I’ve got to admit, I’ve caught the NEO bug. For those of you that aren’t up to date on the lesser known smart contract cryptocurrencies such as NEO or Ethereum, smart contract platforms allow you to send contracts through a blockchain.
Think of a decentralized DocuSign. You send contracts to other people that are then executed. Once you receive the contract there are a series of steps you must take to complete the contract. One compelling use case I can think of is wills.
Before you die, you could make a bunch of smart contracts that go out to everyone that will be tying up loose ends after your death. These contracts could be anything from social media passwords to bank account details that will be transferred to the respective parties. You would give everyone a password to this contract before you die, so that when the contract is transferred, they can open it. The contracts would be transferred on your confirmed death.
The power of a decentralized exchange is that no attorney or potentially corruptable power needs to be involved. You set everything up beforehand and then can be sure that it will be carried out according to your wishes.
This is just one example, but the use cases are endless. The two front runners in this race for smart contract domination are Ethereum and NEO. I personally am a huge fan of NEO because you can write the infrastructure for these contracts in the programming language you are most comfortable with. For me that is JavaScript or Go. If you are going to write contracts in Ethereum, you’ll need to learn a language called Solidity. I’m not going to learn Solidity so I really have one choice at the moment.
I’ve been pivoting into blockchain technologies as a career and NEO has me very excited. I’m thinking about creating this will idea as a contest entry here. $30k for 100 lines of code doesn’t seem like a bad deal to me.