Seven Years of Peercoin: An Interview with Peercoin’s Creator, Sunny King
In celebration of Peercoin’s turning seven this week, we arranged for a brief interview with Peercoin’s Creator, Sunny King. In this interview we asked about his current role with Peercoin, as well as his current work and views of the blockchain space. We hope you enjoy!
What is/was your role with Peercoin?
I was the main designer and developer for Peercoin. I had the belief that coins alone could support a distributed consensus in an open, decentralized network like Bitcoin, that is, proof-of-work and energy consumption is not required for decentralization. Peercoin turned out to be a great idea and opened up the blockchain technology to a prosperous future.
What made you start working on another project? (V. Systems)
Peercoin is based on Bitcoin’s system and tooling, which made development as a blockchain platform costly and subject to the limitations of Bitcoin. The open-source culture of the project is nice, but it comes at the cost of formal organization and funding. V. Systems was intended to be competitive in a blockchain platform market, to provide infrastructure service to the future blockchain technology sector.
What do you think of Peercoin’s progress in the last year?
The team has made huge strides in the past year, as you can see in the latest release and the organization through the foundation. Peerchemist is a great team leader. I am still a member of the Peercoin community, mainly as a consulting role for the team and the foundation.
How do you see the future for all your projects?
The three projects belong to different market sectors. Peercoin competes in the Proof-of-Stake space as a cryptocurrency. Primecoin competes in the Proof-of-Work space as a cryptocurrency. V. Systems competes in the blockchain platform and infrastructure provider space. I would love the see all of them prosper and compete well.
With regards to Peercoin, what do you see as the future? What do you think of the current team?
Peercoin is an innovative project which brought the Proof-of-Stake Consensus to the blockchain industry. I would love to see its legacy preserved into the future and compete well in the market. I am still of the view that sooner or later Proof-of-Stake Consensus will surpass Proof-of-Work Consensus in terms of combined market size. Proof-of-Work’s weakness in its defense against 51% attack will be more prominent every year. Our current team is certainly outperforming, given the severe lack of resources the foundation has gone through in the last couple of years.
As you have been in the space longer than most, how do things today look compared to back then? What do you see as the future?
What I see is that the market has a very strong appetite for decentralization. The growth has been tremendous in the past couple of years. Even though Bitcoin is still the overwhelmingly dominating player, my bet is on its domination waning. Meanwhile, the market is moving toward horizontal scalability, with millions of independent blockchains. Fortunately, we already have the Proof-of-Stake Consensus which provides for such a future, and to top it off, there is no need to burn all the fossil fuel on behalf of decentralization in this future.
We hope you enjoyed this interview with Sunny King! We are thankful for the time he took to answer our questions and we look forward to future interviews! As always, we are active on our forums. Come say hi to us on our Discord/Telegram. You can also follow us on Twitter to stay up-to-date with the latest Peercoin news!
