Block Producers and the game to control EOS

Source

Within DPoS, which is the system that EOS.IO will operate on, Block Producers replace the concept of “miners” as the custodians of the network, running the underlying network layer to process all transactions.

The race to become a top Block Producer on EOS has come to its climax, with the launch of main net in the next days all the candidates are making the ultimate efforts to reach out the spotlight and build a cooperative platform to secure their relevance within the community, a political-like race that involves getting a spot to become a money machine for the EOS ecosystem. 

Block.One has opted to make the launch of EOS a community driven project, so instead of they doing the official launch of the chain, the billion dollar company is betting on the Block Producer (BP) candidates to arrange a bottom-up launch, where the cooperation must be the ultimate goal, and all parties involve get together in just one chain, picking one among them one to boot the genesis block and all of the other just come along. It might sound easy, but keep in mind that there are already tons of candidates with the technical abilities to do this, from a multi-regional spectrum, with all kind of sizes and agendas. 

The BP candidates have done a lot to build the technical community and work out the fast development of the ecosystem prior to the main net launch. All kind of proposals and analysis have been done to secure the future of EOS, and of course organize the pyramid of what could be a million dollar opportunity to become something similar to the role of the Steem Witnesses in Steemit but on EOS. These BPs have to pick a node to launch the genesis block, which would have an advantage to be on the top 21 BPs, and is not until the 15% of the blocks are mined that restructure will happen, kind of a democratic election as seem on Steemit. Big holders of the token will have a heavier weight on their votes, and these votes will have to be cast every 6 months to foster a constant campaign and out reach from the BPs to the community, so there is no arbitrary or pre sealed alliance that can secure their power within the platform. 

The compliance of the BPs is must, because if we don't get a unified community that can choose who can launch the chain unilaterally we can face a multi-chain problem in the beginning or even worse and forced kind of fork, having two chains working in parallel were the players involve will have to fight among them to keep the survival of their interests. It is too much money to play with these scenarios. As it was not enough pressure for the community, there are already some disputes of who can do the job, technical vulnerabilities are filtering the different proposals to be hand-picked from to do the launch, but behind these efforts there are agendas that come from big money players. Rich software and security companies are behind the prize to become a top BP for EOS, alliances that are being build around the promise of money are getting together and the community is just expecting a platform to start to build the future of crypto. 

There is a lot of money on this race, and we are just a very beginning, the exploitation of this opportunity to be the launcher of the chain seems to be no brainer to take a cut for what could be a new kind of crypto business, a very fruitful one, but the key to make everything possible is cooperation, and when money is the underlying theme, cooperation seems a goal a little difficult to reach.