Sorry to break this to you but if you're not running 1.4.x, you are on a fork. So any forging you might have been doing will disappear when you update.
I am not a Nxt dev
Not even one of the founding 73 (~103). I defer my opinion to someone who I think is year's ahead of the curve at the moment..
The humankind knows several ways to counteract Sybil attack and all of them can be categorized into two distinct groups - centralized certification and resource testing. BitShares uses an interesting approach, it's an alloy of the both, people can do their own certification and trust becomes a resource here. Quite often alloys have better qualities than their separate components, you guys should spend more time on formalization and analysis of your method to get rid of big part of accusations voiced upthread. Perhaps you could borrow some stuff from
http://www.math.cmu.edu/~adf/research/SybilGuard.pdf, that paper sounds similar to BitShares delegates without bells and whistles.
Bitshares merges resource testing (POS) with centralization (voting for 101 delegates). I am not convinced it is anything different from the system we have today. It introduces politics onto the blockchain (expect more arguing and FUD for votes) and couldn't it be said that today's world is effectively run by 101 powerful entities? Bitassets are derivatives contracts reliant on the bitshares network. In Nxt, I promote assets as risk^2 for this reason: if the network fails you are left with nothing (not necessarily true for Multigateway however). In Bitshares, they were promoted as the opposite. The network fails, you have nothing. If there is any fear of systemic failure, the bitassets market starts to break down. Why accept or buy something that is denominated in something that might not be here in a week/year? I don't like crypto's with inflation. While clunkier, a direct link between work done and payment in bounties seems a better system. So suffice to say I have never bought any BTS.
CfB is interested in this mixed approach, and with Vitalik publishing his thoughts on 'cryptoeconomic security' and BCNext above stating that maths alone isn't enough, I think we will see more discussion in this area and that it is a tenant of Economic Clustering (you pick the node you bootstrap from because you trust them and have a economic incentive to be on the same chain to be able to transact with them). You have more direct control of who you choose to trust by nominating them for your node, BTS requires you to accept the majority even if you voted for none. If you are going to introduce 'cryptoeconomic' rules using trust as a resource, I prefer Nxt's approach where you have 100% direct control of that element.
But I am not a dev
and I am trying to see through the fog into the future as much as anyone. I could be wrong in my interpretation.