As an investor with very little knowledge about programming, I’m curious to know why Nimiq has attracted so many devs to its community, many of whom are already producing Nimiq related applications. So to all you developers and coders out there - why is Nimiq the platform you’re choosing to build around, especially with so many other base coins/crypto projects to choose from?
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The biggest thing for me is the rest of the devs. I’ve been around since beta and even back then the devs were great (with many faces you’d recognize today, including the now Team member Soren). The group has grown and yet there’s still quality, and given that it’ll grow from the existing group I’m sure it’ll stay that way. Before Nimiq I was big on Ethereum and contract dev, was also active in the ethdev subreddit. The overall vibe is much more about making easy money and while good original ideas come out, they’re followed by thousands of clones (most with nothing new). I’d even once been scammed by a dev who pretended to be new and wanted people to try out a small first contract. I looked it over, and it had a glaring bug so I tried it out (was a guessing game) only to then find out they had used an obscure feature to make the game unwinnable with the bug on purpose.
Besides the dev community, tech wise I love the keyguard and the fact that it’s done in JS (playing with both Nimiq and ETH is possible with Metamask+Web3+Nimiq.js). The team’s viewpoint on community developers is nice, especially how close they are too us. Some coins youll have a hard time getting anyone once in a while, with Nimiq half the team are frequent visitors to one of the 3 chat rooms. Their commitment to blockchain technology in general is huge for me as well.
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On the differences between building on top of Tokens vs Nimiq vs Ethereum:
To build on top of an ERC 20 token like you would on Nimiq (as in using it for payments) would definitely be harder than just using Nimiq. But building an app on Ethereum (whether a general smart contract or ERC20/23/721/over 9000) is different from building one on Nimiq, and both are extremely useful.
I feel the two chains have different use cases. ETH for doing logic (based on unchangeable code) based on receipt of txs; whether that logic is making txs for a token, redistribution of received funds, storing data, or a million other things. NIM is for pure transactions, with recipients able to act based on receiving those transactions (and even reading some data in the message) but they’re the ones acting, whether a human or a computer.
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Very much agree with @chugwig here! Another fact is that there are also quite a few webdevs in the team, including myself. So I think we speak the same language. 
Personally, I really like how easy it is to add Nimiq functionalities to any webapp. It’s all in JavaScript, the arguably most used programming language today (see GitHub’s report of 2018: https://github.blog/2018-11-15-state-of-the-octoverse-top-programming-languages) that every webdev is familiar with.
And from Nimiq’s side, we try to always be available to help, provide examples and documentation, as well as offer community members to apply for funding for their projects.
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Because Nimiq is simple and because the team operates with the principle of delivering the highest quality code, and delivering on everything they promise.
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I figure I should update this post with a new answer since it’s been 1 year since my original one and things have changed quote a lot. Imo there’s very few reasons to build on Nimiq given the current situation and the way things look like they’re heading. The tech is still easy to use for end users and devs, but that’s about the only thing that hasn’t changed for the worse in the last year.
- Price is abysmally low and doesn’t look like it’ll recover in the future.
- The quality community members I mentioned in my original answer (both devs and non devs) are leaving or have left the community. The person who originally asked this question is one example of such a person, there are plenty of others. And there are some that haven’t left, but have taken a few large steps back from the community due to seeing no hope (I won’t name names, but it’s mostly an opinion shared by long time supporters that are/were community devs).
- tech wise things haven’t changed much with Nimiq which is fine imo, though changes are coming to 2.0. The native JS implementation will be lost, and there’s a good chance we won’t get a featureful JS library from Team Nimiq for quite some time after 2.0 is released (and it most likely will never support full nodes). Transaction speeds will be faster in 2.0 which is great, but this isn’t game changing imo and requires the chain to be actively used for the change to really shine.
- The way Team Nimiq views it’s community as a whole, as well as the community developers, has changed a lot too. I only mentioned community devs in my original answer so I’ll stick to that. The team members are much less frequently active in chat though they still do answer most technical questions, but the way they respond to criticism is quite negative at a time when the project very much needs to be introspective and improve itself.
Most of the problems that have occurred over the last year are due to Team Nimiq treating Nimiq the project as it’s product. This results in them stifling the community that needs to be building out the ecosystem, centralizing decision making that affects the future direction of the coin, and being overly defensive of criticism (such as equating criticism of the team’s actions as disliking the project itself, etc…)
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Thanks for the update Chugwig, it’s very informative. As someone who’s only recently has become more active and playing with Nimiq, here are my views.
I was surprised to see you mention Nimiq 2.0 won’t have JS support. It would be a show stopper for me. That is frightening news, could someone from Team Nimiq confirm/deny that ?
Regarding community handling, while I understand that handling a community can be taxing and a lot of work I was a bit shocked about the somewhat cold and harsh responses. I also find a bit difficult to understand follow what the team is working on, this was something I really liked at the beginning with Atua’s Vlog where you could really see the progress and motivation.
On the Nimiq as a product part, it looks to me as if Team Nimiq is trying to build the ecosystem (cryptopayment.link, donate app, gift cards) themselves which can of course work to some degree but shifts the focus away and slows down the Nimiq core itself. I know there is the community fund which is an incredibly good idea and I think that’s where Team Nimiq is needed, to guide and give ideas if the community is lacking.
I hope we see a reply from the team here.
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To clarify on the Nimiq 2.0 JS integration issue: There will be a JS library upon release of 2.0 mainnet, though it most likely won’t be fully featureful (imo it’ll likely provide the minimum required to keep hub/safe/etc… working).
In general, the JS library will not be a priority of Team Nimiq and will most likely only be available for browsers and not NodeJS. The fact that knowledge of how to use Nimiq in the browser translates almost directly to server side if using NodeJS has always been a big plus of Nimiq’s imo.
A few of the messages my knowledge of the JS library comes from, if things have changed I’d love to know:
It’s a pity to see @Chugwig going down this road trying to harm the project he once supported and liked by now commenting with half-truths and partial knowledge as if they were facts. The entire team is currently very busy finishing 2.0 and the new 2.0 Wallet. All those aspects will make the ecosystem more useful and valuable for all Nimiq users.
In terms of JS: It just turned out that Node.js is not a viable platform to run a blockchain node, the network layer is so limiting that even in 1.0 with <10 TPS it turned out to be a problem. With >1000 TPS it would be impossible to even run such a node relying on Node.js. So, a huge effort was made to develop a new implementation in Rust that is much more performant. At the same time, RPC clients are being build allowing a running node to be used from within any kind of environment, including Node.js. I’m surprised Chugwig does not refer to that even though he was part of the Community Funding Board the last half a year.
So, @mario, please always take the opinion of one person with a grain of salt. Of course, Nimiq is and stays browser-first and that means first-class support for JS. And with Rust being compiled to WASM, even the new browser client is going to be faster + it’s running in a separate thread so it will allow for a smoother user experience. All this is currently happening and we’re working hard to get it out and useful within this year. Honestly, I think there are great things in stock to build incredible applications upon.
@Chugwig, you should consider your position. If you decided to hate the project that you once loved because not all of you suggestions have been followed, that is OK, it would be best to be consequent and leave. In many occasion you have been behaving disrespectful toward team members and negative to new community members. It seems as if you assume to know more and everything better than the entire team. How likely is that? And if you did, how come you don’t run you own very successful blockchain project by now? To me, it feels like you’re attending a party that nobody forces you to go to where you hate everyone and continuously bother people with your opinions. That’s absurd. The only reason why you’re still tolerated despite your behavior is that many people here are very respectful and haven’t spoken up yet about your bad behavior. It was the same for me, I’m always trying to keep a good spirit. But in this case, keeping the energy positive for all means telling you to leave if you don’t feel like you can contribute anything positive at all anymore.
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thanks for stopping by to provide perfect examples of most of what I was talking about 
I’m not going to take the time to go deep into this because it never seems to get us anywhere. Long story short, this kind of response is sad to see but not surprising, as it is the same way you respond to all critical messages: dismissal and libel.
But will you consider it? What’s your motivation to stay?
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oh wait maybe I misunderstood, is this you asking me to leave in an unrelated post in a public forum?
As for my motivation to stay, it’s the same as it always was. I see potential in the Nimiq project and the community surrounding it, regardless of Team Nimiq’s state.
Though I’ll admit, you guys are doing a great job at pushing people away from working in the Nimiq ecosystem. I think it more and more often every day, but then I interact with the quality community members and want to see the project achieve its potential.