PPcoin difficulty seems to have skyrocketed recently and I'm not sure why as it's been mostly unprofitable to mine, but it should definitely help a lot when we get more hashrate.
Peercoin was mentioned on the BBC the other day as an alternative to Bitcoin. Im not sure why its on the radar especially but right now its yielding 30% over btc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvIaD8LryZ0What I meant was, up until today, it was unprofitable (compared to BTC) to mine yet people were still driving the difficulty up.