Ich habe vor kurzem eine größere Menge NEM verkauft, die ich seit der Ausgabe 2014 (!) gehalten habe.
Jetzt hat mir mein Steuerberater gesagt, dass eine Coin nur dann für Steuerfreiheit eine Haltefrist von 1 Jahr hat, wenn diese kein weiteres Kapital generiert.
Ansonsten würde sich die Haltefrist auf 10(!) Jahre erhöhen!
Bei NEM gibt es aber POI und das habe ich auch genutzt.
Kann es wirklich sein, dass ich dafür nun nach über 3 Jahren die volle Steuer zahlen muss?  
Nur wegen den paar Kröten aus POI??  

There are a lot of per and cons discussions about no change at all, segwit and unlimited right now.
I want to summarize the basic problems of both and my preferred solution.

I think any kind of change of the current protocol would "mess up" bitcoin payment systems because the current crypto payment "standard" will be destroyed.
We all subscribed to 2 major bitcoin laws, when we bought or mined them:
1. The protocol is 1MB per block. Period!
2. There are only 21 Million Bitcoins. Period!

The first one may be discussable and unimportant for the majority (believe it or not, miners are actually a minority of users) the second one is more severe, than you might think.
The reason is: We would never reach 100% consensus with any kind change. Never! That's simply impossible. There will always be some stubborn people, no matter how good the arguments are...
That means, we would have a forked chain in any case. We turn our beloved bitcoin into two altcoins.

And with the fork we will automatically have 2 chains, with a maximum of 21 million each!
And that further means, we more or less double the amount of coins. We could call that a hidden "break" of the protocol.
Yes I know, its not a double actually, it's two different chains, different coins, bla bla bla... I know that, you know that.
But the uniqueness of the BTC token is gone. Many many of the investors and the press will even not understand the facts! They will just think bitcoin was hacked, unstable, unsecure, unreliable or whatsoever FUD can be used...
Consumers just don't understand it! "Which one is the 'real' one now?" talks will be everywhere ...

We had similar problems with ETH already. The fork harmed ETH a lot.
Ok, it recovered quite good afterwards, but this is, because people invested in ETH are way more technical understanding than the majority of Bitcoin owners and lately because of the entethalliance.
If we fork bitcoin the trolling will be gigantic! It could throw crypto miles back or maybe even kill it completely, if the fork is too severe. Just look at current price fluctuations because of the threat already.

Keeping that in mind I think, there is only a solution with Bitcoin as a truely "unique" bitcoin token. I know it cannot be a perfect solution, but we will suffer in any way. It's just about the least impact.
The bitcoin term is currently used for the token and the whole system, which includes the chain. But the real "value" of bitcoin is actually not the payment system itself any more.
The majority of consumers doesn't use the software. They just use the token. With bitpay, coinify, coinbase, you name it.
It's just about the limited amount and the decentralized payment system between the parties. The "kind" of system behind it is exchangeable and there are plenty of other systems available.
They even are technically improved after the 8+ years, since bitcoin was invented. All those company payment processors still build their system on an outdated protocol which should be glued now somehow to make it a little better. But the ultimate solution is out there.
The current discussed solutions are like having a 14.4k modem and debate about buying a second one or improve it to a 56k one, just because we have to stick to an analog line, but ISDN and DSL is already waiting. We just want to have fast and uncensored internet, who cares about the line?
We have to move the token!

Moving the token
So how can we move the BTC token? This are my suggestions:

1. Create or choose a enterprise ready payment system, that supports the move.
There can be build a new Bitcoin 2.0 blockchain for this use case, but I honestly don't see the point to create yet another system.
There are already plenty of systems, that can be used. The best choice would be Ethereum because its enterprise ready and has a high adaption. Further possibilities would be (in no particular order) NEM, Komodo, Waves, Lisk, Ardor/NXT, Bitshares.

2. Create a multisig bitcoin address
We need a "container" for the frozen Bitcoins, that ensures, that the moved bitcoins cannot be used on the bitcoin chain any more. They have to be locked in a multisig address. This way we can make sure, that the coins are still accessible for the way back. There should be a lot of participants on the multisig address, so that the community can be sure, that the address can't be exploited somehow.

3. Create a smart contract
If the bitcoins are sent to the container, the new BTC asset tokens should be automatically sent to a corresponding address on the other chain. Also sending it to a container address on this new chain could unfreeze the original bitcoins, so that they can be used on the bitcoin blockchain again.
This is probably the most tricky and risky part. If there are bugs in the system, it will be a mess...
But it can be done!

4. Move payment processor companies to the new system
If everything works, the companies can use the new chain for payment to each other. Using newest technologies with childchains enables an unlimited throughput, because you can switch parts to another chain as soon as there are limitations. In a centralized way bigger payment companies could also use their own way to move the tokens to another chain, if the payments stay within their system.

5. Bitcoin block generation
The bitcoin block generation would still go on like before, because bitcoins can only be generated on the bitcoin chain via PoW. So the old chain would still have its use case. There would also be some transactions, but the majority would be on the new chain.

6. Final step
The bitcoin PoW, that consumes so much energy can get obsolete, if the created coins are not worth to run a miner any more.

Further Advantages
The bitcoin consensus was ment to be for all "users". Satoshi invented the PoW consensus because in anonymity hardware is the best choice to create an equality over all participants. Sadly the asics destroyed that idea miserably. Now there is "the miners" and "the users". The worst thing is, that the users are the majority and still have no voting rights. Keeping the current system like it is this unbalance would get worse and worse. By moving the token off the chain we reduce the power of the miners to a minimum.

This is a full copy of my article on http://cryptopay.blogspot.de/2017/03/bitcoin-scaling-proposals-another.html

... Miner, die BU unterstützen, sollten deshalb nur dann einen großen Block erzeugen, wenn es für sie in Ordnung ist, dass Core-Miner und -Nutzer den Block dann nicht akzeptieren.

Verstehe das System auch so wie du es erklärt hast.

Miner die BU Blöcke erzeugen, können also nur BU Blöcke (wenn > 1mb=keine Bitcoin) auf den Börsen Verkaufen.
Die Börsen sind sicher sehr daran interessiert einen weiteren (alt)Coin mit aufzunehmen. Eventuell mehr Umsatz.

Interessant finde ich aber das lt. https://coin.dance/nodes/share 83 % der Nodes Bitcoin sind.
Das werte ich als Abstimmung was die Nodes wollen. Bitcoin.

Die 11% BU-Nodes würden selbstständig funktionieren. Aber wenn 83 % die nicht wollen. Ich weis nicht so recht. Die Motive können vielfältig sein. ...
Will mich hier aber nur auf eine mögliche Prognose mit Hilfe meiner technischen Interpretation beschränken.  

Andere Prognose Meinung, sehr willkommen.

Es sind über 40%. Das einzige was hier interessiert sind die Miner. Die anderen Nodes können zwar auch Prüfen, bilden aber keine neuen Blöcke und sind somit für die Fortführung der Chain irrelevant. (https://coin.dance/blocks)

I really want to mention here, how ridiculous I find those news mentioned as a reason for price declines:
http://www.coindesk.com/19-million-bitcoin-australia-auction/

Cmon. This is really like a drop in the ocean...

24,518 BTC is like 0.16% of the supply. And this is a news about one time this amount. Kidding me?

Its like 16 Billion compared to 10 Trillion supply in Dollars or Euro. Remember? The QEs of USA or Europe pumped abought a monthly(!) supply of about 80 Billion! Thats about 5 times the amount of that mentioned one MONTHLY!

The current daily trading volume without the chinese market is already more than 10 times the selling amount.
Including the chinese markets we go to a 100 times of that amount DAILY.

What do you want with those meaningless news? Its just a trolling price suppressing message!

I am pretty sure, ETH will skyrocket the next week.
It seems like the DAO is accumulating a lot of ether, thats why the circulating ETH supply shrinks.
At the time of wringting DAO accumulated more than 11 of 80 Million Ether!
And a lot of people wait until the end of the ipo. I believe, it could be even 20 Million Ether in the end.
With more people wanting to invest in DAO and ETH being the only asset to invest, people have to buy more and more ETH, which makes it more and more expensive.
So in my opinion ETH can only skyrocket...

I am not responsible for your investment and this is only an opinion, but if this information was useful to you feel free to donate.
BTC: 18brPBR9c2eNuHMtzEhr9ayTxCBmipzrk7
ETH: 0x6D3f2BA856CcbB0237fA7661156B14B013F21240

to be removed.

I don't know, why its not yet existent, but it should in my opinion be possible.
I am glad, if someone explains, why it is not possible. But otherwise:

I pay 1BTC to the one, that offers me a bitcoin client with the following
- written in javascript (nodejs)
- not more than 2000 lines of code, better way less (and I am not talking of minimizing here, normal coding)
- real peer to peer connections to the bitcoin network (no remote node shit)
- possiblity to get all information that you have in a full node
- create transactions like normal
- send transactions like normal
- validate transactions like normal
- no mining needed. no rpc connection. just a simple program with a bunch of methods

I also don't care about private key storage or anything. I want something like:

node app.js send 0.1 <senttoaddress> <sentfromaddress> -pk ≤privatekey>

Hey guys,
I was a little annoyed, because the "light" wallets need to run a server. So I made some adjustions on the lightweight (nginx) from the NEM page (http://nem.io/install.html) and removed the nginx.
Now you can run it just unzipping and doubleclicking the index.html without running any program but the browser.

This is the dropbox link:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/yaod2q3busdhxle/NEM_lightwallet_pure_html_0.1.zip?dl=0

have fun :-)

Why is there still no IMAP/SMTP compatible peer to peer email alt coin?

These people showed, that its actually possible to have a peer to peer IMAP service:
http://www.epostmail.org/
But of course noone runs a server, if he doesn't get anything of it. So a cryptocoin would be a solution for that...

Can the devs explain, where is the problem?
I guess this would be the always expeced "killer app" to get attention of the mainstream.

I think, we can solve that with a smart contract, that is used for mining.
The smart contract provides the functionality of a pool and you commit your work right into the smart contract.
The contract itself has a btc-address where the reward will go, if it finds a block. Then it sends the funds depending on shares.
To secure sending you use multisig with a percentage (for example 50) of the participating miners.

This contract is allowed to have even 100% without a problem.

This project could be crowd funded. The contract could send a small fee to the crowdfunding shareholders as it is in a pool.
Anyone interested to colaborate?

I am not writing coin names here, but everyone can guess, what I mean...

Lets say I made a coin, started it to mine myself in a heavy premine and made the block timings so, that it looks like its 2 years old.
Then I come here and proudly present a coin, that is 2 years old.
I mean. Timestamps can be faked, if you do it right and start from beginning and can write all blocks yourself...
but do you believe me, that my coin is 2 years old?

OK and further: lets say we even don't matter, if its really 2 years old or not:
Do you think its legit, if it was not presented at all? Completely hidden for years??
Is this considered to be decentralized then?

Ah yea. I made a wiki and a website to pretend it was not hidden. But noone will see, that this website was not online before anyway.
So noone can proof anything to me ;-)

And then a year later I celebrate my 3 year old coin. WOW! I have 90% mined a year ago already, but celebrate with me!
We want to push the price a bit, so that I can dump a few. And by the way I have a new roadmap of my features now after 3 years!
Before I didn't do anything the first 2 years ... not even a gui, but anyways...
Do you think its legit?
Do you think that this coin can have actually a market cap of millions? Unbeliveable...

Isn't that a nice idea?
The HOLY button :-)

http://www.holybutton.com/

[POSID]

Features can be programmed into any coin. The biggest problem is, that we don't reach the WORLD. We have to find a way to address everyone.

Heres my idea. I call it POSID (Proof of Stake Identity Distribution). I have it already for a while...
Please pm me at least on your release date, if you implemented this. That's fair ;-)

What is the good thing on bitcoin distribution?
Everyone can still get it "for free", if he mines it. Even now. But its getting less and less.
Early adapters have advantage. Thats good.
Of course they have a little too much advantage in this case, but in general its not bad, because they want to advertise the coin.

What is the bad thing?
Its power consuming.
Now only the people that have money can mine it. The early adapters had a little too much advantage.

How is the POS distribution?
Previous ICO attempts and giving for free attempts fail for only one reason:
They always make the ICO while the coin is still unknown. Later you have to pay more and more, to get it. Early adapters have way too much advantage.

How can we get the best out of all?
Ok. The perfect POS distribution would be, that every person on earth gets exactly 1 stake. But in my eyes thats a little unfair for the early adapters.
Why? Because they took the risk to jump in right away while others waited until its safe.
And: The coin can't get popular, because noone holds enough to say, "Oh, I want this rising! I have to advertise it!".
And people don't jump in because they think: "I can do that later anyway...". We still have to grab everyone on its greed.

So how can we get this more into the bitcoin advantage but not too much?
Simple every person can claim one and only one share for free. The shares stay free and (officially) untradeable.
All available coins (e.g. 36 000 000) are divided by several months (e.g. 36 (too much makes it too less advantage)).
These coins are then sent monthly to all claimed shareholders divided by there number. It can be programmed even in a smart contract.

So in the first month are only less shares claimed (e.g. 100). Then everone early adapter gets more coins (e.g. 10000) plus the later months.
In a later month are alredy more shares claimed (e.g. 10000). Then everone gets less coins (e.g. 100) plus the later months.
And at the end there are many shares claimed (e.g. 1000000). Then everone gets very less but still something (e.g. 1).

This provides a steady and fair growth. To push the price grow you could also put some progression in there, so that the monthly "dividend" is not always the same but getting lower similar to the bitcoin block reward getting less and less.

That sounds nice, but whats the problem?
Yeah, as you guessed, there is indeed a problem with this. It's the oldest problem of crypto.
The UNIQUE person is simply not existing in a decentralized and anonymous environment.
How can we handle this? Honestly I don't know. In my opinion we have to find some consensus, so that the share has to be granted not anonymous, like stellar was starting to do this already.

The following options I have. Tell me, if you have better:
- Facebook.
Fake accounts possible. But Facebook is trying to delete them already. If you say for example, the account has to be not older that 2014, facebook has deleted already most socks and you have potential of some billion users. Of course there are still socks, but a few could be ok. The biggest downside I see. If someone does not yet have a facebook account he can't join.

- Telephone numbers. Sending SMS for a share. Mobile phone numbers are unique. But everyone could have more (or many) phone cards. Still we will have socks. But they may be ok, as everyone can have a few mobile phones but too many are too expensive... So everyone has a reasonable amount of socks...
A problem is maybe the fakeable number, so that you have to provide a service, that sends a secret to a given number and then use this secret to grant a share.

- banking accounts
This is very far away from anonymity but the amount of banking accounts is for sure more restricted than SIM cards. The bad thing is, that in some countries people don't have the possibility to have even one banking account. Some kind of unfair.

- Government IDs
Far away from anonymity this would be still the best option of course. There were attempts like this already from some country-based coins like auroracoin. The biggest problem in my eyes is, that you have to proof every share in person. As long as there is no unfakeable personal GUID, this won't work.

I personally tend to the telephone numbers. What do you think?

Maybe someone wants to help developing it?
Here we come to another problem. A coin will not be developed, if developers don't hold a large amount of it. Even if they are early adapters, that will be problematic, because its not that much. Developing is expensive...
Maybe we can safe a few percent for them.

A friend of mine came with the idea, to fund a movie via nxt:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=802883.0

The market cap should be sufficent for crowdfunding like that. Don't you think?
I mean. Not only funding crypto coins and more cryptocoins but also other real business.
I think, that could really give a boost to NXT, if we put some placed advertisement in a movie.

[What's this project about?]

What's this project about?

This project is about the budgeting of an international feature film project exclusively on the NXT platform. The marketing effect for NXT is just as important as the fact that one does not need the support of Hollywood producers for a professional high-quality feature film.

The company UMOS Productions UG lenses an exciting slasher a la Scream, Friday the 13th and Halloween. We work for the first time together with the partner Matador Film.


Camp Hell (Working Title)


Image made by our partner ParaGrafixx

Vanessa and her boyfriend Steve enjoy their vacation in an outlying camp. One day a roommate is brutally murdered by an unknown person, the murderer has cut out her eyes! The police are baffled. Another murder happens, again the corpse is terribly disfigured! Who is the masked killer and how can he be stopped?
               
Official Page: UMOS Productions Crypto Asset Anouncement (english) - (german)


What is the goal of the project?
              
For the commercial exploitation of the film a worldwide marketing in DVD and BluRay area is provided. Furthermore, aimed at an international theatrical release. To offer the widest possible marketing potential the film will be shot in English.

Several feature-length films were already successfully produced and marketed by our partner. So feature movies in house as well as in order production were successfully refinanced and placed on the Bluray and DVD market by known film labels. The personal and professional experience shows that this project has very good chances of success mainly through the genre.

Your investment enables the production company UMOS Productions UG also future film projects, which may further increase the awareness and success of this film. The majority of revenue is paid directly to you, the investor. Larger investors can also be listed as a co-producer of the film or participate in any form (e.g. as a supporting actor) in the film on request.

The film also has a marketing effect for NXT. The Coin is mentioned prominently in the film and there are preferably used cost carriers, that can be paid with NXT coins. The film thus actively supports the NXT community and the spreading of the currency.


How will we use the money?

The budget of the film is used for the salaries of the actors and the crew, the technical equipment, general production costs such as catering and accommodation costs, venue hire and accounting as well as for the professional post-processing of the film. Leftover money is considered income and will be paid the same way.


Budget Setting

We already have a lot of experience in the implementation of films with low budgets. Of course, any additional budget is a relief and increases the quality of the film. We try to get the best quality out of your budget.

Maximum number of assets: 500 000
Asset starting price: 100 NXT
Asset Name: umosSlash
AssetID: 11482246150566980010 (Caution! We are not responsible, if you buy the wrong assets!)
Issuer Account: NXT-AH72-5DQE-J679-6QCKJ
Sell start: 1st October 2014

The film project will be implemented with a minimum amount of 20,000 purchased assets.

From 40,000 purchased assets a well-known international actor is committed.

From 200,000 purchased assets a prominent star actor will be engaged for a supporting role.

From 350,000 purchased assets a prominent star actor will be engaged for a main role.

Correspondingly higher budget allows of course several more well-known actors and higher quality of the film. If all assets are sold and the income is more than the budget, investors will get an additional 10% of the shares of a next film budgeted in a similar manner.

Until the minimum amount the price of the shares is fixed at 100 NXT. If this is not achieved till 1st December 2014, all shares will be repurchased (investors have to place a sell order at the issue price for their assets).  
If the minimum amount is reached, the asset prices turn variable and are based on the market by publications. For obtaining more investors there will be shot a teaser and finished the screenplay. A purchase prior to that date is probably cheaper. Further sale of assets can be proceeded until the completion of the film.


Payout

If the film is completed, it will be sold the best possible way. 90% of the revenue of the film will be distributed via NXT directly to the investors. All owners of assets with the exception of the not sold assets on the expense account get their share. The distribution will take place on a monthly basis after the completion of accounting. The remaining 10% are used by UMOS Productions UG for the maintenance of the company and if appropriate as budget for future films, which also support the marketing of this film.


Terms, Conditions and Disclaimer

The budget settings refer to the NXT value of the 29th of September 2014. The company UMOS Productions UG is not liable for NXT exchange losses. If value increases, there will be a positive impact on the quality of the film.
If the value of NXT falls sharply, it is necessary to change the asset budget settings or increase the asset prices accordingly. If the value of NXT plummes during production, so that the budget is no longer sufficient for the completion of the film, the production is put on hold. Should this condition persist longer than 1 month, the production is aborted and assets are repurchased. But the assets can then only be bought back with the leftover budget (price = Number leftover NXT / number of sold assets).

UMOS Productions UG buys back shares only if the minimum budget is not reached. If it is reached, there is no repurchase and shares can be sold only to other interested parties. UMOS Productions UG is not liable for losses that may arise from the purchase and sale of the shares. <br/>
Though UMOS Productions UG tries its best, it does not guarantee profits or sale amounts. Furthermore, we can not guarantee that the film will get a theatrical release or is marketed worldwide via a well-known DVD label. But we can assure a release in Germany (and thus worldwide export) on DVD and Bluray.

After ensuring the implementation UMOS Productions UG reserves the right to have parts of the resulting budget available on other public NXT or Bitcoin accounts. Furthermore there will be regularly transfered parts in Euro to the business bank account, as the biggest expenses are expected to be paid in that currency. UMOS Productions UG is not liable for losses resulting from exchange rate fluctuations of Bitcoin or NXT or by trading or transfer fees. Values ​​are exchanged to ensure liquidity in another currency in the first place, to pay expenses in Bitcoin or Euro or to ensure the distribution of NXT to investors. <br/>
The decision how the budget is used exactly in the film and how much budget is kept in which currency is solely decided by UMOS Productions UG. Investors have neither claim on participation nor any direct rights on the movie. They just have a promised share on the expected income of the movie.

UMOS Productios UG is not liable for security holes or availability of NXT or Bitcoin. If the software is hacked and/or the currency (or currencies) has (have) a downfall the project will be canceled if the rest of available budget is insufficient for completing the film. If the income of the film is greater than 50% of the market cap of NXT, all funds beyond remain at UMOS Productions UG. This also applies to high price decline and especially when the software was hacked and NXT is virtually worthless. Should in this case an assignment to the original asset holders not be possible anymore, there will be no distribution.

You as an investor bear the whole risk of loosing your funds and have no rights for a refund of your deposit if prices fall or a failure of the film. Furthermore UMOS Productions in this case doesn't guarante for follow-up projects and other marketing attempts.

You fully accept this conditions by buying assets. Purchases are allowed only from 18 years.

Edit 15.10.2014: The revenue is calculated after taxes.

Hallo,
ich verkaufe meinen FreeSculpt 3D-Drucker für 1,3BTC VHB (NP 699 €).
Ich habe nicht viel damit gedruckt und es gibt die fast volle Originalrolle sowie eine ungeöffnete Zusatzrolle dazu.
Nähere Infos zum Drucker hier:
http://www.pearl.de/a-PV8600-1122.shtml

Wäre super, wenn du in Bayern wohnen würdest, dass wir uns die Post sparen könnten.

viele Grüße
Oliver

I came up with a nice illustration about cryptocurrencies.
I am just thinking about it was, as the first web backend programming languages came out and try to compare them with the cryptocurrencies.
So in my opinion will be:

Bitcoin -> Perl
Litecoin -> PHP
NXT -> Java
BitsharesX -> C#
Bytecoin/Monero -> Python
Ethereum -> Node.Js

any other views? ;-)
And... how many Languages do you think have a chance to survive?

I want to present you a new coin today: Stellar
Coin supply 100 Billion.

You remember Ripple? There were also free coins. Everyone participating was laughing at the not participating ones later.
Its free. Get in now!

Here complete information from the website (https://www.stellar.org/)

Stellar is a decentralized protocol for sending and receiving money in any pair of currencies. This means users can, for example, send a transaction from their Yen balance and have it arrive in Euros, Yen, or even bitcoin. We’re expecting to support the usual categories of transactions: payments to a merchant, remittances back home, or rent splits with a roommate.

You can hold a balance with a gateway, which is any network participant you trust to accept a deposit in exchange for credit on the network. Stellar also comes with a built-in digital currency, referred to as the stellar, which we’re giving away for free. The currency will have value (as determined by the market); however, its primary function is providing a conversion path between other currencies.

We hope that people will build applications on top of Stellar to help bridge the gap between digital and traditional currencies.

Development
We’re developing Stellar as part of a nonprofit organization, the Stellar Development Foundation. The code is open-source, and anyone is welcome to join the project. If you’re interested in following Stellar development or helping us build the network, just jump into our IRC room (#stellar-dev on Freenode), or browse our forum. You can start building applications on top of Stellar now; see Stellar Client (the code behind our hosted web client) or Stellar Viewer (the code behind the account viewer) for some working examples.

The following are some of the people involved (see our about page for a complete list):

Stellar Development is led by Jed McCaleb (resuming development of the open-source technology he created at Ripple) and Professor David Mazières (head of Stanford’s Secure Computer Systems group, creator of SFS and bcrypt).
The Foundation is led by Joyce Kim as Executive Director (former attorney and VC with public interest experience).
The Foundation’s board is Keith Rabois (early Paypal, former COO at Square), Patrick Collison (CEO of Stripe), and Jed McCaleb.
The Foundation is advised by Dan Kaminsky, Joi Ito, Ronaldo Lemos, Linda Stone, Sam Altman, Naval Ravikant, Jackson Palmer, Greg Stein, and Matt Mullenweg.
Stripe has provided initial funding to help get the network off the ground.
The currency
We provide an open-source hosted web client, where the keys are encrypted client-side to your password so we don’t have access to your funds. The supply of stellar will increase at 1% per year.

The network has been initialized with a supply of 100 billion stellars. 5% will be used to fund operations of the nonprofit (its spending, including employee compensation, will be public), and the remaining 95% of the stellars will be distributed for free as quickly as we can manage. We want anyone to be able to get onto the network, and we’re correspondingly going to apportion the giveaway as follows (see our mandate for more details):

50% of the total will be distributed to people who sign up for an account.
25% will be distributed by other nonprofits focused on financial inclusion.
20% will be given to current Bitcoin and Ripple holders—two systems that Stellar owes a lot to.
We’re starting the main giveaway now. Note that we’re still ensuring the stability of our own systems, so we may have to limit the rate of stellar distribution at first.

How it works
Gateways
Stellar is built on the concept of gateways—entities that let people get into and out of the network. (For some related background, it may be worth reading Stripe’s recent cryptocurrency blog post.)

You need to trust the gateways you use, but you don’t need to trust the other participants in the network. This is similar to trusting your local bank to hold a deposit on your behalf. In Stellar, you explicitly decide how much you’d like to trust a gateway by setting policies such as “I trust this gateway to hold a deposit of up to 100 CAD on my behalf”.

Currency balances are represented as credits from the gateway. For example, a user could deposit 100 USD into an appropriate gateway via ACH, and the gateway would issue a “(100, USD, <gateway>)” credit to the user’s Stellar account. The credit issuance will only succeed if the user has already marked themselves as trusting the gateway for at least 100 USD.

gateway_diagram

Credits can be traded between users without involving the gateway.

gateway_diagram_2

Cashing out of the network requires invoking the promise represented by a gateway’s credits. You return those credits to the issuing gateway, and the gateway sends you the corresponding currency. Because the currency return is external to the network, you need to trust the gateway to follow through on their commitment (just as you trust your bank to return your deposit upon request).

Since it’s a distributed and open network, anyone is able to start their own gateway, and to take their pick of gateways to trust.

Distributed exchange
Stellar bakes a distributed exchange into the protocol. You can think of the exchange as a single large pool of offers of the form “I’ll trade (100, EUR, <gateway>) for (79, GBP, <othergateway>)”. Anyone on the network can issue a new offer, accept an outstanding one, or cancel an offer they created.



Anyone can submit orders to the exchange.
Outstanding orders to convert between a gateway’s local currency and stellar let anyone on the network send local currency credits to that gateway’s users. Behind the scenes, there might be a series of conversions along the way. For example, a user might submit a transaction which converts EUR credits to stellar and then converts those stellar to AUD credits. Ultimately, the user will have sent EUR, the recipient will have received AUD, and two exchange orders will have been fulfilled.

Consensus
Under the hood, Stellar uses its own distributed ledger, which is maintained by a consensus algorithm rather than mining. Each node in the network communicates with a set of other nodes that it believes will not collude (such as nodes run by universities, governments, and companies). Importantly, it doesn’t need to trust the nodes themselves — it just needs to believe the nodes won’t work together to produce the same malicious result. Consensus is then reached by an iterative process, which results in each new ledger being decided upon every few seconds. Correspondingly, transactions confirm nearly instantly, and no mining is needed.

We’ll be releasing a paper soon documenting and exploring a provably-correct version of this algorithm.

Today
The Stellar network is just getting started. Today, you can test it out by sending and receiving stellar (or you can use the API to play with running your own small-scale gateway, such as by issuing credits for minutes of your debugging help). We’re working with a few currency exchanges to help them become the first Stellar gateways; once they’re done, you’ll be able to transact in the currencies they provide. In the long term, there will be gateways to cover every payment method that people choose to support.

In the meanwhile, we’ll keep building, and we hope you’ll join us.

Account: NXT-38F9-NS5U-PCGK-BWJGH
Asset Id:  8866097749922303209
Asset Name: MtGoxResc

Asset information:
"This asset is a try to rescue Mt.Gox. There are about 650k BTC missing. If Mt.Gox will be bought, there is a huge amount of money needed, to pay out all users. We only buy Mt.Gox, if we are able to pay out ALL users. If the asset doesn't reach that goal until the end of the year, I will buy back the shares for the initial price. The total amount of shares represent the percentage of Mt.Gox that can be bought with the funds. There will be a dividend of "new" Mt.Gox to all buyers. The current market cap of Nxt is too small, but it can change, if more people want to invest their btc in this asset."

Quantity: 10'000'000 Shares
Decimals: 3

The first Shares will be sold for 1000 NXT per share. Feel free to ask Questions. Feel also free to Escrow this.

You can buy shares with 2 possibilities (the explanations are from NEM, but its similar):
1. with a local client: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B7wAe2jt1MMzYl9kam9TRFlkYlE/edit
2. over SAE: http://news.nemcoin.com/buy-nemstake-with-bitcoin/

Hi guys,
I am wondering if there is a block explorer for ripple.
I thought they made it open source, so normally this should be possible?