IOTA can prove it doesnt work at any time by removing the centralized servers known as the Coordinator which is otherwise enforcing the convergence of the chain.
Exactly, that's the problem. With Byteball there is a similar problem - it seems not to work without trusted "witnesses". However, there is no proof that it
doesn't work, so I give it a minimal chance.
The only reason it did not blow up is because the stake in Nxt is centralized.
PoS does not converge if 51% of the stake is not controlled by an oligarchy to enforce that the nothing-at-stake converges on a single chain.
I know about Nothing at stake, and the attack scenarios are very difficult to implement. I've read the whole series the Ethereum team has written about that topic ("The History of Casper"). From what I know it is even more problematic if PoS coins have an uneven distribution, while a PoS currency with relatively equal distribution would normally work as expected. And at NXT most of the original holders only hold a fraction of their original holdings. Distribution may be still uneven but should have improved.
What is true is that the holders of 51% of the stake must behave in a honest way (not trying to cheat minting on several chains at once), but that is not different from mining.
PoS has some disadvantages, because no external resources are "burnt" and so its consensus depends on the blockchain history, but it can be organized in a way the disadvantages aren't relevant for a working cryptocurrency system.
NEM was evidently a scam where the insiders pretended that there were 1000s of users who they distributed the NEM tokens in an air drop.
I didn't like the NEM distribution and I am not a NEM holder. The advantage their system has to "regular PoS" is that it incentives the creation of services like exchanges (these are rewarded a lot more than in PoS because they "use" the currency) , what can be an advantage for a small cryptocurrency. But for a large crypto (thousands of TX per hour) their method isn't very suitable because it incentives blockchain bloat.
Pegging is never stable long-term because there is always leakage against any such paradigm via externalities such as shorting. This was explained in a Pastebin.
Well, until now, it has worked. Can you link me to the Pastebin? (The other text you're referring to would also be interesting. Isn't it Andrew Poelstra's well-known criticism of PoS?)
Decred (interesting PoS/PoW combination)
These result in the worst attributes of each, combining to make something less secure than either alone.
As I recall, Theymos prior forays into analogous ideas for merging PoS and PoW were handily rebuked with detailed technical explanation. Perhaps he could revisit those threads to read posts.
OK, in this case I didn't know the details, so if you want you can point me to a text explaining that.
Public ICOs are a scam, because the insiders buy the ICO from themselves pretending there is more interest and buyers than there really are.
That is simply speculation. It may be true for some ICOs but not for all of them. ICOs on blockchain platforms are not trustless, that's true - that's also why someone should check carefully
who is selling.
Even if BTC didnt move from Nxt address during the ICO period (and it may have, I have not checked), an insider with sufficient BTC can buy it from themselves.
This and
this suggest the first transaction was on October 29 but to another address controlled by BCNext and from that it was not moved until November 17.
The announcement thread of Nxt which you provided a link to, has no technical or specifications in the first several pages.
No one in their right mind would have bought that obviously premeditated sneaky ICO:
At the beginning, they had suggested to not invest more than a few satoshis.
Who when reading that thread will come to the conclusion that Come-from-Beyond is not (or not an accomplice to) BCNext, as evident showing up in the thread from the very start pretending to be a different person offering server resources.
Coincidentally it was a Java program when no one else was coding altcoins in Java, which is the programming language CfB codes in.
CfB is the coder of the first versions, yes, but that was also announced in the announcement thread. I also believe he could be BCNext (and maybe also Jean-Luc, the anonymous lead developer of the current Nxt team).
But I don't want to hijack this thread for a lengthy discussion if NXT was a scam or not - if you believe that, you can continue to do that. But the "Nxt is controlled by 73 insiders" is a myth that has been divulged very often here and is simply not true, that's why I commented it.