Sorry to say, if you cut away the smoke and mirrors NXT is not a way to make money by mining or forging. NXT makes mining obsolete by making the required infrastructure so cheap that it's going to happen as a low -cost NXT community effort just because we want it to happen.
Here's some words I'm writing for distribution in Texas:
NXT Is Green
Ecological? Financial? BOTH !!!
Bitcoin depends on a small network of mining nodes fighting for their share of a fixed profit pool of 3600 bitcoins per day. The only thing keeping Bitcoin from freezing up is $3.6M or so (at $1K/BTC or under) inflation per day, funding miner generation of the current 25 million GHash/s needed daily. A representative miner pickaxe is a Butterfly Labs Monarch costing $2000 and using 350W of power to produce 600 GHash/sec. Thus the current Bitcoin mining network has sunk unit infrastructure costs of at least $83 million and (at $0.10/KwH) ongoing electricity costs of at least $35,000 per day.
Both costs are rising faster and faster. Exponential growth of Bitcoins hashrate (see blockchain.info/charts/hashrate) means mining rigs and energy use will skyrocket out of control, sooner rather than later. Bitcoin, and clones like Doge, are thus by their very nature destined to fail.
NXT is the sustainable solution to this problem. By using cooperative transparent forging, not competitive gigahash mining, NXT does not have an exponential forcing function at its core that drives its costs and energy consumption ever higher. A NXT blockchain support network of 1000 ($60 ea., 10W) Odroid U3 nodes has a one-time unit infrastructure cost of only $60 thousand and uses only $48 per day in electricity forever.
Excellent thanks. I read the forum posts everyday trying to improve my (still) very limited understanding and this is one of those stand out posts that produce that 'Ah ha' moment.
Thank you for your kind words. I've edited mine to the version above and I am going to try to get 2000 people to read them on March 6 at the Texas Bitcoin Conference. Hopefully that will generate 2000 ah-ha moments - and 2000 new NXT users.