What is interesting to me is that in the (IMO very unlikely) event that Nxt has technical promise, then as soon as the code is open-source it will be possible to create Nxt-clone using the
spin-off mechanism and immediately bootstrap the clone with a more efficient distribution than Nxt-original.
You bring up a good point about distribution though. If nxt did create a major breakthrough, it would certainly be nice to capitalize on that with a bitcoin based distribution, rather than speculating on a new altcoin.
Would your bootstrapping protocol work with nxt even though the coins are so different?
I see no reason why the spin-off mechanism shouldn't work with every alt-coin. We are discussing the protocol details in the
spin-off thread if you are interested. Adrian-X has posted a 1 BTC bounty for source code that builds the snapshot.bin files that become Block 0 in the spin-off.
I think in time we will see the idea of launching "new alt-coin currencies" as economically flawed: money is more about the legitimacy of the ledger than the properties of the payment system. Important open-source payment system innovations will be integrated into bitcoin anyways, and closed-source innovations will not be trusted. I believe people genuinely interested in innovation will be better served building new protocol layers that work on top of bitcoin, launching experimental spin-offs, or working towards side-chains or tree-chains. But, alas, the promise of dumping a huge premine on a frenzied market seems too big a carrot.