The Five Launch Blockchains: Short story on selecting NEO, the “Ethereum of China”

Of the five blockchains selected to launch the Block Collider ion top of the reason we included NEO (previously Antshares)

Some Background

The Block Collider is a new type of blockchain running on Proof of Edit Distance or (PoED) a mutative string similarity algorithm that requires it to use the blocks of other blockchains to create it’s decentralized ledger. The Five Genesis Blockchains are a critical part of the expansion because any blockchain that is integrated in the protocol can trade with or even execute transactions on other blockchains without ever leaving their own.

Of the 120 crypto currencies we went through when we came to NEO we stopped.

Unique blockchain technology not just a fork, or covered over fork of Ethereum or Bitcoin.

Incredibly strong community-lead programming team called “CityOfZion” we had never heard of.

Instead of trying to be “cool” with OP_CODE shenanigans or their own programming language (*solidity* *ahem*) they were using a C# and JAVA

The last point should sink in, here is was a crypto currency that was at least claiming they had determined a method for safely executing code on remote machines through a decentralized protocol using MAINSTREAM languages that esp. in JAVAs case are not type safe.

NEO and the use of mainstream programming languages

The importance of mainstream programming languages can be seen when we look at the widespread adoption of the nightmare language of JavaScript. It’s on your phone, its in your browser, its on your computer so it doesn’t matter how many “WAT”s come from it. This means that any crypto currency supporting an already widely adopted language especially popular among data warehousing companies will have a huge leg up in differentiating itself from others.

So how does NEO do this safely? They use a 4 stack model in their virtual machine with I wish they came up with a better name for as this thing in and of itself is an important evolution of the crypto currency space.

Components of the NEO VM, in here is the primary reason.

CPU

Call Stack

Calculate Stack

Spare Stack

The Spare Stack is something that has never been integrated with this in crypto currency. Of the 120 we reviewed none of them had the concept of the spare stack. The spare stack allows you to schedule with some limits parts of data into the future.

The Spare Stack

In their own words the spare stack is for “When you need to schedule or rearrange elements in the stack, you can temporarily store the elements in the spare stack and retrieve them in the future.”

The ability to schedule things in the future execution of your smart contract is a game changing feature and here is why. In Ethereum, which just barely could be considered a “turing complete” language there is no way to schedule transactions in the future. You have a memory and state machine that can be accessed but only in the confines of each contract. There is not option to move or delay the processing of thing based on other considerations this makes it impossible to do these things in Ethereum:

Make a load balanced queue.

Parallelize things.

Chain conditional statements.

Break loops from within other loops.

All of these can be done within NEO! As a programmer these are things to think about when selecting which ecosystem to work in.

What does it mean for the that NEO is in the five starting crypto currencies?

First and foremost it means that all of the features of the other blockchains can be used without leaving your the NEO blockchain. From a functionality standpoint the world just got a lot bigger. For instance, NEO smart contracts can start listening to and reacting to the transactions that take place on the Ethereum blockchain. This is interesting because while most of the world is still focused on Ethereum the technical advantages of NEO will come through. Ethereum has enormous community support so it will be around for the long haul but we could definitely see notable smart contracts like Omise GO, Bancor, Gnosis, and Civic launching decentralized duplicates that respond to Ethereum Smart Contract changes with changes to the NEO smart contract.

Second, it will shine more attention on a crypto currency that deserves it.

To learn more about the Block Collider visit the website or subscribe to the mailing list.