rickyjames do you want to post your findings on there?
Sure, I'll post some thoughts over there. I was a member at the raspberrypi.org forum from day one. And I always have something to say.
OK, just for the record, below are the two postings I have made in Ola's forum post at the Raspberry Pi forum, which was approved for publication by a totally bewildered mod that couldn't figure out if it was a joke, spam, or cry for help:
http://www.raspberrypi.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=64229&p=474419#p474419"This is a long story, bear with me a second. The people that wandered in above [Ola and landomata] asking for help are in the middle of a war, fighting for something they care about very much (and I do too), so they are sleep deprived and a little shell shocked and perhaps sound a little crazed. Before I go on with a few paragraphs of background below in my next post, here's what any responding Raspberry Pi owner is being asked to do, posted as a dispatch from the middle of the struggle:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic ... msg4140793"
AND
"OK, background to all of this.
Maybe you've heard of Bitcoin (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin) in the news lately, maybe not. It's a new kind of digital money that was started five years ago that has grown into a billion-dollar business today. It depends on volunteers running computers in the background (for a Bitcoin profit) to solve increasingly harder cryptographic puzzles that secure the holdings of its (explosively) growing user base. Although Bitcoin is reasonably healthy today, it is a distinct possibility that in the next few years it will fail as the scaling of the background computers becomes too much to sustain. In the meantime, since the original bitcoin source code is public domain, there have been 50-75 "me-too" competitors to Bitcoin that have popped up. They tweak relatively minor aspects of the Bitcoin code to claim an advantage, but bottom-line they all share the same "need-ever-more-computers-to-solve-harder-crypto-puzzles (Proof-of-Work or PoW)" feature flaw of the original Bitcoin.
NXT (pronounced "next") is a proposed alternative to Bitcoin. It has been written from the ground up in Java by a huge and growing group of developers (read about them here:
https://bt.irlbtc.com/view/303898.0 and here:
https://bt.irlbtc.com/view/345619.0 ) and uses the end-user wallet software in a peer-to-peer network to secure the transactions, not a separate class of "miner" computers running separately in the background. It also has many new features that Bitcoin lacks. Many people, me included, think it is the future of digital money and the logical successor to Bitcoin. It is currently in beta test among limited users and is to be publically released on January 3, 2014 - the 5th anniversary of the Bitcoin launch.
There's multi-millions of real dollars at stake here, and Bitcoin is not going to give up the throne without a fight. To that end, the ongoing beta test of NXT has been sabotaged by an unknown assailant launching a DDoS attack against NXT and trying to spoil its rollout next week. This attack floods the internet with junk packets aimed at the (currently relatively few) computers running the NXT software, swamping them and causing fatal loss of communication in the NXT network. If only there were LOTS more computers that could quickly be added to the NXT network and keep it going...
That's where the Raspberry Pi and Raspberry Pi users come in. The NXT developers have come up with a tweaked package of their software that will run on a Raspberry Pi. If you run this software, load the resulting wallet with 1 to 10 NXT coins, and leave the Raspberry Pi running and hooked up to the internet, then you have helped the NXT network grow stronger. Thank you.
What's in it for you? Getting in on the ground floor of a new digital currency that may well become as big as Bitcoin, a lot faster than Bitcoin did. Maybe you read this story:
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2 ... -oslo-home . There's no guarantee that will ever happen again, but it might. As an initial investor in NXT, you can get some initial free coins to run in your Raspberry Pi NXT wallet from many sources (
https://nextcoin.org/index.php/board,29.0.html) and even buy significantly more if you choose from official exchanges like dgex.com. However, at this stage you should view NXT as nothing more that a SPECULATIVE INVESTMENT; don't risk money you can't afford to lose!
NXT is a deep subject and this is a very brief overview. But if you investigate it and decide to help by turning your Raspberry Pi into a NXT node for a few weeks through the January 3 launch, you would be getting the appreciation of many fine people. And possibly helping to create the future."
Hope this helps.
