A Random Walk wrote:
There's nothing special that I can see about Blockchain that couldn't have been replicated with existing technology. The fact that no-one has decided to do this should tell you something about its real value. There's a Libertarian fantasy that come the overthrow of governments and the apocalypse that follows, the survivors will emerge into the nuclear wasteland to find their high speed broadband connections still work.
As for Bitcoin, my god what an enormous scam. A currency which cannot be tracked by the authorities is unacceptable for reasons of money laundering & terrorist financing - it simply won't be allowed to happen. I had very little interest in this topic until recently, but I'm beginning to be asked semi-serious questions from ordinary people about how they get involved in "investing" in bitcoin.
If it was so easy why didn't anybody do it before?
I am far from an expert on this stuff but the ability of these blockchains to plug and play in different ways and avoid middlemen or centralisation while maintaining strong integrity of the system and data certainly offers up new paradigms (perhaps in the way the cloud allows software as a service and changed the software industry as an example ).
Some of them have interesting new organisations for example the proof of stake voting system.
The Neo platform will probably function as a kind of business wechat for China in future . If you are familiar with wechat it is a consumer platform that can integrate 100s of different functions efficiently in easy to use interfaces.. one could say 'anybody could make a wechat ' but somebody had to be the first and people had to create the micro payment abd credit systems and also wait for the smartphones to be invented first.
One could imagine the Neo platform performing a similar function for real estate, trading, leasing' fund raising , loans , sending money etc. Take real estate as an example, cutting out the middle mans fee would be extremely beneficial.
The ownership and management of Neo is largely the Neo token holders who are rewarded by appreciation in their capital (neo) and a type of dividend that will be paid out every month (gas). The management of these PoS platforms (the voting stakeholders ) get to vote on any major changes or direction to the platform. Its actually a lot more democratic than a typical corporate . Possibly it could lead to better decision making than just a CEO deciding the way for his own bonus scheme...
Neo platform is not a fly by night scheme it in fact knows that to be permitted to operate in China it has to have full compliance with the Chinese authorities!
Go to Ripples website to see why they have potential to wipe out the use of swift system within just a couple of years! Also the banks don't need to hold as much foreign currency float for clearing so their books will look a lot better !