Why Neo might do better than Ethereum in the long run

Everyone seems divided on Neo after the news of Chinese Regulators planning to put rules in place to regulate the ICOs and till then banning Chinese from taking part in ICOs.

The main value (not speculative) driver for Ether and Neo will be the network utilization and demand. More successful dapps and smart contracts will increase the utilization of the network and this would lead to the value of Ether and Neo going up.

Now if dapps and smart contracts are the value drivers, then Neo holds the upper edge. For the following reasons:

1. Scalability of apps is faster when the demographics of its target audience is homogeneous. This explains why Twitter which is available world wide has less active users than Weibo, which is Chinese equivalent of Twitter. For twitter to grow, they would have to concentrate on marketing efforts to get new users from new countries and keep them on the platform in the initial days. If all the content in twitter is in English, for the first guy who is joining twitter from Japan, it is very boring. On the other hand the network effect is stronger for Chinese apps targeting 1.3B Chinese who all understand the same language, memes, news etc.

2. Developing features for homogeneous user group is easier. This explains why WeChat has way more features than Whatsapp. For whatsapp to develop payment, they would have to work with many countries and their banks and regulations, on the other hand to implement payment for 1 billion users in wechat, wechat just has to talk with Chinese banks.

For these two reasons, the success of dapps built for Chinese on top of Neo is higher than dapps built on top of Ether catering to the whole world. And this would directly affect how valuable Neo and Ether get.