Ever since the dawn of currency, currency was controlled by a central entity. This central entity could decide to do whatever it wanted with it's currency. It could weaken it, strengthen it, take it away from you, anything. The money was only valuable because this central entity said it was. The sad part is, we're still using this form of currency today - in the form of your dollars, euros, yen, or anything of that sort.
I’d like to know what the difference between XEM & XRP are? Since XEM seems to be a bank alternative to XRP as I’ve understood it…anyone able to do a compare/contrast of the differences?
I see XEM comparing itself to BTC/ETH. I didn’t know XEM was it’s own blockchain?
Nice article, especially the comparison to Ethereum. How NEM/XEM compares to Ethereum is more interesting as NEM is much more than a pure cryptocurrency just like Ethereum is.
Do you have a roadmap of features to expect for mosaics?
Ripple isn’t actually a blockchain but is a ledger that kind of uses some of the same principles. Also, Ripple has Oracles, or basically like exchanges that a person has to use to move in and out of Ripple. Each exchange basically offers their own “xRipple” asset. You very much then have to trust the exchange/oracle that you hold as they are basically giving you an IOU. Within a very trusted system, Ripple is quite good. The problem is when parties are not 100% trusted. Since NEM is a blockchain without Oracle’s, that isn’t a problem for us.
Ripple nodes are more or less all controlled by Ripple too so they can do what they want with the network. NEM’s network belongs to the harvesters.
Both NEM and Ethereum are blockchain platforms that are aiming to have services built on them. Bitcoin is more about using the blockchain to transfer BTC from one party to another as a form of money.
Some services are being hacked onto Bitcoin, but there are quite a few drawbacks to doing that and NEM and Ethereum are both addressing them in a different way. Ethereum is trying to offer the ability to do everything, but it will be difficult and a person must know exactly what they are doing. As Ethereum matures, this will be less of a problem, but since it is an entirely new language and new tech, this will not happen quickly. NEM is trying to offer a suite of most commonly needed things that will be easy to deploy. This makes NEM the go to solution for many that are looking into blockchains as we are ready for rollout right now and are easy to build on. If the NEM chain has what a company needs, almost any dev can get them going. If it doesn’t and they contact us, we can consider adding it.
This is how I understand the 3 blockchain technologies as well. But you mentioned adding capabilities to NEM… what if I need really custom capabilities that just a few other people need. On the Ethereum I could build my (most likely hackable) contract and implement what I want but what’s about NEM? I guess you will move only the most wanted core capabilities into the protocol. I do no see this necessarily as a disadvantage, just as another use case focus.
What one can do with max. flexibility we already saw with #TheDAOhack on Ethereum. Considering the DAO code was not that complex and carefully scanned by many experts, Ethereum contracts seem to be double edged sword.
Ethereum can now and will always be able to do some things that NEM can’t. But we are betting that NEM will do the most important things much better, faster, cheaper, and safer.
