NXTER.ORG

Nxter News | November 2018 (III)

Only Those who Attempt the Absurd
can Achieve the Impossible

Welcome, dear Nxters and other followers!

At the time I found my interest for blockchain, started following Nxt and began writing newsletters, Nxt's potential almost seemed absurd to me. I fell in love with the idea of cheap crossborder transactions 24/7, decentralization, "banking" the unbanked, and then, as Nxt evolved, with the DNS alias system, p2p crowdfunding, pegged coins, ICO’s on the decentralized asset exchange, dividend payments, the p2p marketplace, earning (forging) interest inside an energy efficient PoS blockchain system, opposed to paying interest for keeping your hard-earned savings in a bank.

Nxt was 3rd on CoinMarketCap - all top 25 "assets" were running on Nxt. Every blockchain developer knew Nxt, still does. It was absurd that the “crypto” media ignored it. And then, the absurdity of Nxt clones raising millions in ICO’s, leading to a Nxt community split, where most turned their back on the leaders of blockchain innovation, just as they spawned Ardor’s scalable parent-child chain architecture. The absurd silence from Jean-Luc. The absurd feeling when the core devs incorporated the project we had all worked on. We agreed it was necessary to obtain the impossible - standing up against the well-funded white papers and their smaller visions.

It was absurd to discuss a Nxt and Ardor “killer app”. A new Silk Road? It’s done. CryptoKitties? All it did was stresstest Ethereum and show its shortcomings. Nxt and Ardor themselves are the killer apps. The absurdity of developers insisting on re-inventing the wheel. The absurdity of mainstream media and 3rd party devs waiting for Buterin to switch Ethereum into PoS and solve its scalability issues when a smarter solution is running in production. The absurdity of "experts" insisting that blockchains aren’t usable IRL yet when in fact Dominium, Mobs, Triffic, EZYcount, Jelurida, show the opposite.

The absurdity of 2 ego-maniacs destroying everything we’ve bled to build, all of us in this cryptospace, them fighting a hash-war that only serves to show that PoW has become a centralized joke. Who wants to use a publicly controlled PoW blockchain after this? The absurdly large gap between inventors and investors. The absurd in making an investment without understanding the nature of it; that a coin is not a stock. The ultra absurd animosity towards people that lost money in the crash. The clash of cultures. In the Want against the Need. In the I against the Us.

The absurdity of prices. The absurdism of governments saying they don’t want to stifle innovation, while at the same time they crack down hard because they try to fit a disruptive emerging tech with an inbuilt new token economy system into the only boxes they know - that of utility tokens and security tokens. Of useless tokens being pumped.

The absurdity of blockchain tokens being held on exchanges. The absurdity of a technological revolution so tightly interwoven with money that devs can’t change the technology for the better, because of too many interests involved that don’t give a shit about tech and society, but about making hard cash. The absurdity of seeing businesses that can benefit from using a blockchain give up their business plans because they fear sudden legal consequences of using tokens. The absurdity of banks laundering billions of dollars, printing unbacked money to earn interest from the poor, crashing economies, passing the bill to their victims, protected, because they sponsor the politicians who do not want to “stifle innovation” as long as they can stay in control, protecting the dysfunctional system. Grow, expand, take more of the world, make more money and hide it - oh you jolly 1%, it’s impossible. Because innovation can't be stopped. The absurdity of punishing whistleblowers. We are coming.

We thank you, for letting us take you through another productive week that was;

 

JELURIDA

> Events!
> Ardor Updates 3

COMMUNITY

> Nxter Puzzle: A Week With Elizabeth
> A Lightweight Contracts Course
> Collect Creatures
> A Blockchain Reputation System

EXCHANGES

> Top 3 Exchanges by Volume This Week
> Community VOTE: Support your Tokens

BUSINESS

> Triffic
> Bitswift
MOBS

CLONES

> Ryacoin Snapshot and Principles


This week's newsletter is put together by apenzl, Jose, and rubenbc.
Translations are published as they come in - Spanish | Russian | Chinese | Korean

Jelurida Status Update

The first Ardor hackathon is ongoing, and the Lightweight Contracts UI got an overhaul. In the meantime, Jelurida is tirelessly representing Ignis, Ardor, and NXT around the world

Events!

Private Spaces

Lior, always busy behind the scenes...

The Future IS DIgital, Nov. 19

Veronica and Alberto Fernandez paid a visit to ISDI. A "worldwide leader in digital education, helping professionals, entrepreneurs, enterprises, and institutions to close the competitive gap to the digital era", they write on their website.

ISDI has campuses in Madrid, Barcelona, Mexico, and Silicon Valley.

KWASU Campus Blockchain Hackathon, Nov. 19-21

Adedayo Adebajo spoke at the KWASU Campus Blockchain Hackathon, the second in a series of blockchain hackathons which take place on five African universities, with a grand finale to be held at the International Conference Centre, CBD, Abuja, Nigeria.

The hackathon is meant to engage the academia "on everything and anything they need to know about the Blockchain, and how it relates to Business". The winning team of the hackathon will be rewarded with the sum of N100,000 (One Hundred Thousand Naira) and will also be eligible for the National Campus Blockchain Hackathon Event in February 2019.

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Ardor Updates 3

Ardor Updates is a video series that summarises the most important events of the month. Here's October/early November.

A new Ardor Updates video has been uploaded to Jelurida's Ardor Platform Youtube channel last week. If you follow our weekly Nxter News you will know its content, but watch this great video summary of events as a reminder about what goes on, and what is in the pipeline. The show is hosted by CryptoDemetrius.

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COMMUNITY

Nxter Puzzle | A Week With Elizabeth

Every week a puzzle is released for your pleasure. Inside the puzzles lie an IGNIS reward, that the first person to solve the puzzle can lay hands on. Seek Thou Must, to find the hidden passphrase, then withdraw the IGNIS in the account it opens.

This week, we are honored to see the director of the Ardor & Nxt Group (ANG) tweet words that can give you access to a NxterPuzzle prize account with 300 IGNIS, if you catch all the words and combine them. But wait - there's more. Inside the prize account, you will find an encrypted message. Follow its instructions, solve a bonus puzzle (if you can), and pick up more IGNIS. This means, there's a second chance to win if you don't get to the Twitter prize account first. All details here:

Elizabeth is using the occasion and her role as the main character of our NxterPuzzle challenge this week, to showcase both new and older stuff that you might have missed or forgotten about. It's a really worth checking her tweet-series out!

A Lightweight Contracts Course

Eric Funk is back with another Ardor course on Udemy! This time about the Lightweight Contracts system, and how to use it. Watch it now - it's free.

Did you take the Ardor Bootcamp course? (if not, you can use the discount code from our review). Now its creator Eric Funk follows up with a class on Ardor Lightweight Contracts development: The Blockchain Contract Developer Course For Beginners!

Lightweight Contracts are those smart stateless blockchain contracts that everyone is talking so damn much about (if they read Nxter Magazine)! ... Jelurida's unique approach to letting you connect blockchain to the world outside with oracles, automated tasks, and/or build your own blockchain Dapps that use the Ardor API or any other you like. Funds are safu, because the contracts are not part of the consensus, and you can even win a hackathon right now if you're smart and know how these Java contracts work 😉 The Udemy course is free if you use this coupon code: "ARDOR-CONTRACTS".

Here is the link:
https://www.udemy.com/blockchain-contract-developer-course-for-beginners/

Eric Funk writes:

Can I ask you guys a favor? 1) Go sign up for the class! 2) Leave a review and a few sentences about why you like it 3) Spread the link and the free coupon code to as many people as possible!

The course is a Beginner's course. You will learn how to install and run the Ardor client, and build a Hello World contract. Expect more advanced courses to follow, but if you've never used the Ardor Contract System before, this is an absolute must-see-and-attend series!

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Collect Creatures

Tarasca DAO is tokenizing a collection of cards called “Mythical Creatures of the World”, which will be available, tradeable and playable on Ignis. Here they share their methods and research.

Tarasca DAO uses Ignis and Ardor to fulfill their vision.

They write:

We want to value the inexhaustible creativity of the peoples of the world, who have filled the geography of the continents with an immense variety of fantastic creatures. Knowing their mythological beings is a first step to get into their way of seeing the world, something necessary to love and care for the cultural diversity of the planet.

The creatures in Tarasca DAO's first card selection are designed by the Galician artist Ana Santiso, accompanied by a brief description of their history and meaning in the culture of origin. Thomas Schmall is the team member responsible for creating the overall design of the project. There will be 50 cards, 10 creatures from each continent, classified by Terrestrial, Aquatic or Aerial, and all endowed with attributes; Strength, Speed, Magic, Resistance; which will allow Tarasca DAO (and others) to build games with them.

"A lightweight contract will receive all payments, shuffle the cards, send the right number of cards to the buying account, and distribute a part of the payment to the collectors who have a complete collection of cards. Cards can be transferred and traded over the blockchain."

"Collectors who manage to collect the entire collection will receive a percentage of the income generated by the sales of cards. This reward will be managed automatically by the same intelligent contract that will sell the trading cards, so that the entire process and accounting are perfectly transparent."

Source

The Tarasca web wallet is currently in the private testing phase. It will show the cards the collector owns, facilitate the purchase of random card packs and give easy access to the decentralized Ardor market where collectors can exchange cards.

If YOU are interested in registering, selling, auctioning and tracking your own artworks on the blockchain, Tarasca DAO already did the research, and they share their methods with you in the following 2 tutorials that explain how you can nail it:

Artworks in the blockchain (I). Copyright.
Artworks in the blockchain (II). Tokenization.

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Blockchain Reputation System

Blockchains should solve problems, not create them.
On the decentralized market scammers can have a very profitable ball, therefore a Reputation System is in the works. 

In a new blog post, Lior Yaffe explains why he thinks a blockchain reputation system is the next thing needed, why it's a necessary tool to drive mainstream adoption, and why a hybrid of centralized and decentralized Reputation Management will be a better solution than starting one off from scratch inside a closed blockchain system.

The third challenge in the ongoing Ardor Hackathon is coding an Identification Verification contract, which - in effect - will provide such a reputation system to the Ardor blockchain platform. Users will be able to connect her/his social media accounts, website or e-commerce store to her/his blockchain account ID, and the contract will set an account property on the account, confirming the owner's public reputation.

Lior writes:

I believe lightweight contracts can be used to provide a bridge between well-established centralized reputation system and the low fee high availability of decentralized applications. Solving the reputation problem will open the door for real world entities to use our Asset Exchange, Monetary System, and Marketplace, without paying excessive fees to centralized systems, while mitigating the risk of being scammed.

There, he said it - don't bite it. You can learn about Lightweight Contracts here, take a Beginner's Course on Udemy, and give Challenge 3 a shot by attending the Ardor Hackathon here.

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EXCHANGES

TRADE

IGNIS | NXT | ARDR

TOKOK disabled NXT during the snapshot of NXT balances for the RYA airdrop.
NXT trading, deposits and withdrawals have been re-enabled on November 19, 2018, 11:30 (UTC+8)

TOP 3 EXCHANGES BY VOLUME THIS WEEK

NXT

coinbit.co.kr
hitbtc.com
bittrex.com

IGNIS

coinbit.co.kr
upbit.com
bittrex.com

ARDR

binance.com
bittrex.com
huobi/hbg.com

Support your Tokens

Community voting helps to get IGNIS / NXT / ARDR on new crypto exchanges.

Here you can cast 1 vote daily for IGNIS | NXT | ARDR 

Tell them why you like IGNIS / NXT / ARDR in this GoogleDoc

BUSINESS

Let's get down to business. Not only Jelurida is doing business here; actually, why not have an ICO, support a new service provider, or maybe you're looking for a child chain to invest in?

Triffic

Triffic will pay you GPS tokens for doing favors, travelling and going on scavenger hunts. Local businesses can take advantage of its Augmented Reality features to create loyalty programs.

Are you game for an ICO? Or did the SEC, the PoW hash-war and the market crash scare you? In case it did, the greatest news from Triffic won't be that their early-bird ICO starts in less than 2 weeks, on December 3rd, but that the development of their app is ongoing, and that a Triffic Rewards bounty program and airdrop is now live! Check out https://triffic.world/news/triffic-rewards-airdrop-bounty-program-now-live.

Also this week, James Malach showed us the latest upgrade to the Triffic App's Beacon-feature:

"Our mission is to establish an ecosystem that makes it easy for brands to use augmented reality and blockchain technology to create and manage innovative and immersive customer loyalty programs."

Triffic's gamified GPS app will pay users for traveling and solving tasks, and connect businesses to their customers by letting them create, market and promote loyalty programs. An Ignis based token powers its decentralized loyalty point system, which gives the tokens immediate real value outside the brand loyalty programs.

ICO | Website | Pitch Deck | Whitepaper | English Telegram

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Bitswift

The Bitswift team airdrops CASH, BITS, and the scrypt-based CDN digital currency as part of their community-driven basic income experiment, which takes place on an Ardor child chain. 

Paul Busch, [15.11.18 02:17]

Check out Bitswift.cash, we just pushed an update. Now supports a new claimable asset "CDN". CDN is a scrypt based digital currency trading on cryptopia, community is composed mainly of Canadians. Enjoy!

Bitswift just published their monthly newsletter, where they update their community.

The professional Bitswift tech team keeps supporting customers and are expanding. Christmas gifts can be bought for crypto and fiat in the bitswift.shop, their Ardor forging pool can be joined any time, and about the Bitswift.cash project, they write:

"The community continues to grow as we experiment with a community driven basic income project and a gateway to the token economy. We now have 3 claimable assets on Bitswift.cash (BITS /CASH / CDN) each with different claim variables that can be adjusted dynamically and while in production to accommodate new demand from citizens or price fluctuations.

CASH — Claim up to 100 per 24 hour period
CDN — Claim up to 1 per 24 hour period
BITS — Claim up to 0.01 per 24 hour period

Bitswift has made quite the amount of friends in the crypto-space since 2014, and perhaps you will see these friends bringing value to users in the Item Mine in the near future.

Bitswift is also looking for exchanges, but still

"we remind our users that Bitswift blockchain already packs a decentralized exchange which is accessible through the web client at https://bitswift.network. Users should also be aware that they can avoid exchanges all together and purchase BITS with Canadian dollars through the Bitswift.cash flexepin top up system.

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MOBS

Bring on the video disruption

Last week, we told you about MOBS, a social video app, leveraging the blockchain and AI, to enable users to collectively create and monetize their smartphone video recordings, and marketers to find and buy the content (and rights) they need to do their business.

"We are integrating blockchain technology and issuing our own token because it makes our business model more efficient and it truly gives us a competitive advantage."

Nxters gave them feedback in ardornxt.slack, and Mobs CEO Raquel Schafhauser checked in to reply.

In the last few years (feels like decades), well-meaning blockchain projects have branded themselves on promises of securing content creators’ ownership of their content, their possible monetization of it, and, of course, in the future, integrating p2p payments and social sharing, connecting artists and fans p2p, all decentralized and all on the blockchain, and what have we. Musicoin. Revelator. Mycelia. What about a meme economy, Archetype? Yes, it can all be programmed, some of it has, on isolated blockchains. What's next? Who will use it? And why? Why use a blockchain and not an ordinary centralized database? Raquel Schafhauser answered:

One of the key points here is MOBS tokens. Marketers not only struggle to get secure access to user-generated content, but they also struggle to reward amateur creators. Why?

For example:
Creators are in other countries, there are currency exchange rates to deal with, different bank policies etc. If the amount to pay is low, the payment fees make it not worth it.

Brands have taken up a common practice of requesting consent by commenting on the post of the content they wish to use and rewarding the creator by crediting them in their post. Other brands ask their audience for content in exchange for products, coupons, entries in a raffle...you name it.

There is no easy way for them to scale a rewards system that could actually work everywhere in the world. [With Mobs] a marketer in Canada could access and license content created by a smartphone user in Thailand instantly, or even ask those smartphone users to create custom content for them.

Self-executing contracts and a trustable peer-to-peer trading system make the licensing of this kind of content more accessible for the parties involved, it's an important part of the blockchain contribution to the Mobs use case.

"MOBS" isn't building a blockchain - Jelurida already did that. Mobs has a competitive advantage, their focus is on doing business, not building blockchain. Their whitepaper concerns a well-developed PRODUCT and a clear business plan, not the development of yet another blockchain or smart contract that must launch on an unscalable development platform before it can be built upon. Ardor's API already supports a transparent payment system, a marketplace, tagging of users, contract signing, data storage, KYC, a decentralized cross-chain exchange, Euro-pegged tokens, and a fiat gateway right out of the box.

Here's an interview with the CEO and co-founder:
https://medium.com/mobs-video/interview-with-the-ceo-of-mobs-raquel-schafhauser-c9b1e786131e

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- BTW -

CLONES

The snapshot has taken place, and the RYA airdrop will be distributed when they launch their main net. Whether you participated or not - read up on their philosophy and principles.

The Rya team has published a second open letter to the community, "An Economic Overview of RYA", about the principles behind their 2 coin blockchain structure, a modified version of the Nxt codebase that they initially cloned, and nothing less than a proposal to establish a stable decentralized monetary system based on the "Proof of Trust" algorithm, not fiat. "A stable medium of exchange and unit of account for everyday transactions while Bitcoin remains the ultimate store of value", they write.

"The theory is simple — instead of naively fixing money supply and preventing inflation as seen in Bitcoin, the amount of Rya coins in circulation is based on credit, as seen in fiat. Unlike fiat however, credit is determined in a decentralized way in the free P2P loan market and not manually set by a central bank."

Read more...

Also, Jelurida mentioned RYA this week and emphasized:

"We always encourage other teams to build their applications using the Nxt public blockchain and its various features but there are also use cases which require radical core changes, and projects that wish to explore new ideas and ways to utilize the blockchain technology using Nxt as fundamental starting point.

A recent example of such project is Rya – a decentralized monetary system with variable token supply and two different types of tokens (Rya Whitepaper).

(...) we could not consider such changes for Nxt itself. But we are happy to see that newly started projects are willing to adopt our blockchain creation framework, to test new exciting ideas and a different approach to further challenge the limits of blockchain technology. Our Jelurida Public License is flexible enough and can be used for projects which are not just copying the code but are making considerable changes to it."

Nxters will receive 0.4 RYA and o.4 TRUST on the new Rya blockchain per 1 NXT they held at block height 2.110.000. Rya will need forgers and nodes when they launch in order to bootstrap a nice decentralized blockchain network. Keep it in mind and stay tuned.

ANN | Website | Whitepaper | Twitter | Reddit | Telegram chat

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