Editor’s note: A version of this article by Steven Lee originally appeared on our sister site, TechNode Chinese.
The mysterious cryptocurrency guru Sunny King is scaling his involvement within the industry to become the chief architect of VEE, a new project that aims to bring about a next-generation platform for blockchain applications, according to King’s statement on Peercoin’s blog. The VEE team is currently promoting the project in Korea, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong and will visit Europe in February.
King hopes Peercoin fans will take it in a positive way, because “my care for the Peercoin and Primecoin projects hasn’t stopped. … The current Peercoin team has been doing great work during the past year while I was mostly unavailable. It is my hope that project VEE can also bring more resources to share with the Peercoin team and community, eventually working into a healthy collaboration between the teams and communities of both projects.”
In a Peercoin blog post, the team says they have confirmed the news with King directly. The two projects are not associated and they have yet to form an understanding of VEE from a technical standpoint, but they are open to a potential partnership once they got the opportunity to evaluate it.
Sunny King: The mysterious person behind PeerCoin and PrimeCoin
Like Satoshi Nakamoto, Sunny King is one of the most mysterious persons in the cryptocurrency industry. Peercoin and Primecoin, the two cryptocurrencies Sunny King has founded, both brought important technical ideas.
Peercoin is the first currency to protect the blockchain with Proof-of-Stake (PoS), as opposed to Proof-of-Work (PoW) adopted by Bitcoin. PoS mechanisms consume less energy for mining.
Unlike Bitcoin, PeerCoin uses a more practical way to make new currencies. Bitcoin is generated by “mining” and people will get Bitcoin through mining, which needs specific software to unlock the computational puzzles. They would receive a certain amount of Bitcoin reward by unlocking a block of data. These computers constantly validate the ongoing Bitcoin transactions everywhere in the world while doing calculations. Nowadays, only those highly configured, custom computers can receive a reward in mining, whereas the miners are still competing to create more powerful gear. The Peercoin generation mechanism is intended to phase out the traditional mining process.
Sunny King believes that the loss of energy will be the biggest challenge that Bitcoin will face when it comes to widespread use. “The concept of designing PeerCoin’s is based on the optimization of long-term energy consumption, not only for resource conservation but also allows us to have a higher cost advantage over similar virtual currencies in the payment process,” according to Sunny King in an internal communication obtained by TechNode.
PeerCoin implements the proof of stake and proof of work system, while PrimeCoin implements proof-of-work and shares most of its source code and technology implementation. Their design is based on a new concept of long-term energy efficiency.
Beside to engage in the invention of cryptocurrencies and technological innovation, Sunny King is also committed to maintaining a stable, fair and free virtual money market. Sunny King said that they embrace the free market principle. It can also be said that they are libertarians but do not advocate direct opposition to the government.
“I think it is better to give people more freedom of choice, rather than forcing them to do something. In economics, we agree more with classical economics and Austrian economics,” said Sunny King in the memo obtained by TechNode.
In addition, they think that the virtual currency also needs some moral considerations. People like to have multiple choices. The biggest challenge would be the ways to get into the public’s field of vision when a new virtual currency and community appear. Sunny King emphasized “Conscience:” This is a free market but in order to win this free war, we should also look at ourselves in the mirror.