How Nxt changed our lives? - James

There were 8 full BTC investors that each got 50 million NXT. The rest of 73 got mostly much smaller amounts. I cant say for sure, but I believe half a dozen of the original 8 (I am not sure who the other two are) have given away or sold off half or more of their 50 million along the way. It is simply a very hard thing to not cash out hundreds of thousands of dollars of profits! The smaller holders have most likely sold an even larger percentage on average than the half dozen. There are probably a couple dozen early adopters who purchased 10 to 50 million NXT on the open market. I would say less than 50 of the original 73 and early adopters who got it at 1 BTC per million NXT (!!) still have more than 10 million NXT. probably less than half a dozen still have 50 million and most of those would be the early adopters and not the original founders. So roughly 25 USD millionaires at current 6 cent prices would be my guesstimate. Most of these are down to their long term core holdings and most likely wont sell at any price, short of $1, cuz they already have all the fiat they need. Whats the rush, especially now that NXT is where it is? This means the active liquid NXT is probably around 250 million total, which is still plenty especially with the normal trading volumes of 1 million NXT per day. The deck has already been shuffled, I dont believe there is any organized coalition that can come up with more than 10% to 15% of all NXT. If you know people, you will know how hard it is to get any half dozen to agree on anything! I dont believe any other crypto has this level of dispersion. OK, NEM is fantastically dispersed, but it is not yet and dispersion is not what creates a great crypto. Concentration in few hands, like the three mining pools that have 66%+ of bitcoin, or the instamines for most alts, really make PoW coins insecure. So, while NXT isnt perfect, it is certainly better than PoW simply due to the fact that someone needs to control the majority of market cap(!) not just majority of current mining power. Even DOGE with decent market cap will be able to be attacked very soon and who does this attacking? The bitcoin miners! Yes, it seems they feel a duty to cram the bitcoin blockchain down all sha256 coins and that sure becomes the longest chain real fast. A big laugher for the bitcoin guys and a totally ruined coin for the alt.

Well I have proven that i am no genius, I just work really hard. At first, I was totally lost with this crypto thing, gee that was 6 months ago. Then with NXT being Java and me only knowing C, I started just doing tech support on the main BTT thread.

I started out with 2 bitcoins that I had a hard time getting. Finally had to by it via localbitcoins and paying $100 premium. That seemed wrong! I stumbled into Ripple and at the time (not knowing any better) it seemed like a big improvement over BTC. Actually, it probably is but it has a fatal flaw. The community there is half a dozen guys and a bunch of corporate forum moderators who dont tolerate anything anti-ripple. just mentioning NXT got me reprimanded. Seeing the huge spreads, low liquidity, buggy software and corporatization I predicted ripple would not last long, or at least it would fizzle.

I had sold off my real world assets to get $20K of crypto and by the time I figured out no alt was worth having I put it all into NXT. I had about 600K NXT. Then the whole peercover disaster got me. They lost 150000 NXT during their development of their NXT gateway into ripple and they would have had a hard time surviving if they had to cover it. So I sent them 25% of my total NXT to cover there losses. When it finally came online, it was rejected by most of NXT community, even though it was a viable path to fiat 6 months ago.

One of the big problems of ripple is that they have two major USD gateways, bitstamp and snapswap with peercover a third. The values were often 20%+ different. With the rippling automatically siphoning off the good bitstamp USD into the snapswap that was worth 20% less, it was a big problem. I had managed to make trading gains to overcome the 20% discount, but it took some luck and several good trades to pull out $25K from ripple into normal BTC and then NXT!

So, I started doing some USD conversion service at a 5% fee. Sounds crazy to charge people 5% for changing USd to USD, but people were clamoring for it and within minutes of the funds being available, it was all gone. So, "riskless" 5% was nice, but I had to pull it out of snapswap and send it to bitstamp. Then I had the idea of bypassung this and going from snapswap to peercover USD, maybe even make another few percent. Pretty clever huh? Well, it was fine until peercover got hit by bank fraud exactly the moment ~$10000 of my funds were going through. Poof! all gone. So, enough was enough. I had lost 150000 NXT and now $10000.

Along the way I became the largest WCG miner with a serverfarm I put together using borrowed funds. I was a bit late starting so I didnt get all the easy money, but for a couple of months it was more than paying the bills. So, added more and more servers on credit until I had over 180! On good days clearing $1 or even $2 per server. Soon I would recoup all that was lost, except the mining difficulty kept rising and rising and by end of Feb it was barely breakeven. then ripple announces they are cancelling the WCG program in 30 days. Ooops. I was on month to month, but I couldnt quite ramp things down in time, so profits became losses. Then XRP started to go from 25 XRP per USD to 30,to 40, to 50, ...

I figured it would bounce back so stupidly didnt convert the XRP, figuring after a ripple announcement of a big business deal, it would snap back, at least some. I had to recoup $70000 to breakeven from the stockpiled XRP. All I needed was it to get back to half its peak value. Well, instead of a happy announcement, we got the Jed announcement that he was going to sell 150% of the total market supply in two weeks. So instead of $70000, I was lucky to escape with $7000. And that took some quick trading to double what it would have been.

Looking at all that happened, it is quite surprising that I am where I am today!

Ah, there were three things I did right. I burned a dozen BTC for XCP and purchased and mined DRK in early Feb. So all the horribleness of the ripple based fiasco was erased with the recent DRK explosion in price. My 50000 DRK went from being worth $10000 to $500000! Actually it wasnt that good, as I kept selling off half each time it doubled after I was able to clear my bills. I was too busy to figure out how to get my XCP to an exchange and sell off half when it would have got me 150 BTC, but still I was able to clear something like 400 BTC.

The third thing I did right? Oh, work 80+ hours per week on NXT and started programming in late Feb. programming has always been my fallback, so the same week DRK pulled me out of debt and got me hundreds of BTC, it was only the second biggest thing. NXT AE had created a market cap of some mind boggling amount. I only sold to private investors and just small amounts on the open market. Most all the volumes of my assets are from the early investors and people who purchased on AE.

I strongly feel that NXT is going to get a lot bigger in the future. I have had this feeling from the moment I found out about it last christmas. Assuming that this is the case, then I conclude that NXT based businesses, especially automated ones will act as leveraged NXT. The critical element is for the business to scale with the NXT user base and NXT market cap. That is why I concentrated on financial and tech assets. The financial ones are no-brainer. As NXT marketcap grows, NXTventure will be able to finance larger and larger enterprises and its dividends will scale with NXT. The automated tech companies also will scale almost linearly, but at the high ends of NXT valuations it will not be able to keep up. However, if there is a large external market that it can cannibalize (like all centralized exchanges), its initial growth path will be much faster than NXT can possibly grow.

People say I am doing too many things. maybe I am, but I think this is better than not doing enough things, or not doing anything like some of my critics who are quick to criticize me but I dont see anything they are doing.

I would like to publicly thank aldrin for his generous support of my ideas and his critical donation to me during the darkest times. He just granted me a big chunk of NXT so I didnt have to worry about money. It was a lot more than anybody ever just gave to me before I did a project and with all my expenses covered for the rest of the year I was able to really concentrate on NXTservices instead of wasting time with bill collectors, finding rent money, etc.

Without aldrin I would have been forced to hire myself out as contractor just to pay back debt and bills (I didnt know about DRK going 50x yet). then most likely my NXT work would have been reduced dramatically.

All the TEAM members who now have about one third of what I originally had can also thank aldrin's generosity. I have worked very hard toward a bounty, only to have it suddenly taken away without any notice or conversation. This is not conducive to getting the best talent working hard. I have created a pretty ambitious vision of assets companies and while given time I could probably do most of it myself, I realized aldrin's wisdom. The more people that become vested in NXT, the better for NXT. So I did my usual too much thing and did too much recruiting :)

So, now I have gone from 2 BTC in hand to coordinating a TEAM of nearly thirty people, one third ownership of half a dozen operating asset companies with a market value of nearly 100 million NXT, in 6 months. I have made many mistakes and I will continue to make mistakes, but I am used to working extra hard to make up for them. I think it is easy for people to say that I became rich too easy, but the above leaves out many other battles I have had behind the scenes. It really wasnt as easy as it sounds.

What is most amazing to me about the NXT community is that the vast majority of people here are good people and are really helping each other as best as they can. The emules and fudster types are few and far between. I think the recent acrimony was due to the big money lost (not made) that put people on edge. I am just one small part of NXT. We just need to do what we can to help each other succeed and NXT is truly unstoppable. Just know this will be a several year marathon to complete the first stage and before the second stage will start.

James

18146608053740744717
NXT-DE2F-W76R-GL25-HMFPR