Only 97% of all currency in circulation is paper money. Think about that. Open your wallet and imagine that only $3 of the $100 in there is real. The rest is what we call “margin”, or rather, money lent to you by an exchange such as Nasdaq or or the NYSE. Hey, Neo, the only thing you experience is what you believe. We live in something like the matrix.

Enter cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin, Ether, Dash coins… the list goes on. Created to be deflationary, the amount of these cyptocurrencies’ coins that will ever exist is either capped or are generated at a set rate that, for the most part, cannot be changed. This differs greatly from the central bank-issued currencies that are created in arbitrary lots based on the interpretation of market conditions by the central banks themselves. The first cryptocurrency, Bitcoin was created as an ideological rebellion from centrally controlled currency. Today, with a market capitalization of over $20 billion and growing, Bitcoin is inherently incapable of government censorship, central banking control, and awareness of macro-economic conditional influence in its money supply.

Understanding how Bitcoin and its underlying technology, the blockchain, works can be quite the undertaking for people new to the space. Often the question pops up: what if Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies get hacked? Is there no central authority that can step in and fix things? What if money is stolen? Who does a victim call? These are all create questions. Furthermore, blockchain is so new, with the first blockchain being that of Bitcoin, only nine years old…. What other potential does blockchain technology possess?

There have been many answers to these questions. Most notably is Ethereum. Ethereum is a blockchain that not only facilitates cyptocurrency transaction, but also allows people to place conditions around how and if transactions are created in the future. Ethereum has been used to launch investment funds, digital casinos, and insurance companies to name a few — apps that cannot be created within the blockchain. One decentralized organization named the DAO, which was simply a “smart contract” inside of Ethereum was hacked to the tune of over $60 million last year. The developer community which made up Ethereum actually voted, using a democratic process, through computer code and rolled back the theft. There was much debate around the ethics of rolling back a blockchain, which is a taboo for a technology that should be inherently “immutable”. However, today, the value of a single ether on the Ethereum blockchain is up to its highest levels in value (nearly $30 at the time of this writing) and many large companies and other organizations are taking notice.

The DAO that caused the vote to roll back the Ethereum blockchain was created with code inside of it that was vulnerable to being compromised. No one noticed until it was too late. Part of this issue was due to the turing-complete nature of Ethereum, which just means that you can write whatever code you want and that outcomes are essentially infinite. There is much debate around the right standards to use in order to prevent this kind of debacle from happening again. Then, there is Bitcoin that has its own vulnerabilities… most notably that it can easily become full with transactions in a way that cause some transaction to get stuck between buyer and seller in cyber location known as the mempool. People have proposed solutions to this. However, the bitcoin network must vote on this change to scale up bitcoin and allow more transactions. Problem is: some people simply aren’t voting, preventing Bitcoin from overcoming a potentially detrimental hurdle.

Now, Enter BOScoin. BOScoin is a blockchain leveraging a form of forced democracy for a self-healing system that can overcome many of the hurdles that have plagued some of the most popular blockchains, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. For full disclosure, I serve as a consultant with the company behind BOScoin.

Invented in South Korea by BlockchainOS, BOScoin is a new kind of blockchain and cryptocurrency that can punish people for not voting on improvements and other proposals by deducting its cryptocurrency automatically from accounts. Sounds a little cruel? Well, only nodes that serve as validators of transactions can be punished this way, so normal every day transactors are not affected by this… only people who have made commitments to uphold the integrity of the blockchain and earn BOScoin for their services.

One big area of today’s blockchain technology which has been widely debated is how to ensure that smart contracts that acts as democratized investment funds, insurance policies and the like don’t act in ways that are unintended by developers and the consumers of these smart contracts. BOScoin is interesting because it uses a language similar to natural language (OWL) for smart contracts for ease of interpretation and well as a time automata technique, which allows for the simulation of how much compute a process can take and types of outputs that can be produced. This largely mitigates the risk of malformed, misbehaving smart contract.

Furthermore, BOScoin is built with scale in mind, able to facilitate millions of transactions per second, just like the Visa or Mastercard systems.

Starting from two production applications that use the technology, both for voting in the South Korean government and for celebrity popularity voting, BOScoin is focusing on not only using the democratic process within itself to solve problems, but for applications that can rely on the blockchain for performing tamper-proof operations that are needed by most democratic processes.

If you’re in a rush to grab some of this crypto, you’ll have to wait, however. The currency is will be sold in an upcoming ICO, meaning you will be able to pre-order it at a discount and receive it when the blockchain goes live a few months after the ICO ends on May 31st. Good things come to those who wait, as they say.

In today’s world, trust is paramount. Blockchain technology promises a world in which we can transact with each other without trusting one another, but trusting that technology which deal fair outcomes based on what we agree to. This is changing how we invest, how we vote, how we get financing, and how we enter into agreements in general. The key to the most successful blockchains will in ensuring that they can self-heal under threat of malicious parties and defunct code through a democratic process set forth by active, knowledgeable communities. The amount of bureaucracy, costs, banking institution trickery, and time we can cut with this technology is tremendous and can soon enough bring us out of the matrix.