I've been looking lately into NXT, eMunie and Ethereum; I still have to wrap my head around the details, but from what I can gather so far all of these seem rather solid propositions in paper.
In practice though... I couldn't help but notice that they all share the following:
Premine: a small stake of the total economy is distributed among founders and friends or otherwise distributed arbitrarily to other people
Funding & IPO: a portion of the premine is sold for funding purposes on release; prices are fixed and set by the devs on said IPOs.
Operating like a company: It's seems pretty glaring that the focus is not so much on creating a currency but on creating a sustainable business for the founders, developers and early-early adopters.
By contrast, successful cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and later Litecoin had no premine and no IPO or funding; they were just open-for-all experiments that grew, not cryptocurrency-businesses. Granted times have changed, and IPOs might make sense now since we know cryptos can work and everyone wants to be aboard the next Bitcoin, but still. This all sounds too much like Ripple, which as far as I'm concerned was a flop.
Am I too conservative in thinking that all of these new cryptocurrencies are doomed to fail despite their technical merits?
Couple of points :
Premine isn't applicable to pure poS currencies...no mining, no premine. All coins are created at genesis.
As with NXT: 1 billion coins in a few seconds, and no more will ever be made.
IPO's are tricky. NXT was probably the very first use of an IPO-like structure to distribute a coin (correct me if wrong, pls) but since NXT's launch the use of an IPO has become insanely popular, especially with the more scammy members of our community.
Most of the 2nd gen cryptos have much more in-built functionality than the old-school first gen cryptos. In order to utilise and exploit this functionality, businesses are being set up by the users of 2nd gen currencies such as NXT.
I think you are being too conservative. The possiblities that some 2nd gen systems offer are absolutely amazing....I think that in a few years to a decade (barring a zombie apocalypse) almost all of a persons financial life will run on a blockchain somewhere.
This means not just using the simple money payment/storage/transfer that first gen systems offer, but asset exchanges, blockchain storage, distributed autonomous corporations, contract signing......everything: your mortgage, your employers business, your investment portfolio, your favourite game, your NetFlix content, your customer loyalty card, will all be under your direct control, accessible via a 2nd/3rd generation blockchain based system.
(I hope this system will be NXT, obviously)
No, Bitcoin isn't slow. Stop promoting Nxt, nobody really likes it.
@Lauda: well, there are a few people who like NXT, but that isn't really the point.
You can't turn the clock back by five years, mate: first gen cryptos will become obsolete, 2nd and 3rd gen will take over that functionality and much more.
The only real question is who will be the ultimate leader of the 2nd gen pack : NXT, Ripple, eMunie, Ethereum, MasterCoin...?
And Bitcoin is slow in comparison with NXT. I can shift NXT from account to account with almost no lag-time in between hitting send and seeing it (unconfirmed) on the recieving account. BTC takes minutes to achieve the same, and getting the required number of confirmations is again slower than with getting NXT transfers confirmed.
I've just spent much of last week trading NXT to BTC to fiat, and NXT is so much quicker to use.
