This are my 2 coins and concerns on NEM situation. Warning-kinda bad english ahead: PLZ READ DONT TAKE THIS AS CRITICISM!

Stinghe_Dorian · October 4, 2017, 9:10pm

Hi.
A few days ago, the German edition of the Manger Magazine reported that several German and foreign big companies are working on their own blockchain projects. including Tui Germany, Daimler, SAP, Airbus, IBM, KPMG and others. How likely is it that such big players adopt a second party developer.

In view of the fact, the banks experiment with their own Ripple project.
Also the fact that relative small teams such as for example of NEM can not keep up with the powerhouses and budgets of large companies. I understand the NEM in Japan is very successful, but I see no clear startegie and no clear road to gold. The questions will also be greater in view of the vice ceo Jeff was an english teacher as you can read on:

https://sites.google.com/site/jefftmcdonald/.

This does not have to mean anything but raises questions. I think it is reassuring that these people are good people but I start to wonder where the journey is going. I would like to know how you assess the situation and what your thoughts are. I have the feeling that we are just sitting tight and NEM is by definition a SLEEPING giant. the team is seemingly small and things like promotion, bounties, web appearance and actual use are not clearly deffined. Information on catapult for example is not defined and communicated well. How far and effective is the scaling in comparison to ETH and so on.

When I first invested in cryptos, the general consens regulation was not possible or at least unlikely. after last months, I consider global regulation and taxation more than possible and desirable. alone the assumption that does not come is naive since man will not accept the wars or criminals thereby be financed. also the fact that everything could be banned makes me headaches. the possibility that the today’s cryptos are forbidden and companies like the previous ones mentiond simply work on their own projects. Blockchain tech is now in all mouths and can be continued even without the so far imagined projectes.
Projects like NEM 101 or Lithuanian basketball sponsoring are nice but not purposeful.I can understand that in the case of the basketball sponsoring also the possibility of the NEM transaction and adoption are shown but … well on to small marketing level. And as far as I can see from Mr Wong’s last statement, the effect is small and such a procedure is not being repeated.

https://dowbit.com/catapult-should-be-released-before-the-end-of-the-year-interview-with-lon-wong-president-of-nem-io-foundation/

About NEM 101 I will not talk at all, here I have the feeling that a of kind affiliate marketing is tried.
For this I have created a poll with the question whether such a proceeding is akzebtabel for such a large project or not. The poll ended with 8 no and 5 yes with the number less yes almost by the weight had won, which leads to the question whether it makes sense to vote in a weight-based POI system. Since big players can easly turn things there way and makes it not decentralized at all.

Another question is why the vice ceo is in charge of almost everything. When i issued that ther is a problem with one of the videos promoted on Nem News, i got the answer that Mr. Mcdonald has to fix it.

We tried to develop a Youtube format for NEM, and asked for feedback and got even shared on NEMs Facebook feed. Asking for any bounty potential was another thing… iam waiting since one month on a positiv or negative reaction. We have emaild Mr. Valero with no real answer… he also quotes that again Mr.Mcdonald is in charge on this topic. Jeff is NEMs ONEMANARMY for right now.

This are my 2 coins and concerns on NEM situation. Plz share with me your thoughts and experience.

memario · October 3, 2017, 6:55am

I share most of your concerns. And because I do share them I can tell you that you’ll never get a proper answer They are a small team and way too busy.
I’d like to see some funds going towards staffing. I’d aso like to see additional developers for nano and mobile clients added.
They are working on big projects but my worry is that the fundamentals are falling by the wayside and that’ll come back to haunt nem.
I also liked the marketing initiative that Lon was gonna start but he seemed to throw a tantrum when everyone wasn’t immediately on board.

To sum up the concerns, at least mine, for everyone that doesn’t do walls of text:

hopelessly understaffed (both marketing and development)
no clear path forward (at least not publicly available)
seemingly ineffective partnerships and initiatives
extraordinary lack of communication in terms of progress on developments
small stuff like out-of-date API reference (when nem is touting simple APIs and that’s the USP, that’s pretty laughable)

The foundation works hard and is doing a good job but I worry that it won’t nearly be enough.

Stinghe_Dorian · October 3, 2017, 8:24am

Good sum up. I do not expect any answer from dev. team, just shared some things that rotate in my mind. Maybe we get schoold when Catapult comes and everything is good. Also i am only 3 months in the project and kinda new.

quasarblue · October 3, 2017, 1:19pm

About Your concern of big companies with big teams.

To my working experience as 18 years IT consultant software engineer,
big companies do not spend much in software R&D, because they lack middle term view.
Many, not all of these companies ofcourse,
use to hire slaves employees and managers exchange executive positions to do or receive privileges.

They use to buy what’s ready for production.

Their most valued human resource is
an engineer not a scientist but for the emerging
mess job called ‘big data’.

But this is an insider view.

For a real world proof, think how could It be possible
the Volkswagen scam on diesel engines gas emissions, if the management would
have ethics and long term businessview.

Stinghe_Dorian · October 3, 2017, 1:28pm

nothing will happen to VW politics will cover up, so long term they have nothing to fear. they will come up with the new stuff next year. i have some friends working in AUDI ingolstadt. i can tell you also that the i8 of BMW was ready 10 years ago, they just sold old shit as long as they could.

Tui blockchain solution is almost ready for roombookings…

but you are right and i also think that they thinking to short…wich leads to this adoption or at least interesst on Eth right now.

the question was, what is Nem doing right now?

quasarblue · October 3, 2017, 2:11pm

Yes,
ETH has big penetration and fits the actual big companies
business model, for two key factors I think:

ETH is not really hyped I think, because the 'world computer’
is so high and pure ambitious target to reach, than it triggers every mind hopes.
ETH leaves production freedom, and everyone is happy to work and spend budget
for something that grows constantly.
(it’s like F35 fighter, design so buggy that took it too expensive, good for a neverending financing)

That said, in the desert I found NEM completely free from todays business vice.
NEM said to have internal plans.
The developement is carried consciously, that’s to say developers are independent
on technological choices and among them there are proven geniuses.
Also proven is Lon, who took NEM where it is now.
Jeff has an M.A from University of Kansas with emphasis in ethics.
That’s the background we most need, he was not simply an english teacher’, please.
Today there is a lack in philosophers, people who could answer to questions like:
"why are we doing this?"
People like Jeff is needed like air we breathe.
Necessary to make a real team which is made by all the other
key figures in the community.

Stinghe_Dorian · October 3, 2017, 2:37pm

what fits to the quote of beeing good ppl, i made in my text.

thx for your input… but never forget this has also a business aspect and thats the core of my concerrns.
some points are pulld to hard and by the way always loved the russian Pak-Fa- su fleet…

quasarblue · October 3, 2017, 2:58pm

as for business, it’s all there, the NEM blockchain:

the most use case comprehensive
the most secure and flexible implementation (json api and off chain smart contracts)
the fastest as we know by design with private chain anchored to public chain

these are the metrics.
What are you considering more? Politics?

Stinghe_Dorian · October 3, 2017, 3:27pm

i think you know very well and non of the points realy relate to the text or the sum up. but like i said thx for your input sir. i just see some qualify of the statements that were made and even if i am not the one to be convineced. i will let the nem on the node and see since it is long term invest and time will proof what is the deal.

DePo · October 3, 2017, 5:19pm

In this era of instant gratification mindset we tend to rush things and hope for the best. I researched and researched altcoins before making my decision to invest in NEM and did so for the very reasons you mentioned. We see all these ICO’s taking off, mass marketing all over the place promoting how great this or that coin is going to be. They play on investors emotions and are very, very good at it. The only thing they’re actually selling is their dream of what they believe they can do. Look at the latest ICO’s that have come out and have a huge spike to start off with and within weeks are flat and are remaining flat. Why? Because they haven’t built anything yet and investors get nervouse, buyers remorse sets in and they leave. NEM on the other hand, did their due diligence and built their platform from the ground up, correcting the errors of Btc and Eth so down the road they wouldn’t have to look back and wish they had done things this way or that way. NEM built it the right way and the companies that are jumping on the Btc and Eth blockchain will soon find out that it doesn’t measure up to their expectations as far as security, speed and overall performance. We are still in the infancy stage and I believe NEM will be the leader in blockchain technology and will continue to grow when others fade for years to come. I agree it’s tough to sit back and watch, but if it was easy, everyone would be doing it. The old adage “Patience Is A Virtue” never rang truer for this organization. My two cent’s worth…

Stinghe_Dorian · October 3, 2017, 5:26pm

True story we will hold for 5years even if it goes down to 1-5 cents but i would be happy if ther would be more information on running projects. We pulld out of every other Project and hold only Xem. I also got emails that say give us a year time and great things will happen, wich is nice but a small info of what exactly could or will happen durring that time period would be nice.

DePo · October 3, 2017, 5:41pm

I agree with you totally, if nothing else hire an Information Specialist for their investors to keep them in the loop with what all is happening and provide at least estimated timelines on projects and new tech. Having an active twitter account to post accomplishments would be helpful too. Like you, I only hold XEM and check it a dozen times a day and plan on holding through thick or thin for the same amount of time. Hopefully, one day we’ll meet up and have one heck of a party! …dp

Stinghe_Dorian · October 3, 2017, 7:05pm

just n idea, dont check every day since that is contraproductive

nem_curious · October 3, 2017, 11:42pm

Dorian, I agree and share your skepticism. The things that concerns me are:

The amount of developers are very small. It is claimed to be top-class devs who really know how to do things, but nothing is known about them. If they are so good please tell more about each of them, otherwise it is better not to tell anything: every startup claims that they have the best team in the world. Also the devs of other crypto are downplayed as “hobbyists”.
The white paper is out-of-date and many things are omitted. How tx are grouped in the block, how the XEMs are circulated? Bitcoin has a good explanation about it with UTxO and merkle tree. If NEM uses the same approach, it would be nice to explain/reference it. The paper tells that NEM was the first to figure out how to sync time on the blockchain. But if this is the case, then with a centralized time you have a way to solve double-spending just relying on this time. No explanation is given why it is not used.
API documentation is also out of date. It doesn’t look that readable and frankly documentation of some 1-person github library looks better. If you need adoption, you have to have a nice, up-to-date, easy to use documentation. Developers will be the first to adopt your project.
No clear path forward. Just check how many times the release date for catapult has been changed.
Blog has many claims which are not really correct and even might be seen as misleading. It is said that NEM is way more scalable than BTC, but it looks like it can handle only 2tx/sec.Yes it can be changed, but in the similar way it can be changed in BTC. Currently implemented things are interconnected with “hopes for the future” and it is hard to guess what is actually done and what might be done.
It does not look like the team is organized and there is a clear hierarchy: in many interviews Makoto told that he is one of the projects lead developers, but then when he was out of the team the clarification told that he wasn’t. If he was not, why the company was ok with him publicly claiming that he is. NEM does not have huge amount of news coverage, so the team should have seen it but for some reason allowed it to continue. They should have asked an editor to add a clarification: “he sad this, but this is not the case. He is …”.
Hard forks are super easy to do because of the supernodes. They will accept everything to get their reward. So devs can push any changes they literally want. This can be seen as plus, but also can be scary.
POI presented as something extremely important. But it is not really that much different from POS. In fact the major part of your importance is your stake.So all these convoluted graph-theoretical equations have very limited value.

I just started with NEM, so these are my concerns after reading about it for a few days. I think that the only thing it is useful now is speculation. At least BTC and ETH is needed to buy any other crypto.

Jaguar0625 · October 4, 2017, 12:18am

It is true that there are not many developers. You can judge the quality of the developers by looking at the code on GitHub.
The whitepaper talks about block creation. Like in Bitcoin, harvesters try to fill blocks with transactions to maximize fees. Time synchronization cannot be used in the way you describe to prevent double spend. Due to network latencies, a small window is used to determine acceptable timestamps, but this could be exploited by an attacker to double spend.
Most of the investments are being made in documentation for catapult. The priority of documentation for the current system is less.
The catapult release date has never changed, but its milestones have never been clearly communicated to the (public) community.
Not sure what blog to which you’re referring. The current mainnet network has a hard cap of 2TPS. Some of the posts regarding scalability also confuse private chain and public chain scalability.
When Makoto gave those interviews, he was still part of the (marketing) team and was allowed to embellish his role. In hindsight, that was a mistake. The NEM Foundation is now in charge of outreach to prevent similar mishaps.
Supernodes can upgrade or not, which gives them a vote on each change. To date, there haven’t been any controversial changes. Unlike Bitcoin, there are fewer groups with competing incentives so agreement is more likely but not guaranteed.
The importance of POI to NEM has been overhyped. The correlation of POI to POS is relatively high.

nzminer · October 4, 2017, 1:10am

Stinghe_Dorian, it may seem that way to you, but lots of work is happening in the background with some major players.

Just look at the likes of COMSA, Luxtag, Landstead to name a few.

There will be some exciting times ahead, and alot of hype has been avoided, check out all the other projects that are nothing more than a bunch of hot air with nothing to show.

NEM is a smart asset blockchain and extremely powerful.

Stinghe_Dorian · October 4, 2017, 8:55pm

Hi everyone,
thank you for your opinions and contributions. @nem_curious you are partly right and as far as the man-power is concerned, we all hope for a hefty financial injection for NEM’s marketing and development team. This action I believe would help tremendously.

In the first contribution I wrote, the functionality, development and quality of NEM was never questioned.
The problem I have addressed is:

that it is missing at Manpower (seemingly)
the marketing goes in the wrong direction (in the west, in my opinion)
that a POI system is not decentralized (at least in the choice, which is now not the world)
and the information about milestones is not properly communicated
(no request about catapult would be adequately answered, as said we wanted to make videos and took distance to it, I can not vaguely produce something that is in such a way or so.)
and that Jeff McDonald, wich I hold in high honors and consider very capable (I am sorry if it was perceived otherwise) can not be responsible for everything.

These were MY points and I wanted to stimulate the conversation, with the hope for change or to start a process of thinking in this direction.

We have stopped producing videos because we only want to report about safe and working things.

Now to COMSA. ( ico ) @nzminer

This is all future music and has no place in our contributions for the first time. and I think the companies interested in Eth are a house number other than Comsa and so on.

nem_curious · October 4, 2017, 8:48am

@Jaguar0625 First of all thank you for the reply.

I looked at Github and liked what I saw. Otherwise I would not waste my time on this forum. My point was that there is no point to shout around about the top-class developers if there is nothing to back it up with. Also there is no point to downplay developers of other major cryptos.
I was expecting that it can’t be used this way but it is nice to explain how it can be used. That part of a technical paper looked a marketing part. We created some synchronization, here is a lot of text how does it work but why do you need it? What is the point being the first to implement it if it is not used? I have not found a normal explanation of how it is actually helping NEM to succeed.
This is great to hear. The problem is that a newcomer like me does not see it. All I can see is the outdated documentation for the current version which is in a pretty bad condition.
The official Catapult paper claims: It is scheduled to be released in various stages, starting from the first quarter of 2017. As far as I am aware first quarter of 2017 has passed. This sounds to me like a very clear communication to the public.
I was referring to blog.nem.io . And yes, I was complaining about the vagueness of statement.
If he was allowed to embellish his role, this shows that the leadership was not experienced enough to figure out that this is a very terrible idea. Any even small lie for a company which tries to establish the reputation is crucial and I am sure that the ghost of Makoto will haunt NEM for long long time. Hopefully NEM will recover and learn from this mistake.
Supernode can decide to not upgrade, but they will lose their supernode reward. So basically they do not have an option. The fact that there were no controversial issues does not tell me what will happen if this issue will arise. But I can also see a good thing from this easy hard forks
And this is a big problem. Because I spent a day trying to figure out all these equations. After some time I started to see that in my opinion all these things are not really changing anything. I failed to see how I can increase my importance 2 time of my pure POS importance. The problem with this that NEM just spent a lot of time telling how bad POS is with all this stake hoarding. It will not take a lot of time before some more mathematically knowledgeble person will write a big blogpost with proofs that POI is just a marketing theater (not sure whether such term exist: analogue to a security theater).

One more thing which I forgot: NEM harvesting is not as great as it looks. Let’s assume that you invested 2200$ and somehow got your 10k XEM. Guess how much blocks will you expect to harvest in a year? Half a block. It will take you approximately two years to harvest only 1 block. In the current situation it there is very high chance that this block will have 0 tx and you get 0 XEM. On the other hand 2000$ will give you a 13.4TH/s ASIC. This will give you 0.0005 BTC/day. Of course this is very very little and of course I have not calculate the depreciation of your ASIC and power consumption. But the point is harvesting is not as good as it looks.

On the bright side. This is one of the few cryptos, which actually does something new and potentially helpful. The community looks engaged as well as devs.

Stinghe_Dorian · October 4, 2017, 1:05pm

good points

wnu · October 4, 2017, 3:13pm

Here were asked questions of interest to NEM holders. NEM developers do amazing things, but why are so few people interested in this? I hope this theme will not pass without a trace.