Telos power

You may have heard of EOS; Dan Larimer's baby, and its profound use of Delegated Proof Of Stake (DPOS) to create the most efficient, decentralised and democratic blockchain consensus there is, yet you may have also heard about the unfair distribution of Voting power between EOS holders, resulting in FAKE Block Producers being able to claim EOS reward without providing the required resources to the network, so (assuming fake Block Producers keep the same level of votes) they can only be pushed down the leader board by decreasing their percentage of votes by increasing the percentage of votes for legitimate Block Producers. There are also other problems surrounding EOS, such as little incentive for Standby Block Producers to provide the required infrastructure and maintenance as Standbys get paid much less than the 21 and many Standbys may not believe that their infrastructure will be needed as they may not reach a Block Producer position, EOS also has an inefficient model for substituting Block Producers who fail to produce blocks for Standby Block producers which enables the possibility of the network to pause in the event of a 2/3+1 consensus not being reached. However, Telos - the new eosio software based blockchain has made an attempt to fix these problems to create an even more decentralised network and to the benefit of Block Producers (and Standbys), token holders and DApp developers.

Telos have provided the solutions for these problems by using eosio open source software and further optimising it by changes small parts of the code. The first Telos solution is for what i think is the most significant problem - whales, to distribute the voting power between users of the chain more evenly each telos account will have a 40.000 cap on all of the accounts in the genesis snapshot, this will create an even supply of voting power meaning the regular individual has a greater incentive to vote and engage with the network as they will have a greater impact. In addition to this, to encourage a larger distribution of voting power voted for Block Producer Candidates Telos incorporates inverse-weighted voting, meaning to be able to use 100% of your votes total possible weight, the voter must vote for the maximum amount of BPs each account can, whether it be 30 or 50. So for each empty slot in your BP votes your voting weight depreciates.

The next problem Telos went out to solve is the possible risk of the EOS network pausing, this is due to the fact that if 6 of the 21 BPs fail to create blocks the 2/3+1 BP consensus cannot be attained and therefore the network will stop, as it takes 3 hours for BPs to be substituted for a Standby. To solve this the Telos team created a system which has a cycle of block production between Standby BPs so each Standby will create a block every 3-7 days, this is to confirm that in case of failed block production between any of the 21, the Standbys are ready. Furthermore, the system will also ensure that any BP in the 21 who hasn't created a block in the last 30 mins will temporarily be replaced by a Standby BP and will be penalised, this creates incentive for BPs to maintain the correct infrastructure required to run the network, this will further reduce the possibility of 6 BPs being down at one time anyway. A problem of EOS stemming off of the previous problem was that Standby BPs are not getting paid enough, this is because the initial cost of nodes and node maintenance are very high and that they're paid on a ranking system so the larger percentage of votes one has the more they will be paid, this means a lot of Standbys are not receiving enough to incentive them to maintain their nodes. Telos have solved this by removing the pay-ranking system and replaced it with equal pay for the top 21, and half of that paid equally to the Standby BPs, meaning all BPs will have predictable pay, enough to maintain their node.

Another major problem of the EOS network is that developers have to pay unnecessary amounts to reserve RAM, this is because EOS launched with much more RAM than the network required meaning there was speculation on the price of RAM so people reserved masses with no intention to use the RAM, leading the price of RAM to rise rapidly. As a solution of this Telos will initially launch with 4GB of RAM, enough so early developers are enabled to launch DApps on the network, but not enough to encourage speculation as prospectors know that more RAM will enter the network later on, devaluing their reserve. Additionally, the BPs will be monitoring the RAM usage so they know when to put more into the network, The Telos Foundation are also going to provide periodic guidance on the price, and if the real price exceeds this amount, the Telos Foundation will sell RAM to developers at their guided price.

All around the changes with Telos have in comparison to EOS are directed towards stopping proplr bring able to manipulate or exploit the system, and focuses on producing a system which was what EOS was meant to be by creating more incentive for BPs to maintain the required infrastructure to run the network, penalising poor or fake BPs by testing BPs infrastructure frequently, and also by removing barriers for developer to make and run DApps on the blockchain and finally by distributing power more evenly between the community so token holders are encouraged to engage with the network