Not really. The rich don't get richer in Nxt. If you own 10% of the coins and someone else owns 0.1%, after both forging for six months you will own 10% and they will own 0.1%. It makes no difference. You only lose if you don't bother to forge at all. Now we have leased forging, there's no reason not to forge.

Lack of hardware costs mean a lower barrier to entry. In both systems you need money to get started. In Bitcoin you spend that money on hardware. In Nxt you spend it on the currency itself. (Or, get a job and asked to be paid in NXT, and raise a stake that way.)

Nxt doesn't use centralised checkpoints. It solve the history attack by not allowing block-chain reorganisations to reach back more than 720 blocks. This is a decentralised solution.

It seems to work. It is the coin with the third biggest market capitalisation so there is plenty of incentive to attack it, yet there has been no successful History attack.

Lack of a decent whitepaper is one of Nxt's biggest PR problems, in my view. There is so much ignorance about how it works, and people confusing it with other PoS schemes and assuming it has features or weaknesses that don't apply. (I suffer from this myself; I don't know it nearly so well as I do Bitcoin.)

However, the current algorithm is published in source-code form. It's not secret. And there is a project to produce a new whitepaper.

If nodes got paid a flat amount, people would create millions of nodes, each forging with a single satoshi.

Airdropping the initial distribution without investors is possible for a new coin, eg with a "spin-off" that bases the initial distribution on Bitcoin balances at some chosen block. That's the only realistic way a Bitcoin replacement can happen.

But the cost of mining is also very low. As long as the interest pays for the mining costs, it's good.

People have got used to PoW mining as a get-rich-quick scheme. People mine Bitcoin who have no real interest in the currency. They sell their block-reward coins for fiat. PoS isn't like that. As a get-rich-quick scheme, it is indeed shit. The purpose of mining is not to make money, but to help secure the money you've made. (Although since some interest is paid, you might as well have it as not.)

Let's not forget that some coins don't have mining in the Bitcoin sense. For example, Nxt has no block reward, no inflation, no way to create new coins. Processing transactions only brings in transaction fees, and they are likely to be low in the early stages. What's more, being a proof-of-stake currency, you get the transaction fees in proportion to the coins you stake, and you are starting off with none. So you are kind of screwed on that account.

The main way you would acquire the new Nxt/Bitcoin spin-off coins is by buying from someone selling their Bitcoin claim. Ironically, the more people like your alt-coin, the higher the price, the harder to acquire it cheap, and the less money you make. Even their indifference, not bothering to sell, makes it harder to acquire cheap coins.

According to http://www.mynxt.info/forging_calculator.php, you'd expect to forge one block every 4 months with that amount.

It doesn't depend on the amount of time it's held, once its been held for 1440 blocks. There are no "coin days destroyed" in Nxt.

No.

Excellent, thanks. Apparently the break-even point for leasing is around 6,000. That's based on a lease time of 32767 blocks and a block time of 90 seconds.

(I still don't really get how the block time can be 90 seconds when it was supposed to be 60 seconds, but apparently it is.) It might be useful if that page could accept lease times in number of blocks directly, instead of in hours, so that it matched what we type when we set up a lease.

Some people like that when they buy online with a credit card, and the merchant doesn't deliver, they can ask for their money back from the credit card company. Those people would like a similar service if they pay with Bitcoin. I expect there will be Bitcoin cards that provide it. Someone will have to pay for the implied costs and overheads. Similarly people like knowing that they can store their money in a bank, and be sure of getting it back even if the bank goes bust. Those kinds of guarantees cost money.

What I hope is that these services will be available, but they'll be optional, and it will be the consumers choice whether to use them and pay the fees.

It's also worth noting that Bitcoin fees are currently low because miners currently get paid by the block reward. As the block reward halves, the miners will get less revenue from that source. They may want to increase the transaction fees to compensate. I don't think anyone really knows what is going to happen to fees over the next 5 years.

I think he was human, but that he digitised his personality and then uploaded it. Now it's secretly hidden in the block-chain, distributed through-out the world, his thoughts piggy-backing on transactions. Far from being dead, he's made himself immortal.

Thanks for the correction.

As time goes by I'd expect more and more coins to be held by complex scripts. I know Armory is working on n-of-m scripts, so they'll become more accessible, and for businesses where two or more signatures are needed to spend funds they'd be a natural fit. So you might be able to get away with excluding them today, but not in 2 or 5 years, without it become political. If you have a claim window of 5 years, or unlimited, then any script type could become common.

Certainly people have proposed spin-offs that exclude Satoshi's coins, and/or all coins that haven't been moved recently. And alt-coin communities often point to Satoshi's holdings as showing that Bitcoin's distribution is poor. So people care. Whether it's affected the market is impossible to say; perhaps the current price would be double if those coins had been provably destroyed. In any case, destroying them within Bitcoin would be near-impossible politically, so it's kinda pointless to discuss it.

I like the idea of the time limit for claims, partly because it has the effect of excluding Satoshi's coins, and those of other inactive people, without having to impose an arbitrary historic cut-off date. If we excluded BTC untouched since 2012, for example, some people would lose out and there'd be nothing they could do about it. Where-as if we require claims to be made before 2016, then Satoshi himself can make his claim if he should awaken from his slumber. It's probably better for the new coin if its users are at least a little bit active.

I don't know. Perhaps because this is the Bitcoin forum, not the Nxt forum. The Nxt forum is public: https://nxtforum.org/general-discussion/some-thoughts-on-arguments-of-pow-guys/.

As I understand it, the Nxt code is modular. The core, including the PoS stuff, will be open-source, but some of the services built on top will not be. The Nxt devs believe a lot of their value is in the services - things like the Asset Exchange. So the clone won't include all of Nxt.

Also, the Bitcoin distribution isn't all that fantastic. It has its whales. And the whole spin-off idea is unproven. The new clone will be neither Nxt not Bitcoin. Merchants who accept Bitcoin won't automatically accept the clone. There probably will be more than one clone, diluting attention. The idea that the clone will instantly have the same market capitalisation as Bitcoin is false. Network effects will encourage people to stick with Bitcoin and/or Nxt, because they will follow the market cap. The reasons that cause alt-coins to struggle, even when they are technically better than Bitcoin, will apply to the new clone.

That's more or less what he said: that he wants public review of the ideas planned for Nxt. As seems sensible.

He says he's concerned about clones. Also, some of this stuff depends on a robust ecosystem, which isn't in place yet, but hopefully will grow over the next few months.

(I'm not saying I agree with this approach, but I can see the sense of it, and there's no doubt the Nxt developers have delivered in other areas.)

You'd also have to decide whether to show the buy rate or the sell rate. And the fiat value of BTC varies between exchanges.

Probably easiest to let the user enter their own value. Then you have the risk that they let their value get out of date.

For tax purposes we're supposed to record the exchange rate that applied for each transaction, so ideally historical data would be stored somewhere.

It'll be 3% of what it is now. We can hope that 1 BTC doubles in real-world value at least every 4 years to compensate, and it might for a while, but that rate of increase can't continue forever. I am thinking in longer timescales than 20 years here.

Does your Signature Validation check that the account is valid? I ask because I had a "Copy Address" problem, and didn't realise because the clipboard already held a Nxt address, and I got through the registration with an address that probably wouldn't work. Eventually I noticed Qora addresses are supposed to begin with Q, and didn't, so I've fixed it now, but it would have been nice if Signature Validation had warned me.

You might want to edit the first post to be clear that signatures can contain other stuff. I wasn't sure if I'd have to stop including my Bitcoin address to include Qora.

Knowing the local fiat value of a transaction would help security. It would make mistakes more obvious.

For example, when I first used Armory as a complete Bitcoin newcomer, it offered to tip the developers with a default amount of 1 BTC. At the time I had little idea how much that was worth, and I could easily have accepted the default. If they had displayed "1 BTC ($853)" then I'd be less likely to send more than I could afford.

Elsewhere there was talk of Armory changing its display units from Bitcoins to milli-Bitcoins. A developer said one reason this wasn't a trivial change is that they wanted to be sure no-one ever sent 1000 times as many coins as they intended to, by mistake. Displaying a fiat value alongside the Bitcoin one would make it clearer whether you were sending 0.5 BTC or 0.0005 BTC. People know how much dollars are worth.

I'm less of a newbie today, but I still get confused counting the decimal places in fees. 0.0001 BTC or 0.001 or 0.00001 BTC? What's that in real money?

(This comes under the heading of "security" because user mistakes are part of the threat, and sometimes a bigger, more omnipresent danger than malicious attackers.)

So, you're encouraging people to split their stakes between many addresses? Does that help?

So coins are not fungible? A coin with 10 stake-days associated with it is worth more than a coin with only 1 stake-day?

That isn't enough to prove the address is running a full nodes, is it? A node could keep track of the blockchain, but not relay any transactions, so it wouldn't be benefiting the network (and would have lower bandwidth costs).

Although there's no improvement in security in the long run. When someone designs an improved ASIC, the network becomes vulnerable to the danger that an attacker will deploy the new technology first. As the new ASIC is adopted by miners, we return to the status quo. The miners need to keep upgrading, just to stay in the same place both with regard to their revenues, and with regard to network security. As long as technology keeps improving, miners will need to pay for new hardware, and the community will have to pay for that hardware, as well as their electricity costs, either through block-reward inflation or through fees.