I know all the blockchain buzz on Steemit seems to be focused on EOS at the moment - for obvious reasons. However today I did a bit of reading about Tezos which just had a record ICO sellout of $200M (by the time EOS is done with its ICO we know that record will be left in the dust). I liked what I read about the building in of governance into the blockchain itself which allows it to be self-governing. No more doubts about if miners or stakeholders will accept a change resulting in a hard fork or two competing coins like Ethereum experienced and Bitcoin may experience later this year. With Tezos if the change is supported by the governance rules it will automatically be accepted and rolled out to all Tezos users.
In this article by Techcrunch they quote work by Yaneer Bar-Yam a theoretical physicist who analyzes complex systems and concluded:
hierarchal systems no longer work given how complex society has become and how globally interconnected we are. Hierarchies used to work in smaller kingdoms but since the 1980s there’s been a breakdown. Whether it’s a financial crisis or environmental issues or diseases, it’s just too complex for a few entities or people at the top to respond to and decide on policy
So apparently Tezos attempting to address that problem in the hope that its can evolve and survive the governance crises that might face it if it became a globally adopted blockchain.
I need to read more about Tezos - probably at least get to the end of the position paper they wrote but certainly it has some interesting concepts.
Also of note, from an implementation perspective, is that Tezos is being implemented in the OCaml functional programming language and supports smart contracts written in Michelson, a statically typed and purely functional language described as “a mixture of Forth and Lisp”. See the Tezos Overview