This project has massive problems with the way the difficulty is calculated and its showing up in numerous places. Sunny King is doing his best to cover this discussion up, and getting people to remove all references to the code throwing difficulty target errors, but it is happening for anyone not mining in one of the large PPCoin pools.
The large oscillations, or ringing, are also a product of the way the difficulty is calculated. It's unavoidable for this coin.
This is new to me. Is this something real that you have encountered yourself? If so please provide more details I'd like to look into them. As far as I know solo mining works fine for most miners except for cpuminer 2.x.
As to the oscillations it's also in the other chains but is less obvious due to 2 week adjustment interval. But quite a few chains were having problem recovering from it exactly due to this long adjustment interval.
ppcoin has shown that it can recover from high difficulty and withdrawal of miners quite well. Besides the quick adjustment reduced miner advantage in the initial two weeks. I see plenty of people trying to accuse me of 'effective premining' but conveniently ignore the fact that keeping bitcoin's two weeks adjustment interval would give me a lot more time to do this 'effective premining', which pretty much lasted less than two days for ppcoin. No, there was exactly zero premining with ppcoin and it is fair, at least more fair than most other chains.
The PPCoin is also centralized because of its dependence on checkpoints for proof of stake.
I have explained this numerous times, since v0.2 checkpoint only serves to protect the network in the initial growth period. It is not part of core protocol and will be gradually weakened as network matures.
It looks like quite some people are ready to 51% attack a new block chain so yes it's a more responsible way to start an alt coin.
We did quite a bit of work to ensure this form of temporary centralization has less chance of becoming a single point of failure. See solidcoin has some recent problems with their trust nodes and block chain stops. But if ppcoin's checkpoint master node runs into problems most likely block chain would not be affected.
PS
At the moment I do not wish to answer questions related to my identity/privacy. So I will ignore all such questions for now.