Weekly Update #202

• Bitcoin reached its 2nd halving this week (congratulations!). As expected peercoin's proof-of-work difficulty is pushed up due to influx of miners. Currently peercoin's proof-of-work difficulty is about 700M, roughly doubling the difficulty before bitcoin's halving.
• There is a discussion regarding merge mining (https://www.peercointalk.org/index.php?topic=4655.0). I am still of the opinion that merge mining does not provide any security benefit to peercoin as peercoin's security is pure proof-of-stake. Additionally supporting such feature involves significant development and maintenance overhead.

Have fun!