Trustless decentralized crypto-currency is probably impossible.*  (http://www.links.org/files/decentralised-currencies.pdf)

No matter what the design, in the end you have to trust human beings at some level.  Satoshi's design provided strong incentives for human behavior via costs of physical resources consumption.  The miners have the most skin-in-the-game and can therefore be trusted to behave in the best interests of the system.  The flaw in the design is more apparent than ever right now with the blocksize debate.  Essentially we have non-miners who also have skin-in-the-game in the form of STAKE in the system (e.g. Coinbase, Blockstream, BitPay, users wanting "cheap" transactions, etc.) that are at odds with the incentives of miners.  All want Bitcoin to succeed in different ways, and there is no clear path for miners to decide which is better for them to profit because it is an economic uncertainty that falls outside of the bounds of technical knowledge.

Proof-of-stake consensus gives us a similar situation, but it does so with far less centralization than proof-of-work.  A participant in a proof-of-stake system like Nxt has direct representation and never has their voting rights diluted, and therefore the system can maintain a higher level of decentralization than proof-of-work, where it is inevitable.  Mining today is effectively a barrier-to-entry for anyone who wants to participate in consensus, which is good for some attack vectors (expensive) but bad for others - Bitcoin stakeholders/companies/users have no choice but to lobby centralized miner overlords, which results in social & economic attacks like BitcoinXT/Classic/etc.  If the threat of a fork by a majority of users exists, is there any justification in burning energy?

In my opinion the security trade-offs in proof-of-stake favor decentralization.  The active research in consensus protocols may give us new tools and techniques to sufficiently increase the security of PoS to practical levels of "trustlessness".  The energy efficiency of proof-of-stake consensus as well as the low barrier-to-entry for participants make it a worthwhile pursuit in my opinion, and in the long run Bitcoin itself will benefit from proof-of-stake experimentation.

Nodes can identify themselves by cryptographically linking their IP address with an account (called "hallmarking" in Nxt) which mitigates Sybil attacks.  The client can be configured to only download blocks from a subset of nodes linked with known accounts and/or a minimum stake threshold.  In an attack scenario this would allow offline nodes to filter out malicious nodes and sync with the proper chain.  It's basically an optionally enabled reputation layer for trusting nodes linked to known accounts, not a silver bullet because of the flaws with all reputation systems (long term planned exploit) but still helpful as another layer of security.

https://nxtportal.org/peers  ("weight" is the stake of the account linked to the peer)

Example:
https://nxtportal.org/nxt?requestType=getPeer&peer=192.3.196.10

https://nxtportal.org/nxt?requestType=decodeHallmark&hallmark=65758c584d6eba44d405277a76bd58adb7c3f78744300e61ef4d12136539940a0c003139322e332e3139362e313064000000659e33010257b14003389b2904476641824dd076810210aea2f354d5ade07352a8d636f50974a2dd0641d38d5f3ec819f76d8cfd8ed1faff94112dc1269944a91b90267fe4

Nxt has been running over 2 years and you are now soapboxing the same arguments that have been refuted over and over.  If you think you can easily attack it we have a testnet and plenty of people who would gladly provide you with all the testnet stake you need.  No hyperbole and no harm done, go ahead and prove your claims.  You might want to read the paper that kushti posted first.  The best that you can probably do is a short-range attack that is still impractical.

I expect that you know blockchain consensus is not a purely technical in nature.  Blockchain consensus relies heavily on economic incentives to influence human behavior, whether you are using PoW or PoS.  In the impossible attack you are imagining, many user accounts would cease to exist, which would clearly indicate to any normal user that they are on a fork.  Its no different that imagining that someone secretly breaks SHA256 and mines a new Bitcoin blockchain that outpaces the existing chain.  How do you think people people would react when their bitcoin addresses no longer have any balance?  The chain would be perfectly valid according to the consensus rules.  Would everyone simply shrug their shoulders and accept the loss of all their BTC?

Here's a passphrase generator you can use - https://nxtportal.org/tools/diceware_passphrase.html

Right-click, save-as for offline use.   

Just because it can be done with Bitcoin, doesn't mean it should be, especially if it doesn't fit particularly well.  Bitcoin colored-coins solutions require you to involve a 3rd-party software or sidechain, and different crypto-currencies ARE sidechains, they just use economic "free-market pegs" instead of cryptographic.  


People can be hostile to each other when they have financial interests that they perceive to be threatened.  I certainly want Bitcoin to succeed because it is the value base for other crypto-currencies/DAOs/DACs.  Nxt is an account-based decentralized services platform and you use the tokens (NXT coins) to pay for a variety of transaction types with different fixed fees.  That is nothing like Bitcoin.  Nxt has a lot of digital asset features native in the protocol and you can already do multiple types of deferred & voting based transaction commitments on-blockchain.  If it provides the features you need, at least try it out for free on Nxt testnet.  Nobody is asking you to stop using Bitcoin, and you can always hash your own checkpoints into the Bitcoin blockchain for extra security if you feel guilty.  

You forgot to mention that the decentralized voting system allows for asset issuers to create polls where only asset holders can vote based on their balance.  i.e. http://nxtportal.org/polls/1407765120236853374

That seems rather excessive.  Try http://shapeshift.io, it doesn't get much faster.



Does your NxtMint.conf file have two parameters for the gpuDevice line?

For non-Scrypt hashing (i.e. EGOLD) it should be something like:
gpuDevice=0,256

Another option for a block explorer that has NXT MS currency support -
http://nxtportal.org/search/NXT-GXDT-NMJZ-U96Z-CJ8GJ

Summary view of NXT MS currencies here:
http://nxtportal.org/currencies

I'm surprised that they completely ignored NXT.  Religious debates aside, that seems pretty biased considering the amount of progress NXT has achieved in one year.  The NXT monetary system is about to go live, which will allow for digital currencies to be be issued and traded on the NXT blockchain, and they can even be minted using proof-of-work or backed by locked NXT.  Following that are plans to implement coin-shuffle on monetary system coins.  IMHO these are going to be very interesting projects to watch in 2015.

https://bitbucket.org/JeanLucPicard/nxt/issue/205/monetary-system-documenation
https://bitbucket.org/JeanLucPicard/nxt/issue/135/coin-shuffling-monetary-system

NXT allows you to lease the balance of your account to another account for forging.  This way you can lease your balance to an empty proxy account that can remain unlocked/online without any risk.  If the account is compromised, you simply issue a new lease transaction for a new account, or move the coins out of the leasing account.  A lease only becomes effective after 1440 blocks to prevent a number of exploits that would otherwise be possible.

http://wiki.nxtcrypto.org/wiki/Nxt_API#Lease_Balance

Tulip mania!  NXT isn't backed by anything, not even mining cartels!

Lots of misinformation here.  NXT is not a clone of Bitcoin, it was written from scratch using java + javascript and has almost nothing in common with Bitcoin aside from the general concept of using a blockchain.

NXT is a platform for decentralized services that is powered by NXT tokens.  Comparing NXT to Bitcoin as a "currency" doesn't really make any sense.  NXT and Bitcoin can function as complimentary systems (they already do) as NXT was designed from the ground-up to process a variety of transaction types that are not suitable for the Bitcoin blockchain.  I like NXT because I like being involved in projects with promising technology and contributing effort to help them grow - the same reasons I got into Bitcoin.  If a fatal flaw is discovered in the NXT PoS mechanism it will probably fail, but we won't know with any certainty unless we try.  Nobody is forcing anyone else to use NXT and it's certainly not a "scam".




If you want to "mine" NXT, you can use a pool like http://hashrate.org.  It mines other alt-coins and automatically sells them to buy NXT that it pays out to miners.  

You need to use an ampersand for query parameters: "&cors=true"

ex -

NXT decentralized services.

Arrived today, safe and sound with the excellent packaging.  Thanks again!   

Is DoS expected to be more of a problem with TF than regular forging?   If we can guess who will forge the next block with a high degree of probability, won't an attacker do the same?

If this was already discussed, can someone point me to it?  I'd like to find more detailed information on how TF is planned to be implemented.


edit -
Just noticed this is mentioned in the faq, but not really answered fully.

http://www.thenxtwiki.org/wiki/FAQ - "This is possible. If it is a concern for you, you should run your Nxt software through a personal VPN service or Tor. "

That fixed it, thanks.  After disabling LOCK_TRACKING 4.0.1 is now running at a very steady 11% on my system, which is actually a nice improvement over 3.9.   

I wanted to post the same observation.  I've been upgrading every few releases and had been on 3.8-3.9 for a long time with a few BFL units.  In 3.9 the CPU usually averages around 15%-16%.  Going to 4.0.1 the CPU usage slowly increases and levels off at ~35%.

Ubuntu 12.04.4 x64, 3.11 kernel, gcc 4.6.3
CFLAGS="-O2 -Wall -march=native" ./configure --enable-bflsc

Can't find the NXT donation address in your sig...   

Owning NXT is somewhat like owning shares in a virtual public company.  The shares were issued all at once, but they happen to be coins that are traded on crypto markets, which is nice because they are accessible to anyone.  They function as both shares and as the resource used in the network itself.

The forging fees are not attractive right now as an incentive for profit because there is no real activity yet.  To me, forging fees are more of a programmatic "dividend" that is built into the shares.  You are only paid this dividend if you show up to shareholder meetings (run a client with an unlocked account)(run a node).