As the recent hack has proven if the hacker would have been malicious nxt would be dead at next to no cost at all.
Someone already said that, you guys keep repeating the same things over and over.
of course it's quite possible if Bter didn't do it, the price of all NXT on the market would be 0.
It would stay depressed at 4-5k satoshi for 2-3 months if he chose to sell in equal portions (1m each day), that's how long it would take for the market to absorb 50M volume. If he chose to sell all in one go, it would go to 100-200 satoshi for a few hours, buying 50m NXTs at 500 satoshi takes only 250 Bitcoins, that's about daily volume of NXT trading. So all the 50m would be quickly bought within 1 day, that's rough calculations, give or take a few hours. Gradual selling over 2-3 months would hurt more because it'd be more prolonged bleeding, but not dramatic either.
Hacker can't control NXT network with 5% of the coins. The only thing he could do is what is quoted above.
quoting your opinion proves nothing. we just saw 45M NXT bought for a measly 200BTC. just goes to show you how badly the hacker wanted BTC instead of NXT. yet he still hold 8M NXT to screw around the NXT network. can one short NXT yet?
trying to physically buy up a crapload of asic mining equipment, build a secret datacenter equivalent to all the current mines out there, channel enough water and electricity to such a secret facility, hire the manpower and construction machinery to build out said center, hire the expertise to implement such hardware is NXT to impossible at this point. we see asic chip makers pushing the 14nm chip frontier while Intel is still on 28nm. and yet the boogeyman gubmint is supposed to be the bleeding edge? no, i'll take the private, open source sector anytime.
agree...
If you are an investor want to damage a PoS coin you would prolly just lend the money to do it, like george soros when he messed up the british pound:
http://internationalinvest.about.com/od/gettingstarted/a/Black-Wednesday-George-Soros-Bet-Against-Britain.htmIf you are govt agency and want to get rid of a PoS coin you would prolly just send an email to the exchanges requesting the wallet they own, a few or prolly even 1 exchange would be enough to dictate the network.
If you are a hacker and want to get rid of a PoS coin you would prolly just hack Mintpal and Cryptsy or whatever, 1-3 exchanges should be enough to dictate the network (see Vericoin and Mintpal).
Keep in mind you just need 50+ percent of the current staking coins, not the total coins. Even stealing/buying old privatekeys that were filled with enough coins before a hardcoded and thus centralized checkpoint in a pos coin is suffiecient to rebuild a chain with a higher commulative difficulty and thus fork the network.
Trying to secure something with itself seems at least for me totally absurd. PoW gets secured by Hardware all around the globe, PoS secures itself with thin air.
If you steal PoW coins you steal money basically, you don´t endanger the network at any point, yes there will be panic sellers if you dump the coins but thats just a shortterm efffect, but if you steal PoS coins you steal way more then that, i can´t see how that has anything to do with being safer than PoW.
PS: The same fundamental PoS problem also applies to absurd concepts like the DRK masternode system.