Review on ICON by Nate Mielnik

The issue at the core of bringing together blockchains is dealing with the liquidity problem of different coins. How can you write transactions between various blockchains if there aren't enough coins available to convert ICX into any other currency? Solving this problem is the key IMO, and how to build other infrastructure on top of that is a far simpler problem to solve...and ICO has just delegated solving that problem to Bancor (originally) and now Kyber Network! They're handing off the most innovative part of the problem to another project to deal with! Once you fix the issue of communicating cross-chain, I don't even know if we'll need a set system for everything else since any blockchain could really build mechanisms like governance or extend some of their own project's principles to apply to the global community. I am always suspicious of any BFT-based consensus protocol too since this creates the need for trust within the system, and the hope that you can have less than 1/3 of the network be bad actors...it just seems like centralizing around a smaller number of delegates and leaving yourself vulnerable to attack by a lesser number of nodes than would be needed to take over something like bitcoin (51%). I also feel trying to connect all the blockchains together before we even know all the ways blockchain can help us as a civilization is putting the cart before the horse...we're not even sure all the ways we're going to adopt blockchain technology, so why are we trying to connect all the blockchains together already? What if we end up just having every app in the world be on Ethereum, and running any other node is pointless? What it public blockchains only deal with certain kinds of financial markets and otherwise we have private blockchains that aren't willing to interact directly with other blockchains?