This is really scary.  There is apparently a continuous, ongoing attack against NXT looking for weak passwords.  There is no way to know how many hackers are doing this or how much computer horsepower is being directed towards this because the attack can be run offline against a copy of the blockchain.  Every day we are signing up 100 users on average and we are hoping to get many, many more.  NEW USERS ARE NOT BEING TOLD OFTEN ENOUGH OR STRONGLY ENOUGH ABOUT THE IMPORTACE OF A LOOOONG RANDOM PASSWORD.  Every day new users are coming in and using a short password and immediately lose their NXT just like dzarmush did.  

They do not put a happy smile after their experience.

They do not put a happy smile after their experience.  

They do not put a happy smile after their experience.  

I truly believe that one of the biggest threats to NXT is word of mouth about poor security.  "Yeah, I tried to buy some NXT, it was stolen in 24 hours, better steer clear of that coin..."

That kind of talk - and the poor security hygiene that precipitate it - needs to be nipped in the bud NOW.  We only get a fresh reputation once - and people are losing NXT at an alarming rate, at least it seems that way to me.

Some day when I am all caught up (ha ha ha) I want to start a Wiki page listing every known past instance of lost NXT and have new users record their experiences on what happened to them in some kind of table.  This is data we need to be accumulating.

My understanding of NXT is far from perfect so somebody correct me if I'm wrong but here goes.  

The peer tab only shows the subset of nodes that are in your "peer group", not all that are connected.  This list will grow the longer you stay on with your client and are eventually "discovered" by other nodes, one guy got up to 3000+ I think before his client crashed.  The client is continually being updated to have fewer bugs/memory leaks/etc  and is running longer and longer with each version number.  NXT is only a couple of months old, so creaky code is a given at this point but is getting better and better.  

Security is a hot issue and there will be upgrades in the user security interface as new clients are introduced (at least, I sure hope so) - keep an eye out on Solaris, our best hope for a new user friendly client.

Choosing who prints the next block based on transaction quantity would not be a Proof of Stake system as NXT currently is, it would be a Proof of Transaction Quantity system.  Proof of Stake is the method used to assign trust levels here, presumably people who own more NXT have a bigger stake in seeing the system run smoothly that those who own less NXT.

If there ever was a NXT wallet, it would be an illusion for general public users.  NXT is a brainwallet, all a user's NXT is stored on the encrypted blockchain itself and not in a separate file that can be taken offline and stored in a bank safe deposit box.  This is why long 40+ random passwords are so important - with NXT your holdings are available to you anywhere at any time, but they can be attacked continuously by hackers as well.  There is no hiding your NXT away from others offline, it is always in the cloud.

Welcome to NXT - new users like you are the only hope we have at success.  Head on over to https://nextcoin.org/ to dig deeper into NXT!

Swag that is big and bulky is going to be very difficult to manage if we have no exhibitor table to use as a base.  Basically I intend to walk around two days shaking hands so any swag to give out would need to be small and light so I could lug it.  Engraving on objects is neat and I appreciate the effort but I also think it is expensive and I hate to see that go to waste when people just chuck it into a back drawer when they get home.  To me the key items are brochures and business cards - cheap, lights, full of information.

Texas Bitcoin Conference - Austin Strategy Discussion

Here's the numbers for upcoming expenses on the TBC:

We are down to 1NXT = $0.06.  My expenses (jet, car, hotel) are $600 = 10K NXT.  I will cover these travel expenses personally so I am effectively offering the equivalent of a 10K NXT bounty for TBC that I am paying myself.

If anybody wants to be my wingman, PM me.  As I mentioned before, I am booked at America's Best Value Inn at Buda, TX ( http://www.abvibudatx.com/ ) on Tues (March 4) and Wed (March 5) nights.  I have a car reserved and we can carpool.  I'll arrive at the airport at 3:55 PM local time on Tues (March 4).  My flight out is Thurs (March 6) night at 7:10 PM.  I am going for BBQ Tues night at Taylor, TX, and I would love to meet Austin area NXTers.  Especially Russian ones.

Apparently I am tentatively a speaker, and they get free entrance tickets.  Let's hope I stay a speaker, otherwise I may ask for reimbursement on that...tickets are expensive.

Entrance tickets of Texas are $275 each thru Jan 31, $325 each thru Feb, and $350 at the door.   If we send two people besides me, their entrance tickets alone will be $700 = 12K NXT.  

They have changed what they are offering for exhibit tables.  They have dropped the 2X2 floor slot.  Now you get a full 7 foot table all to yourself for $4000, or half a table shared with another exhibitor for $2500.  Either one gets you two entrance tickets plus 20% off on up to 5 more.  

The half-table with two passes is $2500 = 42,000 NXT, so the half-table is effectively 30K NXT more than the two passes alone.  So, questions to ask: are there two more people coming besides me, and if so, is it worth 30K NXT more to get a (half) table for us to stand behind for two days?

So at the moment I am going to TBC and will not cost the NXT community anything.  I will do my best.  I want lots and lots of swag / brochures to hand out, but I'll wait to see what gets done for Berlin and leverage off that for a starting point.

What else happens at TBC is up to the NXT community.  The basic numbers are given above.  You guys talk (if you want) about what else / who else you want to go to TBC, how much it will cost in NXT, and whether that will be worth it to the community.  I'm on the launch pad for TBC gratis, and have had my say.

Of course I'll volunteer as treasurer.  I'm from Tennessee, the Volunteer State!

Amen, brother, preach on!  (That's what they used to yell in the little Tennessee church I attended as a boy).

I use World First to transfer money to and from my UK account for poker and have been very happy with them.

http://us.worldfirst.com/

It's ridiculously difficult and expensive to do this thru a US bank.  WF worked with me to get their New York Citibank account listed on my list of "approved" bank accounts I can send money to online from one of my personal bank accounts (BB&T, Wells Fargo).  

JUST RECEIVED FROM PAUL SNOW, ORGANIZER, TEXAS BITCOIN CONFERENCE:

Ricky,

We are being buried under content, which is a good thing for a conference!  We will be sending out formal confirmations to all speakers by Friday.  I can tentatively say we will have you as a speaker.  If I have to reverse that decision, I can give you a discount on the conference ticket at the $250 level.

I hope that helps!

-Paul

Texas Bitcoin Conference Strategy Discussion

Hey everybody, I want to start talking about the Texas Bitcoin Conference in Austin on March 5-6.  

http://texasbitcoinconference.com

We made some initial contacts in Miami about this.  I have written both the official request-to-be-a-speaker email address and also Paul Snow, the conference director, and have heard nothing back at all about getting to be a speaker to introduce NXT.  I think I may be getting deliberately ignored.  I sent another email this morning asking for a thumbs up / thumbs down statement from them about doing a talk for NXT, I'll let you know what I hear - or don't.

Whether or not they let me stand up and talk, I am going.  My jet ticket has been bought and I have reserved a car and hotel room about 5 miles from the site.  Now the question is, what do I do when I get there?

Do you want me to just walk around trying to hand out stuff or do you want me to sit behind a table that says NXT?

It's $2500 for a 2X2 foot square floor space (roughly a half-square meter, for an unmanned display) and $4000 for a seven foot long (two meter) skirted table with two chairs in the exhibit area.  

http://texasbitcoinconference.com/images/docs/Exhibitor.pdf

If we get a table - then what?  I REALLY like the idea of running Salsacz'a Iceland video on endless 90 second loop if an NXT user in Austin can loan me a HDMI TV for two days.   What else can we get ready in 30 days?  2000 business cards?  2000 plastic 3D keychains?  2000 giveaway brochures?  What do they say?

If we are going to build off the great start we got in Miami to do even better in Austin, we need to start NOW !!!

Thank you for doing this.  The more I've thought about doing this from the US with my UK Barclays acocount, the more uncomfortable I feel about it.  If I processed more than $10,000 at once, I would have to refile my Foreign Bank Account Report (FBAR, Form TD F 90-22.1).  I had to file it once because I had to have more than $10K to open the Barclays account, and pulled most of that back once it was opened so I wouldn't have to file it annually.

I just want to play poker for small stakes and be left alone, not juggle stuff all year to keep from being suspected of being a money launderer.

Doge is where old GPUs go to die when they are no longer profitable for mining Bitcoin.  Really, Doge is totally unsustainable, it is an attempt to reset the clock to a more profitable period on the Bitcoin growth curve, plus some smart advertising.

Hashtab is indeed an easy downloadable solution but not all that obvious how to use it once you've got it.

I recommend checking SHA-256 of a file you've downloaded by uploading back online here:

http://hash.online-convert.com/sha256-generator

This is a REALLY GOOD original original post "(teach me") and we should consolidate and repeat these answers over and over and over at every client download site for every new NXT user.  

People do not realize how desperate the world financial situation is.   Where do you think A TRILLION DOLLARS  comes from EVERY YEAR NOW to finance the American government annual deficit?  It used to come from China.  No more, they're out of cash.  Since 2009, if came from the Fed.  No more, they're out of cash.  Um, NOW WHAT?  

If you are an American, IT'S GONNA COME FROM YOU.  And since Washington can't say the words "New Taxes"...

http://money.cnn.com/2014/01/28/retirement/savings-retirement-myra/

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/30/your-money/obama-orders-creation-of-myRA-accounts.html?_r=0

..as in "Give us your money NOW and don't come back for it for 20/30/40 years..."

Since the crash in 2007 it's all been a game of musical chairs, and the music has been getting slower and slower.  

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_chairs

It's about to stop.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/10605957/World-risks-deflationary-shock-as-BRICS-puncture-credit-bubbles.html

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/ambroseevans-pritchard/100026436/trying-to-deleverage-china-without-blowing-up-the-system/

You've got nothing wrong.  That is all the incentive they need.  Anytime money is created, the people that have it at its creation face a challenge to get it into the hands of many people and convert it from "money" into "an economy".   They do it right, their remaining retained holdings rise in value.  There is no perfect way to do this.  NXT is just one of many, many attempts to gt it right, and is doing distributions at exchanges and with bounties.  Every cryptocoin and every national fiat currency faces this challenge.  Central banks do it with fractional reserve banking (and the current debt levels means they are not doing it well).   NXT did it with a six-week open enrollment period where anybody could kick in up to 1 BTC to obtain a proportional share of the one-time NXT created.   PoW coins do it with "mining".  

Interesting experiments to watch, eh?

The banks in both the UK and the US are implementing creeping de-facto currency controls, they are in big trouble with liquidity now that the Fed is tapering off QE.


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-25861717

http://www.forbes.com/sites/halahtouryalai/2013/10/17/no-jpm-isnt-banning-international-wire-transfers-no-limits-on-withdrawals-either/

What's even scarier is there is increasing talk by the IMF and national central banks of a one-time 25% wealth tax to try and rebalance the currently desperate debt ratios faced by banks:

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-01-27/bundesbanks-stunner-broke-eurozone-nations-first-bail-your-rich-citizens

This is I think the real reason cryptocurrencies like NXT will take off in the next 24 months.

I was hoping somebody else would step up to the plate on this one, but since they haven't. here's my two cents, er, shillings worth.  I have a UK Barclays bank account I use to fund my online poker adventures.  It's a totally legal one in my own name, no funny business; I've filed the correct paperwork on it with the IRS and Department of the Treasury here in the US and even voluntarily gave up the number for it during my last security clearance interview.  I go thru a proxy and look like I'm in London since the online poker sites block me otherwise coming from an American IP address block.  All of these gyrations are due to the 2006 UIEGA anti-online-poker act that was passed here in America, land of the free; but I digress...

Bottom line, I've got the UK bank account but I have no desire to sell any of the NXT I've accumulated.  However, I understand the importance of getting NXT hooked up to Bittylicious so I'm willing to try and help.  If I've got enough public trust built up here, maybe people could dump NXT they wanted to sell into one of my toy NXT accounts, Bittilocious could take it out of that account to give to a buyer, send GBP to my Barclays account, and I could send that back to the original NXT holders via Moneybookers/Skrill (I've also got accounts there, too.)

This would require me to be a trusted middleman, which I'm OK with if you are.  

If we really want to pursue this, let me know, I'll do my part to get NXT rolling in the UK.

Are you saying the shape of the NXT sign reminds you of a stop sign and has a negative connotation?  Actually the NXT symbol is a hexagon and a stop sign is an octagon, they aren't even the same shape...

I wonder if BCNext has picked the hexagonal NXT symbol he did for a reason...like bees in a hive using a hexagonal comb?  Could this be an allusion to a "hive"?

From the business insider article quoted above:

FAIELLA, 52, of Cape Coral, Florida, and SHREM, 24, of New York, New York, are each charged with one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison, and one count of operating an unlicensed money transmitting business, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison. SHREM is also charged with one count of willful failure to file a suspicious activity report, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison.

Notice that each of these charges have nothing to do with drug activity even though it was drug activity that got law enforcement focused on these two guys.  In the United States, money flow is tightly regulated.   Theoretically anybody in the US who owns a single cryptocoin of any value could be charged with the first two legal charges, and anybody that makes a transaction having a value greater than $10,000 with any cryptocoin can be hit with the third charge.  

So far cryptocoin activity in the US is pretty much "under the radar" but as it gets bigger in years to come it is going to be more and more tightly regulated.  That includes NXT, and innovations to make it truly anonymous will be seen as a threat.

+1.  Absolutely.

Probably forever.  I like it.  This place is like a noisy and boisterous pub full of interesting people, a fun place to be.

NXT can duplicate any function in much less time than Bitcoin took to create that function in the first place.  

They have the advantage of first-to-market branding and innovation.  

We should take advantage every chance we get of next-to-market reduction in effort required to achieve equivalent functionality.