Hi, everyone! As noted above, there is active discussion of development for NFD.
MaWo was good enough to show the first innovation that's already in the pipe: localization. It's taken a lot of delicate work, so that's why he,
lordoliver and
richwang have spent so much time on it. The time they spent shows the core philosophy of NFD tech development: take it slow, be thorough, test, test and test before adding it to the NFD infrastructure. That way, we don't offer you any unpleasant surprises.
This dev philosophy, which I'm living up to in my own way during my 'testnet phase' of Relationship Marketing around this board, makes NFD the very opposite of a scamcoin.
Unfortunately, this philosophy has a downside: you already know what it is. In part because your tech team takes our time and gets it right, the usual band of punters have decided that NFD is a go-nowhere coin. That's the real reason why it sluggishly trades between 2 and 3 satoshis. There's a nice thick bid stack at 2 and 1 satoshis, but there's an imposing sell wall all the way up to 9 satoshis. NFD has some volume behind it, but not much at the moment. Although it might be a bit of a disappointment for Bter at the moment, it is active enough for the Bter guys to rightfully consider listing NFD to be a good business decision for them.
As for myself, I'm "testnetting" my rusty writing skills by working on an outside project. Unfortunately, I'm so out of shape at the moment that I have to write in adrenaline spurts followed by post-adrenaline exhaustion when I'm kind-of listless. Nonetheless, I've managed to bang out ~25,000 words - half a full Kindle book - in about a week an a half. And the quality of the content, according to the editor to which I've submitted the first two parts, is pretty durn good.
Once I'm through the 'testnet' part of my Relationship Marketing foray in the wide outside world, and once I'm through the 'testnet' phase of getting my daily word count up to hack speed
, I'll put my keyboard to writing books and articles, articles and more books and articles to spread the word about NFD. First on the list is a small series of get-started how-to short books. And - I'm sure you know why - the first book will be a how-to book on using Keepass to generate and maintain a secure passphrase. Since Keepass is free and open source, I'm going to write this one in part out of duty. But, it will be tied to NFD by using the NFD online wallet as the first walk-though example for using the Keepass properly.
As for the rest of the NFD team, the
Trello board MaWo mentioned will give you a good idea of what we're up to. High priority right now is coming up with a simpler client that the ordinary Internaut can use simply to buy and sell with NFD. In other words, your dev team has an eye on the long-term prize: NFD being used as a real cryptocurrency for commerce. That's what NFD should be. Not a speculator's plaything, not a hypey coin whose peaks and inevitable valleys leave a swath of disappointed bagholders, but a solid slow-growing but growing cryptocurrency that will eventually be used for real buying and real selling.
And of course, the Asset Exchange is fully developed and ready to go. This part, we're leaving up to the community in the near term.
So that's where we are right now. Each active participant in NFD development, including badly-needed volunteers like
CoinKombinat,
ciappa and
l8orre (sorry if I missed your name), are working methodically and steadily. Subject to the constraints of their outside responsibilities.
But we do need your help!The best thing you can do, as an NFD community member, is to follow
ciappa's advice above and
please be patient! Please give us the time we need to get things right for you.
I know that the current price performance of NFD is disheartening; it's sometimes got me feeling a little depressed myself.
But I ask you to consider the silver lining, the compensatory upside, of NFD's listless performance and current unpopularity:
Right now, NFD's order book is strikingly like that of Reddcoin's back in the spring, when it was mostly seen around here as yet another write-off. There was a solid bid stack for RDD at 4, 3, 2 and 1 satoshis but an imposing sell wall at 5 satoshis and above. Back in the late spring, had I had
twenty Bitcoins, I could have bought
four hundred million Reddcoins and have
the entire order filled at five satoshis in less than a day. If I had had fifty bitcoins, plus enough for Cryptsy trading fees, I could have become an RDD billionaire at five satoshis. I just checked Cryptsy and saw Reddcoin last trading at thirty-one satoshis, and that's after a pullback whose peak was forty.
If you know the Redd story, you know that it came alive after the RDD dev team unveiled a new network-securing algorithm called "Proof-of-Stake Velocity" which they're in the process of implementing. In the early days, when I was involved with Redd, the team had no plans to unveil PoSV; at that time, in fact, they hadn't even thought about it. It took them several months of active community-building, developing new tipbots, and facing recurrent complaints about Redd's then-listless price performance, before they hit upon the idea.
That's what it takes to come up with a real innovation that wakes up a blah coin. Real, unique, new innovations actually take a lot of time, including a lot of time to come up with the original idea in the first place. After all, it if were easy to come up with, it's a safe bet that someone else has already thought of it.
Right now, the trading and order book of NFD is strikingly like that of Reddcoin in its listless blah days (months, really.) That's the reason why I'm asking for your help, why I'm asking you to be patient and stay the course with us.
If you're of a mind to, NFD's listlessness actually gives you lots of chance to "leg in" through buying more when you want. That's what I'm planning to do if I scrape together a little fiat or if my currently stuck-in-limbo investments wake up and pay off. You can take this self-disclosure as a "whale alert" if you like.
I'm also withdrawing my NFD after I've bought them. Thanks to those of you who are doing the same. We need more forgers to keep the network robust. (FYI: when I open up my NFD client, I make sure that my forging is turned off because I don't want to whale-tilt the forging lottery.)
So that's where we are right now. On the tech side, development is proceeding slowly but steadily and carefully. On the promotion side, I still need to limber up but I'll come out of the gate with reasonably quick speed. Once I've mostly recovered my flabby writer's muscles.
NFD's price performance and volume are disheartening at the moment, but so was Reddcoin's back in its dog days. All we need is that One Big Catalyst and NFD will finally wake up! We're already quite ready to join the ranks of serious coins; we just need to be recognized...