would make your goal more efficient, noting transaction fees but also required infrastructure. Finally, you can do a cost/benefit comparison to decide if distributed consensus is right for you.
If your application does require some degree of centralization, Peercoin can still be useful as a settlement layer. Perhaps most of the time the parties involved are trusting each other, but every so often they settle their score on-chain. Lightning network is surely one way of looking at this, but so is your normal cryptocurrency exchange where you trust to trade, but then settle out to your wallet. This way of using Peercoin is powerful and underutilized, so give it some thought.
Let’s talk NFTs. First off, let’s be straightforward about what Non-fungible tokens are and what they are not. They are single issuance units of account that act as digital references to other items of value, hosted on a decentralized blockchain. They are not cryptographic keys that prevent any kind of access to the object, rather their relationship to the object is purely on the burden of an external (centralized) entity of one kind or another. There are surely powerful uses for NFT-like concepts; indeed, Peerassets has had an implementation of single issuance tokens since 2018¹ and colored coins have existed on Bitcoin since 2012² . NFTs themselves may be a fad that will fade as users begin to understand the complicated relationship between a decentralized blockchain and centralized authorization entities, and this may be a situation where in the end the simple local spreadsheet/database model wins out. However, there is a reason why tokenization keeps having bursts of popularity: the freedom it provides the user to interact with the system is attractive.
Peercoin is at heart a protocol. By setting forth rules for how the system functions, it makes it more sustainable to write long lasting code. As a result, apps and websites and user interfaces can pop up without obtaining permission from a central entity. That is where the decentralization of cryptocurrency really shines, in the ability to stimulate participants by creating a global distributed consensus. It is quite literally a way to get open source software providers to all come to consensus on code. The core conceptualization of the blockchain provides a platform for collaboration, and that is perhaps the most fundamental activity wherein Peercoin surpasses Excel.
At the end of the day, whatever your reasons are for using a blockchain, it is always tinged with the influence of community through its living chain of history. The transactions that you deploy on-chain are redundantly backed up all across the world, and you are participating in something inherently greater than yourself. The difference between Excel and Peercoin is similar to the difference between a computer and the internet. There will be market bubbles and many ‘killer app’ proposals before innovation and practicality settle on the best use cases for high level distributed networks, but one thing is for sure: there will always be a place for both cryptocurrency and database/spreadsheeting. It is the intersection of the two, use cases that have both an on-chain presence and a locally kept ledger (again, think akin to a crypto exchange), where we find the richest possibility. By discussing these ideas, by participating in fads and latest new tech, and by otherwise exposing ourselves to fresh innovation we can seek to build and better the ecosystem established on Peercoin and other cryptocurrencies.
¹https://talk.peercoin.net/t/peerassets-on-the-peercoin-mainnet/7907
²https://yoniassia.com/coloredbitcoin/
