Bitcoin Forum

Since those seem to be the 2 hottest IPO for the year (maidsafe running right now and Ethereum coming within months probably) a lot of people might be wondering in which one to invest.

Now Ethereum is a platform that can do pretty much anything.
MaidSafe is just for decentralized hosting (well of everything)

The question is, Ethereium being the more versatile, can you do on top of it what MaidSafe does? And in that meaning are they competitors?

Would either of them need the average user install any clients?

Bit of a tricky question to my understanding Ethereum is a platform that can be used to develop technology on bitcoin based infrastructure but does not rely on the Bitcoin Protocol it's independent

MaidSafe does similar things and is decentralized data storage

As far as I know you will need to have both clients to use them but will wait for a more informed opinion from someone else.

yeah the question is can the ethereum platform can be used to build something like maidsafe (better or worse?)



and of course does any of them would allow a user to access that without installing anything?

Hello, Ethereum here.

Ethereum has storage capabilities but mostly for state information, not file storage. You would never say, upload a video to the Ethereum chain.

Maidsafe is a decentralized storage layer. Ethereum is a decentralized logic layer. The two would work together, for example in the context of creating a decentralized dropbox application.

Ursium, thanks for the concise answer.  I was wondering about this myself and wasn't quite sure, but it is clear now. 

Very valuable input thank you!

It's good to know they will be complimentary and not competing!


Now do you think they can be setup so the average Joe won't need to install anything?

IMO Ethereum is more in a competition with NXT.

Thanks for the clarification.

Seems to me they are not really competitors then and can certainly coexist nicely. Maidsafe is focusing more on anonymity and storage while Etherium is more geared towards contracts, DACs and as a platform to build these things on top of.

Bottom line - both of these projects rock and are going to be taking off in the not so distant future  :)

I think you can do almost everything maidsafe can do on top of NXT soon, certainly sooner than one of both will.
But if maidsafe claimes the storage side, and the user will accept it as the new dropbox, then maidsafe will succedd.
But I think all the other stuff like social network, financial stuff, etc. will be on NXT or Ethereum.

NXT has the advantage of starting a lot sooner than either MaidSafe or Ethereum, but both MS and Eth (too lazy to type more) have a lot of serious backing, probably more so than NXT right now.

NXT can also offer the functionality of both MS and Eth in one package, which is a good thing. Saves time/money on integration hassles.

So: answering the OPs question: MS and Eth are not really in direct competition with each other, but NXT is in the race and ahead at this moment.

It's going to be an interesting year...............

Delusional

This is the funniest shit I've read all year.  NXT is a joke.  It isn't anything.  It isn't bitcoin with built in programming language (like Ethereum) and it isn't a decentralized storage and computational platform.  NXT is a bullshit cryptocurrency which only has the advantage that it doesn't burn too much electricity like bitcoin.  

NXT is garbage.  Nobody will bother with their nonsense.  Why do you think MaidSafe raised all that money in ten minutes?  Because it is a real system.  Not sure if it will work, but it isn't just a bunch of nonsense like NXT.

NXT is good marketing with nothing under the hood.  We don't need another bitcoin, the bitcoin we have is already too much of a pain in the ass.  NXT will never replace bitcoin.  Stop being a fool.

lol, it's actually the reverse. NXT marketing is non existent at the moment, but if you look at all the tech related development projects in the works it's hard to write NXT off as garbage. In 2-3 months NXT will have a lot of new 'toys' out for people to play with.

People love to hate NXT, just like bitcoin in the early days :)

You don't read very much then.....
Try this:
https://nxtforum.org/index.php
then try:
http://www.cracked.com/

NXT is simply ahead right now, in terms of delivering usable code, no argument possible. Neither MS nor Eth are anywhere near actually releasing anything, while NXT's Asset Exchange is set to go live in less than a month.
I'm not bitching MS or Eth up, btw, either one of them could become an important player. I'd bet on Eth before MS, though.

And as MadCow said, NXT is strong on tech, and much weaker on marketing right now.
That you haven't seen that makes me think that you could maybe do some first hand research on NXT.

I never stated that NXT will replace Bitcoin. It might do, it could do, but thats gonna be at least a few years down the line, if ever.
BTC has massive advantages:  proven tech, huge user base, great usability and utility. It's here to stay.....probably.
NXT doesnt actually have to beat BTC to be successful, because it is competing in the 2nd generation game, not the first gen. where BTC rules.

http://www.manta.com/ic/mt6qtfq/gb/maidsafe-net-ltd

Maidsafe is a small company 6 people and they likely only have two to three developers.  Considering it's 6 people and an office (overhead) on a revenue of $400K, they've probably ran out of their own money, investor's money and that's what motivated them to search for more revenue (creating a coin).  The actual coin project itself probably only has 1 developer, so most alternate coins have bigger development teams than the Safecoin project.

   It's 8 year vaporware (they even acknowledge it themselves) and Maidsafe is built upon Freenet (a 14 year old project).  Maidsafe is never going to come out.  A lot of gullible people here are stuck with these "Maidsafecoins" (proxy token coins) which is not to be confused with Safecoin (the coin which will be used to sustain the Safe network).

You thought people were stupid to hand money over to MSC, Visacoin and other IPO scams / exaggerations.

Well, you've just proven that you haven't done any research at all into Nxt.  You got it completely backwards.  Nxt has BAD marketing with great technology under the hood.

Bad is a bit of an understatement.  Though a NxT clone like NAS is even worse, where they took NxT's worst feature (distribution) and made it worse.

From my understanding Ethereum is better than NXT because Eth is a platform where one can build anything.
In NXT those functionalities have to be hard coded, right?

I don't think so.  Check this out - https://nxtforum.org/automated-transactions/what-is-automated-transactions/ (https://nxtforum.org/automated-transactions/what-is-automated-transactions/)

The way I understand it, they will both have advantages over the other.  Sounds like Nxt may end up being faster.

AFAIK: You are totally right. All NXT apps will have to be created pretty much from the ground up, whereas Eth will offer a "Turing complete" programming language allowing easy creation of financial apps. Think Lego for finance.....
So, in theory, Eth will probably be the superior system, at least from the point of view of a developer.
But Eth is a long, long way from any form of code release.  Eth isn't slated (AFAIK again) to release anything usable until the end of this year.

The way I have understood the Turing points are that NXT is trying to make only one part Turing complete, just the part that deals with transactions.  This for right now is also the most important part too.  In 5 years, who knows!  Ethereum wants to make everything Turing complete.  Some people have stated that by Ethereum making everything Turing complete that it might have many more points of failures for hackers to take advantage of, where as with NXT focusing on making transactions Turing complete might make it more secure.  Still... that is all developer speak, so I don't really know.  It seems like the more open and more flexible a platform is, that it would be better, that in the long run being Ethereum.  But...... Ethereum isn't here and NXT is.  The best platform is the one you can actually choose and not the imaginary one.  So for now NXT has a lot of time to build a user base. 

Right now NXT is just a coin with aliases and messages.  Not that big of a deal.  But..... it aspires high and lots of developers are working on lots of projects to make NXT have any and every service that any other coin has ever made but all put into NXT.  On top of that, they are working on lots of projects that haven't ever been done.  The problem or blessing is that all these projects are being done by different people.  Ethereum and Maidsafe each have a central team organizing everything.  NXT just has a lot of people working here and there.  If they pull it together, it will be awesome.  I think summer of 2014 will be the real tipping point where many services have been thoroughly tested and are live.  At that point, I think NXT's price will explode.  But if NXT can't coordinate and get these together, it will crash.  People will only be patient for so long.  If NXT has the killer apps by summer and Ethereum is still just going to conferences, it bodes poorly for Ethereum and well for NXT.  If buying NXT now and the summer is owned by NXT, the buyer will have got a great deal, but if NXT falls apart, it will have been a terrible buy. 

This is right, MaidSafe is to do such work

Very very interesting.
So if I have to sum it up looks like Ethereum, NXT and MaidSafe are the 3 (potentially) hot things one can invest in 2014 if he wants to be what bitcoin early adopters did in 2009?

Well..... no..... very few people believed in bitcoin back then.  it took years for it to gain momentum.  Nobody wanted to be a part of the action so the people that did were heavily rewarded. Maidsafe already made almost 10 million dollars in two days.  People are very aware of it and ready to invest.  So yes, investing in one of these technologies, or all three of them will get you an advantage if it makes it, but by no means will you be able to get the gains the way early people got into bitcoin did.

Not an economist so I don't really know but that is just my opinion.   

Good summary of the current situation!!

NXT's big weakness is decentralised organisation
NXT's big strength is decentralised organisation

My hunch is NXT adoption will grow slowly for a while to come, then it'll explode once people appreciate the genius of BCNext's social experiment. Without 'leaders' NXT is impossible to block legally by rival 'companies' or governments, so it's on a par with bitcoin.

MaidSafe and Etherium (and RippleLabs & eMunie) are big easy to hit legal targets, and I'd expect them to spend a lot of time and resources on legal and administrative tasks, plus defensive manoeuvres to protect their company office holders. The people working on NXT will just worry about perfecting the tech

Once people fully realise NXT is the only viable decentralised 2nd gen offering its adoption will expand rapidly, and the network effect will do its thing.

Just to be clear

MaidSafe has 14 Staff, 3 are not developers

Equity raised so far before crowd sale (which is not equity or in fact MaidSafe's it is a community raise) £2.75 million over 8 years

MaidSafe is written in c++11 from the ground up (udp -> app layer) and is not built on any other project.

It is absolutely not vapourware, download the code run a network or some of the thousands of tests or millions of lines of code. Read the papers etc. from 2006 till now etc. You may disagree with what we do or the algorithms in place, that is your choice.

The rest is your opinion and that is fine, everything new has people who believe and those who do not. It is a normal thing and I am not going to defend my belief here, you are entitled to yours though.

I would like you to show us saying it is vapourware, [citation required] 

Very well put. I also like the organic and industrious nature of what's going on with the NxT project.

I don't think there's any need to see these various technologies as being in competition with each other. They are all very different and interesting each in their own right.

Etherium is seeking to be a "Javascript" for blockchains - no mean challenge but if anyone's up to it I think Vitalik probably is.

As far as Maidsafe goes, well that appears to be born in my home town so I'm not going write that one off either. I didn't invest in the IPO simply because I only found out about it yesterday and it would have been a panic buy which I've decided to stop doing, there's just so many of them these days. But the project looks quite fascinating.

I hope all these projects are successful, they certainly deserve to be.

Really really funny,we will see what happen.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1yxxgf/the_posted_address_with_a_transfers_totaling/

oopppss.....wrong thread.
Too many tabs open.

You should invest in an innovative project that is written using C++.

The best programmers work as close to the hardware.
C++ will give a unparalleled control of the machine. java is not an appropriate development platform for professional applications and it's recommended as a second language because it is less powerful than C++ and slower. An altcoin written from scratch, using the C++ programming language, will look more serious and professional and it appears a little less "scammy".

Bitcoin and Ripple are written in c++.

Nxt Java. MaidSafe and Ethereum...?

First of all, why would you want "Unparalleled control of the machine" for a machine-independent blockchain application ? I'd have thought portability would be more important.

As for "The best programmers.." bit, I think that might be a matter of opinion given what the creator of Linux says about it...


:).... you pays your money, you takes you choice  ;)

Linus Torvalds likes C. He just prefers C over C++.

C/C++ is a low-level language and it's the best language to use maximum performance.

It's very difficult to learn C/C++ by yourself and be a good programmer by reading only tutorials without getting an education. Java is much easier but it's not a low-level language. C++ is definitely not a language for beginners, by using this language that shows you are professional and serious with your project.

Are you a professional ?

You don't sound like one coming out with nonsense generalisations like that.

I graduated with a diploma in computer engineering.

I am not saying java is bad. Java is good for quick web development and much better than Visual Basic :)

C++ is much more powerful, faster and efficient but it's not very handy for quick development.

All I'm saying is that your on shaky ground making an appraisal of an entire technology form the language its written in. It's one part of a big picture and the language needs to fit appropriately in that picture.

The only reason anybody's interested in performance these days is if there's a performance priority - like in games or realtime signal processing. Nowadays, productivity, portability and accessibility are usually higher design priorities which puts Java well above C++ as far as meeting those criteria for internet hosted applications goes.

Take NXT for example. It's APIs use industry standard internet protocols such as http and JSON. Java is a perfect choice because it runs on just about every OS, browser and conceivable host where those protocols form the primary access medium for that blockchain's clients. Performance isn't a problem.

On the other hand, something like Etherium will probably have a higher performance priority because it's got to interpret a load of psudo code so I can see C++ being more appropriate there.

None of these things have anything to do with 'professional tools'. It's the right tool for the right job.
 

So this somehow drifted to Java VS C++ thread? :)

Well it seems like more a Technical and Development Discussion thread than the standard alt currency thread now :)

At least it's clear now they are complimentary and not competitors, which is great I think.