My prediction is that NEM will probably take the role of NXT's "Litecoin". I think there is great potential for the platform, and NEM does bring a few good ideas and innovative concepts to the table (such as their POI algorithm which has never been attempted before). Litecoin did the same back in 2011. It allowed people without GPU farms to mine it, and it had a faster block time which meant that people had to wait less for confirmations. Like Litecoin, NEM offers some potential advantages over NXT but also like Litecoin, I personally don't feel that these advantages are significant enough to overcome the fact that NXT got there first.
That isn't to say that the NEM community won't grow over the next months/years or that the technology is destined to die. It just means that it's unlikely that NEM will overtake NXT, that's all. Even utopianfuture seems to have liked the Litecoin comparision. When drawing up the specifications for NEM, he copied Litecoin's practice of multiplying the total coin supply by 4 (which was later abandoned however).
I'm not a software dev, but I have some experience in software development and programming. I've seen snippets of NEM's code and it looks to be well written (although the same also went for Qora too which wasn't exactly a success). Then again, it's the ideas that matter and not the quality of the code. NEM has good ideas, good distribution, good devs, and the beginnings of a good community. I think it has a bright future.
I whish everyone was levelheaded enough to write down their thoughts in this manner. I may not agree 100% of what you're saying but I respect that you kept it clean
I would agree with you if NXT was already was what BTC was when LTC came. I don't think NXT has the adoption yet (not that BTC has much of "real" adotpion but you know what I mean ?) that would prevent NEM - or any other crypto - to take it's spot. IMHO there isn't much of a spot to take as the majority of people haven't even heard of either of them.
Can't argue with the fact that NXT is far ahead regarding 3rd party driven projects utilizing it and even community wise (to some extent at least).
Hmm... That's a good point. I'll add a few others too:
1. Litecoin was released a couple of months after Bitcoin was first "revealed" to the mainstream world. That was around June 2011. NXT, so far, has not had such an opportunity to cement its name into the public consciousness.
2. NXT isn't the only platform in the 2.0 niche whereas Bitcoin was pretty much the only crypto back in 2011 so the possibility of NXT getting dethroned as the most widely used 2.0 platform is probably far greater than Bitcoin getting dethroned.
3. If you compare the market cap of Bitcoin in October 2011 when Litecoin was released and NXT today, they're actually pretty comparable. Bitcoin was trading at $2-3 back then with a total coin supply of 7 million coins which equals a market cap of about $20 million. NXT's market cap right now is $10 million and was higher in the past. However, market cap doesn't really tell the full story and being the first crypto is a lot more significant than being the first 2.0 crypto.
I do still think that NEM being so late to the party will prove to be a handicap though but you definitely have a point in saying that this barrier will probably be nowhere near as unsurmountable as that of Litecoin's.
tutorial list here: http://blog.nem.io/nem-tutorial-list/
