EOS whitepaper walk-through: Requirements.
Read the Whitepaper here
Last time we finished going over the abstract, note and disclaimer, and took a brief overview of the EOS whitepaper.
And we went over the first of the ten parts, Background.
Today we'll be reading over the second part, Requirements, of the whitepaper.Here it is, reproduced with commentary.
Requirements for Blockchain Applications
In order to gain widespread use, applications on the blockchain require a platform that is flexible enough to meet the following requirements:
Support Millions of Users
Competing with businesses such as eBay, Uber, AirBnB, and Facebook, require blockchain technology capable of handling tens of millions of active daily users. In certain cases, an application may not work unless a critical mass of users is reached and therefore a platform that can handle very large numbers of users is paramount.
The most popular application on Ethereum, CryptoKitties, at its height had about 14,000 daily users.
This saturated the Ethereum network, slowing it down and making other applications on the network unusable.
In comparison to the examples listed: AirBnB currently has 6 million daily users, Uber has 40 million, 170 million users on eBay, and a massive 1.4 billion daily users on Facebook.
These example were chosen because of they require a large number of users on the platform before it becomes useful.
Most people use Facebook because their friends and families are on the platform.No one will use Facebook if they were the only person on it.
Currently, the Ethereum network can only handle 0.001% of Facebook user count before becoming unusable.
This is obviously not enough capacity to handle anything remotely commercial-scale.
For comparison, the blockchain-based social media platform, Steem, handles about 60,000 daily users per day using less than 0.5% of the network capacity.
This means the Steem blockchain can easily handle a million users at its current implementation.
Free Usage
Application developers need the flexibility to offer users free services; users should not have to pay in order to use the platform or benefit from its services. A blockchain platform that is free to use for users will likely gain more widespread adoption. Developers and businesses can then create effective monetization strategies.
A legacy design choice Ethereum carried on from Bitcoin is that of transaction fees.
Transaction fees was a mechanism designed to incentivize Bitcoin miners to process transactions after the last block reward has given out, and no more Bitcoins can be gained from mining.
It was a replacing one incentive, the block rewards, with another, transaction fees.The problem is, this incentive for miners becomes a disincentive for users.
When using any application on the Ethereum network, it is necessary to pay a fee to perform any action.That means that every time a user does something, he would have to do a small cost/benefit analysis before taking the action.
This might be ok for those who are looking to profit from their actions, but most people have other motives for using these platforms for their utility rather than making a profit.
Easy Upgrades and Bug Recovery
Businesses building blockchain based applications need the flexibility to enhance their applications with new features. The platform must support software and smart contract upgrades.All non-trivial software is subject to bugs, even with the most rigorous of formal verification. The platform must be robust enough to fix bugs when they inevitably occur.
The DAO hack in Ethereum was like a nightmare you were conscious of, but could not wake up from.
Smart contracts, the building blocks of Ethereum applications are fixed and cannot be changed.
When it was hacked, the DAO token holders saw their funds being slowing drained but could do nothing.Any badly written contract will be there forever, and nothing can be done to stop it.
This means, if theoretically there was a smart-contract that exploited some weakness of the Ethereum network protocol, all the Ethereum network users can do is watch while the house burns down.
Incidence like this happen with even the best coders.
Gavin Wood, co-founder and CTO of the Ethereum, and the creator and developer of Solidity, the language used to write Ethereum smart-contract, had a bug in the smart-contract his company, Parity, developed and as a result frozen 300 million dollar worth of Ethereum.
Worst still, the attacker was a novice with no malicious intent.
If the Chief Technology Officer and the creator of the scripting language cannot avoid bugs in the software, what are our chances of doing so?
Low Latency
A good user experience demands reliable feedback with a delay of no more than a few seconds. Longer delays frustrate users and make applications built on a blockchain less competitive with existing non-blockchain alternatives. The platform should support low latency of transactions.
Latency refers to time it takes between a user taking an action and the network to process and reflect the changes caused by that action.
Current blockchain simply does not ability to relay those action reliably and quickly. They take minutes to reflect that update and the time-interval is not consistent.
This will cause immense frustration during operation, something anyone have interacted with a slow and outdated computer will sympathize.Current web applications, in comparison, have a latency of around 25 to 125 milliseconds.
EOS aims to have latency of around 500 milliseconds, not as fast as traditional web application, but which will make using EOS applications similar to traditional web applications.
Sequential Performance
There are some applications hat just cannot be implemented with parallel algorithms due to sequentially dependent steps. Applications such as exchanges need enough sequential performance to handle high volumes. Therefore, the platform should support fast sequential performance.
Parallel Performance
Large scale applications need to divide the workload across multiple CPUs and computers.
Most blockchain today can only do sequential transactions, and a small number can do parallel transactions.
But no blockchain today can do both.
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If you would like to know more about me and what I'm doing you can read my introduction post here.
Read my series on the Steem blockchain:
Steem: Welcome to the Matrix. Part One
Steem: Operating in the Matrix. Part Two
Steem: Construction of the Matrix. Part Three
Read my series on the EOS blockchain:
EOS whitepaper walk-through. Abstract
EOS whitepaper walk-through. Note and Disclaimer
EOS whitepaper walk-through. Overview
EOS whitepaper walk-through. Background
And you can contact me in the following way:
@bluabaleno on Steem.chat
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Another comprehensive overview. O believe the government aspect being the most striking aspect of the EOS project, even more important than the technical aspects (which are more or less in place with steem already). This could turn into a globally valid crypto-code-of-law...
Thanks for your continuous support!
I think the governance aspect of EOS is definitely interesting, and one that is tested and proven by the Steem blockchain.
But I still have my reservation about the idea of code is law.
There are definitely areas of law where computer code can definitely help to make more efficient, but there are just somethings that are written by human that can only be interpreted by human fully and no computer can do.
Absolutely agree with you, and i assume, that this is where eos intends to go, namely giving back control to humans.
What i tried to point out with code-of-law was more the idea of a quasi universal legislation, ruling the blockchain but done by humans. If this comes into effect this might become the real game changer.
Btw. hope you don't mind me shilinng my own work here, but in case you are interested, I've summed up what is available as regards the EOS constitution and a few thoughts on it: https://steemit.com/eos/@conceptskip/eos-the-constitution-has-arrived
no I don't mind at all!
I was hoping to do something similar. The idea of a constitution is a very interesting idea that deserves to be explored further!
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