A Brief History of Nexus & Bitcoin

“I’ve been working on a new electronic cash system that’s fully
peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party.”  - Satoshi Nakamoto

Now that basic introductions are out of the way, would you like to see the full power of Nexus through a four-part series about our plans to provide financial and informational freedom to the world? We have been busy building cutting-edge technology, meeting with exciting industry partners, and planning our annual Nexus Conference. Our team and community have been hard at work reaching out to individuals and organizations that help uphold our core values of trust, security, collaboration, education, and hope!

The Nexus Mission is to provide a secure platform for people to create, and inspire a better world through the connection of technology and community. Combining innovative software and hardware, we aim to create opportunities that empower the voice of individuals, businesses, and humanitarian efforts for global prosperity.

In this first post, Nexus takes you back to the beginning of blockchain, distributed ledgers, and peer-to-peer networks starting with the myth and legend: Satoshi Nakamoto. With exciting revelations in the coming months for banking, entertainment, real estate, supply chain management and other industries, we want to help people learn about blockchain. We’d like this blog to be a beacon of hope as we steward in this young technology together.

The Beginning of Blockchain

All Hallows’ Eve 2008.

Satoshi Nakamoto’s white paper “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” hits Metzdowd.com and the architecture for a trusted, distributed, peer-to-peer ledger is born.

Blockchain, as described in the initial paper, is simply a chain of verified and recorded transactions linked to one another. Every time a new transaction (or set of digital information) is created, all computers in the network validate that action and add it to the distributed ledger chronologically. This creates immutability which simply means that the information is hard coded and anyone is able to go back and check the true state of the ledger at any specific time.

Presented as the solution to the 2007-2008 financial crisis, one of the main innovations of Bitcoin was the elimination of the double-spending problem. In the old monetary system if Mary sent $10 to Joe and then tried to send the same $10 to Steve the banks would let her. It would result in charge-backs and overdraft fees, making it difficult for businesses and individuals to trust each other. In contrast, a blockchain will not let you spend that second $10, or rather 10 bitcoins or nexus, as all the computers in the network would reject the 2nd transaction unless Mary had enough money in her account. Blockchains create a truthful history of accounts with irreversible transactions to help us transition from a debt-based monetary system to one that is equity-based.

You may have heard stories about Satoshi; that he was a laid off programmer fed up with a corrupt system or an idealist who wanted to eliminate fractional reserve banking. There are also rumors that Satoshi Nakamoto was actually a group of cypherpunks. Regardless, his innovation of a trusted, secure, and peer-to-peer distributed ledger is the pinnacle of transparency and accountability in our digital age.

The Beginning of Nexus

Nexus was born from a deep desire to build a better world, where Satoshi’s vision of a true decentralized, distributed, global peer-to-peer network could give humanity a better and easier way to transfer financial and informational value. Colin Cantrell, the chief architect and founder of Nexus, sat back in 2013 and watched the evolution of the crypto industry. He saw the strength of on-chain transactions through Proof-of-Work (PoW) and the weaknesses in the Peercoin Proof-of-Stake (PoS) system. He witnessed the benefits and limitations of the original blockchain engineering and took the opportunity to rewrite the code from scratch, including the most secure and efficient protocols for scalability and mass adoption.

At this time, the altcoin market was being flooded with scams and pump and dump schemes where coins pushing promises, buzzwords, and the allure of quick profits were used to swindle BTC from communities. Fom Colin’s vision, Coinshield (CSD) was born.

The first CSD block was mined on September 23, 2014 at 16:20 UTC-7, and the project soon-to-be-named Nexus went live. At that point, Coinshield had one channel for mining: a Prime Mining channel (CPU). On October 23, 2014, the second PoW Hashing (GPU) channel was launched. The rewards system included a self-funding mechanism where a portion from each mined block would be sent to one of 13 developer accounts and another portion would be sent to one of 13 exchange accounts. On January 24, 2015, CSD was listed on Bittrex Exchange.

Shortly afterwards, the Core team drafted the first white paper that outlined how the network would recycle and merge the economies and communities of the scam coins. The goal was to help those people, bring them into the CSD community, and help clean up the cryptosphere. The exchange accounts would be used to merge these economies by exchanging the coins for a portion of CSD.

Soon after, Colin announced the intention to rebrand and on July 24, 2015, Nexus version 2.0 was released with Nexus Proof-of-Stake (nPOS) and the introduction of the Trust Network. This laid the foundation for the broader scope of Nexus.

In October 2015, a more formal team was formed to promote development, expand the community, and market Nexus. The ticker symbol was revised to NXS. Discussions on Nexus’s direction led to the decision to abandon the recycling and merging that was part of the Coinshield project. The technical work required to implement the merging was done, but with the explosion in the number of new cryptos, the process would have had little impact. Therefore, Nexus began to develop into something much more expansive. The project had a whole new direction.

What’s Next?

The three main components of the Nexus vision now include distributed software (a scalable and quantum resistant multidimensional blockchain), distributed hardware (a satellite and ground-station mesh network for worldwide communications like the internet), and a distributed governance system (Decentralized Autonomous Community).

Nexus still seeks to help carry on Satoshi’s dream of decentralization, and as such continues to work on improving blockchain technology through its revolutionary architecture. How it will work, its goals, specifications, and features will be discussed in the next three parts of the series.

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