NXT :: descendant of Bitcoin - Updated Information

[xyzzyx]

It's interesting watching your progress, you focus on very unimportant features like the power of the computer needed to mine.  That's totally irrelevant since your system can't give the forging reward to more than a single person, so you have all the same problematic incentives towards centralization and pooling of forging as Bitcoin does, just lacking the reward to actually make people bother with it.  If you had a dividend solution where mining rewards were given to ALL holders who were mining during that period (replacing mining with forging), then everyone would be incentivized to mine whether or not they were the individual node that achieved consensus and stake would just dictate your proportional share of the payout.  

This is being worked on (called Nodecoin, an asset earned by running a node to support the network), but unfortunately it is a rather touchy and polarizing subject in this thread at the moment.

you can't even pool effectively since the secret (which gives control of the entire account) must be sent to the pool operator for them to be able to forge on your behalf which is the same as giving them to the pool operator and hoping that they give them back along with your share of what was earned.

Currently, this is true.  It is also being worked on.  It will be possible soon to lease forging power to others.

[mindtomatter]

Adam, NXT passphrases need to be at least 50 sufficiently random characters. On my website nxtcoinmagazine.org I outline in red letters at the top the importance of a strong NXT passphrase.

I use a Yubikey to create the second part of an NXT passprase. The following link is a short video detailing the process.

http://m.youtube.com/view_comment?v=Br4HEt_HbOY&guid=&hl=en&gl=US&client=mv-google

Your link does not work, but seriously? 50 random characters and you need it for every action?   How is this not an obviously alarms-blaring red-lights-flashing problem that you guys didn't stop everything to address immediately?  It seems like every other system out there does not have this problem and so is much much more user friendly simply because they can use a human-rememberable password since their local machine likely won't be compromised?

[jabo38]

I think more than anything NXT suffers from lack of people who have both a deep knowledge of the project and who have strong presentation skills.  You have some people in your group who have good presentation skills (like Kris) but who feel out of depth when it comes to technical stuff.

Anybody I talk to needs to be able to explain to my why it's not an insanely bad tradeoff to not have a wallet.dat and to require a very difficult to remember, unique brainwallet to be entered for every action.  That is by far the biggest barrier to actual use, and I've yet to hear a good solution.

I am a newbie and to be honest don't know much about bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, but I like a brain wallet much better.  These might not be good reasons for other people, but these are the reasons I like them.

1. I am not very computer savy, not like many other people on this thread.  I read about how to get a bitcoin wallet, install linux, save it some programs, back it up, encrypt it, and don't ever use that computer to connect to the internet, (this might not be the exact order as I couldn't figure it out anyway) and it was all too much and way too many points and steps along the way for me to mess something up and lose my money.  I hear stories about people losing their hard drives, people having malware on their computer (the average person can't fight this well) and having their bitcoins stolen.  Even the big exchanges who are "pros" are getting hacked and ripped off, so what does that mean for me.  So for me, just the average guy, I have to keep my bitcoins in Coinbase.  Yes... it is a risk, but when I consider all the possible points of failure and steps I go through to have to store my bitcoins "off line" it is really difficult.  Also, as an average consumer that is buying bitcoins hoping to spend them on the internet later on when they are worth more, having them offline kind of defeats the purpose.  The problem now with keeping them on Coinbase, while being easy, is I am trusting a third party with my money, and this is kind of going against one of the reasons I got into bitcoin in the first place.  Still.... honestly, I wouldn't have ever bought bitcoin in the first place had it not been for Coinbase, I just wouldn't have been able to do it.  Coinbase made it super easy for me as a regular consumer.

2. With the brain wallet, I can make a passphrase unique to my life, like my childhood address, name of pet, first girlfriend, favorite food...... String them together and I have something that is really easy for me to remember.  Now even if my computer breaks or is stolen, I can just download a new client on a new computer and have my nxt safe, just as easy as logging into coinbase.  With nxt, there is only one thing to write down and keep safe, with bitcoin I have to do soooo many things and along the way trust many other people.  To me, the point of failure for nxt is somebody steals my password or I forget it.  With bitcoin, these are also points of failure plus many more points of failure, most of which are out of my control as a normal guy user.  I have 7 different coins, but nxt is the only one I haven't had to trust to a third party.  People might call me silly for not being able to protect my bitcoin, but guess what, I am the every day guy and I AM THE FUTURE if it ever has one.  Compared to my gf, friends, and most of my family, I am way more computer literate.  If I can't do bitcoin well, neither can they, but if I can do nxt's passphrase well, maybe they can too.

[salsacz]

I think l8orre is a good example of a speaking developer, he is going to speak in Amsterdam, but he is also a develeper of one of the Nxt clients And he did excellent job in Berliner conference, when we were talking about Nxt there

[CIYAM]

Your link does not work, but seriously? 50 random characters and you need it for every action?

You don't need "at least 50" - these are numbers that are just being thrown around (and getting bigger it seems) rather than base upon "math" unfortunately (but yes a brain wallet cannot be a small pass phrase).

[Anon136]

If you'd rather, I can interview the guy who is representing you at Coinsummit, or Kris.  I don't think it was a very good interview, were you talking to people on chat between answers, or typing our your response before speaking?  I was trying to figure that out lol.

yea i was just trying to organize my thoughts. stepheny said it was fine because it would just be cut out anyway. sorry about making more work for you.

by the guy at coin summit you mean tai zen?

No.  I think Tai Zen is trying to help but his presentation (prison or freedom) comes off a bit salesy since he is a sales guy.  You guys need evangelists like Ethereum has who can paint the big picture and help people see the ways they could use NXT to make their lives better.

Pursue any use-cases you can like crazy, those are what will make your platform actually matter - early interesting and successful usecases.

did you ever see my interviews with tai zen?

I did.  I don't think it helped that he kept the same intro and outtro in unpolished form for all the segments of the interview.  I did that once got tons of complaints and it was way shorter, much more edited and audio only  

It's interesting watching your progress, you focus on very unimportant features like the power of the computer needed to mine.  That's totally irrelevant since your system can't give the forging reward to more than a single person, so you have all the same problematic incentives towards centralization and pooling of forging as Bitcoin does, just lacking the reward to actually make people bother with it.  If you had a dividend solution where mining rewards were given to ALL holders who were mining during that period (replacing mining with forging), then everyone would be incentivized to mine whether or not they were the individual node that achieved consensus and stake would just dictate your proportional share of the payout.  

So the raspberry pi stuff is basically a gimmick because someone actually mining with a raspberry pi, unless they have a very large amount of NXT statistically isn't going to be rewarded, and you can't even pool effectively since the secret (which gives control of the entire account) must be sent to the pool operator for them to be able to forge on your behalf which is the same as giving them to the pool operator and hoping that they give them back along with your share of what was earned.

I would really like to see a focus on solving problems, setting long term bounties to bring about specific outcomes in the ecosystem (like "A wallet that achieves more than 200,000 concurrent users before March 2016".   Take the problem "There aren't enough people using NXT and our wallets need to be better", look ahead and see what the solution looks like "somebody who designed a wallet that is being widely adopted and used" and then take a big pile of NXT, stick it in a fund marked THIS 200,000NXT CAN ONLY BE RELEASED WHEN THE FOLLOWING CONDITION IS MET: REWARDED TO THE TEAM THAT CREATES THE WALLET THAT HAS 200,000 CONCURRENT USERS BEFORE MARCH 2016, and then you put this up on a big page and announce it as broadly as possible.

Over time, the reward will become more valuable because people will be building towards those bounty/goals, so the 200,000NXT becomes a bigger magnet for ecosystem growth the more people work towards it.   Towards the end it will become obvious who the frontrunners are, so this is why it's important to have a long term bounty system that extends say, 5 years with defined-outcome goals.

The power of the computer needed to mine is not an unimportant thing. The difference in price between the computers used to forge nxt and the price of the asics used to mine bitcoin is savings for the user. So lets say its 1/100th the cost but 1/100th as secure than you would be right in that we arnt really getting anything out of that on net. However if the security is even similar than thats a huge benefit.

As for the issue of there being incentive to pool, its not clear that there is anyway to do pools. You can have your coins held by a castodian but thats a huge counteracting incentive pushing away from pooling. And if there were a way to do trustless pools than that is probably a problem that would be solved by DAC's which would mean that they would have open source code and we could know that that they would not work against the interest of the network. So then the last question is, if we arnt pooling why would people forge at all, and the answer to that will come from technology devises like trezors that sign transactions and blocks without displaying the private key. Devices like these will make it so that there is 0 cost to forging. Meaning that even though the chance is slim that you will win that "lottery" there will be no reason at all not to play.

Also i like the idea about a bounty for a wallet. that may fall into the bailiwick of the techdev committee. thanks for the idea.

[NxtMinnow]

Sorry about the link. The Offspring wallet can hold these long pass phrases in the wallet.dat. The user the uses a smaller password to unlock the wallet.dat

[mindtomatter]

I think l8orre is a good example of a speaking developer, he is going to speak in Amsterdam, but he is also a develeper of one of the Nxt clients And he did excellent job in Berliner conference, when we were talking about Nxt there

It would be great to see a "NXTpresscenter.org or something where people who can speak about various parts can make themselves known and some faces and names can be put to the project.  

[mczarnek]

As I understand it, the way Nxt currently picks the next person to forge a block is that it hashes the account balances of the accounts that forged 1440 blocks ago, right?  Somehow this hash is weighted based upon the amount in people's accounts, right?

And the advanced consensus problem is that you could really quickly move money around between accounts balances so that you will be chosen as the next account to forge, right?

[salsacz]

I think l8orre is a good example of a speaking developer, he is going to speak in Amsterdam, but he is also a develeper of one of the Nxt clients And he did excellent job in Berliner conference, when we were talking about Nxt there

It would be great to see a "NXTpresscenter.org or something where people who can speak about various parts can make themselves known and some faces and names can be put to the project.  

We will be writing scripts for Joefox, so if he has access to a nice camera, this would be easy

[CIYAM]

As I understand it, the way Nxt currently picks the next person to forge a block is that it hashes the account balances of the accounts that forged 1440 blocks ago, right?  Somehow this hash is weighted based upon the amount in people's accounts, right?

It has nothing to do with 1440 blocks ago - the next "best" forging account is according to the hash of the last forged block (which is weighted by the account balance).

[mindtomatter]

I think l8orre is a good example of a speaking developer, he is going to speak in Amsterdam, but he is also a develeper of one of the Nxt clients And he did excellent job in Berliner conference, when we were talking about Nxt there

It would be great to see a "NXTpresscenter.org or something where people who can speak about various parts can make themselves known and some faces and names can be put to the project.  

We will be writing scripts for Joefox, so if he has access to a nice camera, this would be easy

Scripts are not the same thing.  You need someone who doesnt need a script.  This stuff isn't *that* hard, is it?

[jabo38]

I think more than anything NXT suffers from lack of people who have both a deep knowledge of the project and who have strong presentation skills.  You have some people in your group who have good presentation skills (like Kris) but who feel out of depth when it comes to technical stuff.

Anybody I talk to needs to be able to explain to my why it's not an insanely bad tradeoff to not have a wallet.dat and to require a very difficult to remember, unique brainwallet to be entered for every action.  That is by far the biggest barrier to actual use, and I've yet to hear a good solution.

I am a newbie and to be honest don't know much about bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, but I like a brain wallet much better.  These might not be good reasons for other people, but these are the reasons I like them.

1. I am not very computer savy, not like many other people on this thread.  I read about how to get a bitcoin wallet, install linux, save it some programs, back it up, encrypt it, and don't ever use that computer to connect to the internet, (this might not be the exact order as I couldn't figure it out anyway) and it was all too much and way too many points and steps along the way for me to mess something up and lose my money.  I hear stories about people losing their hard drives, people having malware on their computer (the average person can't fight this well) and having their bitcoins stolen.  Even the big exchanges who are "pros" are getting hacked and ripped off, so what does that mean for me.  So for me, just the average guy, I have to keep my bitcoins in Coinbase.  Yes... it is a risk, but when I consider all the possible points of failure and steps I go through to have to store my bitcoins "off line" it is really difficult.  Also, as an average consumer that is buying bitcoins hoping to spend them on the internet later on when they are worth more, having them offline kind of defeats the purpose.  The problem now with keeping them on Coinbase, while being easy, is I am trusting a third party with my money, and this is kind of going against one of the reasons I got into bitcoin in the first place.  Still.... honestly, I wouldn't have ever bought bitcoin in the first place had it not been for Coinbase, I just wouldn't have been able to do it.  Coinbase made it super easy for me as a regular consumer.

2. With the brain wallet, I can make a passphrase unique to my life, like my childhood address, name of pet, first girlfriend, favorite food...... String them together and I have something that is really easy for me to remember.  Now even if my computer breaks or is stolen, I can just download a new client on a new computer and have my nxt safe, just as easy as logging into coinbase.  With nxt, there is only one thing to write down and keep safe, with bitcoin I have to do soooo many things and along the way trust many other people.  To me, the point of failure for nxt is somebody steals my password or I forget it.  With bitcoin, these are also points of failure plus many more points of failure, most of which are out of my control as a normal guy user.  I have 7 different coins, but nxt is the only one I haven't had to trust to a third party.  People might call me silly for not being able to protect my bitcoin, but guess what, I am the every day guy and I AM THE FUTURE if it ever has one.  Compared to my gf, friends, and most of my family, I am way more computer literate.  If I can't do bitcoin well, neither can they, but if I can do nxt's passphrase well, maybe they can too.

To be fair, there are some things that I don't like about the nxt's system too.  First of all which is the most important, since cryptocoins are often getting stolen, there is no 2 factor authentication for nxt.  I really like that on Coinbase and it makes me feel safer.  

Also, the passphrase is long.  The first few times I entered it, I entered it wrong and ended up in strange accounts.  I had to test and retest it to make sure I had it right.  Even now, one third of the time I enter it wrong because it is so long.  Still... as time goes on, it isn't that bad now.  It hardly takes me anytime to enter as long as it is the first time.  I just got use to it and it is no big deal.  That being said, I think it would be way cooler to just scan my thumb print on my iphone, or had some program that I could just type in a simple password that unlocked my bigger password to unlock my account.  I think that kind of thing will happen more in the future though.  The passphrase  being so long in a way is something I like too.  People proved to me with statistics that if I make it long and random, it can't be brute forced.  

[NxtMinnow]

I will be live and unscripted.

[CIYAM]

In regards to pass phrases I think people should understand that we are reaching a point in time when they will simply have to be replaced by things like yubikeys (or better still by QR code from an air-gapped permanently offline device).

You shouldn't be "trying to remember" them you should be using software to do that for you (there's plenty around for that).

Understand that if something is going to be able to "read your clipboard" it is just as likely that this *something* can read your keystrokes also.

[brooklynbtc]

Heads up marketing team...This is the second time I am repeating this, Just a pointer for a more effective marketing strategy, other than the guerrilla marketing we have been limited to. The other crypto 2.0 platforms are doing it right.

Solution: Create campaigns marketing directly to businesses who will IPO on the nxt blockchain, each of these businesses will then partially serve as autonomous marketing vehicle for the nxt platform

1) counterparty has got it right: They have got 7+ businesses plus Adam b Levine ready to go on their platform

2) watch the video bitshares video..Their main focus is to appeal to businesses http://bitshares.org/

This is why platforms like Apple app store, Amazon and ebay are so successful...The sellers and affiliate marketers on these platform actually work to promote their product listed there, which in in turn brings greater exposure to the platform. I have yet to see any consensus on a similar strategy..So if you are a key decision maker on the NXT marketing committee please think about this post, I should know I studied a bit of marketing in college and made a living working in the field for a while other than just writing code...

Just my 2 nxt..back to work.

yo ola.. PM'd you

im on the MC.. lets meet for coffee and talk about this ASAP

sent you my email

[intmain()]

Wesley,
Have you considered implementing a random character generator into the nxt client, and then saving that string in a local file encrypted by a password chosen on the first login? It would act as the equivalent of a wallet file.

I can write the scripts for you in whatever language you need...

[Sebastien256]

Wesley,
Have you considered implementing a random character generator into the nxt client, and then saving that string in a local file encrypted by a password chosen on the first login? It would act as the equivalent of a wallet file.

I can write the scripts for you in whatever language you need...

that is interesting.

[CIYAM]

Wesley,
Have you considered implementing a random character generator into the nxt client, and then saving that string in a local file encrypted by a password chosen on the first login? It would act as the equivalent of a wallet file.

I can write the scripts for you in whatever language you need...

that is interesting.

The main problem would be *backup* when you are considering .js (storing in localStorage).

So even if you were to do this you'd need to display the multiple words or random characters (better multiple words IMO) for when the user changes browser or computer.

[rickyjames]

Adam: have you watched my video about Nxt decentralized internet? http://youtu.be/RtTWUwRL9mQ - still little imperfect, but with ideas

Who are you trying to appeal to?  Maybe people on this forum but few others would stay past the first few clips.

You guys need to create your own content.  I have loved what Kris has done with the NXT Minute, I think its the perfect mix of update and invitation.  It's obvious you guys are doing stuff and making decisions, the community is active and growing and you're one of the leading players in the 2.0 game. 

But you need more than soundbytes, you need speakers who breath NXT.  Don't look to existing Bitcoin people, everybody I know is crazy overwhelmed with projects right now, you need to self-organize and make this happen.

Speaking in public is not impossible or even difficult, and I'm sure many of your stakeholders do it for work all the time.  Time to pull them out, rip the masks off a few of you and put your name on the line because if you aren't willing to, nobody else is going to do it for you.

My name is Ricky Roberson and I'm ready to put my name on the line and speak out for NXT anytime.  I already have.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1oqFRROW7M