This as pointed out by others Is due to the cold minting development that is going on and again a product of the boundary conditions of peercoin, which include a relatively much longer wind up period then other coins because its pointed directly at backbone and large value itself.

As pointed out by others NuBits has removed this and its ok. With PeerCoin it is done to protect it until features such as cold minting are in place.

Bitcoin has of course similar features to cost to include so called spam, but the boundary conditions are not nearly so prohibitive on spam behavior as Peercoin nor as encourageing to transfer large amounts nor to allow people to join in without large set up costs so resists centralization.

Much like the boundary conditions in the Navier Stokes Equation can see quite different outcomes, so to do the boundary conditions in a Coin. This coupled with the POS, SK and others as Devs, the length of time PeerCoin has been going, its interesting now to see BTC essentailly having to face up to the fact its needs to be able to be a backbone currency first to be largely relevant.

The problem is most BTC'rs cannot see this.

All they can see is "Muh Amazon", Ebay etc etc, and the reality is the money nor value simply is not in retail, its a minor part of the economy and value transfer proposition.

So BTC is wedged between wanting TPS and needing Backbone and the discussion by those who understand such as yourself, interestingly identify that it is the Backbone component that grounds relevance, which is a class of argument that PeerCoin has be propounding since day 1 and by design.

I think the Checkpointing argument is orthogonal to what I am saying in this matter.