Following the announced forthcoming launch of Nxt’s Ardor Blockchain, a near-anonymous and leading investor within the NXT community dubbed ‘Megalodon’ is offering 5 million (c.$150,000) in NXT digital tokens to anyone who runs NXT nodes. Requiring no registration to participate, potential parties need automatically to download the NXT client and run the node. Not to confuse matters, NXT is the digital currency that acts as the fuel for the Nxt eco-system . Nxt is a ‘peer to peer’ (P2P) network, meaning that the network is made up of a large number of equally important units (i.e. nodes), each consisting of an individual computer running the Nxt software. In theory, all nodes communicate with all other nodes, in effect creating a decentralized super-computer. Running a node in basic terms means that someone is running the Nxt software on their system – or creating dedicated systems to run Nxt – and is therefore contributing to the overall network. Node operators will, under this bounty program, receive extra rewards for supporting the Nxt network. The number of nodes is important to ensure security of the network: a small number of nodes can be compromised or attacked much more easily than a larger network. This would not be the first time investors have put forward bounties to encourage other developers to join. For example, the Tel Aviv-based venture capital fund Aleph announced back in June 2014 the first of a series of $50,000 bounties aimed at boosting activity among entrepreneurs and developers in Israel’s bitcoin space. The bounty involving Nxt is being distributed via the so-called NXT ‘forging’ process, the equivalent to Bitcoin’s ‘Proof of Work’ mining with a deterministic lottery. Participants need at least 1,000 NXT for 1440 to run a node and a chance of mining the winning block. Recommended by […]
