Blockchain for 5-year-olds - Nimiq.com/betanet

 “So Simple Your Mom Will Use It” 

Short version:  Go to https://nimiq.com/betanet – now you’re using a blockchain wallet.  Done. Goodbye. Stop reading. Now.   

That was easy, right? See how that all happened in a single, short sentence? It can be explained in 8 words + 1 domain name,  thanks to the developers of a platform (a.k.a. an easy-to-use, nice-looking online payment tool), called Nimiq. 

Long version: 

Only read this if you’re a little bit interested in why Nimiq is necessary for the world, and why you might want to know a little background about why it’s so freaking awesome, and what many other developers of blockchain have overlooked. Whether you’ve been around cryptocurrency since forever, or you’re relatively new to it (like me), you’ll no doubt have had a rough ride figuring out exactly (or even remotely), what this mysterious “blockchain” is, exactly how it’s going to “revolutionize everything” and how it’s going to take financial power away from the banks, and give it back to the people in the form of much-reduced fees (my favourite part), and more truth and transparency in finance in general.  

(E.G. You can prove via a blockchain record/transaction that the money/value /cryptocurrency you donated to a charity actually went to the needy recipients you intended it to, and not towards a cracking good Christmas party for the staff of the charity. After all, you wanted to help the needy, not the greedy, right? 

So along your journey through blockchain land, you’ve probably come across the qt wallet that can take (on my laptop’s estimation), up to 77 years to download the 13 gigabyte blockchain on an adsl internet connection. (I’m looking at you bytecoin).  You could leave your family in country (A), move to country (B), settle down, make a new family, get tired of them, and come back to your old family, and the blockchain would be still downloading. Not convenient if you were intending to actually transfer your value to someone else in the World one day using this fancy new “blockchain” technology (say your newly retired family in that other country). Bummer, no alimony for them, since you were going to pay in bytecoin, but it hasn’t finished syncing, yet.. 

Maybe you’ve installed NEM wallet and gone hunting for your Receive address to no avail. Maybe you’ve installed the NEM mobile wallet only to be told that the payment address you’ve supplied doesn’t contain the required N plus 40 alphanumeric characters. So you go back to the Nano wallet and forage around all the menu tabs you can find, and inside the Send tab, you find the Receive address - a bit like the START button on windows that you click at the end of the day when you actually want to STOP the computer – which never, ever made sense to me; and then they brought out Windows 8, but not before stealing the start menu and hiding all the other basic functions, which required installing Classic Shell to get your computer to work again, like a computer. But I digress. 

You might have tried your hand at farming hard drive space to Storj, only to get stiffed on a payment and uninstalled it, or wanted to test Maidsafe but don’t know a port-forward from a port-a-loo. Maybe your computer shut down during a 4 terabyte Burstcoin plotting run, and you had a mini-breakdown; shit happens in crypto. Maybe you’ve ventured into cloud mining or even tried Minergate for yourself. The list of excruciating experiences available to learning about, interacting with, and attempting to minimally profit from  basic implementations of blockchain from a laypersons point of view, is daunting to say the very least. 

Even with 7 years of web development under my belt, and a further 3 years as an I.T. Projects Officer, it’s been a head-twisting, mind-numbing learning experience for me, and even my old programmer can’t tell me what bitcoin is, what it does or where to buy it. This stuff is in a league of its own, understood by (as yet), very few people.  So then along comes a guy named Robin Linus, who having foreseen the insurmountable wall confronting normal, rational people in venturing into or interacting with blockchain with all its warts, scams, caveats and annoyances, decides to make things easy. And I mean stupid easy. Robin and his team of jungle warriors have created an in-browser payment gateway that is so simple that if you don’t immediately understand how to use it when you visit their site, you probably shouldn’t be using your parents computer. 

Nimiq is either blockchain 3.0, or something very close to it. In fact, I’d rather just dispense with the term “blockchain” altogether. What the Nimiq team have done is make it VERY SIMPLE for you to transfer your value, to anyone else in the world that has an internet connection. If you’ve found this article by accident, then you may not appreciate what this means to you, or your family’s future. It means that banks can no longer charge you fees to transfer your value to someone else. There’s no bankster middle man to steal a significant chunk of your wealth, every time you move your value to someone else. There will be a miniscule fee applied by the Nimiq application for each transaction, but this is to ensure the integrity of your transaction, and reward the miners who allocate their computer resources to verifying it.  

Where a bank charges (lets’ say) 5% for an international transaction, the Nimiq platform might charge .005%. Now I’m not great at maths, but if you’ve got a calculator, I think you’ll find that’s a significant difference…  You probably won’t hear about Nimiq anytime soon on your local news, or in the newspapers, because it’s going to cause a great loss of wealth from banks who didn’t earn your value in the first place, but who desperately want to retain control of their $trillions in annual fees. Indeed other platforms also allow you to save your value with a reduction in transaction fees, but to be sure,  Nimiq is the easiest, fastest, most promising, least annoying method of value transfer that I’ve come across in the crypto space, and to be honest, I’ve understated what Nimiq can do by orders of magnitude.  

It’s going to be far more than just a wallet you can use to move value around, but in honour of the developers, who I’m sure would have preferred I did a 1-setnence article and left it at that, I’ll encourage you to just check out this new, potentially revolutionary platform at https://nimiq.com/betanet, where you can play with their single webpage that self-mines crypto, which I think I forgot to mention. Yes, it actually mines coins for you for free, just by opening their web page. Its stupid simple, and you earn coins just by opening your browser and leaving it open for a while. 

The Mainnet goes live in December 2017 and I have no idea where or when the NET tokens will be available on an exchange, because the ICO sold out in about 14 days just recently. Regardless of whether you own any NET tokens is irrelevant anyway. It’s the ease-of-use you’ll benefit from the most. You don't need to know it's written in JavaScrypt which is native to the web, and you don't need to care that the blockchain is only 1MB, because you'll barely notice it anyway. That's the whole point of Nimiq. It's built to be easy and fast. As users, we don't really need to know what's under the hood, to drive it really fast and get where we want to go. I'm not a mechanic, but I know a nice looking ride when I see one.

Tell your friends if you think it’s an awesome site, and spread the love. The team have worked their butts off to build something we can all use, easily, while retaining more of our own hard-earned value. The banks have taken enough, it’s our turn now people.  Nimiq just rode in on a white stallion ;)  

I’m out.  

11 July 2017