Understanding Komodo from a layman's perspective: A conversation with lead developer, jl777

I had the pleasure today of discussing Komodo with jl777, the lead developer.

He helped me understand what Komodo is, where it is going, and why we should be interested.

Everything that we discussed was relevant and essential to Komodo; it does not concern the upcoming announcement.

The following is my best attempt to capture what he explained to me.

If you find this article helpful, you may contribute to jl777 and Komodo as a whole by investing and engaging in the community.

And you may also send me a tip at the addresses at the bottom.

A brief first-pass description

To understand Komodo, we need to understand that blockchain technology is a complex and rapidly evolving economy.
Problems are legion with any blockchain.

But, furthermore, blockchains that attempt to remain anonymous and decentralized have an exponentially more difficult time over blockchains that instead go back to centralization.

For absolute newcomers: decentralized means that "basically everyone is in charge," whereas centralized means that "a small group of people can take control."

There are advantages and disadvantages to both routes, and benefits and costs to both routes as well.

Decentralization is the hard way, and it is the way that blockchain inventor and Bitcoin founder, Satoshi Nakamoto, meant all of this "blockchain stuff" to be.

It prevents a small group of people (like "The Federal Reserve Bank" in the USA) from taking control over everyone else.
But keeping things decentralized is difficult.

Add in privacy and anonymity on top of that...and things become exponentially more difficult.

The Komodo team is comprised of several industry innovators who seek to stay true to this difficult road.

In spirit, among other things, Komodo embraces the phrase, "Power to the people."

Getting more technical.

At the core of Komodo is simply the philosophy of providing a service to the blockchain community: simplification, reducing costs, security, and anonymity/privacy are a few of its core offerings.

As more and more blockchains appear, each with their own purpose and intended audience, it will become more difficult for each blockchain to find a place in the world. Komodo offers services to these blockchains that enable them to be more secure and cost effective.

As an example, say you have an entrepreneur who wants to run a niche-market blockchain. The project will only ever interest 10,000 people, and that's okay. The problem is, in order for the entrepreneur to run this blockchain, she would need lots of people from the outset to help, including nodes to keep track of how people are spending their coins and and computers working to secure the network from an outside attack (which would, theoretically, ruin the entire project).
Instead of trying to do everything from scratch, the entrepreneur could start from the Komodo framework and kind of "link off" of it with her own audience. On a daily basis, for instance, she and her audience would do their sales and swaps with her customized currency, but at the end of every day (just by way of example), for security purposes they would "check in" with the Komodo framework.

The Komodo framework, being far larger and more secure, would run things over and make sure that nothing's changed. To do this "check in" would cost a transaction fee on the Komodo framework, which would be paid in KMD.

So, Komodo is the business, the asset chains are the consumer.

When you buy KMD now, as potentially more and more asset chains appear and use KMD, the KMD supposedly becomes more valuable.

Also, you can get a 5% rate of interest on your KMD holdings while you wait. All you have to do is swap your coins around a little bit between wallets, to show that you're still alive and kicking.

In addition, Komodo offers a few services that are rare, if not non-existent, elsewhere.

One of the foremost among them is privacy in transactions. It can hide who the sender and recipient is of each payment, as hide how much was transacted.

Komodo has some of the most competitive technology in this area, having acquired much of it from ZCash and from the experience of the team on their previous project BitcoinDark.

The logo of the Knight and turtle shell, therefore, show what Komodo is about: Security (the shell), and the right to privacy (that is, ducking inside your shell, when you choose).

Finally, for everyday non-programmers, like me, Komodo also offers services. You can trade coins on the Komodo platform (like Bitcoin to Litecoin, for instance), just like you would in an exchange. You can also use coins that are tethered to fiat prices, which would give a much needed amount of stability in this cryptocurrency environment.

That's about it for now! I took up my position in KMD earlier today and will be hodling through the upcoming market chaos (crazy dips and rises) that is to be expected with the announcement.

Performing this investigation and putting it together into a shareable form took roughly 9 hours of my time. If you found it valuable, tips are appreciated at the following addresses.

Happy trading!

STEEM: (Just upvote, right? This is my first post here!)

KMD RYGvANqXBQ75RCXVWAamEiP1aVh5gkJDfw

BTC 15n1X7gdvfVfBnm5ho7oggkPBDVSrb14oV

ETH 0x9670f9484EbCc19DC44E19eB4976bAf14e199137

NEO GAS APGxmbWKfMRVuxuBupG2gQ7S3KrB9BPi8j