I've been looking at the source code of peepcoin, and also blackcoin (which peepcoin appears to be a clone of) and I think I've found a couple of silly mistakes by the dev, which could potentially save this coin...

blackcoin hard forked at block 38424 with a bug fix for a negative difficulty retarget (see http://web.archive.org/web/20140325000902/http://www.blackcoin.co/wallet-2/official-statement-regarding-blockchain-problems-23rd-of-march/ ). peepcoin has the same exact same hard fork conditional code, but with the number changed to 50000. I think what has happened is that the dev thought that block 38424 was blackcoin's PoW limit, and changed it accordingly, when it was actually just the point where the difficulty retargeting algorithm was changed.

If I'm correct, this means that PoW will continue indefinitely - it will NOT go to PoS only after block 50000.

The dev has also set MAX_MONEY to 56000000000 (5.6 billion PEEP) but again seems to have made a mistake by assuming that this is some sort of maximum minting limit. My understanding, from reading the source, is this is NOT a hard limit on how much the network generates, it is more a sanity check to ensure you don't try to do something silly like send 1 trillion PEEP in a transaction. It has nothing to do with money supply.

In a nutshell (if I got it right) :

1. PoW will not stop at block 50000

2. PoW will not stop once 5.6 billion PEEP has been minted (in actual fact, 39.5 billion has already been minted, and mining still works...)

So this means that the network isn't limited to minting only a few hundred million PEEP via PoW - the money supply will continue to grow indefinitely. Maybe there's hope after all?