A good long term investment good be a PoS with real and growing actual daily use and innovative and adaptive tech orientation, ie. not a mere tool of financial speculation. IMHO FIMK has very good potential to fulfill those specs.

I didn't read the whole thread, but in case FIMK (pure PoS) has not been mentioned yet: http://fimk.fi/en/info.html

PS: the basic development philosophy of FIMK may be quite different from the other ones mentioned, as the main development interest and effort is in the communal aspect and every day use - gradual distribution of third of the coins to Finnish citizens as "basic income" over five years, the same time as extra stake rewards are being paid, in gradually lowering curve.

For block chain ecosystems this is still the age of first adapter nerds and the situation will remain like that for some time. In that regard the first five year period 2008-2013, aka "the age of bitcoin", has been nothing but amazing.

Bitcoin is just one monetary recepy a lá Austrian School & gold bugs, using already outdated block chain tech, and in that respect the age of bitcoin is over, and probably same goes for all purely PoW system. And this is not about bitcoin - or mere financial speculation (even though much of the hypnotism of dollar images still remain, as above), this about the full potential of block chain to reinvent and rebuild whole global society and it's multitude of various localities on decentralized peer-to-peer basis instead of currently centralized hierarchical pyramid schemes. To disrupt the destruction and to realize genuine global constructive anarchy.

To grow the user base of block chain ecosystems and make it available to averadge joe and my granny, much needs to be done and much is being done. In that respect I can talk about FIMK-project, which I'm personally most familiar with. FIMK is a semilocal and semiglobal coin, third of which will be distributed as "basic income" to identifiable Finnish citizens, and to succeed it is very important not to be and not to even appear as a pump-and-dump. The basic technical challenges of the core system are getting solved (on tech wizard 2.5 generation level), and the next and parallel phase is making the tech not only user friendly but easy and simple to adopt and use for both merchants and buyers in every day life. And as the basic philosophy of FIMK is community instead of speculation, the main interest in FIMK assets has not been to imitate stock market, but to vision and plan use of FIMK based assets for example as local community (city, (eco)village, etc.) currencies. Needless to say, FIMK is ongoing gradual process, and its experience and success can teach us a lot of how to grow user base of block chain ecosystems, and to answer from one part in responsible and creative way to the growing global demand for means of building alternative society to replace this self-destructive one.

Reliable PoI is for sure the desperately and still missing killer app, but the real deal is to give every producer - individual or collective - the possiblity to create money/assets/token/credit (the word does not matter, what matters is purchasing power) representing their production. No products, no purchasing power, and to be free people need to be free to exchange their products freely. Individual producer credits can be as simple as promises of working hours that they exchange into food etc.

Small but important reformulation:

"So that we may be careful in making and using smart contracts, decentralize control of the world's purchasing power, to all its people."

Ideally best distribution of cryptocurrency would be even spread among all human beings, with automated sensible flattening procedures over time. Note that such automatically flattening crypto would be just measure of value, platform and exchange medium for "producer credits", or "assets", as we call them, and the latter forms of cryptocurrencies would represent most of the genuine purchasing power. Individuals and communities could and would create assets according to what they produce (no production, no purchasing power) and exchange those assets to other assenge on the global exchange platform. Best distribution: de jure AND de facto equal possibility to freely create and exchange cryptocurrency assets. Market anarchy, money creation anarchy, anarchy with strong social consciousness and global empathy.

Interesting. Lot of talk about mergers around lately. Is that just mining pool merge of something more radical?

Actually as a spin of FIMK can very easily dublicate and incorporate anything and everything in NXT client(s) if and when willing. It's all open source . But that's not the point. One of the aces of FIMK is distribution as basic income to Finnish citizens and investing in use of FIMK in everyday payments. So I don't see FIMK  as trying to compete with NXT, it has very different philosophy and approach. And if SuperNET succeeds, also FIMK will most likely be part of it.

Exactly. And various 2.0 platform coins/tokens/lubricants are not competing against BTC but against each other, over which will become the one ring to rule them all. The global platform of value exchange, over which everything happens. And even though it is way too early to make predictions, I dare to predict that it will not be Counterparty aka BTC blockchain. Simply because it is way... tooo...... sloooooooow.

PS: most likely the winner is something we haven't seen yet. Ethereum is a possible candidate, so is SuperNET (merge of various coin techs, NXT etc. etc.), if it succeeds, but maybe Stellar and some others have chance too. who knows. Killer ap will be IMHO good and trustworthy enough proof-of-identity so that an account can be reliably associated with a unique human being. Just saying.

Financial speculation is not the core or main purpose of cryptocoins. In fact, a very plausible explanation for BTC fiat price downward shift is that as the use of BTC for ordinary shopping keeps increasing, most merchants exchange what BTC they get from selling products immediately to fiats. Some day, again, more and more salaries get paid in BTC instead of fiat, people will hodl and something else happens.

On the other hand, as second generation ecosystems (and also "traditional" altcoins) keep on emerging and evolving and people get more and more interested in what they have to offer, their combined value rises.

And it is not kosher e.g. to count e.g. counterparty as "alternate", because it's part of BTC block chain and the BTC that were invested in XCP were "burned", sent to genesis.

This incident isn't related to "fight between NXT and BTC", JZ got million NXT for a job he didn't do, a journalist reports the case and does a little character assassination - cryptocommunity idea of justice is that if you do bad, you lose you cred - and JZ blathers about US legalese.

What I thought was strange was why quote the comment instead the article?

In the internet age there is no excuse for a pay wall around scientific publications.

Transaction fee should be related to the total amount of coins in sensible manner, agree that dollar nominated comparisons are not meaningful, as are not PoW mining fees and PoS transaction fees . And in PoS like NXT, there will be whales in the beginning to whom the transaction fee does not mean anything, and interested new comers who get 2 nxt from the only functioning faucet, use 1 nxt to send 1 nxt to some address to get a public key to be able to start forging, and then happily forge with account balance of 0 NXT. Not most inviting newcomer experience, I can tell you .

PS: FIMK has same total as NXT, but our transaction fee is 0,1. On the other hand, for some reason FIMK asset creation costs 1000 FIMK which is preventive for newcomers, and apparently we can't change that before before we make a major client update (totally new client with programmable plug-in interphase, which btw will make NXT jealous ).

Because it already is money!

Now purchasing power is a whole different story. What did you do with the STR you got, Thebenj?

Here's a suggestion: create a personal NXT-account or other similar account that allows you to create your own assets, name that "My Account". Create a second account on same platform, use that to create asset called 'Givout Coin' with 1 000 000 tokens. Send all of them to "My account". Bingo!

Ripple is like Stellar. But if you meant something else, FIMK will be distributed as basic income for Finnish citizens.

What you call "complaining" would be more wise to interpret as friendly advice.

All in all, bitcointalk is not very friendly and supportive forum and community, and when Monero publishes and discusses all and everything here, there's constant grind, fud and all the flame jazz of the beloved web. And thus monero people get in battle state instead of supporting each other in more friendly environment.

Slightly OT, but my main gripe with NXT is the high transaction fee (1 NXT).

I'm aware that also academic people themselves are very tired in the current system, and there is already a one p2p research crowdfunding system going on, but that's still in fiats only and internal to a certain university. But the p2p foundation has already funded few research programs and the the results are much better than the usual "publish-or-perish-nullstudies" that the hierarchic establishment mostly produces.

OMG! So they run out of water and are using maple tree sap for fracking??? The end of the world. So long and thanks for all the phish.