Tezos finally releases activation keys - launch imminent?

Amidst discussion of a hardfork the Tezos team releases

The evidence from Github now supports the idea that the Tezos team will in fact release under the MIT license after beta. There are also reports from Reddit that Tezos will be releasing or has released the activation keys. This during a period of low communication from the Tezos foundation and confusion around whether US citizens will be segregated or removed. It appears so far that US citizens will be allowed based on unconfirmed reports.

Still there are security problems with this process. There is not a lot known about where exactly the data will be held. It is unclear what the standard for securing the data is.

Tezos vs EOS

Many people have figured out that Tezos is one of the main competitors with EOS. EOS has been having a complicated launch and so is Tezos. The fact that Tezos is managing to launch at all is a success at this point but the same could be said about EOS. Ultimately in my opinion it will come down to community and mainstreamability. Tezos and EOS both seem to compete for mainstream access.

Mainstreamability and Tezos

Tezos is rumored to be trying to get Kik on their platform. This would be a coup as Kik is quite a bit network. At the same time Steem 2.0 is being developed for EOS. Whichever platform can achieve the most developers and most users is the mainstream success. Ethereum currently has a lead in developers but I do not think that lead will last because Solidity just isn't an easy language to work with or popular. Unfortunately Tezos's Michelson is even worse in some ways but it's at least in the initial stages being designed from Ocaml which is a good basis. That said, the fact is EOS will likely have the advantage here even if it is more complex to develop for.

For Tezos to have a good chance the foundation will need to improve communications dramatically. The foundation also will have to focus on mainstream ability by offering great tools for developers and apps for users (particularly social media).

Security and Tezos

This is the area of greatest concern so far. The launch using KYC seems counterintuitive for the goal of increasing the security of the "bakers". Tezos is a DPOS chain which means if the identities are well known it can result in complete centralization as a side effect. Coercion becomes much more likely unless the original holders sell for the sake of the network. I would say ask does it make Tezos a security if the stakeholders make critical decisions? How about EOS? Legally I don't know if this is good or bad, but since the stakeholders are being treated like shareholders does this mean DPOS chains result in a corporate style model? The corporation has been a successful model for many years and in this case a public corporation can work provided that enough people are staking and the token is distributed widely. If it's concentrated into the hands of too few and those few are known then they could have votes which may at the end of the day be coerced.

The one way to fix this would be to add privacy features ASAP. Votes would have to be private and untraceable to have any hope of coercion resistance. Otherwise votes would simply be signals and people will vote not based on their conscsience but based on how they think other people want them to vote or think they should vote.