PoS does not intrinsically need inflation. Nxt is a PoS coin that has no inflation. There's no block reward, just fees, so the number of coins is constant.

That's true while the block reward dominates. As the block reward reduces, and transaction volume increases, transaction fees will come to dominate in Bitcoin. The cost of security will be equal to the sum of fees, and the community will get greater or lesser security by paying higher or lower fees.

This is why I care about Proof of Stake. It seems to me that either Bitcoin fees will end up very high, to pay the miners for the work they do securing the network; or else the fees will end up comparatively low, and the network will be insecure. If PoS works (a big "if", I concede), then it's inherently more efficient and will require lower fees for the same security, and that could lead users to shift over to it in the long run. (Much as lower fees is often cited as a reason for merchants to prefer Bitcoin over credit cards.)

That's one way to forge, but there are others. Specifically, you can lease your forging power to a pool, then it will forge on your behalf and you don't need to keep your wallet open.

You can get the cold wallet to display its addresses. Type those addresses into a block-chain explorer via a browser on a machine that isn't compromised. Probably a random cyber-cafe machine would do. This is more practical if you are willing to reuse the same address, so you only have one to check.

Another reason is that there are legitimate reasons to reuse addresses. For example, I have an address in my signature on this forum. That's only practical if I have an address that is stable and reusable. I don't much care about privacy for that address. If anything, I think it might be useful to have an address I am publicly associated with. (I keep it in a separate wallet so it's less likely to get confounded with addresses I do care about). You'll notice I made it begin with the first few letters of my name; that's how lacking in anonymity it is.

Note that the security issue only arises for reusing addresses that have been spent from. You can send coins to the same address any number of times without revealing its public key. Also note that, provided you don't have a bug in your wallet software, the loss of security from reusing an address that has been spent from is academic.

The source code for core Nxt is at https://bitbucket.org/JeanLucPicard/nxt/src. (That may not include all the services that run on top of Nxt.)

Nxt doesn't require you have to your wallet open to forge.

Again, this doesn't apply to Nxt because in Nxt minting with coins does not preclude them being available for other uses.

People who don't want to be online 24/7 can lease to those that do. So a high proportion of coins should be online at any given time. (It's not like that now, partly because leased forging is new, and partly because I think some whales are keeping out of it to let other people gain forging revenue.)

If you have sufficient coins that leasing pays for itself, it's the rational thing to do, with no downsides, so most people will do it. (Except the ones that have enough to justify running their own node.)

It's something we need to be vigilant about, in the same way the Bitcoin community needs to be vigilant about mining pools becoming too powerful. However, because Nxt forging doesn't have the same economies of scale as Bitcoin mining, there is less pressure towards centralisation.

Because trusting a forging pool is no worse than trusting a mining pool (except you have a choice about which pool you trust, in Nxt.)

They can only mint blocks when the algorithm picks them as the current forger. Minting blocks when you aren't current is pointless.

Initial distribution is orthogonal to PoS. It's a problem for Nxt, partly because it's so new. It improves over time.

I don't understand why you think there is a connection between mining revenue per block and the number of blocks to wait before considering they are confirmed.

It's similar to the situation with Bitcoin hashing pools. A few hashing pools together control over 51% of the hashing power, so that becomes a vulnerability for Bitcoin. The difference is that it's easier to set up a forging pool than a hashing pool, so hopefully we will have more of them, and the power will be less centralised. But yes, leased forging makes it feasible to gain a large fraction of forging power for little financial outlay, and that's something the community needs to be vigilant about (much as how the Bitcoin needs to be vigilant about hashing pools).

(Nxt has the additional danger that forging power is effectively moved around by transactions, and the node that forges a block gets to choose which transactions they include, so they could reject transactions that transfer forging power away from themselves. That is why forging leases are temporary, so they will eventually expire even if no transactions get processed. I'm not sure that's enough. In this regard a hashing pool is more responsive, because nothing can stop an individual hasher from withdrawing from a rogue pool immediately.)

I don't think most of DaT's comments apply to Nxt, because it's such a different algorithm not based on coin-days destroyed. For example, it doesn't use checkpoints so all the discussion of those is irrelevant. Unfortunately I don't understand Nxt's algorithm too well myself; and even if I did, they plan to change it to something called "transparent forging" in a few months, and the details of that are being kept secret for fear of clones.

But that near-constant rate renders your topic moot. It means the hardware used for mining doesn't affect scarcity. It only affects distribution.

Is there any interest in having a way for nodes to broadcast alerts about the double-spends they detect? Is there a concern doing so could be exploited for denial of service?

I don't believe that is true for Nxt. Especially with leased forging. ("Forging" is what Nxt calls mining.) Leased forging delegates the forging power of one node to another, leave the source address unable to forge. However, the source address still owns the coins and they can still be spent - spending them reduces the effective forging power of the other node. There's a transaction that sets this up, and then the network remembers the lease and takes it into account when calculating forging powers.

Once leased, the source address no longer needs to be online. Your stake isn't locked capital. You can still spend it and be economically active. You can keep your stake in cold storage and still use it for forging.

Bitcoin wins that comparison only because it doesn't have a significant number of ATMs. Eventually Bitcoin ATMs will be as common as fiat ones, and then we'll have that cost in addition to the costs of mining.

Whatever the answer is today, it's likely to be different in a few months. The rate depends on (a) the number of transactions; (b) the average fee for each transaction; (c) the fraction of NXT used for forging. We can expect all three change over that timescale. Hopefully the number of transactions will increase as Nxt gets used. The average fee may increase from new kinds of transactions, but there is also a community desire to see the base fee reduced. The fraction of NXT used for forging may increase because leasing pools make forging easier, or it may decrease as the stake of whales gets gradually distributed to smaller holders who don't bother to forge.

Currently the return is insignificant. I have leased around 20k to a pool for a couple of weeks, and have apparently earned 0.5 NXT. So that's about 0.007%/year. It's probably not going to be enough to pay the transaction fees leasing involves. It's wiped out by changes in the NXT:BTC exchange rate.

Yes please. I would like to receive some of your silver asset. My Nxt address should be below.

In the client, Settings/Use Reed Solomon Format. Also, when you click on your account number, the second option is Copy Account RS.

You can create an account on an offline computer, send some coins to it, then create a transaction signed on the offline computer, move that transaction to an online computer, and broadcast it. That gets your account associated with a public key without the private key ever being exposed an online computer. I say "you can" but I don't know if the wallet software to do this exists yet; if it doesn't it could (and should!) be written. It'd work pretty much the same as Armory, except with the need to create that initial (offline) transaction.

True. On the other hand, the issues around key length and exposing public keys are well-known. If Nxt has problems, it probably isn't there.

It is necessary if there's to be progress and innovation in the space of core crypto-currency protocols. Bitcoin itself innovates slowly, if at all, because its devs are rightly very conservative. I think coins that are very different to Bitcoin, like Nxt, are more worthy of our time than the clones, even if we're more confident the clones are technically secure.

I don't think this got replied to. As I understand it, that's not what an account is in Nxt. In Nxt an account is only the first 64 bits of the hash. That's why it's relatively weak. It's also why it can be expressed in 21 digits, where Bitcoin needs 34 alphnumeric characters. So account collisions are much more likely in Nxt. When you first send from a Nxt account, your public key is registered to the account, and that brings the security back up to 256 bits.

I've been learning about Nxt recently. That protocol always exposes public keys (and reuse addresses). They just didn't think it was worth worrying about at all.