Welcome Nxters: newcomers as well as long-time community members!

News Summary

Nxt has just released another major feature: The Monetary System, which allows users to issue customized coins on top of the Nxt Network. The community has voted on whom to entrust with spending our community funds, lots of 3rd party projects are cooking, the Consensus Research Group has released reports about the Nxt PoS algorithm, and also: You can now donate towards the possible destruction of our blockchain. Sounds massive? It is. This is NXT Newsletter #16.

In this week’s issue, the focus is mainly on the inner workings of the Nxt core tech and the Nxt Community.

Topics

The MS launch

CFC: Voting result

New Nxt core devs

Kill the blockchain!

Consensus Research Group

Hail to the old committees

Quote of the week

Words of Wisdom of the week

The Monetary System launch

The Nxt Monetary System (MS) has launched. Using the various parameters outlined here, anyone can now create customized currencies on top of the Nxt blockchain. New coins can be designed for specific purposes, some of which are touched on in this article.

750+ currency names were registered within the first 24 hours of the launch, making it a good day for forgers, with approximately 370K NXT in fees (40NXT – 25,000 NXT per registration) being paid out.

With the Monetary System, you can create coins without having to set up and bootstrap a network, as it’s already backed and secured for you by the Nxt Network. Bootstrapping is one of the biggest hurdles to overcome when launching a new p2p coin, so this is of particular relevance whether you’re a person, a business or a local community which wants to go digital with an already existing local currency. Loyalty points, game currencies, and controllable/pegged currencies are easy to create, it’s even possible for existing coins to be moved onto the Nxt blockchain. The Nxt wiki has a great in-depth tutorial, and if you need further help, you can visit the Monetary System forum.

Another use case is the ‘crowd funding coin’, which is ‘sold’ in exchange for donations; if a pre-set amount of ‘coins’ have been ‘bought’ at a pre-set time, the funds are released to the issuer. If not, the money is returned to the donators/buyers. This feature turns Nxt into a 100% decentralized crowdfunding platform.

As usual with Nxt, this new core feature doesn’t come with an in depth ‘For Dummies’ manual. Use cases are proposed, but the community is encouraged to test, learn and tweak it, brainstorm and find more use cases. If you want to play around with issuing currencies, you are advised to start by doing so on the Nxt Testnet.

Nxt.org has set up an easy to access testnet node, and a well-funded account will provide you the testNXT you need to get familiar with the Monetary System. Instructions and testnet can be found here.

On mainnet new ‘PoW’ coins like EGOLD, ELEMS and FORKK are being minted with the Nxt Mint Worker Utility and sold in the in-client exchange, whilst in the giveaway threads in Nxtforum useless MS currency coins, created out of thin air for a 40 NXT fee, are being given away for free.

While some early MS coins are meaningless, others have clear purposes. These are a few examples:

ORA

The Ora project started out on bitcointalk.org with an idea of making a “free and fairly distributed” 2.0 PoS coin based on the Qora source code. Ora describes itself as being a “leaderless, decentralized ‘starfish’ community software development project”. The initial method of stake distribution was a giveaway using the Nxt Asset Exchange: 889 people registered for a free stake of 166,666 assets each, between June 24 and July 8.

On Nov. 25 Ora announced that it would be launched as a Monetary System coin.

Kora:

When CFB first suggested this option in June the only real reservation was that ORA would be dependent on the NXT platform for its very existence. Six months on, as NXT celebrates its first birthday we believe the connection with NXT is a major advantage for ORA. The NXT ecosystem is resilient, vibrant, and grows stronger every day, and the development output over the last 12 months has been truly staggering. We believe the NXT platform offers ORA long term network stability, just as TCP/IP offers stability for higher order protocols like HTTP, FTP, SMTP, and this stability will allow us to focus our resources and attention on the more ‘retail’ level concerns, like user experience, leaving the ‘backstage’ grunt work of network security and stability for NXT. As always, we welcome any feedback our stakeholders might have, and we take this opportunity to invite all people to join us, particularly those with dev skills who are interested in developing the ORA applications that will run on NXT.

ORA’s three letter code is the ISO compatible, ‘XOR’, so ORA is set up for future growth and international recognition.

ZIN

Sepehr:

We have issued ZIN as a POS Crypto in NXT Monetary System and will assign everybody with a SMS Number 100 ZIN soon! It can be the biggest airdrop ever in Cryptocurrency history!

Sepehr is a veteran Nxter from Iran, and also the issuer of another asset, Forgecoin, which has earned him trust in the community by paying dividends to its holders for 7 months.

CryptoZin will make NXT (as well as the MS coins built on it), BTC and other top altcoins simple to use for anyone with a smartphone. We don’t yet know whether ZIN will have its own monetary value or not. But by sending a Nxt backed cryptocurrency as a promotional offer to “anyone in the world with a mobile phone”, Sepehr will be indirectly demonstrating the value of his service. ZIN will prove to a non-tech audience that CryptoZin not only works but also is so easy to use that they can send ZIN/MS coins on to friends or even grandparents. Next step, of course, will be to teach them the value of real cryptocurrencies. CryptoZin plans to integrate SuperNET.

https://nxtforum.org/assets-board/(ann)-(cryptozin)-cryptocurrency-for-anyone-with-a-smartphone!-)/

TSC

jl777 has suggested in SuperNET Slack that he will issue an MS coin with a special use case. Exactly how he will tweak it, is something we’ll have to wait and see, as the announcement only contains limited information about this.

jl777:

I want to make a short life cycle realtime currency for poker chips. We need a way to do 1000 tx per second between the players as the poker players are playing that fast. Any change in players extinguishes the currency, and it goes to something more solid, maybe NXT, maybe some MS coin. I believe I figured out how to achieve realtime tx, backed by locked NXT, freely exchangeable, verifiable. Still some unsolved issues but I feel the locked MS coin is a key part of this.

James has not earned his respect in the crypto world by talking tech without backing his words with actual code. So we might soon see a new MS use case turn up here, as part of a feature in his brainchild, the SuperNET.

LTB or not?

Swiss NXT and Bitcoin investor Marc De Messel has recently offered Adam B. Levine to buy out all Let’s Talk Bitcoin coins for 4 million NXT, provided that Adam would use NXT as his reward currency instead. After having his offer appreciated but turned down for various reasons , Marc changed his offer to this: If the LTB crew and community re-issues their LTBcoin experiment as an MS coin with additional features, Marc will back it with 2 million NXT in addition to its own current net worth.

The discussion about his offer is ongoing and can be followed here.

So what’s next?

The Monetary System can be used in its most raw form within Nxt’s NRS client (like any other core feature), but as usual with Nxt, further developments, including third party ones, are quick to appear or at least be under discussion: a java ‘minter’ has already been launched, NxtMint, there’s talk going on about making easily customized standalone MS-wallets, MyNXT has released an MS-plugin for their online wallet, and MS enhancement proposals are being discussed with the core devs.

To discuss the use of MS currencies in Local Exchange Trading Systems, visit this thread.

Anyone can build on the Nxt platform for free. There’s a list of API calls here, and a list of the public nodes available for all. Inside.org is an initiative designed to help new Nxt programmers, and on the forum, you can get help from the Nxt core developers themselves. Nxt is an easy to use crypto platform, and with the MS core feature launch, Nxt has now taken another big technological step forward ahead of the competition. The current use cases for the NRS client are merely the tip of the iceberg of possibilities, as described in the Nxt [CORE] article series.

CFC: Voting result

The proposal on how to structure a new and pro-active Nxt Community Fund (as mentioned in the last newsletter) was adopted with 94.1% of the votes, meaning that the remaining NXT (approximately 6M in total) from the 3 existing community funding committees will be transferred to this NEW committee, which will be given authority to act and spend on behalf of the Nxt Community.

On December 03, interested Nxters were asked to nominate themselves for one of the 8 unpaid positions in CFC. On January 14, a 2 weeks’ voting round finally began and the result of the vote is the following lineup:

Chair : EvilDave

Secretary: Cassius

Business position : Damelon

Technical member : ChuckOne

Treasurers: DomP and Pouncer

Congratulations to all those elected and not least a great big THANK YOU!

New Nxt core devs

A new developer team has joined our CORE dev team. They will implement:

Global Collaboration, which includes: Project Management. Regular and flexible payment models via simplified Smart Contract Transaction.

Reputation System.

Their vision is a decentralized business network (https://nxtforum.org/debune/announcing-debune/).

NRS manager ChuckOne writes:

Please welcome the new members of the core dev team by providing donations or help to them. Roberto is going to release assets for crowdfunding in order to try covering their expenditures for both the NRS core additions and their third-party application DeBuNe on top of Nxt.

Welcome, Roberto (Capodieci), Yudi and aryanatameiyana. A full list of Nxt core devs are here.

Kill the blockchain!

A week ago a visitor from Bitcointalk made it to the Nxtforums.

cynicSOB:

Hi! I’m cynicSOB and I’m a cynical SOB

and I’m here to hack your coin

white hat

promise!

Nxt raises funds for its funeral

BCNext once advised: Do not trust strangers on the Internet, especially if their nickname is “BCNext”. It’s not the first time that the Nxt Community has set up bounties and dared hackers to attack the Nxt blockchain and kill it. cynicSOB has been met with open arms and best wishes by the community, as well as pledges of both NXT and BTC bounties from Nxt veterans, and EvilDave (former TechDevFund Committee member, now chair in the new Community Funding Committee) is offering cynicSOB technical support to carry out the attack. Unfortunately, an attack on the Nxt blockchain would cost around 3,7 million dollars, so the attack will be carried out on testnet.

EvilDave:

Could we please beef up the TestNet and get some more nodes up? I’d like to see around 20 nodes, with at least 10 forging accounts. We may need to do some serious TestNXT redistribution, as cynicSOB will also need a substantial amount to set up an attack (10% of the total was suggested) as well as substantial sums for the forging accounts.

Let’s see if the creation of BCNext and the Nxt CORE dev team can be trusted. We’re in the hands of cynicSOB. The ongoing drama can be followed here.

rlh:

Only in Nxt do prominent Nxt users want to see their coin hacked! We know our devs can innovate past any verified flaw!

Consensus Research Group

December 12, Kushti published a simulation tool for Nxt forging on GitHub, taking a less ‘cynical’ approach to the same declared goal – testing whether the Nxt PoS tech is as secure as we claim it to be or not. With ‘Consensus Research Group’, Kushti has started what he calls “the first independent research group going to bring formal verification to the world of cryptocurrencies.”

Kushti:

Cryptocurrencies suffer from unproven claims, bold statements, low-quality ‘papers’ and naive implementations, though the cost of an error could be very high (USD$ millions). Consensus Research Group is going to improve overall quality of thinking about cryptocurrencies with:

proven open-source reference implementations code made partly at least in Coq programming language/theorem prover (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coq).

executable simulations anyone can play with (to e.g. find best parameters under some assumptions).

formal but understandable papers.

coins’ developers’ consultations.

The research project began when Kushti started writing a series of personal blog posts about the Nxt forging algorithm. Following up on the ideas contained in the first 2 posts, his friend andruiman published a statistical paper on some of the properties of Nxt forging, thereby causing a heated debate in the Nxt forums. He converted Kushti’s model into Coq, “proving some basic properties as theorems, and introducing multi branched forging (which could be turned into so-called Transparent Forging during implementation and also to open the door to Nothing-at-Stake investigation.”

Paper on attacks related to Multibranch Forging: https://github.com/ConsensusResearch/articles-papers/blob/master/multistrategy/multistrategy.pdf

1st paper: http://www.scribd.com/doc/248208963/Multibranch-forging

MultiBranch Forging Simulation Tool: https://github.com/ConsensusResearch/MultiBranch

Nxt PoS forging simulation tool: https://github.com/ConsensusResearch/ForgingSimulation

Vitalik Buterin (Etherium) has discussed the first paper in this thread on reddit.

On January 14, 2015, Kushti concluded:

Nothing-at-stake attack – not possible at the moment! Will be possible when a lot of forgers will use multiple-branch forging to increase profits. (…) In such scenario attack is possible only within short-range e.g. with 25 confirmations needed 10% attacker can’t make an attack. And attack is pretty random in nature, it’s impossible to predict whether 2 forks will be within N best forks (from exponentially growing set) for k confirmations. So from our point of view the importance of the attack is pretty overblown.

People are invited to carry out their own experiments using N@S simulation tool.

Kushti first entered the Nxt stage as the lead developer of a Techcrunch Disrupt Hackathon project, Cryptamail, a decentralized email system built on top of Nxt. He joined the Nxt CORE dev team as a tester and subsequently went on to develop several Nxt core features, including the Voting System and 2-Phased Transactions.

Consensus Research Group has issued a crowd funding asset (‘consensus’, asset ID 5841059555983208287) which is sold in lots, the timing of the sales being based on the achievement of certain development milestones. The price of each asset is 1 NXT and should be bought only from the Issuer account. There will be no dividends but there will be opportunities for investors to start research projects by vote. You can view all the results here: https://nxtforum.org/consensus-research/

Hail to the ‘old’ funding committees

To round this off, let’s take a look at some of the projects that the soon to be obsolete Nxt Funding Committees actually funded.

Recurring core developer salaries

The most valuable investment of the community funds: The core of the Nxt platform.

Nxtwiki.org

https://wiki.nxtcrypto.org/

300,000 Nxt to cover 12 months of bounty funds at 25,000 Nxt per month.

NxtWallet / NRS GUI

400,000 NXT. http://nxtra.org/nxt-wallet/ (redirects to nxt.org)

Freenxt.org

10,000 NXT for the faucet. http://freenxt.org

Nxt-Starter.com

One of the first community initiatives to get funded. 200K NXT were sent on April 23 to the NXT crowd funding site initiative, but then things got complicated. On October 27 POPPP announced that the site was finally up.

Nxt-Starter.com is fully functional but still in its first version. Payments are made through a coinpayments.net solution – the plan is to integrate p2p funding with NXT and MS-coins directly, making the payment system fully decentralized. If you want to raise a bounty for the NXT Community, you can do it here for no fee. In addition to running crowdfunding campaigns you can get a page for your Nxt Marketplace store, and list projects that have already got funded.

Nxt-Starter is part of the NXTweb asset, which will also contain a freelancer and a microjob website, based on source code from CoinEvolve. But, as they say, that’s another story.

The Nxt B-day giveaway

10 random NXTER.ORG newsletter subscribers have been picked as the winners of 100 NXTP each, as announced in the last NXT Newsletter. The Nxt Community was asked for random numbers, which we checked against our list of email subscribers to find the lucky winners and then asked them for their Nxt account ID to receive their prize. Congratulations to the winners!

6 x 100 NXTP have been sent out. As for the last 4 winners, if they haven’t claimed their prizes before 27.01.2015, new winners will be picked – so now is the time to check your inbox and spam box.

Quote of the week

Damelon

Work needs to be rewarded

Words of wisdom of the week

ChuckOne:

NXT will be the fuel currency of the Nxt ecosystem. People will pay NXT to forgers (as they do now) in order to get transactions verified. Forgers will sell NXT to people in exchange for currencies. So, there will be a market that determines the price of NXT.

Also read: The Value of 10 NXTs