NEM (improved PoS algorithm called "Proof of importance", not a big deal but may be OK for 0.1 points as it's a very good option for small coins
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.
Those who argue there is no proof of the scam, take note that the insiders refused to use Facebook and other verification, and instead required only a BCT account.
So they were just distributing tokens to themselves via their 1000s of sock puppet accounts.
PoI is just another variant of PoS. It only works because the stake of NEM is centralized.
All of these cryptocurrencies exist to extract money from greater fools to the insiders.
None of these cryptocurrencies are real in any way.
Again I am regurgitating what I have read in a document written by another.
Bitshares (pegged assets)
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.
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.
As for the scam aspect of it, isnt it well documented already what they did with the ICO, Jinn Labs, and besides everyone knows that Come-from-Beyond originates from the Nxt scam wherein the entire money supply was awarded to 73 founders. IOTA is in the same breed of scams being perpetuated over and over again here.
The NXT "scam" was open to everyone, the "founders' list" was not limited to insiders. If you want, you can call me a shill, but please read the original announcement thread from 2013 before you make accusations. This "ICO" (one of the first of all) was running about 2 months and everyone could participate, only that it had only limited success. These weren't ERC20 times where even insignificant projects can get easily tens of thousands of dollars.
Public ICOs are a scam, because the insiders buy the ICO from themselves pretending there is more interest and buyers than there really are.
With an ongoing scam ICO such as EOS and perhaps Nxts 3 month ICO, the insiders recycle the same ETH or BTC and buy the ICO from themselves over and over again.
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.
I see someone is adding transactions non-stop. Is it a stress-testing or a DoS attack?
Or someone thinking they can take all of the nxt for themselves by doing multiple 10k transactions until they reach 1,000,000,000 in their own account.
I appreciate a lot of the commentary and I would not try to contradict anything necessarily but the discussion is about technical merit. XEM is the first altcoin I have ever taken really seriously as a possible major technical advancement. I am still learning about it, but I am suprised there has not been more discussion of it on this thread.
As I understand it, the founder admitted to using the sock puppet accounts and resigned, but I don't believe that there were thousands of them.
Being technically superior to Bitcoin does not guarantee adoption. But neither does centralization automatically negate technical merit.
In some regards XEM seems inferior to BTC- for example, the total number of possible addresses is much smaller and there is the possibility of losing coins by sending to the wrong address. It's still very unlikely, but much more so than with BTC.
However the POI has interesting implications when considered from an economic perspective. It acta as an incentive to increase the velocity (to borrow from monetary theory terminology) or the speed at which the currency is transacted. The best way to earn XEM through harvesting is to provide a service that sees high levels of circulation. There are built in algorithms that favor the addresses with the most transactions with other addresses- in other words, making it more costly to set up fake accounts to fake 'importance' than the value of the coins harvested in the process.
The supernodes program seems like it might just be an extended premine scam. A number of XEM are set aside to be awarded to those running supernodes, but it requires having an address with something like 3 million XEM. There is a sizable reserve of XEM that is then awarded to the supernodes, but my calculations showed that this reserve will be exhausted within four years, and I'm still not clear on what the incentive for running a supernode will be after that, perhaps beside ensuring the continued value of of the sizable investment required for setting up.a supernode in the first place.
The multisignature transactions also appears to be a big deal- ETH smart contracts sort of sound great in theory, but the actual implementation remains... ethereal. As I understand it XEM multisig transactions are essentially a very robust and versatile established protocol for one of the most useful smart contracts imaginable.
I don't quite understand the namespace and mosaic functionality yet, but it also appears to be an attempt to provide readymade smart contract functionality which can be used for issuing securities. I am not sure how novel this actually is or how it could be used.
As far as scalability, the experiments conducted by Mijin using NEM technology suggest that XEM tech could support what might be the highest transaction volume of any cryptocurrency to date- please go ahead and correct me if I'm wrong. I don't understand why this is, perhaps someone can explain.
However, combining a high degree of scalability with the incentive to generate a high transaction volume present in POI could result in a very unique and active ecosystem more suited to microtransactions and more conducive to an active economy, as compared to bitcoin's tendency toward hoarding. I never bought the criticisms of deflationary currencies put forth by mainstream economists, but I do think a concept like XEM is more likely to cut into the day to day economic activity, whereas BTC seems like it might be more likely to remain primarily a store of value and escape from fiat.
In sum I get a feeling from XEM that I have not gotten from any coin since I first learned about bitcoin. I think there may be elements in XEM that could be part of some major advancements for cryptocurrency. Certainly I think it deserves more discussion.