Nxt did not fork and bter has gotten most of the nxt back. I am now more bullish then ever! With the release of the instantdex around the corner (near instant trading on the asset exchange and decentralized crypto to crypto, nxt is preparing to be a force to be reckoned with.
I was quite impressed with nxt. The developers released a version of the client that would reverse the stolen transaction only but the forgers did not accept the change. This demonstrates the power of distributed consensus and hopefully the world takes notice. Obvious threat to central banks is obvious. Maybe POS has merit after all.
The rollback discussion did the opposite to me. It proved the PoS achieves consensus by popular opinion rather than by objective truth. With PoW, you must expend resources to "vote" on your chain, so you pick the single best chain based on a mathematically-defined selection criteria (mining two competing chains would be a waste). Each new block added to the chain decreases the chance of a re-org exponentially, and all the participants realize this, so deep re-orgs are out of the question.
With PoS, there is no tether to the physical world. Since there are no resources spent to "vote," stakers can vote on many different chains for very little cost. Even today, it would be possible to roll back the 50M NXT theft as it costs nothing to change their blockchain. PoS gives the economic majority the power to rewrite history. Truth is defined by opinion.
There's a reason the first sentence of
1984 was used as the passphrase for the Nxt Genesis Account.
I think what people are missing is that nxt is not actually a currency. It is a platform that contains a token that is required to use the different features the platform provides. Of course those tokens have value and therefore can be used as a currency but it is not the primary use. Bitcoins primary use is as a currency, which it does well. Nxt provides and asset exchange, a decentralized coin to coin exchange, a digital goods store and many other types of tools that are just not something that bitcoin is for, as a currency first.
I like to think that nxt is a platform built on top of bitcoin. Not in the same sense that http was built on top of tcp but they are connected. Without bitcoin nxt would not have been possible. Bitcoin is layer 1, it provides that connection to the real world as you said. Then nxt was made possible and it still only possible to get to it through bitcoin. Hence nxt is connected to the real world through bitcoin, which is the gold standard of crypto. Nxt provides extra features on top of bitcoin that bitcoin cannot provide for itself. They are very much intertwined and will feed off of each other's strengths. They are not competitors. Crypto is a brand new thing and perhaps that means that the concept of something being built on top of something is also in a brand new paradigm.
