Welcome back.

all those tech companies were lending to two-bit telecoms startups to buy their crap.

carly fiorina at lucent was guilty of destroying lucent using that strategy. she went on to destroy hp soon afterwards. she's now feted as a great businesswoman, go figure!

She is widely regarded as being one of the worst CEOs of all time and has not held anything close to such a position since being fired from HP.

she should never have got in at hp after gutting lucent and she had a good run at getting the nod as GOP presidential candidate in 2016, she hasnt gone away.

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 !

The statutory obligation of the CEO is to serve the interests of the shareholders. That's the job. Executive remuneration is already voted on by shareholders, that bonus scheme will have been approved by them and aligned with their interests.

In any case, companies are mostly steered by markets for their products and services. Customer votes are what count.

w.r.t Bitcoin the perceived value hinges on one's attitude to authority and the role of the State. We have very well developed systems of authority-based dispute resolution that have been carefully developed over thousands of years. I'm just not seeing how the blockchain is going to overturn all that. Maybe if I lived in a real banana republic I might see it.

Voted on by shareholders......Hardy har har.

If you havent at least tried to use these platforms or send money by blockchain then sorry you are not qualified to comment . You need to try the experience first. I just started into this last month. Previously I thought it was a lot of rubbish also.

The major reason BTC is going down apart from speculative bust is simply that BTC had some issues with the design of their blockchains resulting in very slow transaction rare and high fees being charged by the miners who control large blocks of BTC. I recently tried to move BTC around and took an instant dislike to it as it is very slow to confirm transactions and there are very high transaction fees. Some of the other currencies have no fees or very small fees with transaction speeds of 5 seconds.

The newer currencies have major advantages over BTC as they have learned from its problems and implemented much more resilient and democratic systems (or centralised with no miners as is the case for Ripple). There is a large variation of different coins and platforms to choose from.

These platforms and coins are currently in a kind of battle of the fittest and strongest which is going to quickly thin out the herd but leave some real behemoths standing with the size and power of Visa, Citibank， Google or even bigger!

Soon the biggest banks could have no physical structure at all!
Dont think this could happen within ten to fifteen years?

One word...Amazon.

The Libertarians behind Blockchain forget that just because they hate the government, most people don't.

Most people are quite happy with a Property Registrar for example, which is run by the government & can be relied on to safely record who owns what. They don't want to be reliant on some obscure protocol dreamed up by a techie, which could see their house deeds stolen from under them by a hacker.

When you see the headlines saying "Bank xyz is using blockchain", read a bit deeper - most are research projects, many are just to generate headlines.

You'll be proved wrong in Qtr 1.
Also there's lots of corporate money behind blockchains already.

In the meantime you should actually do some hands on research about the stuff you talk about.

That is a decent point on the survival of the fittest argument Taipeir. Care to share some decent links on the research you found most prophetic on this?

I am not an expert either, though I do understand real-time settlement systems somewhat. My understanding is that blockchain is not easy to plug and play, it hasn't been used for anything else, the performance is abysmal, and while it looks like a new paradigm, in the same way that the cloud is "somebody else's datacentre", blockchain is multiple copies of "someone else's ledger".

A key competitive advantage of Amazon is that users know that there is a far higher level of trust in any purchase than a purchase from a Chinese manufacturer on Ebay. I would not underestimate that in relation to crypto-cur which most people don’t understand apart from the price of Bitcoin.

I also think that saying the biggest banks could have no physical structure at all is wholly unrealistic. Amazon has displaced retail, but physicality remains. So blockchain can be an efficient payment method? Fine. What about all the other elements of banking. So German engineering company X wants to borrow 2B to build a new plant (as opposed to bonds). Tap into P2P financing for that stuff? Bullshit.

Your other comment about blockchain making the balance sheets of banks look clever is a bit naïve. Banks rip off customers for forex, particularly retail customers. There are far cheaper regulated entities for payment transmission than the main banks. No responsible corporate entity is going to use an unregulated entity for payments. That’s a recipe for people losing their jobs. Banking charges in companies are trivial from a materiality perspective.

IT dudes were telling me for years that Open Office was going to destroy MS. The cost of MS is also trivial and everyone is comfy using it.

I think this is where your argument falls down.
I believe that there is a growing number of people (mainly those with assets) that are increasingly fearful of government intervention that will adversely affect them.

@dubrov
read what he posted
...."most people don't."

imho government was/is designed to protect the weak.

That's why we should, morally (sure, with a degree of pain) pay our taxes.

Eventually we will all be weak at one point in our lives.

The Hobbesians want to have their cake and eat it. (In a system/but without a system)

https://www.reddit.com/r/NEO/comments/7 ... _content=3

This is the founder of Neo at a conference in Bangkok last month..
You may not get all the jargon but he is a good presenter and explains the roadmap quite well.

We can see how quickly this spaCe moves when he says crowd funding is old hat, ICO days are numbered and something called decentralised exchange is the story for next year (I have to look up what he actually means by this last bit ).

Biggest takeaway from this...they are one of only two functional smart contract platforms and have massive potential for growth in next few years.
Their biggest advantage is simply being based in China with access to a lot of talent and also language ability and business network there.
There are some other platforms such as Cardano and Qtum in the running but it looks to me that Ethereum and Neo will dominate due to first moved advantsges mainly.

Ethereum has 80 billion market price (and in the presentationhe explains its because it's popular for ICOs which applications then depend 9n the Ether platform) Neo is only getting started at 4 billion market price. China banning ICOs slowed down Neo appreciation but will not stop it medium term to long term, eventually China will fully open up for this local platform champion.

Even without Chinese direct support they are attracting worldwide dApps and ICOs which is pretty impressive.

It is quite similar to Android vs Apple I think or rather I would say Android X vs Android Y.

Neo is a ten to twenty bagger in my book, maybe more! Generally when other companies use Neo platform for their applications and ICOs they will also utilise Neo and Gas which drives up their price. The Gas innovation is really interesting it rewards businesses for using Neo as their platform and contract currency and just holding Neo.