These posts, although unpleasant, are also necessary to learn and grow. If we don't understand what we are doing wrong we will continue to do so.
One of the main differences between Nxt and XCP is that NXT has a central lead, someone who is directly responsible and invested in the success of the currency. With XCP no one person is any more invested than the next. We all stand to gain and lose just as much as we invested.
NXT has someone to say "hey, this is a problem, so we are going to do this". Where as XCP doesn't have that central lead or authority. This was the decision of the developers to create a grass-roots free-growing enterprise and only the future will tell how it all turns out. I don't support this model and in the past I have voiced my opinions on the subject so I wont rehash them. It's also important to understand that NXT isn't limited by outside factors (BTC). NXT lives and dies by its own decisions. It is not arbitrarily limited or denied (OP return anyone?) by external forces (BTC developers). The initial XCP developers chose to attach this project to BTC for certain reasons and it was their right to choose so.
I would like to point out a very interesting comment though:
2) I'm not sure about 'everything', but XCP is a much more powerful currency than BTC, and all of the more interesting functionality of Counterparty requires its extra capabilities.
If XCP is so much more
powerful and
amazing than BTC, why are we arbitrarily limiting ourselves to the shackles of bitcoins blockchain? 10 minute blocks? In the future we will be saying "30 second blocks are you serious? I'm not waiting 30s to pay for my coffee!". If it can't be used to pay for everything and anything, then its not a true currency. If its not a true currency, then why are we using it. Bitcoins first-mover advantage is not going to last forever. And when it does start showing the signs of its age (which in my position it already is), we are going to be in an uncomfortable position.
The promise of bitcoin will live on, regardless of whether we are using Bitcoin, or blackcoin, or darkcoin, etc, so to arbitrarily pick one of these and say "this is
the one" and attach ourselves to it seems foolish.
Regardless of whether bitcoin fails and another takes its place, NXT will continue on. I hate NXT mainly because of its distribution. But we are a large unwieldy and uncoordinated beast competing against a well-oiled machine. They have the budget, the focus and the drive to pick goals and accomplish them. Not only that but we are self-limiting ourselves. With this in mind its obvious why the price hasn't moved.
Technological Anarchy (thats what this is, people coming together and working together by choice, not by law) sounds nice on paper. "Hey we'll all contribute together and it will be egalitarian and no one will control anything and it will be great!". But in reality doesn't help get things done in a efficient and timely manner.
Theres a reason why we've always had central authority in the form of a monarchy or president. It gets shit done.
That reminds me of a picture.
Hard to argue with that.
The creator of Nxt is still anonymous and, indeed, has not posted on Bitcointalk since early November. We three, on the other hand, have revealed our identities, in spite of having had no intentions of doing so in the beginning, for the specific purpose of going to conferences and doing business development, ourselves. If we don't mention everything happens internally, that is because we don't want to count our chickens before they are hatched, and are aware that making growing business relationships overly-public does more harm than good.
The fact that fewer than 80 addresses initially controlled all the Nxt is not some minor "detail" that will be forgotten in the future, nor is the fact that they cut off the Kickstarter period before planned and without warning. That aside, we are writing a document listing Counterparty's "competitive advantages" over some of the other "2.0" projects, in which we address Nxt in particular pretty extensively. This document will be available in the next week, hopefully.
For now, we should point out that proof-of-stake mining has inherent problems, which, to my knowledge, neither BCNext nor anyone else in the Nxt community has addressed. In particular, the well-known "nothing at stake" attack, by which miners can mine on multiple blockchains at no cost to themselves; this is in contrast to proof-of-work, where the resources one uses to mine are depleted in the process of mining. "Transparent forging" doesn't solve this problem, and, in any case, transparent forging has not even been implemented yet.
With regards to proof-of-work, shorter block times aren't magic: shorter blocks means less security.
EDIT: wording.