Are You Ignorant About EOS, STEEM, and DPOS?
I got a new backdrop yesterday which included a green screen, so I thought I'd try it out and do a recording with some thoughts on DPOS, EOS, and STEEM. Is the world ready for on-chain governance? Do they understand it?
The green screen flickering is a little distracting. Sorry about that, I'm still learning how this works. You can see my setup here (I turned a corner of my room into a little studio):
I think we are still discovering the pros and cons of the different consensus mechanisms. The reality is that most are still better than the centralized alternatives of banking and fiat we most use today. They will continue to rule at our detriment if we do come together more as a community to support trial and errors to learn in the process. The fact of EOS concentration is clear but how detrimental is it on a protocol that is still being developed and probably has overcapacity due to adoption still being low. We should not point out the flaws and instead work on the solutions.
Well said! Thank you. I hope to see more reasoned responses from people like this, whether they support EOS or not.
'.....bit part of it is ignorance..........'
This the case so many times that it's like a self correcting protocol. If you have too much confusion about something than we know that it is time to take a look ate what we are missing.
You shared in the beginning of the video about your experiences with the different aspects of the blockchain since 2013. Those few times when bitcoin was minted essentially out of nothing, block size debates and how a few individuals were pushing their agendas on it. The time when you watched the live fork of bitcoin and the time when mining cartels started to gather power and then essentially centralized the bitcoin................. this all reminded me of something very important.
That tells me how new we all are. It is easy to be overwhelmed by the senior people here in the world of blockchain and forget that all of us are still in the process of learning from the past mistakes. Maybe a century later from now there'll be some ironclad protocols refined over a hundred years but now is the time when the mistakes are going to be made and the most intelligent guy in the block would be the one to learn from them.
Right now we operate in a ecosystem where the onus of taking care of it lies on each and every individual. Just like Steem, where if shortsightedness gets out of hand and value extraction becomes too prevalent than we might see the ethical side of the community take a harsher stand against this abuse.................. its safe to say that not only the process of governance is evolving but the debate (for the governance) itself is evolving.
The human element is far too complicated for the code to encompass so we have to see a greater degree of human involvement in the process of governance. Probably acknowledging the human intention from the beginning is far more easier in the beginning than to be adopted mid journey and here EOS holds a big advantage. The human element is faulty and subject to greed so a consensus is a must.
In my understanding the rise of crypto in 2017 is underestimated. It has done far more than just to push the market cap into hundreds of billions of dollars. It has brought into perspective that what kind of power the people in the developer community of the blockchain can hold in the future.
It is best to bloodied now and take the losses than to be bloodied at the forefront where the level of scrutiny can possibly scare people away. We all can take this time to prepare and improve ourselves.
Just as example - In last October I entered the market thinking of making dollars and it was after that I learned about the idea of the Distributed Ledger and what it could possibly mean. After that I decided to keep the crypto as my currency, the money that is on the blockchain rather than the fiat.
Just a few months ago my roommate and I were talking about some money troubles that we were having and he reminded me that I can sell some of my Steem for the Euro and make up the rent. The first thought that struck me was the fact that I am here to earn Steem and not Euro, so why would I sell it to buy Euros.
This mindset was a much improved version of the one that was six months ago. I am still learning, sure it is taking an inordinate amount of time to just absorb one aspect of this evolving system. There is this tiny part of me that is a little afraid of the next bull run. I know for a fact that when the next ATH arrives, hundreds of people will be asking me for advice and I don't want to be the guy to point people in the wrong direction and I definitely don't want to be the fool who bought what he didn't understand.
Until now I have bought first and studied later, but I am trying to change that.
.............. shit this got really long - sorry for that!
It's a fantastic comment as always, @hashcash. Thanks for giving your perspective.
My pleasure man :D
How can they freeze accounts? The top 20 vote on it on-chain?
The 2/3+1 of the top 21 BPs can pretty much do whatever they want, just like in STEEM. Witnesses here can roll out code changes right now to freeze accounts, refund money, create 100,000,000 new STEEM tokens, etc, etc, etc. The difference being on EOS, some of these things are done in system contracts which can be updated in real time via transactions on the chain. It's like having upgradable EPROM in hardware. Some pieces of the system can be updated while it's running via consensus of the block producers. If token holders disagree, they can vote out those BPs and vote in new ones who could potentially undo whatever was done.
As for "freezing" accounts, what was done as an emergency was to use a blacklist approach in the config each BP to exclude transactions from the accounts. This was an emergency step that many were not happy with (hence the 3.5 hour call). Because it required unanimous approval (if even one producing BP didn't have the blacklist in place, the transactions would go through and the money would be gone), it was a very difficult discussion. Based on the feedback from the community, my hunch is it won't happen again (I don't think eosDAC would support it, as an example).
Interestingly, here's what the current ECAF website says:
I just got off what has become a daily BP call (70+ participants from around the world) and there's still a lot to be worked out in terms of who ECAF is, how they get funded, what role they play, etc. Doing on-chain governance is really complicated stuff.
I think the green screen needs to fill the whole frame.
Love the enthusiasm.
Don't shy away from wealth and power.
Having them isn't the problem; loving them is the problem.
As long as your love is for your fellow man, and assuming wealth and power have to land on someone, better it be you than some other schmuck.
The green screen fills the frame, but the background image I had doesn't. I'll have to fix that. I may go with just a solid color background image as well or something. Definitely need to play with it a bit more to get it right. Thanks for the feedback.
Wealth, I'm all about as it creates new opportunities. Power is a bit concerning depending on how we define it. Is it power over ourselves? Power over nature? Power over others?
Love for our fellow human beings is, for sure, the key. I have some thoughts on that here as it relates to Maslow's Hierarchy: How to Improve the World
I might also recommend lighting your green screen separately, and - if possible - at more of a distance away from your back. Part of the problem with keying it when it's so close is color spill. You're getting a little of that green on you when the light bounces off of it and onto you. If you put more of a gap between it and you, then light it separately, you'll get a cleaner key.
Thanks Winston! I got this exact advice from someone else also. I played with it a bit more today and got it looking a lot better by lighting the backdrop: https://www.facebook.com/750870567/posts/10156116519175568/
If you're a Steem witness and you're instrumental in the EOSDac team, that's going to make you incredibly influential in the very near future.
Power granted voluntarily, (and withdrawn at will) is still power.
Don't shy away from it just because evil people have wielded similar in the past.
People want leadership, and I'd rather they found it in a voluntaryist than anywhere else.
Which definition of Power are you using?
If #1, then I guess that makes sense?
#2 I don't like because it seems to drift away from voluntary interactions. #3 is fine as long as it's not over someone else. #4 is technical and doesn't apply.
I'm for leadership, vision casting, creating education that influences people because it's based on reason, logic, and evidence... but power? Well, power corrupts. I don't want power. I want people to think for themselves. I guess, in a way, I want everyone to have power as in the #1 sense of the word so that no one else could rule over them (including me).
As a witness you have power over the blockchain, where a great deal of my kids' inheritance is invested.
Those vests give me some power to pick and choose witnesses, but the witnesses can collectively make changes, increasing or decreasing the long term value of that investment.
Don't be shy to wield that power. Decisions have to be made somewhere.
The developers have far more power, IMO. They right the code. Witnesses just say "yes" or "no" when it comes to deploying the code.
i tried that too and had mediocre success because i used amateurish lightning and setup. There are several things which you should take in consideration if not answered by others:
-> i'm personally abandoned my intention because realized it needs a lot of efforts and money to produce high quality videos with green screen
All very good points but... This is what I think and it very well could be totally wrong. Just some food for thought
Like bitcoin has many large miners which can control and determine what direction bitcoin goes. Is DPOS the same? Since only a few people running the servers have vote weight. So now 100 people are deciding what 5 million people can do and how they can do it?
BTW I do appreciate all the work and commitment and good you are doing for steem. Thank you
Thanks for the encouragement.
I think the hugely important difference between bitcoin miner cartels and DPOS is that token holders, in a single moment, can actually change their votes on who gets to be a BP. That can't happen with POW. Token holders have no say at all how things go. The motivational incentives are not inline. DPOS aligns those in a better way because it's the token holders that hold all the value for the chain. The "if you don't like it, sell your tokens" is good approach because bitcoin lost a ton of marketshare from people who still love bitcoin but didn't have a way to express their views on how it should work.
I don't think 100 people deciding is an accurate way to describe it. 21 BPs are (ideally) just securing the chain. If they are called to do something extraordinary by the community, then it's the token holders who are deciding by agreeing or disagreeing with the approach the BPs take.
Great briefing, Luke. Needs some more research on my part. Thanks for the gentle push in that direction. 😎
The excitement for the future is real. To be honest I bought into Eos because of the hype and the more and more i learn about it the more Im glad that I did fomo it. Keep up the great work Luke. Don't forget to get some rest though. Lol
Hahah... Count yourself lucky. Usually FOMO doesn't end well. :)
To the question in your title, my Magic 8-Ball says:
Hi! I'm a bot, and this answer was posted automatically. Check this post out for more information.
Hey Luke thanks for, let me say, teaching about stuff people who're working with crypto should know. I'm really new to this all and you're showing me the easier way of getting knowledge.
Thank you and I have to say i appreciate your work.
Thank you for the encouragement!
@lukestokes Thank you for all you do for EOS and eosDAC. I Really am getting Sick of all the FUD that has come out of Bix Weir's Mouth for the Last Few Months !
There's a lot of FUD all over the place.
@lukestokes I know what you mean. In fact Bix Weir just put up this video on YouTube and I wrote a comment asking him a question and he responded. You may find that it was an interesting response.......
I tried watching a full video of this guy and the number of things said which have no evidence gets me frustrated. It's the same reason I don't watch Alex Jones. It's shock TV designed to prey on the weakest parts of the human mind, not calm, rational, fact-based evidence. The connections being made between Brock and the actual code running EOS are ridiculous.