Aloha EOS Block Producer Candidacy

Aloha, EOS!

We are Aloha EOS, a block producing candidate for EOS that will primarily be hosted in Hawaii. At Aloha EOS, we believe firmly in acting with integrity, honesty, fairness, openness, and transparency as we work towards promoting and supporting the EOS community at large. Our team is led by industry experts in high availability server administration, application and web development, usability and design, and blockchain technology.

Vision and Goals

We are committed to the EOS platform that enables the development of commercial-scale decentralized applications. We promote the community tenets of integrity, transparency, benefit to the community, and the overall success of EOS. Our unique geographic location helps to diversify the EOS block production network as we bridge the North American continent with all points West. We aim to have among the highest level of security and performance as a block producer. Additionally, we will strive to maximize stability and uptime. Finally, we intend to provide measurable value back to the community – both for the Hawaii populace and the EOS community at large.

Team

Nate is a long time entrepreneur with both a broad and deep technical background. He brings over 20 years of experience in development and systems engineering, with a focus on scalability and security. As an entrepreneur, Nate founded or cofounded numerous companies and has the experience to wear many different hats. He has also been a cryptocurrency and blockchain enthusiast since early 2010.

Joe focuses primarily on the development of enterprise applications. With 20 years of time spent at a Fortune 3 technology company as an engineer, he has a deep understanding of usable UI concepts and design patterns combined with strong development skills on both mobile and web platforms. To that end, Joe will bring his skill set to bear on the development of Dapps for EOS. In prior positions, Joe ran a software development company and was the director of information technology at another.

Patrick has 23 years experience and proven success working in diverse environments within both private and public sectors of information technology. He is experienced in managing IT services across multiple facilities and has developed efficient and reliable technology infrastructures with scalable solutions to allow businesses to meet current and future needs. All of this puts Patrick in a prime position to leverage his experience to build and maintain a highly performant, stable, and secure EOS infrastructure.

Location

Our primary servers will be hosted in Honolulu, Hawaii, U.S. Additional locations will be evaluated as we progress (see Phase 3 below).

Our headquarters is in Boise, Idaho, U.S. Our team is spread out across Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, and Washington.

Hardware

We are planning a phased approach to our hardware rollout.

Phase 1

Time period: May 2018

For the first phase, we have deployed two block producing nodes in a private cloud configuration to allow us to experiment with the blockchain as well as build robust load balancing and failover processes.

Primary and Backup Block Producer Node configuration:
Location: Private Cloud - Tier 3 datacenter in Honolulu, HI
Mem: 64GB
CPU: 4 vCpus
Storage: 512G SSD
Uplink: 1 Gbps

Phase 2

Time period: July 2018

Shortly after mainnet launch we will evaluate our Phase 1 capacity and launch phase 2. We will migrate our virtual configuration to a fully redundant and fault-tolerant bare-metal infrastructure. We will have dual carrier uplinks coming into an Active/Passive firewall cluster which is then connected to two 10Gbps switches utilizing VLT (Virtual Line Trunking) to provide fault tolerance. The block producing server network cards will be split between both switches using static LACP trunks.

Primary and Backup Block Producer Node configuration:
Location: Bare Metal - Tier 3 datacenter in Honolulu, HI
Mem: 512G
CPU: Dual Xeon Gold 6144 8C/16T 4.20 GHz
Storage: 3.2TB SSD
Uplink: 1-10 Gbps

Phase 3

Time period: Fall 2018

For phase 3, our plan is to consider replicating our working infrastructure to another location and use that as a hot standby.

Budget

We are independent and 100% self-owned. By doing this we can assure that the needs of the infrastructure/network never conflict with investors that may wish to direct the capital in a different way.

Our estimated expenses are as follows:

Phase 1

Setup: $5k
Monthly: $3-5k

Phase 2

Setup: $100k
Monthly: $5-10k depending on usage and extra services like DDoS protection.

Community

Aloha EOS plans on returning value to both Hawaii Islanders as well as the EOS community at large through a few acts:

For the first 60 days of operation, Aloha EOS will be donating 5% of all post-expense operating profits to the Hawaii Life Charitable Fund, which will serve disaster-stricken islanders (such as those affected by the recent volcanic activity of Kilauea). Additionally, on an ongoing basis, Aloha EOS will be donating 10% of all post-expense operating profits to needy non-profit organizations. Such organizations may include those such as the Hawaii Foodbank which serves one in five islanders. At our discretion or possibly through input and voting from the EOS community, the list of organizations receiving this charity may change from time to time, but the percent shared will not. As with all the transactions, all information will be fully disclosed to the EOS community.

In addition to donating part of the profits to local needy organizations, we also plan on investing a portion of the revenue to fund EOS decentralized app (dApp) development, education, and advocacy that will promote EOS and assist the community at large. We will do this as transparently as possible. We are developing dApps and will be announcing them on our site as we progress into the later months of the Hawaiian summer. Additional activity will include reinvesting in our EOS data center infrastructure and promoting EOS Community support and engagement. The success in EOS is when the community benefits, not the individual. Doing these activities will increase the value of the EOS ecosystem, which will create a self-sustaining uplift for all of the EOS community as a whole.

Dividends

Similarly to how many people believe that corporate special interest groups should stay out of politics so as to not influence legislation that may impact individual voters, we think that block producers should also not unduly influence votes. We do not support vote-buying or kickbacks in any form. Vote-buying is an economically damaging tactic for the future of EOS - we need to encourage and educate investors of the technology on long-term value vs. short, pay-for-votes.

Roadmap / Timeline

Links