Now that I saw what the Nxt's voting system is, I am disappointed. It appears that all votes are recorded in the blockchain in plaintext so that anyone can see who voted on what. https://wiki.nxtcrypto.org/wiki/Voting_System "On the bottom of the pane, the votes cast in the poll are displayed while they are still available. For each voting account the account ID is shown along with the integer range value associated with each option voted for."

Most (if not all) cryptographic voting schemes are private (no one can see my vote) and receipt-free (I can't prove that I voted on a given option), this is done to avoid coercion and vote buying. Nxt's voting system is neither so it can't be used for any serious election. Despite that, there are articles saying it could be used in shareholder's elections, corporate governance (http://cointelegraph.com/news/113414/nxt-teases-voting-system-two-phase-transactions-and-a-foundation) and even government elections (https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/nxt-decentralized-voting-system-twitter/). This is very misleading and it appears that a lot of people think that Nxt's voting system is secure when it is not.

Seems like we would need this: https://bitbucket.org/JeanLucPicard/nxt/issue/176/private-polls

Somebody ready to implement it? [directed at the Nxt community devs, not you specifically   - Daedelus]

Now that I saw what the Nxt's voting system is, I am disappointed. It appears that all votes are recorded in the blockchain in plaintext so that anyone can see who voted on what. https://wiki.nxtcrypto.org/wiki/Voting_System "On the bottom of the pane, the votes cast in the poll are displayed while they are still available. For each voting account the account ID is shown along with the integer range value associated with each option voted for."

Most (if not all) cryptographic voting schemes are private (no one can see my vote) and receipt-free (I can't prove that I voted on a given option), this is done to avoid coercion and vote buying. Nxt's voting system is neither so it can't be used for any serious election. Despite that, there are articles saying it could be used in shareholder's elections, corporate governance (http://cointelegraph.com/news/113414/nxt-teases-voting-system-two-phase-transactions-and-a-foundation) and even government elections (https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/nxt-decentralized-voting-system-twitter/). This is very misleading and it appears that a lot of people think that Nxt's voting system is secure when it is not.

Whereas I agree about the importance of anonymity in social voting, when it comes to business voting things are quite the opposite. A corporation is always an oligarchy, buying votes is the norm (it's called stake) and buying and selling influence (at the board) is how things get done.

Also let me remind you that in our republic (US of A) for the longest time the ballot was reserved to male property owners. And while the ballot was indeed anonymous - the real voting (taking place in Congress & Senate) has never been. Indeed all legislation an policy decisions to this day are passed in public (often televized) votes. And this is how most of the parliaments in the world operate.

So the idea that you must have anonymous voting for public governance is not entirely true. It only matters during the ballot, where indeed you may want to prevent explicit monetary transactions between the constituents and their Representative. Vote buying still takes place however ("I know how to bring the pork home and (unspoken) you'll all get a cut when it's here") which if not illegal is at least morally questionable

Lets not get ahead of ourselves here this is an exchange in similar fashion to BTC-E or Cryptsy that runs on a server written in PHP, MYSQL that a newbie can setup in a matter of hours it will have step by step video instructions for succesful setup.

since there will many of them setup for each coin by community spreading the risk across many many exchanges. There will be first mover advantages gaining user trust.

Marinecoin DEV
http://marinecoin.org

The NXT IPO happened during a completely different time vs. the IPOs which came after it so they're not really comparable. NXT was the first IPO coin in existence and the success of the NXT IPO for its initial investors is the main reason why IPOs since then have been so huge in the first place.

NXT was also pretty much the first 2.0 platform as well which gave it a massive head start back when there were very few other competitors around and those that did exist were still under development (eMunie anyone?). Back then, most coins were just scrypt and SHA-256 clones based on Litecoin/Bitcoin with a logo stamped on top. NXT succeeded because BCNext created an innovative product with innovative features but few people took notice of it or believed its claims when it was first announced.

Lastly, there is also jl777. He's not a core dev but instead, he develops services that exist on top of the core protocol. jl777's assets have popularized the asset exchange and in turn developed it into NXT's greatest strength. Without him, NXT probably wouldn't be as successful as it is today.

so u can just cut these out of regular cardboard?

I'm trying to decide which asset protocol I should implement for a coin and wondering what the community thinks of each and how they interact with PoS.

Thoughts?

i guess sooner or later some people were bound to show up when proof of stake is mentioned and of course the coin they want to discuss is nxt, not anything else.  Look if you like nxt good for you. If you want the documentation I based my comments on use google and look up what people say about it. Also keep in mind the 'source' code was not initially available https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=394916.0

If you disagree with my opinion or the opinion of the Ethereum dev. about proof of stake and the concepts he cited be my guest.

One fact about this altcoin forum around here in general I have noticed

Certain coins seem to have some type of 'protected' watchers that are watching all unmoderated threads.   I won't name coin names.  There are several.

Most coins if you post a negative comment on their thread it will be ignored or others may join in. Rare will someone defend the coin in fact the most you may see if someone , maybe on the development team tell you if you don't like the coin don't mine it and gtfo. 

Now ---- certain coins --a select few -- things seem to happen differently.

If a negative comment without much merit is posted like 'this coin sucks' , it won't take long for others to say they like it and just post other items..... this 'forum bumping' technique is a very old tactic and even employed by the United States and likely other governments to sway public opinion on certain things normally related to politics.  This is not a conspiracy theory there are published foia documents that confirm it.

If a negative comment is posted to a coins thread that actually has some foundation and or documentation to it as to what flaw exists or why they will not support it.... a different approach is used.   Multiple accounts slam that user, often following other posts they made elsewhere here in this forum and negate them even to the point of stating things like 'you post negative comments about several coins' .... ect....   Some people have even been confronted online or in person and threatened.
I know of a few confirmed incidents like this.


If a coin thread has a multitude of people responding or even paying attention to every negative or questionable item posted about that coin proceed with caution.  Honest , fair, legit and real open source projects have nothing to hide and no place to hide it. Their code is released to the world and can be tested by anyone. 

Personally I think if you are using any cryptocurrency at all and it is not 100% open source from day one you should seriously reconsider your position but in the end it is up to you.

Coins you think are run by party x could actually be under control of someone else, like a government agency, organized crime ring or many many other things/people ..... use your imagination. 

In closing I will say I stand behind all prior posts I made here.

If you have FACTS that refute anything I stated post them to the thread.

I don't care if anyone likes my opinions or agrees with them or feels differently.

Also, you may want to think twice about attempts to bother me personally as it has happened in the past when I have criticized things. I don't care how many fake sock puppet accounts come of of the sky. I am not afraid of you, whatever government agency you work or are in informant for or what other organizations you are associated with. I can say this with confidence since I am not a criminal.

To summarize the discussion, known claimed attacks on proof-of-stake distributed consensus algorithm(and concrete implementations) at the moment:

1. Short-range attack  - attacker can offer better chain started few blocks behind current canonical chain. The attack is possible at the moment, the only likely outcome though is just gathered fees increase for an attacker. In our simulations this kind of attack is possible mostly when a long delay occurs due to low target. By the way, the attack has positive aspect for network, as it shorten delays average between blocks. So attacker gets extra fees for a good job done 

2. Long-range attack - attacker can start fork hundreds or thousands blocks behind current chain. From our investigations the attack isn't possible. 

3. Nothing-at-stake attack - not possible at the moment! Will be possible when a lot of forgers will use multiple-branch forging  to increase profits. Then attacker can contribute to all the chains(some of them e.g. containing a transaction) then start to contribute to one chain only behind the best(containing no transaction) making it winner.  Previous statements on N@S attack made with assumption it costs nothing to contribute to an each fork possible and that makes N@S attack a disaster. In fact, it's not possible at all to contribute to each fork possible, as number of forks growing exponentially with time. So the only strategy for a multibranch forger is to contribute to N best forks. In such scenario attack is possible only within short-range e.g. with 25 confirmations needed 10% attacker can't make an attack. And attack is pretty random in nature, it's impossible to predict whether 2 forks will be within N best forks(from exponentially growing set) for k confirmations. So from our point of view the importance of the attack is pretty overblown.

4. History attack - attacker can buy whale's private key for $5 and build alternative story. Solved with some checkpoints now, located behind max rollback possible, so the solution is not so scary in terms of centralization etc.


If you know any other kind of attack, please add. Please note IPO properties of a concrete coins etc isn't related to proof-of-stake distributed consensus problems.

And Consensus Research is going to work on better proof-of-stake prototyping & implementation !

If someone tries to push me around I will look through your coin /code/ everything else and I am very skilled at finding out vulnerabilities and information.  If provoked I will publish my work. That aside, when left alone I tend to allow a 'confrontation' with another to be a one time thing and not go looking to screw with other people. 

You understood it perfectly, the account tree has the unspent outputs of all transactions. The advantage for me of separating the unspent outputs from the transactions is that the transactions are much larger in size (in this scheme) than the unspent outputs, so there is a considerable saving. The minimum output value was borrowed from Bitcoin and it seems to be working well for them. An interesting variation could be forcing the minimum output value to be a multiple of the transaction fee, for example, if you include a transaction fee of X then all outputs must be at least 3X.
I remember that you wanted to have maintenance fees in Cryptonite to control dust but you were having problems with the actual mechanism of deciding the value, but having the stakeholders voting on it seems to be a good solution. Nxt is going to implement (or has already implemented?) voting by stakeholders. It is probably worth seeing how they do it, maybe it is applicable to Cryptonite.

Hash: SHA1
Release 1.5.10
[Removed by Daedelus]
sha256:
[Removed by Daedelus]
sha256:
[Removed by Daedelus]


Change log:

Create installer package for Windows and Linux using the IzPack installer.
See https://bitbucket.org/JeanLucPicard/nxt/issue/283

Added separate linux and windows (cygwin) build and release scripts.

Track and log database query execution times. The new properties:
nxt.statementLogThreshold, nxt.transactionLogThreshold, and
nxt.transactionLogInterval can be used to configure logging of slow queries.

Database performance improvements and optimizations. The account leasing data
has been moved from the account table to a separate account_lease table.
More table indexes have been added or existing ones modified.

Improved JSON encoding performance.

Outbound websockets connections are no longer initiated when using a socks or
http proxy (if system property socksProxyHost or http.proxyHost is defined).

Include expired prunable JSON in API transaction JSON, if available.

To protect public nodes from unneeded extra load, the getState API does not
include counts even if includeCounts=true, unless the adminPassword is either
provided as a parameter, or is not needed.

Added numberOfAccountLeases and numberOfActiveAccountLeases to getState,
showing the total number of scheduled (first lease only) or currently active
account balance leases.

Limit peer details length to 10 characters for version, 20 for application,
30 for platform, and 100 for announced address.


Client UI improvements:

Fixed a bug sometimes not showing notification badge after login.

Improved Bulgarian and Slovak translations.

Fix local signing of upload tagged data and approve transaction

This release will perform a full blockchain rescan on first start.

Updated jetty to version 9.2.11. If unpacking on top of existing installation,
delete the old lib folder first.

Ignoring that proof of stake is pointless (it doesn't work unless ultimately centralized, in which case there are better solutions),

To answer those on nxt and the proof of stake questions, I have looked it over but not real close. I do not own any and never experimented or tested it..  I have read the work and research of others however and (at least to me) I think the papers I posted earlier from the Ethereum developer are very well written and his logic applies not only to any coin based on older (or newer) ppc code bases but also to nxt.  I am not knocking nxt on 'tech' specs although I think any ipo where initial coins are created out of nothing but code and sold to others and build a system that just generates more coins is something that has a reward structure contrary to what I feel is fair.  You can disagree if you like. I am not saying it is a scam only that some things surrounding nxt I heard about (mostly in this forum and on twitter) like coins vanishing for example have been brought up often enough that I believe it has happened.  It is more likely a glitch if it actually happened not something done intentional.

So basically you use transactions-as-proof-of-stake. That sounds reasonable; it's as good as I can think of at this point, although it has the moderately-serious-but-not-fatal flaws that I described in my On Stake article. I eagerly await a full whitepaper description and open source code of your complete protocol so both myself and more formal academics can properly whack at the specifics.

Look what we just released onto CoinGecko! 12 months Google Trend chart!

This is a sample image for Litecoin



What are you waiting for? Check it out now!
https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/litecoin

P/S - I'm using Litecoin as an example but this chart is available for all coins such as Bitcoin, Dogecoin, Vertcoin etc

The last rebound / hurrah we saw in NXT was the result of John (the marketing guy) lying about NXT being added to CoinBase.  So outside of the initial floor manipulation with Dgex and John's deceit campaign, has there ever been any reason for NXT to have a 8 figure capitalization?  Probably not.

If there are really only 1150 addresses with more than 10,000 NXT then user adoption, even by crypto world standards, has been a major failure over the past 1.8 years.  This is contrasted with NXT's capitalization being a moderate success, despite the lack of adoption.

 There are many crypto currencies with a bigger and better distribution.   It's indicative that nobody really wants NXT or, alternatively, they've read about the distribution, security incidents and technical issues and they're discouraged from adopting it.  

NXT... too much of everything on their end

Proof of work is best. Proof of stake??  Sorry I cannot support it because of security issues.  At one time I was a true believer in proof of stake and even personally launched an alt coin that was proof of stake.  I can tell you it took a while for me to realize that without centralized checkpointing and control (like ppc has) proof of stake has some security issues in particular since many alt coins use an older codebase of bitcoin to start from.  I don't want to go technical in this post but I personally know several ways that can really produce 'unusual' or 'undesired' results with a proof of stake coin.  Some of these you need to be able to change code around and compile your own attack client or node and some of these flaws are exploitable by someone with some coins in a regular wallet just by changing the clock on a windows computer.   Even with the centralized checkpointing system that ppc was using proof of stake fails to solve /resolve what is called the byzantine generals problem. 

Regarding the 'centralized' concept of checkpointing I realize some proof of work coins use this to a lesser or greater extent to secure the block chain from attack.  I don't think anything centralized is good. If an individual like me or you can compile the code, run a node and it will work with everything that is my personal test.

Pure proof of stake is not secure, because somewhere in the workings of it there has to be some kind of random or pseudorandom number generator used to decide which staking client wins the/a stake on any particular block.

Someone with more computer power can explore multiple possible futures, generating billions trillions quadrilions etc such random or pseudorandom numbers, massively increasing their chance of having their stake, of whatever size, "get lucky".

This is pretty much a pure nature of the problem kind of problem, not only has it not been solved it probably is not solvable.

To summarize the discussion, known claimed attacks on proof-of-stake distributed consensus algorithm(and concrete implementations) at the moment:

1. Short-range attack  - attacker can offer better chain started few blocks behind current canonical chain. The attack is possible at the moment, the only likely outcome though is just gathered fees increase for an attacker. In our simulations this kind of attack is possible mostly when a long delay occurs due to low target. By the way, the attack has positive aspect for network, as it shorten delays average between blocks. So attacker gets extra fees for a good job done 

2. Long-range attack - attacker can start fork hundreds or thousands blocks behind current chain. From our investigations the attack isn't possible. 

3. Nothing-at-stake attack - not possible at the moment! Will be possible when a lot of forgers will use multiple-branch forging  to increase profits. Then attacker can contribute to all the chains(some of them e.g. containing a transaction) then start to contribute to one chain only behind the best(containing no transaction) making it winner.  Previous statements on N@S attack made with assumption it costs nothing to contribute to an each fork possible and that makes N@S attack a disaster. In fact, it's not possible at all to contribute to each fork possible, as number of forks growing exponentially with time. So the only strategy for a multibranch forger is to contribute to N best forks. In such scenario attack is possible only within short-range e.g. with 25 confirmations needed 10% attacker can't make an attack. And attack is pretty random in nature, it's impossible to predict whether 2 forks will be within N best forks(from exponentially growing set) for k confirmations. So from our point of view the importance of the attack is pretty overblown.

4. History attack - attacker can buy whale's private key for $5 and build alternative story. Solved with some checkpoints now, located behind max rollback possible, so the solution is not so scary in terms of centralization etc.


If you know any other kind of attack, please add. Please note IPO properties of a concrete coins etc isn't related to proof-of-stake distributed consensus problems.

And Consensus Research is going to work on better proof-of-stake prototyping & implementation !