"Blockchain technology is something that's very expensive to implement today. The goal of Plasma is to reduce the cost of implementing it so that anyone who knows JavaScript can create a fully functional cryptocurrency complete with user interface in one page of code. This is one page of code that can sit on your monitor at one time, it's like a complete cryptocurrency. You can transfer it, you can do everything you can do with Bitcoin, minus the scripting, but transfer from key to key balances. And you can implement all that knowing only Javascript and without knowing any cryptography. That's the goal of Plasma." - Dan Larimer
Tweet it : https://twitter.com/News_BitShares/status/678264103119355904
Plasma is just another Eris.
https://erisindustries.com/
I think Plasma is being made to impress banks and big companies like Amazon who might feel threatened by true decentralization. It's slightly more secure yeah, but it's not as resilient and resilience is the whole point.
How isn't it as resilient?
It relies on DNS and servers. Neither of which are immune to being shut down. Availability is attackable from what I understand.
To make it resiliant you cannot have any central points of failure. The website, the DNS, and the corporation itself with it's traditional structure, are all points of failure. Eris and Plasma seem to be designed for people who want to cautiously try out blockchain technology without becoming a DAO, DCO or DAC. It's for banking institutions who want to experiment with blockchain technology, without touching Bitshares.
Basically, they like the buzzwords, they like "blockchain", but they don't like the people or community associated with it. They want to basically have the people be their gated community of employees but that right there is centralization and also a high barrier to entry. It assumes they can trust their employees or that somehow an employee is more trustworthy than a crowd sourced miner but the truth is that is not necessarily the case.
The whole point is trust minimization and if you're trusting your employees then not much has changed in terms of resilience. You do get some security benefits but without the resilience it's just a private blockchain which is only as secure as the company itself. I'd say, in some ways having private corporate chains affords more security, but in other cases less, but in most cases it's less resilient.