I recall reading somewhere that 50% of these ANS are held by the developers. Is this correct or mis-information?
If you watch the 16th of June 2017 conference video I just posted, you will have the precise breakdown of that. In short: The developers do not own those shares.....they manage them to promote the interests of NEO holders. Of those 50 million, 10 million will be used for promotion and development, 15 million will be used to work together with other companies, 10 million will be used over time to pay the NEO management and 15 million will be used for all kinds of unforeseen events. So in short I think the management team will receive 10 million NEO shares over the life time of the project, but they have no other salaries. So all in all I consider it a very fair value proposition. Per year 15 million of those 50 million can enter the market at most, but I expect most of those shares not to hit the market at all and Da Hongfei made clear that he expected the first year expenses to be a lot lower due to the rise in price of NEO.
Compare that to the always continuing yearly 30% inflation that Ethereum has..... NEO would appear to be better thought out than Ethereum in all respects, but it will take some time for people to realise that. Likely NEO will even further improve the voting process on bookkeepers for even greater security (but the details are a bit much to go into).
One thing to keep in mind is that the main focus of NEO is initially China and not the international sphere. The NEO management has chosen to put more accent on the central development of the core matters before rolling them out as this ensures a higher quality ultimately. NEO actually took aim directly at Ethereum in that conference that Ethereum's too swift decentralised development lead to all kinds of issues. I have faith in that they know what they are doing and they have proven at various times that they certainly are willing to listen to the community.
From what I understand NEO also has some cross-chain patents which would seem to imply that NEO knows how to integrate NEO with other blockchains and thereby over time make it a central hub in the entire blockchain network.
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New more Western block chain explorer for NEO:
https://neotracker.io/