I've been closely following the development of a very interesting crypto-currency called Slimcoin. It is a fork of Peercoin, with 2 very nice additions: Proof of Burn and Proof of Stake.
Proof of Burn works by mining with your cash. Instead of consuming vast computing resources to validate transactions, you spend a certain amount of currency. That amount gives you the "mining power". Basically, the more you spend, the more chances you get to validate a transaction. It's a bit more complicated than that, but you got the point.
Proof of Stake works pretty much as you'd expect: from time to time, a certain amount of your holding is "staked", meaning you get a little bit of rewards for every session of staking.
But what's truly impressive in the last version, released a little more than a week ago, it's the innovative use of the OP_RETURN operation. This is something that every blockchain based on Bitcoin has (including, of course, Bitcoin) but it's quite overlooked. This field let you store arbitrary data in the blockchain and retrieve it later. It's not longer than 80 bytes (standard it's 40 bytes, but it's configurable when you build the binary from source) but that's enough to store, for instance, a magnet link to a torrent.
That link can retrieve everything you stored in the torrent, being it an image, a file or, why not, an entire website (built in such a way that it doesn't reference outside links). The current version uses a QT rendering engine widget, but you're free to write whatever frontend you want for it. And, voila, we can has a serverless, domainless web, all based on the blockchain.
This is not yet ready for public adoption, but as I know a lot of Steemians are also hardcore geeks, maybe it's worth playing with it. You can start from Github and use the "master" branch. I successfully compiled the GUI wallet from source, using a bit of QT magic and it works beautifully.
I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me 
