What's interesting to me is how they've moved PayCoin from a cool, sexy idea that had a lot of appeal, but also a lot of experimental components, into one that's not very innovative, but much more likely to be functional out of the gate.

I thought the initial idea was pretty slick, with the tiered system and blockchain compression for the lowest tier of miners. The whole thing looked like something that could actually pull off nearly instant transactions without the blockchain overload for new miners and wallet holders. A lot of that was very new, however, and probably wouldn't have worked perfectly right away.

Now, it's a PoS coin that can support different kinds of value transfers. They could really just clone the NXT codebase with a minor tweak and come up with something that matches the new description. The big difference between PayCoin and NXT is the large fund providing price support. That's really critical. Instead of giving new functionality as well as price support, they're now counting on just price support to pull in consumers and merchants. That's a big advantage, but there isn't the level of new tech they first described.

I'll stick with it for now. Price support is a big deal. But I sure felt a lot better supporting actual innovation, too.