How is that relevant to whether it is a scam? Mineable coins can equally be scams, because they massively favour early adopters.

No, they can't. The number of NXT coins is fixed. A developer who tried to change that would not have their software accepted by stakeholders.

(I'm assuming you aren't talking about the Monetary System feature of Nxt, since that's not restricted to developers. And because I doubt your knowledge of Nxt extends to the MS.)

It has to start somewhere. Nxt started with 72 founders. That's enough people that it doesn't matter if some of them are duds, and few enough to minimise bystander apathy. The problem with coins that launch with thousands of users is that most of those users will sit idle waiting for someone else to make their coins worth something.

Anyway, that's ancient history. It's clear that the Nxt developers have put in a vast amount of work since it was launched; way more than makes sense if it was founded as a scam. And the market price of NXT has been low for long enough that anyone could afford to buy some, so that initial distribution has long been irrelevant. I don't think there's any convincing argument that Nxt is a scam now.

That seems unlikely to me. Why publish the database in that case? Once all the details are out in public, there's not much potential for blackmail any more, or to sell it to a blackmailer. (And likewise, anyone who paid after the database was published, was trying to lock the stable door after the horse had bolted.) Most likely the blackmailers are not the hackers, but saw an opportunity to exploit gullible people.

"Block target time" is pretty meaningless. Nxt may target 1 minute, but it doesn't achieve it. Why not show the measured average block time instead? For Nxt this is about 1.8 minutes, or 104 seconds per block. For 10 confirmations you can expect to wait 18 minutes on average.

(Block 493582 was just before midnight on the 9th August, and block 499047 was just before midnight on the 16th, so 5866 blocks that week or 781 blocks a day over that period. I think that's pretty typical.)

(The reason the block-time is longer than was hoped is known. It's a coding issue that the devs apparently don't want to fix for now, because of transparent forging or whatever. If ever they do fix it, update the table then.)

(Sometimes the Nxt block time is vastly longer. I don't know how you'd capture that variance in the chart, but it's may be a concern if you are trying to base a business on Nxt.)

Who says that? The first quote in this chain says Nxt is getting it, not that it already has it. Currently Nxt is far less anonymous than Bitcoin, because Nxt is based around reusing accounts. Adding shuffling will help, but it's not a panacea. Privacy will be compromised if you continue reusing accounts, and even if you don't it'll be subject to statistic analysis.

They could start a new decentralised currency. People would trust it because it is decentralised and the government couldn't abuse it, any more than they could abuse Bitcoin. The reason it needs to be a new currency is that the government can't afford to buy BTC, or any other currency for that matter.

The government would declare that they'd accept it for paying taxes, and that it was legal tender for payment of court-ordered debts, and that would give people incentive to use it. They might also order bank's holdings currently denominated in euro to be converted to the new currency. Basically all the stuff they'd do if they left the Euro and switched to drachma. Bitcoin's slow growth is a bad analogy because Bitcoin was never sponsored by a government in this way.

Bitcoin won't. However, if Greece exits the Euro, they will need to adopt a new currency, and in order for that to work people have to trust the government won't abuse it. So there could be a reason to adopt a trust-free crypto-currency. They can't use an existing currency like Bitcoin because they don't have anything to buy it with. They could start a new crypto-currency.

As I am a fan of Nxt I will suggest that the best way to do that is by creating one within the Nxt monetary system. That could get them up and running very quickly, without having to find people to mine it. 

Very little of the money loaned to Greece in the last 5 years has been used to help the Greek economy or the Greek people. Most of it was used to pay off earlier loans. In effect, the money moved from the public banks to private (non-Greek) banks. That's why the Greek GNP has remained in decline.

No. The invalid chain would never have been accepted by up to date full nodes, regardless of how long it got, because it was invalid.

It sounds like they had code to do that, but disabled it because of a bug, and never got around to re-enabling it.

eBay does add value in the form of a moderation service. Generally it favours the buyer, so you can buy with some confidence that you will get what you paid for, or your money back. That's important. Even the Silk Road was moderated, I gather (I never used it myself). The Nxt marketplace has nothing like that. It doesn't even have a formal reputation system. I'm not even sure if phased transactions help with third-party escrow. So it's far from a complete marketplace solution.

Won't most transactions have been propagated onto both sides of the fork? If that happens, the same transaction would get confirmed on both forks and it wouldn't matter to it which fork won. A double-spend attempt could mess this up, but if the sender is honest, the fork shouldn't matter.

In Nxt this can be done by leasing one account's stake to another account. "Leasing" means the second account is forging as if it owned the first account's stake, but can't spend those coins or do anything else with them other than sign new blocks. The second account has to be online to make and sign new blocks, but that's safe because its own spendable balance is zero. The first account has the balance, but can be offline. The first account needs to create a transaction to tell the block-chain that it is leasing its balance, but that transaction can be created and signed offline and then the signed bytes transferred to an online node to be broadcast, so the first account's passphrase is never entered into a connected computer. It's always air-gapped.

Basically, this is a solved problem. It's the sort of thing you can do in a crypto-currency that has persistent accounts and a variety of transaction types.

Probably later this year. I think it's at least 2 updates away, though.

Nxt recommends 10 blocks for normal confirmation, 720 to be sure. (There's a rolling check point at 720.)

Generally Nxt has 40-50% forging, so 10% stake means 4-5% of supply.

I don't know what you're talking about here. Nxt makes newly moved coins wait 1440 blocks before their weight is counted, but after that their weight counts in every block. I don't know what you mean by "age [that] accumulates equally to all miners". The chance of forging a block does not depend on how long it is since the previous block you forged. It depends on what fraction of the forging coins you have.

What is your criteria for a successful attack?

Sure they are. Because they know they'll make more money in the long run if the average fee increases.

Mining pools will help this. Without pools, miners will know that if they don't accept a given fee, some other miner will, so they lack the power to extort users. However, if a consortium of pools amounting to 51% of the hash-power agrees on a minimum fee, then (a) the other miners are likely to go along with that consensus, because they know they benefit in the long run; and (b) those that don't will find their blocks orphaned as the 51% reject blocks containing transactions that have too low fees. So the users will have no choice but to pay the minimum fee if they want to use the network at all. The only reason this hasn't happened already is that the block-reward is so high.

If they don't, Bitcoin is doomed, because eventually the block-reward will halve to zero and fees will be all that miners get. Some of the slack may be taken up by increased volume of transactions: which is an argument for increasing the block size limit, so that miners can make more money from the extra transactions.

Eventually the only options are to pay for transaction validation is to increase the fees, or increase the block-size. It won't be paid for by inflation forever.

A larger block size limit does not preclude miners from rejecting transactions with too low a fee.

Miners are supposed to compete with each other, but that doesn't work well when mining pools are so dominant. Currently they have no real incentive to gouge on fees, but that will change as the block-reward halves and fees become more important. High fees are in all miners interests, so it makes some sense that they will collude on that. We will probably get some small fraction, say 5% of miners who accept low fees, which means a user paying a low fee will have to wait on average 20 times as long for their transaction to be confirmed.

Whatever. The point is that market forces will play out regardless of the block size limit.

Nxt is open source. However, development happens privately and the source for a version is not published until that version is complete and released, so the process isn't completely open, only the result is.

The main repository is at https://bitbucket.org/JeanLucPicard/nxt/commits. If you download and install the Nxt reference software, its source is included in ...\Nxt\src\java\nxt. You can inspect it, and then compile it, yourself before running if you wish.

The transaction fees come from the existing supply of coins. Specifically, they are paid by the account that creates the transaction. No new coins are created to pay miners.

None, yet, so far as I know. The basic idea is obvious and Etherium is based on it. Nxt is due to have 3 different implementations, one of which is AT itself. Burst will get it. AT is open source, so any coin that wants it can have it. There's a good chance Qora will be first, but it won't be the only one.

I'm dubious, partly because past experience suggests that features are not what raises the price, and partly because the AT won't be a unique feature anyway.

Nxt wants to be all things for all people. It has a lot of features aimed at business, including a free marketplace and an asset exchange. Those things have been live for months and there are businesses using them. The Monetary System isn't live yet. It too is partially aimed at businesses. You can use it for crowd-sourcing capital and for gift-token type things.

Bitshares looks like smoke and mirrors to me, but the part that seems most interesting is its willingness to engage with regulators. I think eventually 2.0 crypto-currencies will need provision to conform to money laundering laws, eg with assets that can only be bought by accounts with a certified real-world identity.