By leveraging the concepts of inflation (new token emissions) and token al-locations by post-based voting, SMTs exist in a manner where value must be distributedto users who are participating in their related content networks and applications.

Smart Media Tokens (SMTs) is a proposal to build a consensus-level token issuance pro-tocol on the Steem blockchain. Inspired by the revolutionary properties of the STEEMtoken, including automatic distributions to content creators, SMTs will be an upgradebeyond previously created blockchain token issuance protocols due to carefully designedtoken sale programmability, automated liquidity providers, decentralized token marketsand dynamic token distribution parameters, as well as a large ecosystem of tools (opensource wallets, shared key signing tools, etc.) for integrations at website and applicationlayers.

Due to suboptimal transactioncost structures that incur fees for basic actions such as voting or posting, misalignmentof interests between meta and core tokens that aren’t built for influencing distributionsbased on Proof-of-Brain, private key hierarchies that don’t cater to social versus financialoperations, and slow transaction speeds that are out of sync with real-time websites - noneof these protocols could ever provide an acceptable user experience for content websites,such as Twitter, Reddit (even subreddits) or The New York Times.

Steem has a current marketcap of ~$280 million, but the dapps being built on it are arguably very much in their nascent stages and their value has yet to be demonstrated in a way that correlates to the value of Steem in a sane way, IMHO. What this means to me is that the vast majority of people treat Steem like an asset and not like a platform on which to develop

It doesn’t even really matter if the EOS marketcap is $3 billion and the repo on github is going bonkers 24/7; if EOS becomes a super computer with no users then we’ve all failed (unless you’re only in it for the ICO).

 but ultimately such raw processing power is only cool to the crypto community

Neither of those blockchains are (currently) built to handle high TPS so of course they’re smaller. It feels very apples and oranges to me.

Blockchain technology has migrated from public blockchains, like bitcoin, to either open blockchains, like Ethereum or, increasingly more frequently, private blockchains. It is the latter that currently hold the promise to serve as viable platforms for data economy.

The notion, for example, that bitcoin’s in-built scarcity will drive its price higher ad infinitum assumes it operates in some kind of detached vacuum. The ever-present prospect of software forks, while not technically adding to the supply of bitcoin core, points to a wide set of options for investors in the future.

But as someone who spent decades watching financial markets go through repeated patterns of exuberance and retrenchment, I’m quite uneasy with bitcoin’s latest runup. A 20% gain over the weekend left it up 60% over two weeks and up an eye-popping 900% year-to-date.

Many of you won't like it (at first), but push will win over pull. Healthcare is going through a similar transformation from pull to push

What people really want is to tune into information rather than having to work to get information

Facebook "pushes" a stream of personalized information designed to tell you what is happening with your friends and family; you no longer have "pull" them and ask how they are doing.

Instead of visiting a website, we will proactively be notified of what is relevant and asked to take action. The dominant function of the web is to let us know what is happening or what is relevant, rather than us having to find out.

Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal, talks about “the big reverse of the web” and states “the current web is ‘pull-based,’ meaning we visit websites or download mobile applications. The future of the web is ‘push-based,’ meaning the web will be coming to us.”

They've been usurped by specialist firms with the resources to make their own powerful mining kit.

Bitcoin pushed beyond $8,000 this week, a boon to those willing to pour money into a risky and speculative piece of code that's hoarded more than spent.

The key point that President Obama has missed along with all the rabid supporters of net neutrality is that ISPs and the companies that control the Internet backbone infrastructure that knits everything together do not have the power to pick winners and losers either. Consumers decide what products and services are successful because we adopt them. If an ISP blocks Netflix NFLX +1.09%NetflixNFLX$196.22$2.12(+1.09%)As of 11/22/2017, 03:46am EST because of the bandwidth it requires, consumers who want Netflix will take their business elsewhere. If enough people do so, the ISP will have to change policies or go out of business.

As the former chief economist for the FCC, Thomas Hazlett, pointed out this week in Time, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter TWTR +3.55%TwitterTWTR$21.88$0.75(+3.55%)As of 11/22/2017, 03:46am EST, LinkedIn LNKD +0%LinkedInLNKD$0$0(+0%)As of 11/22/2017, 03:46am EST (and many, many more success stories of innovation) all emerged without the benefit of net neutrality. In the time when the government might have been ensuring a level playing field for the Internet pipe into our homes, smartphones and mobile devices completely changed how most people connect to and use the Internet.

Wealth managers also remind would-be bitcoin buyers that the first mover in a new technology is often not the big winner

Of the finance chiefs based in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, 41.7 percent said that bitcoin is "real but in a bubble" compared to 20.8 percent in the U.S. and 28.6 percent in the Asia Pacific region. A third of respondents in EMEA also think bitcoin is a "fraud," higher than their counterparts in the other regions across the world.

Meanwhile, 27.9 percent said bitcoin is a "fraud" while 30.2 percent of CFOs said they don't know enough about the digital currency to have an opinion.

Out of the 43 that responded, 27.9 percent said the cryptocurrency is "real but in a bubble." Another 14 percent said that bitcoin is "real and still going higher."

NEO’s GitHub has alarmingly sparse activity

There are 7 consensus nodes at this moment, for reasons explained in the whitepaper (for example balancing decentralization with performance). These consensus nodes are voted in by NEO holders. There is no whitelisting; whoever got the votes becomes consensus node. In fact, two external nodes have already been consensus nodes (explained later), confirming that the voting system work perfectly fine.