http://www.peercointalk.org/index.php?topic=2934.0
Ben: Primecoin is one of the two cryptos that you released. While the Primecoin community is smaller than the Peercoin one, there are a lot of dire hard supporters.
Ben: There is some confusion in the community about the purpose of Primecoin, how it relates to Peercoin, and how it should be marketed.
Ben: Could you please comment on the relationship between Peercoin and Primecoin, and their intended respective purposes?
Sunny King: Primecoin is a different approach to Peercoin as to the energy problem of cryptocurrency. In my opinion proof-of-work would stay for quite some time as at least one of the major security models of decentralized consensus, so putting the computing power to something more useful than just hashing is definitely an important improvement there
Sunny King: Let's put it this way, Adam's hashcash is cool, but at this point it's rather boring don't you think? I think implementing primality testing in ASIC is a lot more useful for computing industry than just a bunch of hash functions, although that's probably my prejudice
Ben: I've noticed that Primecoin recently broke another world record
Sunny King: We know that the current market is highly competitive, right now the scientific approach is not very well capitalized by market. There are a few other networks, all not very well capitalized at the moment. So primecoin is still leading the scientific proof-of-work market.
Ben: Has there been any academic discussion about how these very long Cunningham chains can be put to practical use, beyond as a mechanism to protect cryptocurrencies?
Sunny King: Yes we claimed 14-prime chain record. So primecoin is holding 10-primes through 14-primes world records at the moment.
Sunny King: Not that I am aware of, however these structures have some link to cryptography, so you never know.
Ben: I may be the only one, but I'm excited at the prospect that proof-of-work using the Primecoin algorithm could be put to use pushing scientific research forward. Hopefully we'll hear about interest from outside the cryptography and cryptocurrency domains in the near future
Sunny King: Regarding the relations between peercoin and primecoin, they are designed to each be contenders to the energy efficient and energy intensive market sector of cryptocurrencies
Ben: Did you envision a time where they would be linked at a more fundamental level?
Ben: For instance, is there a development path that could lead to Primecoin someday providing the proof-of-work component for Peercoin?
Sunny King: Most likely not in this fashion, I think peercoin is more likely to move to stop proof-of-work rather than switch to prime mining
Ben: Would you ever consider opening up development for a wallet that could support both XPM and PPC?
Sunny King: But I think primecoin would get its own eco system. If infrastructures of side chains are developed, there will be both for peercoin and primecoin.
Sunny King: As for combined wallet, that's probably too early to say at the moment.
Ben: That's an interesting thought, and one that I had not considered, to be honest.
Ben: The codebases for Primecoin and Peercoin are similar enough that a lot of the development advancements in one (outside of their core hashing schemes or proof-of-work), could be repurposed to work in the other.
Ben: What is the next logical step in Primecoin development on your roadmap?
Sunny King: The main problem is to keep sync with bitcoin's bug fix and new features. Bitcoin's codebase is not very amenable to multi currency wallet development. But this is also something to be looking at from side chain development point-of-view. Currently I think spending the effort to just combine wallet is probably too costly.
