Firstly, what is NEO?
NEO was rebranded from the name antshares. It try to give clients a brand new confidence, thus the name NEO which come from greek means new. It is elegantly executed by Da Hong Fei, the CEO of NEO. NEO is claimed to be Chinese Ethereum, so let's take a look why.
Smart economy
I'm pretty sure you guys are familiar with smart contracts as it's the main feature from ethereum. So what does smart contract really means? In 1994, The smart contract was first proposed by the cryptographer Nick Szabo. He told that when a pre-programmed condition is activated, the smart contract will execute the corresponding contract terms. This is very useful feature to be added to the blockchain technology, as this further increases the confidence of seller without the need to worry about violence of contract. NEO has it's own smart contract technology too and it's called NEO Contract
Why is NEO contract better than the one from Ethereum?
NEO harmoniously integrate with preexisting programming environment. Developers can stay at the comfort of programming in their own favourite language without having to deal with new IDE. As with Ethereum, Ethereum uses different programming language called Solidity. This is very inconvenient for developers. NEO support programming languages such as C#, Java and other mainstream programming languages in their familiar IDE environments (Visual Studio, Eclipse, etc.) for smart contract development, debugging and compilation.
NEO technology :
NEO uses consensus mechanism which is called Delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerant or in short dBFT. What it basically does is give NEO token holder to have the right to vote which bookkeeper it supports and hence produce a block. Don't worry, it comes with an interesting story about Byzantine generals! There's a group of 9 generals, each commanding an Byzantine army. So they had to come to an consensus whether to attack or retreat. 4 of them agreed to attack and another 4 to retreat. But there's this traitorous general which may send a vote to those who wanted to attack and a vote to the rest. The same problem can happen in blockchain too.
So to prevent this, NEO uses Delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerant. This is the best solution so far compared to other existing solutions such as PoW (proof of work, used by bitcoin) and PoS (Proof of Stake, used by Ethereum) PLUS, It also allows for better scaling and performance. Scalability is clearly an issue as we saw in the case of bitcoin with segwit. Performance wise, it can process up to 10,000 transactions per second as compared to ethereum with only 15 TPS. And such algorithm also makes it hard to fork, as we saw with bitcoin cash.
Cross chain Interoperability (NeoX)
NEO company also foresaw the exploding varieties of public blockchain. And without cross exchange it will just be an island of wealth isolated from each other. To link them all together, here it comes NeoX :) so the value in other blockchain can be exchanged among each other to achieve the true value of the Internet. I personally have not seen any coins able to do that. NEO is the first one.
NeoQS (Anti quantum cryptography)
Quantum computers do exist nowadays and judging by their outstanding computational speed. They're exceptionally good at cracking cryptographic encryption based on ECC and RSA. And NEO is using lattice based cryptographic mechanism, and quantum computers doesn't seem to have an upper hand on this algorithm. So they claim it's quantum resistant!
In conclusion,
NEO added more values and improvements to the blockchain technology. Plus, China like to use their own created products. For example, baidu replaced google in China and also facebook is replaced by weibo. And of course NEO will be huge in their country too. Considering the size of population in China this thing is going to be huge! More than just the next Ethereum, it's even possible to be bitcoin. While I was writing this article, NEO already sits at 6th in market cap of 2.44 billion dollar!
