NEM (XEM) Official Thread - 100% New Code - Easy To Use APIs

[LemonAndFriesOne]

FYI: Poloniex will no longer be offering services to residents of  New York ...

If nobody saw this coming, you're incredibly naive.

Governments may praise crypto all they want, but in the end it challenges their positions of authority by undermining the fraud that is FIAT. I think this is just the tip of the iceberg for things to come:

http://www.coindesk.com/ny-bitcoin-business-45-days-bitlicense/

Can you expand on your assumptions?

I don't see how it challenges their authority, FIAT is just a way to trade value for goods/services just like crypto is trying to do.

No it's not. Fiat is a tool of the zionists/illuminati to control (economic instability, scaring people, financing both sides of wars), rob (illegal taxes) and enslave people (debts and interest - interest was invented by Jews. Interest is a form of injustice and it therefore forbidden by God -> God encourages trade and charity).

Not sure if serious or sarcastic, either way lol.

[schnötzel]

@rigel

THANKS!

[gimre]

[Apr 23 21:16:10] gimre:something cool is on the horizon

In my case I actually had NEM WP in mind.

[apullman]

FYI: Poloniex will no longer be offering services to residents of  New York ...

https://i.imgur.com/zPk23NB.jpg

If nobody saw this coming, you're incredibly naive.

Governments may praise crypto all they want, but in the end it challenges their positions of authority by undermining the fraud that is FIAT. I think this is just the tip of the iceberg for things to come:

http://www.coindesk.com/ny-bitcoin-business-45-days-bitlicense/

Can you expand on your assumptions?

I don't see how it challenges their authority, FIAT is just a way to trade value for goods/services just like crypto is trying to do.

No it's not. Fiat is a tool of the zionists/illuminati to control (economic instability, scaring people, financing both sides of wars), rob (illegal taxes) and enslave people (debts and interest - interest was invented by Jews. Interest is a form of injustice and it therefore forbidden by God -> God encourages trade and charity).

Not sure if serious or sarcastic, either way lol.

The invention of interest was by the Sumerians from Mesopotamia, modern-day Iraq, Kuwait and parts of Iran, Syria and Turkey.

[nzminer]

FYI: Poloniex will no longer be offering services to residents of  New York ...

If nobody saw this coming, you're incredibly naive.

Governments may praise crypto all they want, but in the end it challenges their positions of authority by undermining the fraud that is FIAT. I think this is just the tip of the iceberg for things to come:

http://www.coindesk.com/ny-bitcoin-business-45-days-bitlicense/

Problem is how can they even enforce this?
How would they know you are in New York?
Easy enough to provide a different address if it asks...

[rigel]

FYI: Poloniex will no longer be offering services to residents of  New York ...

If nobody saw this coming, you're incredibly naive.

Governments may praise crypto all they want, but in the end it challenges their positions of authority by undermining the fraud that is FIAT. I think this is just the tip of the iceberg for things to come:

http://www.coindesk.com/ny-bitcoin-business-45-days-bitlicense/

Problem is how can they even enforce this?
How would they know you are in New York?
Easy enough to provide a different address if it asks...

Databases of ips per country are available online for free.
State information can be extracted from the whois.
You can fool it by proxy or vpn.

[jabo38]

It seems like me the main consumer services Bitcoin is offering is 1) drugs/gambling/illegal activities, and with that 2) privacy, 3) remittance and the trailing 4) internet shopping

Does that seem about right in that order?

And while right now 1 and 2 are much bigger than 3 and 4, in the coming years 3 and 4 will grow much larger than 1 and 2. 

[samysamy1]

FYI: Poloniex will no longer be offering services to residents of  New York ...

If nobody saw this coming, you're incredibly naive.

Governments may praise crypto all they want, but in the end it challenges their positions of authority by undermining the fraud that is FIAT. I think this is just the tip of the iceberg for things to come:

http://www.coindesk.com/ny-bitcoin-business-45-days-bitlicense/

Can you expand on your assumptions?

I don't see how it challenges their authority, FIAT is just a way to trade value for goods/services just like crypto is trying to do.

No it's not. Fiat is a tool of the zionists/illuminati to control (economic instability, scaring people, financing both sides of wars), rob (illegal taxes) and enslave people (debts and interest - interest was invented by Jews. Interest is a form of injustice and it therefore forbidden by God -> God encourages trade and charity).

Not sure if serious or sarcastic, either way lol.

The invention of interest was by the Sumerians from Mesopotamia, modern-day Iraq, Kuwait and parts of Iran, Syria and Turkey.

That's true, but I was more talking about the modern day banking system that is owned and run by the Jews.
https://europeanmediacentre.wordpress.com/2013/09/02/list-of-banks-owned-by-the-jewish-rothschild-family/

If we're talking about Sumerian we'd better start talking about Nimrod, the very first evil person that invented paganism (after the flood) that has spread into many forms and still can be found in our society e.g the trinity concept, Christmas - it's date, the wreath, tree, santa (celebrating the birth of nimrod aka sun god) or the olympic games especially the way they lit the torch (isn't satan called lucifer the torch bearer like the Statue of Liberty/Slavery  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_%28goddess%29)

[KimNg]

@jabo38

Here are few more notes and stats that may be useful.

MasterCard debit purchase volume: $448 billion in the United States for the full year of 2012.
Visa debit purchase volume: $1.10 trillion in the United States for the full year of 2012.
MasterCard debit transaction volume: 11.3 billion transactions in the United States for the full year of 2012.
Visa debit transaction volume: 29.5 billion transactions in the United States for the full year of 2012.
Total number of debit card transactions in the U.S.: 47 billion in 2012, vs. 15.6 billion in 2003.
http://www.nasdaq.com/article/credit-card-statistics-industry-facts-debt-statistics-cm21786

Stock analysis
https://www.trefis.com/company?hm=V.trefis
https://www.trefis.com/company?hm=MA.trefis

Charts & Graphs Archive
http://www.nilsonreport.com/publication_chart_and_graphs_archive.php?1=1&year=2014

Visa's network is a star-based system.
http://usa.visa.com/download/corporate/_media/visanet-technology/visa-net-booklet.pdf
http://usa.visa.com/download/corporate/_media/visa-fact-sheet.pdf
http://investor.visa.com/

MasterCard's Banknet is a peer-to-peer mesh network.
http://www.mastercard.com/us/company/en/docs/virtual_private_network.pdf
http://investor.mastercard.com/investor-relations/default.aspx

MasterCard and Visa use ISO 8583 Financial transaction card originated messages protocol.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8583

Visa handles on average around 2,000 transactions per second with a daily peak rate of 4,000 tps.
http://usa.visa.com/about-visa/our-business/visa-transaction.jsp

Visa has a peak capacity of around 56,000 transactions per second and 19,000 tps during peak shopping periods.
(removed, only available in yahoo or google cache)
http://www.visa.com/blogarchives/us/2013/10/10/stress-test-prepares-visanet-for-the-most-wonderful-time-of-the-year/index.html

PayPal handles around 10 million transactions per day for an average of 115 tps.
https://about.paypal-corp.com/

The Bitcoin network is restricted to a sustained rate of 7 tps due to the bitcoin protocol restricting block sizes to 1MB (anti-spam).
7 tps is the theoretical maximum, the practical maximum is about 2.4 tps. 
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability
https://www.quora.com/Bitcoin-is-limited-to-7-transactions-per-second-Other-than-increasing-miner-fees-for-the-processing-power-needed-what-other-viable-solutions-are-there

Side-chains can increase Bitcoin's transaction rate.
http://www.coindesk.com/could-the-bitcoin-lightning-network-solve-blockchain-scalability/

"If  all  Bitcoin  transactions  were  on  the  blockchain,  to  enable  7  billion  people  to  make  two
transactions per day, it would require 24GB blocks every ten minutes at best."
http://lightning.network/lightning-network-paper-DRAFT-0.5.pdf

One Bitcoin negative you may want to include is that it is susceptible to the "51% attack".
And actually with less than 50%, the same kind of attacks are possible, but with less rate of success.
Someone with only 40% of the network computing power can overcome a 6-deep confirmed transaction with a 50% success rate.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses
http://en.bitcoinwiki.org/File:Bitcoin_weaknesses.jpg

Bitcoin is more centralized due to large mining pools.
http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-mining-detente-ghash-io-51-issue/
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/9402/mining-pool-centralization-crisis-levels/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1uk690/ghashio_just_mined_6_in_a_row_again_no_big_deal/

Bitcoin hashrate distribution
https://blockchain.info/pools

The Bitcoin network has ~5800 reachable nodes (8-2-2015).
https://getaddr.bitnodes.io/

Bitcoin Network Speed 8 Times Faster than Top 500 Supercomputers Combined
https://tradeblock.com/blog/bitcoin-network-8-times-faster-than-top-500-super-computers-combined/

Global Bitcoin Computing Power Now 256 Times Faster Than Top 500 Supercomputers, Combined!
http://www.forbes.com/sites/reuvencohen/2013/11/28/global-bitcoin-computing-power-now-256-times-faster-than-top-500-supercomputers-combined/

Tianhe-2, the world's fastest supercomputer has a performance of only 33.86 petaFLOPS compared to 4,831,951 petaFLOPS of the Bitcoin network (8-2-2015).
http://www.top500.org/featured/top-systems/
http://bitcoinwatch.com/

PoW is wasteful, every second about 400,000 trillion SHA256 computations are being performed by the Bitcoin network.
The current Network Hashrate is at 389,815,294 GH/s (2-8-2015).
https://blockchain.info/stats
https://blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate

Bitcoin Miners Are Racking Up $150,000 A Day In Power Consumption Alone
http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/13/the-cost-of-a-bitcoin/

The Impossible Trinity: Security, Environment Protection and Decentralization
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/10829/impossible-trinity-security-environment-protection-decentralization/

Think Tank Reignites Debate Over Bitcoin Mining's Environmental Effects
http://www.coindesk.com/think-tank-debate-bitcoin-mining-environment/

Under the Microscope: Economic and Environmental Costs of Bitcoin Mining
http://www.coindesk.com/microscope-economic-environmental-costs-bitcoin-mining/

Under the Microscope: Conclusions on the Costs of Bitcoin
http://www.coindesk.com/microscope-conclusions-costs-bitcoin/

Virtual Bitcoin Mining Is a Real-World Environmental Disaster
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-04-12/virtual-bitcoin-mining-is-a-real-world-environmental-disaster

Bitcoin's carbon footprint is out of control.
http://bitcarbon.org/

[KimNg]

@jabo38

Also, the $1.5 quadrillion figure is a rough estimate. The size of the unregulated derivatives market is really unknown, some say it is ~$1.2 quadrillion others
say it is about half that at ~$600 trillion. Infographics are not normally academic, but its good to at least have some sources.

Big Risk: $1.2 Quadrillion Derivatives Market Dwarfs World GDP
http://www.dailyfinance.com/2010/06/09/risk-quadrillion-derivatives-market-gdp/

Here's What $1.2 Quadrillion Looks Like
http://moneymorning.com/2013/09/18/heres-what-1-2-quadrillion-looks-like/

Why Derivatives May Be the Biggest Risk for the Global Economy
http://business.time.com/2013/03/27/why-derivatives-may-be-the-biggest-risk-for-the-global-economy/

World Derivatives Market Estimated As Big As $1.2 Quadrillion Notional, as Banks Fight Efforts to Rein It In
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/03/worldwide-derivatives-market-estimated-as-big-as-1-2-quadrillion-as-banks-fight-efforts-to-rein-it-in.html

Naked Capitalism and the $1.2 Quadrillion Question
http://www.theotcspace.com/2013/03/26/size-matters-naked-capitalism-and-the-1-2-quadrillion-question/

Bank for International Settlements - Derivatives statistics
http://www.bis.org/statistics/derstats.htm

"Total notional amounts outstanding of OTC derivatives amounted to $630 trillion at end-December 2014."
Bank for International Settlements - OTC derivatives statistics at end-December 2014
http://www.bis.org/publ/otc_hy1504.htm

"Compression has reduced notionals outstanding by a little over $200 trillion, including some $120 trillion in interest rate derivatives and $80 trillion in credit default swaps."
International Swaps and Derivatives Association - The Stats Tell the Story
http://isda.derivativiews.org/2012/06/07/342/

JPMorgan Chase had a notional value of $69 trillion (12/31/2012). JPMorgan Bank, not the holding company, had a Total Credit Exposure to Risk Based Capital ratio of 228%.
Quarterly Report on Bank Derivatives Activities
http://www.occ.gov/topics/capital-markets/financial-markets/trading/derivatives/derivatives-quarterly-report.html

Office of the Comptroller of the Currency
http://www.occ.treas.gov/

How Big is OTC Really?
http://www.theotcspace.com/2013/03/22/how-big-is-otc-really/

A good infographic on bank exposure in derivatives.
http://demonocracy.info/infographics/usa/derivatives/bank_exposure.html

9 Biggest Banks' Derivative Exposure - $228.72 Trillion
http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user5/imageroot/2012/03/derivs%20by%20bank.jpg

No surprise here.
Bank of America blocks employees from reading Zero Hedge blog
http://www.bizjournals.com/boston/blog/mass_roundup/2012/12/bank-of-america-blocks-zero-hedge.html

The sooner we transition away from fiat, the better off we'll be.

[LemonAndFriesOne]

One amongst many reasons why bitcointalk is avoided by other people:

[nzminer]

FYI: Poloniex will no longer be offering services to residents of  New York ...

If nobody saw this coming, you're incredibly naive.

Governments may praise crypto all they want, but in the end it challenges their positions of authority by undermining the fraud that is FIAT. I think this is just the tip of the iceberg for things to come:

http://www.coindesk.com/ny-bitcoin-business-45-days-bitlicense/

Problem is how can they even enforce this?
How would they know you are in New York?
Easy enough to provide a different address if it asks...

Databases of ips per country are available online for free.
State information can be extracted from the whois.
You can fool it by proxy or vpn.

easy ways around it i guess, but i never realised that ip addresses were linked to particular states, i thought it would be the US as a whole, but the US is a big country i guess, anyway NY is really only a small part of their business so i doubt they will be affected much.

[jabo38]

@jabo38

Here are few more notes and stats that may be useful.

MasterCard debit purchase volume: $448 billion in the United States for the full year of 2012.
Visa debit purchase volume: $1.10 trillion in the United States for the full year of 2012.
MasterCard debit transaction volume: 11.3 billion transactions in the United States for the full year of 2012.
Visa debit transaction volume: 29.5 billion transactions in the United States for the full year of 2012.
Total number of debit card transactions in the U.S.: 47 billion in 2012, vs. 15.6 billion in 2003.
http://www.nasdaq.com/article/credit-card-statistics-industry-facts-debt-statistics-cm21786

Stock analysis
https://www.trefis.com/company?hm=V.trefis
https://www.trefis.com/company?hm=MA.trefis

Charts & Graphs Archive
http://www.nilsonreport.com/publication_chart_and_graphs_archive.php?1=1&year=2014

Visa's network is a star-based system.
http://usa.visa.com/download/corporate/_media/visanet-technology/visa-net-booklet.pdf
http://usa.visa.com/download/corporate/_media/visa-fact-sheet.pdf
http://investor.visa.com/

MasterCard's Banknet is a peer-to-peer mesh network.
http://www.mastercard.com/us/company/en/docs/virtual_private_network.pdf
http://investor.mastercard.com/investor-relations/default.aspx

MasterCard and Visa use ISO 8583 Financial transaction card originated messages protocol.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8583

Visa handles on average around 2,000 transactions per second with a daily peak rate of 4,000 tps.
http://usa.visa.com/about-visa/our-business/visa-transaction.jsp

Visa has a peak capacity of around 56,000 transactions per second and 19,000 tps during peak shopping periods.
(removed, only available in yahoo or google cache)
http://www.visa.com/blogarchives/us/2013/10/10/stress-test-prepares-visanet-for-the-most-wonderful-time-of-the-year/index.html

PayPal handles around 10 million transactions per day for an average of 115 tps.
https://about.paypal-corp.com/

The Bitcoin network is restricted to a sustained rate of 7 tps due to the bitcoin protocol restricting block sizes to 1MB (anti-spam).
7 tps is the theoretical maximum, the practical maximum is about 2.4 tps. 
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability
https://www.quora.com/Bitcoin-is-limited-to-7-transactions-per-second-Other-than-increasing-miner-fees-for-the-processing-power-needed-what-other-viable-solutions-are-there

Side-chains can increase Bitcoin's transaction rate.
http://www.coindesk.com/could-the-bitcoin-lightning-network-solve-blockchain-scalability/

"If  all  Bitcoin  transactions  were  on  the  blockchain,  to  enable  7  billion  people  to  make  two
transactions per day, it would require 24GB blocks every ten minutes at best."
http://lightning.network/lightning-network-paper-DRAFT-0.5.pdf

One Bitcoin negative you may want to include is that it is susceptible to the "51% attack".
And actually with less than 50%, the same kind of attacks are possible, but with less rate of success.
Someone with only 40% of the network computing power can overcome a 6-deep confirmed transaction with a 50% success rate.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses
http://en.bitcoinwiki.org/File:Bitcoin_weaknesses.jpg

Bitcoin is more centralized due to large mining pools.
http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-mining-detente-ghash-io-51-issue/
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/9402/mining-pool-centralization-crisis-levels/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1uk690/ghashio_just_mined_6_in_a_row_again_no_big_deal/

Bitcoin hashrate distribution
https://blockchain.info/pools

The Bitcoin network has ~5800 reachable nodes (8-2-2015).
https://getaddr.bitnodes.io/

Bitcoin Network Speed 8 Times Faster than Top 500 Supercomputers Combined
https://tradeblock.com/blog/bitcoin-network-8-times-faster-than-top-500-super-computers-combined/

Global Bitcoin Computing Power Now 256 Times Faster Than Top 500 Supercomputers, Combined!
http://www.forbes.com/sites/reuvencohen/2013/11/28/global-bitcoin-computing-power-now-256-times-faster-than-top-500-supercomputers-combined/

Tianhe-2, the world's fastest supercomputer has a performance of only 33.86 petaFLOPS compared to 4,831,951 petaFLOPS of the Bitcoin network (8-2-2015).
http://www.top500.org/featured/top-systems/
http://bitcoinwatch.com/

PoW is wasteful, every second about 400,000 trillion SHA256 computations are being performed by the Bitcoin network.
The current Network Hashrate is at 389,815,294 GH/s (2-8-2015).
https://blockchain.info/stats
https://blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate

Bitcoin Miners Are Racking Up $150,000 A Day In Power Consumption Alone
http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/13/the-cost-of-a-bitcoin/

The Impossible Trinity: Security, Environment Protection and Decentralization
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/10829/impossible-trinity-security-environment-protection-decentralization/

Think Tank Reignites Debate Over Bitcoin Mining's Environmental Effects
http://www.coindesk.com/think-tank-debate-bitcoin-mining-environment/

Under the Microscope: Economic and Environmental Costs of Bitcoin Mining
http://www.coindesk.com/microscope-economic-environmental-costs-bitcoin-mining/

Under the Microscope: Conclusions on the Costs of Bitcoin
http://www.coindesk.com/microscope-conclusions-costs-bitcoin/

Virtual Bitcoin Mining Is a Real-World Environmental Disaster
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-04-12/virtual-bitcoin-mining-is-a-real-world-environmental-disaster

Bitcoin's carbon footprint is out of control.
http://bitcarbon.org/

Okay great

[Thingamajig]

FYI: Poloniex will no longer be offering services to residents of  New York ...

If nobody saw this coming, you're incredibly naive.

Governments may praise crypto all they want, but in the end it challenges their positions of authority by undermining the fraud that is FIAT. I think this is just the tip of the iceberg for things to come:

http://www.coindesk.com/ny-bitcoin-business-45-days-bitlicense/

Can you expand on your assumptions?

I don't see how it challenges their authority, FIAT is just a way to trade value for goods/services just like crypto is trying to do.

No it's not. Fiat is a tool of the zionists/illuminati to control (economic instability, scaring people, financing both sides of wars), rob (illegal taxes) and enslave people (debts and interest - interest was invented by Jews. Interest is a form of injustice and it therefore forbidden by God -> God encourages trade and charity).

Not sure if serious or sarcastic, either way lol.

The invention of interest was by the Sumerians from Mesopotamia, modern-day Iraq, Kuwait and parts of Iran, Syria and Turkey.

That's true, but I was more talking about the modern day banking system that is owned and run by the Jews.
https://europeanmediacentre.wordpress.com/2013/09/02/list-of-banks-owned-by-the-jewish-rothschild-family/

If we're talking about Sumerian we'd better start talking about Nimrod, the very first evil person that invented paganism (after the flood) that has spread into many forms and still can be found in our society e.g the trinity concept, Christmas - it's date, the wreath, tree, santa (celebrating the birth of nimrod aka sun god) or the olympic games especially the way they lit the torch (isn't satan called lucifer the torch bearer like the Statue of Liberty/Slavery  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_%28goddess%29)

Although i get your perspective (It's certainly something i've witnessed many a time in this sort of discussion), my point wasn't about the religious groups (potentially) involved in this FIAT monetary system, all that matters is the system itself, of which slowly siphens wealth from people through increasing inflation and taxation, leading to the economical, social and eventual political unrest we all witness even to this day.

Addressing the fundamental causes (fraudulent money) is, in my view, the main point of crypto and something NEM should be a front runner of. It shouldn't be a message that encourages hatred towards people of any faith, regardless of the conspiracies (Or, for that matter, even facts) that surround it. Targeting specific groups as the cause of this system (True or otherwise) just simply focuses things away from whats important, and in fact, just encourages hatred and division.

NEM should steer well clear from any affiliation or sympathy to any political or religious views, and strictly remain unbiased - especially as in the grand scheme of things, it's not whats important or for that matter, even relevant.

[dandruff1138]

Christ is this a joke? This is why NEM is going no where.

[greentea]

@jabo38

Here are few more notes and stats that may be useful.

MasterCard debit purchase volume: $448 billion in the United States for the full year of 2012.
Visa debit purchase volume: $1.10 trillion in the United States for the full year of 2012.
MasterCard debit transaction volume: 11.3 billion transactions in the United States for the full year of 2012.
Visa debit transaction volume: 29.5 billion transactions in the United States for the full year of 2012.
Total number of debit card transactions in the U.S.: 47 billion in 2012, vs. 15.6 billion in 2003.
http://www.nasdaq.com/article/credit-card-statistics-industry-facts-debt-statistics-cm21786

Stock analysis
https://www.trefis.com/company?hm=V.trefis
https://www.trefis.com/company?hm=MA.trefis

Charts & Graphs Archive
http://www.nilsonreport.com/publication_chart_and_graphs_archive.php?1=1&year=2014

Visa's network is a star-based system.
http://usa.visa.com/download/corporate/_media/visanet-technology/visa-net-booklet.pdf
http://usa.visa.com/download/corporate/_media/visa-fact-sheet.pdf
http://investor.visa.com/

MasterCard's Banknet is a peer-to-peer mesh network.
http://www.mastercard.com/us/company/en/docs/virtual_private_network.pdf
http://investor.mastercard.com/investor-relations/default.aspx

MasterCard and Visa use ISO 8583 Financial transaction card originated messages protocol.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8583

Visa handles on average around 2,000 transactions per second with a daily peak rate of 4,000 tps.
http://usa.visa.com/about-visa/our-business/visa-transaction.jsp

Visa has a peak capacity of around 56,000 transactions per second and 19,000 tps during peak shopping periods.
(removed, only available in yahoo or google cache)
http://www.visa.com/blogarchives/us/2013/10/10/stress-test-prepares-visanet-for-the-most-wonderful-time-of-the-year/index.html

PayPal handles around 10 million transactions per day for an average of 115 tps.
https://about.paypal-corp.com/

The Bitcoin network is restricted to a sustained rate of 7 tps due to the bitcoin protocol restricting block sizes to 1MB (anti-spam).
7 tps is the theoretical maximum, the practical maximum is about 2.4 tps. 
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability
https://www.quora.com/Bitcoin-is-limited-to-7-transactions-per-second-Other-than-increasing-miner-fees-for-the-processing-power-needed-what-other-viable-solutions-are-there

Side-chains can increase Bitcoin's transaction rate.
http://www.coindesk.com/could-the-bitcoin-lightning-network-solve-blockchain-scalability/

"If  all  Bitcoin  transactions  were  on  the  blockchain,  to  enable  7  billion  people  to  make  two
transactions per day, it would require 24GB blocks every ten minutes at best."
http://lightning.network/lightning-network-paper-DRAFT-0.5.pdf

One Bitcoin negative you may want to include is that it is susceptible to the "51% attack".
And actually with less than 50%, the same kind of attacks are possible, but with less rate of success.
Someone with only 40% of the network computing power can overcome a 6-deep confirmed transaction with a 50% success rate.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses
http://en.bitcoinwiki.org/File:Bitcoin_weaknesses.jpg

Bitcoin is more centralized due to large mining pools.
http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-mining-detente-ghash-io-51-issue/
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/9402/mining-pool-centralization-crisis-levels/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1uk690/ghashio_just_mined_6_in_a_row_again_no_big_deal/

Bitcoin hashrate distribution
https://blockchain.info/pools

The Bitcoin network has ~5800 reachable nodes (8-2-2015).
https://getaddr.bitnodes.io/

Bitcoin Network Speed 8 Times Faster than Top 500 Supercomputers Combined
https://tradeblock.com/blog/bitcoin-network-8-times-faster-than-top-500-super-computers-combined/

Global Bitcoin Computing Power Now 256 Times Faster Than Top 500 Supercomputers, Combined!
http://www.forbes.com/sites/reuvencohen/2013/11/28/global-bitcoin-computing-power-now-256-times-faster-than-top-500-supercomputers-combined/

Tianhe-2, the world's fastest supercomputer has a performance of only 33.86 petaFLOPS compared to 4,831,951 petaFLOPS of the Bitcoin network (8-2-2015).
http://www.top500.org/featured/top-systems/
http://bitcoinwatch.com/

PoW is wasteful, every second about 400,000 trillion SHA256 computations are being performed by the Bitcoin network.
The current Network Hashrate is at 389,815,294 GH/s (2-8-2015).
https://blockchain.info/stats
https://blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate

Bitcoin Miners Are Racking Up $150,000 A Day In Power Consumption Alone
http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/13/the-cost-of-a-bitcoin/

The Impossible Trinity: Security, Environment Protection and Decentralization
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/10829/impossible-trinity-security-environment-protection-decentralization/

Think Tank Reignites Debate Over Bitcoin Mining's Environmental Effects
http://www.coindesk.com/think-tank-debate-bitcoin-mining-environment/

Under the Microscope: Economic and Environmental Costs of Bitcoin Mining
http://www.coindesk.com/microscope-economic-environmental-costs-bitcoin-mining/

Under the Microscope: Conclusions on the Costs of Bitcoin
http://www.coindesk.com/microscope-conclusions-costs-bitcoin/

Virtual Bitcoin Mining Is a Real-World Environmental Disaster
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-04-12/virtual-bitcoin-mining-is-a-real-world-environmental-disaster

Bitcoin's carbon footprint is out of control.
http://bitcarbon.org/

nice research ...

[NorrisK]

It seems like me the main consumer services Bitcoin is offering is 1) drugs/gambling/illegal activities, and with that 2) privacy, 3) remittance and the trailing 4) internet shopping

Does that seem about right in that order?

And while right now 1 and 2 are much bigger than 3 and 4, in the coming years 3 and 4 will grow much larger than 1 and 2. 

I guess you are right. Internet shopping is a still increasing market and with the right incentive to use crypto currencies it can easily overtake 1 and 2.

[patmast3r]

The delay was caused by one of the cosigners being on a business trip.  After he is back this week, the last of the transactions will go out.

The business trip has not been going on for a quarter of a year

Thanks for pointing that out!

[g3rszpi]

Christ is this a joke? This is why NEM is going no where.

Nem is going no where because of "marketers" or whar are they called. So many excuses, delays, weak marketing,almost no PR at all,no innovation and developement in last few months,devs dont accept the help offered.by the community,i mean they have to be more open minded Thats why nem woth nothing. We need a radical change.

[Buratino]

Christ is this a joke? This is why NEM is going no where.

Nem is going no where because of "marketers" or whar are they called. So many excuses, delays, weak marketing,almost no PR at all,no innovation and developement in last few months,devs dont accept the help offered.by the community,i mean they have to be more open minded Thats why nem woth nothing. We need a radical change.

No. There is financial world crisis (grexit, china stock market bubble). Also Vitalik's baby born, Ethereum sucks out all oxygen from second generation cryptocurrency family. There is no room for NEM growth.