China's first open-source blockchain platform Antshares has rebranded to NEO
The new name comes from the Greek and stands for youth and novelty. The ANS symbol on exchanges will soon be replaced by NEO while the developers are currently working on new clients and revamping the UI for the new brand which comes with new and innovative Blockchain development plans.
They recently organized a big meeting at the Microsoft headquarters in Beijing which was attended by 200 representatives of different organisations, several major potential investors, industry specialists, Blockchain enthusiasts and even representatives of the Chinese financial and mainstream media attended the meeting.
Some of the presenters at the meeting were:
Da Hongfei, founder of NEO who announced some of NEO's plans and strategies and how their new smart contracts will make it a reality.
Erik Zhang, core developer of NEO, introduced the new Smart Contracts 2.0 to the audience and explained the main differences between NEO and Ethereum, for instance, Ethereum has its own programming language called Solidity whereas NEO will be able to support all porgramming languages via a compiler. Including languages like Microsot.net, Java, Kotlin, Go and Python with the hopes of attracting a vast community of developers.
They recently also released a new and updated whitepaper which can be found here:
https://github.com/neo-project/docs/blob/master/en-us/index.md
Since one of the biggest challenges to date is how to use cryptocurrencies in the real world, the new Singapore-based startup says the answer will be its Visa card. They are pitching their debit card as an instant coverter between multiple digital currencies and fiat money, i.e. the dollar, yen and euros.
They've received over 10,000 orders for their cards already and will be taking a 2% cut from each transaction. Although for some of the cryptoheads this may seem like a huge cost, don't forget that giants like Paypal and Western union take anywhere between 5-15%.
The transactions are currently capped at $2,000 a year but users can apply to increase the limit through identity verification. To avoid the huge volatility risks in crypto that's been happening over the past years the company has built an app that serves as a digital wallet connected to the Visa card so that when it's swiped at a cafe or restaurant, the merchant is paid in their local currency instantly and the user's crypto account is debited at the same time.
Siacoin announces a bounty program
It has by now been posted on their github and can be found here:
https://github.com/NebulousLabs/Sia/issues/2155
All bounties will be paid in Siacoin and they have recently started off one for integration with Minio which is a popular project in the storage space. The offer stands for 300,000 siacoin which is currently valued at $3000.
A group of Sia enthusiasts and probably early adopters set up the funding for this bounty program and quietly organized a "donor's club", they wished to remain anonymous.
Siacoin ASICS are now live for pre-sale
The website was weirdly hard to find through google and their usual website: http://sia.tech/
Could be an indicator why only 1350 out of 4000 units have been sold so far, but that is only speculation, if you want to access the site directly, here is the link:
https://obelisk.tech/
I talked about this pre-sale in "Alt-news #2" and it has been live now for a few weeks already.
Some technical details about the ASIC:
CHIP: FULL CUSTOM 28NM ASIC
HASHRATE: 100+GH/S
POWER CONSUMPTION: 500 W OR UNDER
NOISE: 65 DBA OR UNDER
WEIGHT: 20 POUNDS OR UNDER
POWER SUPPLY: INCLUDED
Profits Calculator:
As it says at the end, this is with their current block reward and with the 4000 ASIC miners included. 150,000 Siacoin a month would equal around $1,500 monthly income if the price remained steady minus electricity costs depending on what they charge you for that in your location.
I think this would be great for so many countries, i the sence that it will provide easy transaction between individual. Once it's affordable to i will gladly buy and keep.
Thank you for this information.
My eyes have been set on Ant-shares for a long time. And i'm even more curious now after rebranding to NEO with its self-managed smart contracts and digitization of assets.
About TenX, i still can't believe that everything is developing so fast.
Just watched how Levi from Cryptocurrency Edutainment is using this card easily.
This is so awesome. I need my Bitcoin card asap!
Very nice article about Antshares (soon to be NEO). I'm very excited about what will happen with this ETH competitor. China has a huge market and I'm sure they will be fully behind the effort to make NEO a top 10 crypto in 2017/2018. I'm expecting an explosion that puts NEO on par with ETH in terms of market cap. We will see what happens!
Yeah, can very well be, I also wonder where EOS and Steem will be in between all of these. There are a lot of people in this world though and much room for many of these projects/companies. Their main competitors I believe are current centralized ones.
Are there any working crypto debit cards? Seems like its always promised. Good read, cheers
I do believe there are some Bitcoin ones but I personally haven't ordered any yet, too busy holding. ;)
Depends on what you mean by "working". The TenX card "works" in that it successfully converts cryptos to fiat but there are some potentially serious legal issues in the US and other countries. Using TenX as an example - you are not actually buying anything with cryptos from a vendor - you are converting cryptos to fiat and then giving fiat to the vendor. In the US if you convert cryptos to fiat you are legally obliged to pay capital gains tax, at rate that can vary wildly depending on how long you have held the cryptocurrency. So for these "crypto debit " cards to be feasible in the US they need to either exchange only cryptos for services/products, or convert cryptos to fiat - collect or at least calculate capital gains owed - then give fiat to the vendor. Very dicey. I love the idea of using cryptos to buy stuff in the real world, but the legal grey areas are rather large at the moment.
How hard do you guys think it would be to be a miner for SIA? and would it be worth the costs?
This includes of course many IF:s and depends totally on the future for SIA :) Just wondering bout your thoughts!
Its all speculation, when ASIC's arrived for bitcoin it made GPU mining pretty obsolete and the difficulty started going sky high so you had to have an ASIC miner to compete for the newly minted coins. Sia is also at its infancy and competing vs other cloudstorage currencies like Storj, if the price and development hold up (which I personally believe it might) then an ASIC miner can be very profitable in the future and I'm sure there will be more and more being created as there will be more demand for them just like there was for Bitcoin.
The advantage of blockchain technology will be massive for these cloudstorage projects compared to the normal ones (amazon, dropbox, etc), so with further development and adoption there will be enough space (:P) for many of these to compete against the current ones instead of each other.
Space is the limit, or was it the sky? :) Thanks for sharing your knowledge Acid!
So what Anthares / NEO is doing, is attempting to make cryptos mainstream. Good move on them. Am I correct in assuming that this might be a good time to invest if one is willing?
Sure, but always be careful with investments, short-term it can be a downhill battle as many who may have heard about this have invested early and wait for news to dump, etc.
Crypto is a wild west but it has proven that if you hold long term you might see some decent profits, if nothing unexpected were to happen to the project, or exchange or something else.
Thanks! I'm more interested in starting conversations for now, as I don't know nearly enough about cryptos to risk too much. I mean I've only been at it for a few days at the advice of @creutzy. I'm also lacking in funds, so even if I want to invest, I cannot afford it.
But I am curious to learn, so why not ask people who have been at it for a while and hope for some advice :) . Hopefully I get the hang of this, as from what I've seen it's the way to go. And I especially like it as it eliminates banks as middle men. And I sure am glad if banks no longer exist :)
How do you get to this number? Siacoin is currently value at $0.01, so if their numbers are true shouldn't it be $1500 minus electricity (150 000*0.01)?
Oh thanks, that's a typo.
As you can see from this part
It should be $1,500 like you said. Will edit.
Ah yes indeed... so the ASIC would in theory pay for itself in less than 2 months and then give you 1500-1000 USD per month, taking into account mining difficulty increase and electricity costs... even if you have to wait 11 months, that's almost too good of a deal to be true
In my opinion the rebranding of antshares was a very important step it getting greater adopted.
It's hard to take a currency serious as long as it sounds like a children's game.
For my taste NEO is not necessarily the best name choise, but at least far better than antshares.
NEO is a terrible choice for a name in cryptocurrency as it's tarnished by NEO & BEE which ran off with their investors money.
Frantically looks around for $2,500........ I seriously want that SIA Miner.
Me2
amazing news thanks alot dear for very good info. upvoted.
@acidyo thank you for those information :)
Would like to see something new being made , like cards or better app
Thanks for this informative post. I should consider to invest in NEO. It seems to be a nice investment.
Buy NEO hold 1 year at least. Ignore the swings. Thank me later.
That can be said for most good potential altcoins lately. ^^
Good advice!
Interesting post to add knowledge insight. thank you
many are working on this, and the hard work is showing
Very informative post .Indeed it is very important news of all us steemitians. Gradually crpto market should over through the traditional system of the world. Thanks for the valuable post. You are requested to give a visit on my post too, your presence and support turns my blog lively. Welcome.
Upvoted and RESTEEMED :]
Should I be hoarding antshares?
You mean NEO? ;)
Haha..I expected this reply.
:D
nice to see notifications working again, btw! wuut!
Yes. Took a lot of time to fix them though.
It would be great for many countries. Thank you your informative posts. I loved it
what thanks for telling about this.
Has this been already updated on Coinmarketcap yet? Antshares branding to Neo? It would be interesting to see. Great article and very informative.
Not yet, no.
Excellent post. Amazing. Well done. I believe we will enjoy and have amazing time here to collaborate and learn for other members through writing.
Wow interesting post, follow and see my content @bangjal
So they did it already...as a Greek I do like the name - thanks for the etymological explanations @acidyo :D One of my best friends here in Denmark is Chinese and she's in the currency (FIAT) exchange business so we talk about stuff like that and clearly the next big thing is happening to China right now. Still doubtful about TenX, more secure with NEO - not sure if best long or short term quite yet. Either way, not that much to invest at this point so I have to wait anyway, but not for long 'cause it seems the evolution is happening really fast!
I am keeping my eye on antshare now for a while. When do you think is the best time to buy myself in?
Oh, man. I really hope debit cards based around cryptocurrency become more of a widespread thing in the future. I definitely think NEO is gonna rise up the ranks quickly, it'll be interesting to see at least. Thanks for sharing all the good info again, bro :P
A great post!
Please guide me so I can be great like you @acidyo
@acidyo great info u hate ant :D
To jupiter with the Neo!
Always nice to know about the increase of recognition for crypto currencies.