DONT GO POSTING THIS ANYWHERE UNTIL FIRM PEER REVIEW

First I will go over total combinations of all entities, then I'll go over the address violation between them.

Definitions:
Passphrase can be any 100 unicode chars
SHA256(passphrase) gives privateKey of 256 bits
Curve25519(privatekey) gives publicKey of 256 bits
SHA256(publickey) gives accountId of 256 bits
First 64 bits of accountId  is 20 digits visibleID (visible in the upper left of the client)

Combinations of different entities:
First, lets talk about passphrases.  Its unicode, but lets round down to the 97 characters available on my keyboard, between  letters  upper and lower, numbers, and symbols.  Actually, lets round that up to 100 for ease of future math.  So thats 100^100  or 1e+200 or
1000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
different possible passphrases.  In reality this actual number of all possible unicode combinations is vastly vastly vastly larger due to what unicode actually allows, but lets just talk about terms of how we expect the system to be used.  IMO, for this mental exercise, it is very sufficient.

The total number of private keys, or total number of SHA256(passphrase) combinations, is 2^256, or 1.15792e+77, I will round that down to 1e+77, or
100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

Total number of public keys, or number of different Curve25519(privatekey) combinations, is same as total number of private keys:  2^256, or 1.15792e+77, I will round that down to 1e+77, or
100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000


Total number of accountIds, or number of SHA256(public_key) combinations, is also same as total number of private keys: 2^256, or 1.15792e+77, I will round that down to 1e+77, or
100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

And total number of visibleIds, 2^64 is 1.84467E+19.  To try to account for rounding the others down I will round this one up to 2e+19, or or 20000000000000000000

Address violations:
First, with 1e+200 possible passphrases and 1e+77 possible private keys, we have 1e+123 passphrases that can each generate the same private key.  For accidental situations, I like these odds, as 1e+77 is waaaaaaaay more than the total number of users to ever use NXT.  For cracking though, its another deal.  Id have to do further math on the capability of current and future-predicted machines and their ability to crack this.

Second, Im not intimately familiar with the inner workings of sha/curve, so I cannot say for sure if each of the unique 1e+77 privatekeys will generate its own unique publickey for a 1 to 1 correspondance between all privatekeys and publickeys, and if each of the 1e+77 publickeys will generate its own unique addressId for a 1 to 1 correspondance between all entities. Id like an expert on sha/curve to comment here on these.

Third is the violation between the accountId and the visibleId. Of all the 1e+77 accountId's, 1e+58 of them have the same visibleId of 64bits.  1e+58 is 10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
Once again, for accidental situations, I like these odds, as 1e+58 is waaaaaaaay more than the total number of users to ever use NXT.  For cracking though, its another deal.  Id have to do further math on the capability of current and future-predicted machines and their ability to crack this.

Obviously, any brute force cracking involved here would be a triple-calculated operation of sha(curve(sha(passphrase))) and be done on all passphrases you wanted to crack on.

I think we all understand how the address space in the 1st case works.  That is straightforward.  The 3rd case though, seems to indicate that when someone sends NXT to a particular visibleID, that those funds are mirrored in the 1e+58 other accounts that share the same accountId and are available to be sent out once again from any of those other accounts.

But then something doesnt make sense to me b/c then if you add up all NXT from all different accounts, the running total sum of all accounts should be way greater than 1000000000!  But maybe the way you examine the blockchain doesn't work that way..

Really waiting on release of the source code (mind you I only completed java 1 and 2 in college, and did no more, so I dont believe Im the guy to review it)


ETA:  ok I see how that second address space violation is prevented in the first place.  See Jean-Luc's write up later on in this thread...

yes, QRK is on a TEAR today!!!!  


Im thinking of getting some more, what exchange should I use then?

did i make it?  1JHJVRqfqsdMQLDt9uQQLzf6N12f89zNTF
thx op!

nice!  sNp6M97zuPWopyUJK3LPFG6PLfvAmKp7Pd

so like $1200USD for a single chip, for 60KH/s?  I guess if youre gambling that the price of power will skyrocket this may be a good deal.

Or I could be understanding something wrong.

those of us behind NAT routers/firewalls cannot participate in the hallmark, right?  any plans for a NAT traversal mechanism?

woohoo!  thanks OP

1JHJVRqfqsdMQLDt9uQQLzf6N12f89zNTF

 

found it:  http://cryptocompare.com/

quite a few coins on there.

awesomesauce 5720962949012144242
thanks dude.  really excited about this transparent article.  too bad i missed the stakeholder thing by jsut a few days (damn you cryptsy) but glad to be in as early as I was.

I saw the exact info you were looking for on a page yesterday.  Sorry I cant remember it now, but it is out there

I didnt get any tips on my submission draft like other people have, so I've finalized it with formatting, and also have added a section on the new TRANSPARENT MINING




Nxt is considered a 2nd generation crypto currency.  With all the alt coins coming out that only change things such as hashing mechanism, time between blocks, starting difficulty, and so on, Nxt brings much much more to the table and was designated this way for a number of reasons.  We'll go over the 5 most important ones.

1.  It is not an "alt coin" like coins such as litecoin, peercoin, and others who have their code based on Bitcoin's source code.  It is brand new from scratch with its own code.

2. It is a 100% proof of stake versus the proof of work mechanism the vast majority of other coins are based on.  This effectively removes a large security risk inherent in most other coins, as now the issue of a 51% attack or other vulnerabilities inherent to PoW coins are now gone.  The biggest plus here is how green this protocol is (not a reference to colored coins) in power consumption, since PoS doesn’t require massive amounts of hashing power

3. NXT when released for production in Jan 2014, will have a very slick new feature called "Transparent Mining".  This will allow NXT to approach Visa/Mastercard rates of transactions.  There is currently not a single crypto currency that can scale this high and this is possible with NXT because the transparency provided in the protocol will allow each user's client to automatically determine who will generate the next block, and so they can then send their transactions to that node.  This will also allow additional fees to be realized for immediate/priority transactions.  An equally important feature of Transparent Mining is an outstanding security feature of the protocol to temporarily reduce to zero the mining power of nodes who should generate the next block but dont.   As previously discussed, the 51% attack is prevented by PoS mechanism.  This transparent mining feature will prevent against even a 90% majority owner of all NXT branching out and forcing a fork.  So if a node that has 90% of all NXT, and doesnt generate a block when scheduled, for network security, the system will reduce its mining power to zero temporarily to prevent a bad fork from being forced.

4. It provides built in support for planned extra features such as a decentralized peer-peer exchange, colored coins, messaging/chat, decentralized DNS, and options for instant transactions.  We will describe these advanced features later in this article.

5. It was announced months in advance, unlike mere hours like most coins.  The 71 stakeholders are responsible for distributing the 1 billion Nxt coins that were ejected from the genesis block via an injection of bitcoin (donated by them, 21 BTC total) into the genesis block.  This is a requirement for this PoS system to work and this distribution is now in progress.  Nxt is listed on http://coinmarketcap.com/ and people are trading on a 1on1 basis in the forums as well as on a temporary (centralized) exchange http://www.dgex.com.

Decentralized Exchange
Let's get into the first planned feature, a decentralized exchange.  How do we currently trade coins now?  Well you have to sign up for an account on a centralized platform such as Cryptsy/BTC-E/Bter/etc, transfer them your coins and pay them for transactions. This brings in a large concern that I personally have yet to be seen brought to light, in that it’s possible that the exchange could just bail with everyone's deposits.  This has actually already happened when the Sheep Marketplace did just that with 96,000 bitcoins, ending up as the largest theft in history.  The developers of NxT (BCNxt and his crew) are developing a peer-peer exchange into the software to allow for decentralized trading which will eliminate this trust point.  It will also eliminate trading fees!  Obviously this is all still completely secure and anonymous as are current bitcoin transactions.

Other Decentralized Services
But let’s not stop there.  If you can have a decentralized exchange based on the peer-peer model then what else is possible?  Well, quite a bit as it turns out; the developers are also building in a decentralized DNS system to compete with namecoin.  Also in the future we can expect messaging and chat systems that, like the p2p exchange, will also be completely secure and anonymous.  Think of what this will allow:  Completely anonymous websites, AND anonymous payments, to go with an anonymous support system in the chat/messaging feature, all 100% secure, encrypted, and irreversible.

Colored Coins
Nxt (pun intended) is one of the more curious services: colored coins.  To understand the concept of colored coins requires a fairly deep view into bitcoin transactions that most people aren’t aware of.  With bitcoin, each transaction's output hashed address is based on a previous receiving address that originally received that coin.  So with the blockchain, a set of bitcoin transactions can be traced.  Not to a person mind you, but what is meant is that an individual coin or pieces of that coin can be traced back on a transaction by transaction basis.  Since this is a case, then if it was possible to expand the protocol to allow a person to designate or "color" a particular coin, then we can build a bridge from the virtual crypto currency world to the physical world.  In effect that coin can then be used to represent some physical entity here on earth.  Property, stocks/bonds, commodites, or really any concept that can be concretely identified could be used.  This protocol expansion is exactly what is being built into Nxt’s unique code to allow for the use of colored coins.

Green Energy
Let’s talk about Proof of Stake and green energy.  Everyone knows how bitcoin is based on Proof of Work.  That is there are thousands of miners around the world crunching away at hashes and gobbling up TONS of power.  Now, PoS doesn’t really involve ‘mining’ per se; it’s important to realize that unlike bitcoin, all Nxt that will ever exist already exists, so client wallets now ‘mine’ for transaction fees.  A growing trend is to refer to this as ‘forging’ instead of ‘mining’.  Since this can be done on a client wallet loaded on a PC (CPU mining), it is MUCH more environmentally friendly and power efficient.

Proof Of Stake Details
Now, on to the nuts and bolts of Nxt’s implementation of PoS.  Its elegantly simple: transaction fees are distributed out proportionally to all users based on the amount of Nxt a client has. (assuming that client is running and unlocked).  So if a client has 1 million Nxt, then they have 1/1000 of a chance of receiving the transaction fee for any transaction.  The math here is 1 million (amount the client has) divided by 1 billion (total Nxt in existence) is 1000, so that is 1/1000 of a chance.

Extra notes on NXT
Nxt is a brain wallet, a very long and secure passphrase MUST be used to generate your account.

As stated, to forge (AKA mine) for transaction fees, your client must be running and unlocked on your machine.

The software is currently java based, and closed source.  Pieces of the code are available for review upon permission of the devs, but the full code will not be released until Jan2014 official launch.

Many people refer to this as 100% pre-mined, but this isn’t really accurate since there *is* no mining, and the PoS system depends on all coins being distributed out.

The Nxt official thread in bitcointalk.org is at https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=345619.0

Amazing.  This is very slick. Ive linked to your thread here on nextcoin.org and stickied it over there.  

Also, can you define the term "stakeholder" as it pertains to just the topic in this post?  I kind of think what you really mean are just accounts with an inordinary high amount of NXT.  If not how can the system determine who the original stakeholders are?

What if a non-stakeholder buys 10M NXT, and has more than some stakeholders who have been distributing coins?  Will they get penalized for not forging?

How long does the system penalize a stakeholder by giving them 0 forging power to those who arent generating blocks?

only 1/7 of stakeholders were forging?

I was about to make the following comment in the regular thread:


but I guess its a non-issue now

cool OP thanks!
my colossuscoin add on crypty is 2CK1xxA7DPn6nXAWfDLSpCYT2M7eoGfpPk
but my crypty trade key is e1603bbd4f48ea9612fe298f950b1a2b6230ce63

login with your passphrase?  LOL

if you've already done that, then update your .nxt files.  IF that didnt resolve it then your NXT is probvably stolen due to a weak passphrase or someone keylogging

Yes, I get all that all fine and well, but I thought blocks were supposed to be generated every X number of seconds.  In some cases there are multiple minutes between blocks.

hmm looks like someone wikia'ed my article on NXT that was my submission for the 100K bounty for a general article.  I was hoping to received that bounty but the bounty thread seems to have been abandoned

yes, please add stablecoin back.  while youre at it, securecoin as well.  heck I say add em all.  If anyone gets butturt for you adding something they consider "premined/instamined" they can go create their own better competing website (yeah right thats what I thought)

we just want the cold hard facts.

though exceptions should be made for suspected market maniupulations.

OUTSTANDING job on the website BTW, thanks much OP!  hope you're getting $ from ads

ETA: I see you have automated delisting/relisting due to aged data.  very slick, im impressed OP

Coinbase PISSES me off continually.  Any other US based exchanges that allow pulling from bank accounts to buy BTC?