The price to performance index: EOS, Ethereum, Tezos, Tauchain
For every dollar you put into EOS do you get the same value from it as you would for every dollar you put into Ethereum, Tezos or Tauchain?
When Dan Larimer designed Graphene it's competitive advantage was performance. If Dan Larimer continues down this path as indicated by his posts on Wren then the competitive advantage of EOS will also be performance.
Dollar for dollar, I would expect that with EOS you will get more performance for the exact same cost when compared to Ethereum.
Tezos is offering the competitive advantage of a secure smart contract language, which gives greater reliability. Reliable smart contracts is a performance advantage over Ethereum which suffered from the collapse of TheDAO.
In my estimation Tezos offers security but sacrifices simplicy and ease of development. In this case the costs might not actually go down compared to Ethereum because very few people actually know OCaml compared to Javascript. Solidity is not easy to program in, but it's familiar enough that most programmers coming from typical syntax can pick up on it quickly.
Tauchain competes by being secure yet also capturing simplicity using simplified English, which could in theory give it the advantages of Tezos without the risk of knowledge centralization and high development costs.
Note, because EOS, Tezos and Tauchain have not yet been released, all of my musing above is speculation. The point is that the developers and crowd will in my opinion flow to the platform which offers the best price to performance ratio for what they want to do with it. Tezos being more secure than Ethereum will definitely be used. Consider all of this pure speculation until all three projects are released and we can benchmark them.
It is in my opinion that these are the main four in terms of technical specification and potential. Tezos and Tauchain are both self amending. EOS is yet unknown but if it is DPOS then we know what it can do. Ethereum is known, and it's limitations are known.
Nice post
Very glad you introduced me to Tau chain, it looks very promising
I'd write about it if I understood it more, although I try to refrain from crypto articles in my posts as I think it can put off newcomers
What is the DPOS you speak of with respect to EOS? Admittedly I haven't looked into EOS much
DPOS is Delegated Proof of Stake, which is the consensus mechanisms behind Bitshares, Steemit, all of Graphene. It is based on LMAX optimization with some elements of the RAFT consensus.
Dan has been hinting that there will be an inbuilt mechanism to reverse transactions (?) by agreeing on arbitrer/legislation when entering a contract. If this is true, it will significantly
In this case EOS would have the benefit of speed, scalability, ease of development and lower risks. It could also be expected that it has decentralized governance unlike Ethereum and low or zero tx costs, which would open it up for much more use-cases.
All current crypto's have the problem that holders collectively have to pay the price if a criminal manages to steal coins. I don't know how high Bitcoin or Ethereum would be by now if there never was a Gox or DAO situation. That is a very real cost. In addition there is a cost to trying to prevent such failures. If EOS has a mechanism to reverse such transactions by decentralized consensus, it would be a massive leap forward. This probably isn't too obvious, but it's implications on trust, development and agility would be significant.
Reversible transactions are interesting but I don't follow how it can lead to the conclusions you mention below. I've always known reversible transactions were possible but that seems to be about disaster recovery which I admit is good for resilience and critical for security. As far as using arbitrators, and dispute resolution, this can be done but Tezos, Tauchain, and Ethereum can all do this so this isn't a technically EOS specific feature unless you are saying EOS can somehow do it better? As far as I now maybe EOS is the first to do it but once everyone else sees how it is done they'll just do it on their.
This is very true. Ethereum is insecure. On the other hand Tezos is very secure at least from the specification, and as flexible as Ethereum. In a sense it is like Ethereum done right in terms of a ground up secure design. Tauchain theoretically from what I know has some surprise features it is capable of which none of the others, and Tauchain will have the benefit of learning from the mistakes of the projects which came before it, just as EOS does not duplicate the mistakes of Ethereum, and Tezos does not duplicate the mistakes of Ethereum.
So I guess my point is what EOS will have going for it is network effect and community, not technical specs. Tezos and Tauchain will be able to equal or perhaps even surpass it in technical specs but that doesn't mean it will have Steemit community, Bitshares community, Peerplays community, really next to Bitcoin and Ethereum this is the biggest most active community. Also if EOS smart contracts are a familiar looking language then I'll be able to program it right away, while with Tezos I'll describe it as an alien programming language, not because it's hard but because it's a different ecosystem with different development style etc.
As far as costs you have a point but I think cost of development is the flaw Tezos could have which EOS likely wont have. If you can spend less to get the same quality code then this is more bang for your buck. I have to see more of EOS or at least a whitepaper before I can really respond in a way which is coherent so don't take my criticism too seriously.
All 4 will probably continue to exists for a very long time, and it will be incredibly interesting to see which use cases each of them find. Well, Ethereum has a crazy head-start. It will likely maintain it's lead for a long time because of the network effect and bandwagoning. Dan has a track record of creating new things really fast. Tauchain seems like it's full power will become obvious gradually - like to our grandchildren. Tezos is getting much attention, so let's hope they get something released soon.
dana, what people mean by "immutability" ,this is the reason why bitcoin maximalist prefer bitcoin, they argue etheruem does not have "immutability." Thanks.
No, they are talking absolutist philosophy. Ethereum has immutability, it just has two chains. Bitcoin can fork as well and ultimately just because you have two chains preserving immutability it doesn't mean socially the human beings who give meaning to all transactions will prefer the chain which has no respect for people. So the fact that ETC exists shows what will happen, the less popular fork will not have the developers, will not have the community, etc. An unethical chain will simply become less popular than an ethical chain which proves any chain exists to support a community and not for it's own sake.
You cannot reverse history, but you can create two histories and ignore the fake history.
Jesus i'll be lost without. Thanks
I really appreciate your insight but I think it's unnecessarily to spoil it with your personal opinions. Categorizations like "ethical" or "unethical" are very subjective in the blockchain space. And we all know that when something is more popular it does not necessarily imply that it is more ethical.
The confusion of those terms is especially evident when you say this:
In case of Ethereum, the more popular chain is actually "fake history", which contradicts your judgment about it being the ethical chain.
I never denied that ethics are subjective. My point is the majority of people set the ethical guidelines of any community. It's true that people are free to choose a fringe chain but it will be a fringe chain and support the people who have friends ethics. The majority chain will be the one which supports the ethics that the majority of people have.
In the case of Ethereum the real chain is the chain with the most community support. If the chain history wasn't the one considered the most real then the people would prefer the other chain. It appears the developers, majority of smart contracts, majority of money, have chosen the reality they want, and have selected the history which they deem to be the real one by their social consensus. The social consensus includes economic, developer, and user consensus, which ultimately determines which set of transactions are legitimate and which are illegitimate.
My point is it's people who interpret the meaning of transactions and who give a blockchain meaning. It's people who give a smart contract meaning. A smart contract exists for people, not the other way around. The history exists for people and if people agree that one chain is more right, or more meaningful, they'll choose it, and that is my point. My point is you cannot remove human subjectivity from interpretation. And my point is also that when the fork happened, it isn't the code which determines which chain is most real or which is reality, it's the community.
The reason our opinions differ is that it is central to my belief and I suppose to the majority of others supporting Ethereum Core (ETH) rather than Ethereum Classic, is a difference in purpose. If we see the blockchain has no intrinsic meaning, purpose, value, except to support the users, developers, and community as a whole, then at any time the people have veto power, or if we frame it like the US Constitution then the people have the capability at any time to over throw dictatorship even if it's a flawed algorithm, a broken smart contract, a rogue AI, etc. Does this mean these people are violating the Constitution because they overthrow the dictator? I would say no, it means they interpret the the words in a way which is different from the dictator, and or the dictator isn't respecting more fundamental rights which the Constitution was set up to protect in the first place. If a smart contract is the dictator it doesn't change anything in my opinion if the ecosystem, ledger, and the history it contains, exists to support the people who interpret it.
Your point is valid, we just disagree.
Thank you for this detailed response.
It's clear we have a disagreement at a very fundamental level. I would never say that "ethics are subjective" and are defined by whatever the majority decides at a given moment. I guess your mindset represents the essence of post-modernism: there are no absolute values, everyone is free to interpret the world the way they want (every interpretation is of equal value) and ethics comprises of whatever interpenetration prevails at a given time.
For me, the essence of ethics is the fact that they are absolute and they transcend everything else (including science and the will of the majority).
And to be clear, my stance does not imply that things like US Constitution should be immutable. Quite the contrary, they should define a way to amend themselves. My point is, they should not be allowed to change its rules retroactively. This is a meta-rule which is kind of sacred and was clearly violated in case of the DAO incident.
What's more, the Ethereum webpage still mentions "unstoppable contracts", while according to your interpenetration (which I guess is shared by the entire Ethereum community) it is not the case.
If they clearly declared something like this: "We aim to make contracts unstoppable but reserve the right to override a contract which most us perceive as unacceptable" - then I would be OK with it. I'd never use their platform, but still I'd respect this pragmatic approach. As it is, the whole thing is either based on a lie (as no contract is actually meant to be unstoppable) or it violates one of the primary principles of our civilization: lex retro non agit.
I make a distinction between public and private morality. Public morality is only determinable by opinion polls and is the "current moral sentiment of the crowd". Private morality is what an individual might know or feel is right. In the end public morality is what communities shape and members of the community are influenced by in laws, social consensus, etc, we have public morality which shapes that.
The developers of a technology have to ask themselves "what do my stakeholders think is ethical?" and make their design decisions based on what they think others think is right and wrong. This is because the tool, or the platform, isn't private but is public, and it's no different in my opinion from when a corporation goes public and then must change it's product in order to not upset the shareholders. My point is like with companies, the stakeholders determine what the consensus ethics of a platform is.
I do not think there is any absolute truth or at least I don't know of any. Science doesn't work on absolute values. It's more you chip away at difficult problems over time by being wrong, failing, and learning from failed attempts until eventually a picture begins to emerge based on that. In a sense, science isn't about absolutes, it's just about being continuously less wrong over time. Absolute truth might not be achievable, but you can approximate by simply being continuously closer to it by ruling out what isn't true. In other words iterative improvement just like in engineering is the process which I think is more important than any rigid adherence to absolutes, whether this be moral absolutism, or if we are talking about software, algorithms, etc, the software is never finished and can always be improved, the algorithms are almost never optimal and most are just the best found fit solution.
So we agree on the Constitution. My point is immutable as you are using it does not mean human beings have to adhere to anything immutable. The blockchain is immutable in the sense that when we agree on that version of reality it's set in stone, recorded for all time, on the blockchain. But then if there is a fork then we can agree to ignore the old chain as a means of correcting our own mistakes, as I see the blockchain only as a means to an end. The chain itself may be immutable but there is no rule we can only have a single immutable chain, when we can have many competing chains (competing versions of reality) which the market selects, or the community chooses.
So Ethereum Core has it's chain and that chain is immutable. Ethereum Classic has a chain and that chain is immutable. The fork simply turned one chain into two, but the only thing which changed was the interpretation on the human side. If we are saying we cannot ever fork because that would break immutability then Bitcoin broke that a long time ago because it has forked many times, had bugs, and I suppose if we think of it like that then the purity of the chain was adulterated too. But I don't view it like that because I don't think the purity of the chain has any meaning without a community behind it.
Honestly you have a point here. Very naive marketing, and this way of thinking is actually typical in this space. A lot of very naive catch phrases, buzzwords, and even some toxic memes are floating around. I do not endorse these memes. But for people who believe in that they can use Ethereum Classic. It is for that reason why we had the fork and why they have their own chain, but I agree it should be removed from the website because it's false marketing but what else is new? Lots of crypto projects make false promises in the marketing, like come on, world computer? Ethereum is not that, and it's not a super computer, and it's not exactly secure. Unstoppable contracts, okay so if the contract is destroying all life on earth it's unstoppable because Ethereum says we cannot shut it off? No, it's only unstoppable if a community exists willing to continue to mine it whether for economic reasons or others, it's only unstoppable if developers are willing to support the chain it's own, if it's an AI it's only able to be unstoppable if people keep feeding it resources. I'm saying that I endorse the "kill switch" idea as a safety precaution and in the case of The DAO no such safety mechanism was designed, it was threatening the health of the community and the project, not just economic, not just ethical, but legally as well. In the marketing I would hope they learn not to make naive promises which cannot be kept without leading to dystopia and unstoppable contracts is the sort of promise which would lead to that if we are talking about smart contracts completely as code without any arbitration or fail safe or human fail safe.
To be clear, I do not have a strong opinion about the "code is the law" rule. Maybe it's not such a good idea and maybe the "kill switch" that you mention is worth considering.
What I do have a strong opinion about is this: when you publicly announce that "code is the law" (which is effectively what the phrase "unstoppable contracts" means and what was reiterated in the DAO terms & conditions) than you need to stick to this rule, no matter what, even if it means a huge financial loss and going against the will of the majority of your community or even destruction of the entire platform. In other words, take full responsibility for your words, as this is one of the fundamental (and absolute) meta-rules, on which our civilization stands.
You seem to acknowledge my point but still you dismiss it as just naive (or I would say, manipulative) marketing which should not be treated seriously. For me, it's much more than that and maybe this is actually the core of our disagreement.
As for your other arguments, it's obvious that we need to distinguish between forks which fix mistakes (so that existing rules are imposed) and forks which change the rules retroactively. There is a huge difference between those two.
And finally:
I think you actually believe there are absolute truths, as otherwise your life would be unbearable. They are deep inside you, accumulated by millions of years of evolution, just inaccessible on the rational layer. Or so intrinsic that you don't even notice them.
As for science, I fully agree, it doesn't work on absolute values. That's why it's extremely efficient in building stuff and completely useless in telling you how to live. And I guess the latter is much more important than the former.
Thanks for this introduction.
dana-edwards thanks! I am new to this blockchain world, so I started to invest recently in ETH... reading your article just in terms of investing, I feel like I made a mistake?
Invest in the platform you personally will use and don't take advice from people like me. I'm a complete stranger on the Internet not qualified to give investment advice.
I'm a stakeholder, and promote the stakeholder mentality. I'm involved with the projects and platforms I have a stake in. It's up to me to do what I can to develop for, community build, or promote these platforms. Ethereum has competition, but that will not stop me from being excited about certain projects being developed for Ethereum, just as if these were all video game consoles, I'm not going to stop enjoying my favorite game just because a more powerful console just was released by a competitor.
If you cannot see yourself using Steemit then don't buy Steem. If you cannot see yourself using Ethereum don't by ETH. If you cannot see yourself using EOS, Tezos, Tauchain, then don't buy the token. It doesn't benefit the platform if you're only buying it to sell it as that does not contribute to the ecosystem or community.
Actually, lending money to a community does help. It is the holding time of a currency that represents contribution of value. Just don't contribute that which you cannot afford to lose.
Good advice thanks dana-edwards. sometimes people like me just wanna have some alternative to invest outside the "system"... I invest in physical gold & silver and want to be more diversify...
I think @craig-grant has a good attitude. Treat it all as play money, and also @dantheman makes a good point also which is don't contribute that which you cannot afford to lose. If I look at the charts to be honest crypto has been an excellent place for us all to store our wealth and because it's only about 10 million people total there is a lot of room for growth too. With crypto the buy and hold strategy seems to work, it requires patience. Look at Bitshares for example, if you bought it as Protoshares and held until now you made a nice profit.
I take the stakeholder approach because I'm not patient enough nor the sort of person who can buy something like ETH and just forget about it. I'm too attracted to the community, the technology, etc. The topics being researched just happened to be the exact topics I spent my life studying, that I went to school for, so I feel as if my contributions can be most useful in this space. If I feel I can add value to a project that I'm a stakeholder in then I'm taking active responsibility to increase the price of the token if that makes any sense.
Thank u @dana-edwards for your very informative response, YOU ARE DEFINITELY ADDING TO THIS PROJECT! Wow only 10 millon ppl. investing in cryptos??? there is a super-mega-big-huge OPPORTUNITY here!
ppl. of my age that were working in the 90s. & we didn´t "board the internet train" we lost that great opportunity (to make huge passive earnings)... note that I was working in a bank and studied finance! and I could NOT even figure it out!!!
NOW I (and some other friends too) are trying to get in this "train" that seems it will be more paradigm breaking that the internet itself! Really appreciate your helpful advice & posts! God bless.
More or less 10 million last time I checked. New people coming in every day though.
I thought it was much bigger the crypto-money investing ppl., this really motivates me to invest more into crytocurrencies! maybe in the future if I understand more about the uses of blockchain tech even participate more, like you.
I have a simple question:
Which one, based on the speculation, do you favor the most? I am trying to read as much as possible about EOS and I find a bunch of other things here.
Just asking! :)
I don't know much about Tauchain or EOS but Tezos seems to me like the most promising in smart contracts outside of Ethereum. I believe its possible for a few of Ethereum Dapps to failed due to bugs in the smart contracts. Similar to what we saw with the DAO. Its unlikely but possible. All the major DAPPS have undergone intense audits but their is still room for human error. This is one main reason we see a slow release of Digix and Augur. They want to be extremely careful to test heavily with their beta users to ensure the contracts are secure before what potentially could be millions of crypto running inside them. Tezos may solve on of the key problems of hard forking since it can self upgrade with its governance system and seed fund itself. OCaml may offer safer smart contracts. Tezos def has great potential to be good option for developers seeking greater security although the benefits of Tezos or any other smart contracts platform may not out weight Ethereum's growing network effects. A good example is Bitcoin. All the troubles with the blocksize war and yet here we sit at 30 billion dollars due strictly from its first mover advantage. Not b/c its a better system. Brand name matters.
Tezos is promising in it's design but the problem is likely the cost of development. Think about it this way, if it's not easy to develop for then you end up paying more for the same code you could get for much cheaper on Ethereum, EOS, or Tauchain. Tauchain will have the competitive advantage over all of them in terms of development cost but Tauchain hasn't arrived yet. EOS will likely arrive first and also have a network effect to work with, and given enough time developers will learn to develop for EOS, but Tezos launches at the same time as EOS, and if a developer like myself has to look at each one and figure out which one is the one I can immediately code someting up? It might turn out that EOS is more developer friendly.
So it's about who wins the developer and who has the most dedicated stakeholders. Tauchain and Tezos are new kids on the block in terms of the community building bizdev side. It takes years to build a community, even when you have something potentially viral like Steemit. Tezos as it looks now seems to be nice for cypherpunks and hackers who know functional programming but it's not going to bring in the sort of every day people you see on Steemit or even Ethereum.
Developers, Developers, Developers! Very important. I wanna see how Tezos crowdsale goes. There's some very high profile VC's that are coming into back it. Its hard to tell what advantage it may have now with OCaml and its governance system. If the system is truly more secure from bugs and 0 risk of chain splits then I think for some very high level use cases developers would choose to build on Tezos instead of Ethereum. Since blockchains are each their own economy I think will see several large smart contract platforms that make it long term. Several large Social media blockchains too.
Do you think Agoras token is a good buy at this price?
Sure ,agoras token is now undervalueted
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Being a bit newer to cryptocurrency, this is a post I have saved to re-visit as I learn more about the technology, various use cases, and macro-market scope. Very technical, but you make it easy to do the research on considering the references below! Gave you a follow - I'm a crowdfunding advocate and learning about cryptocurrency to ultimately democratize access to capital for all...the government regulations completely choke out innovation. Looking forward to reading more of your posts!
So it's difficult to enter into this kind of interesting ISO.
I hope it'll open soon.I expect the reaction of the mayor.