What Is EOS?

Just another crypto coin, Right?
This was what I thought when I first learned about EOS in January of this year. Now that the EOS mainchain is launched and I have been able to play around with the EOS ecosystem, what I discovered is totally mind blowing.

What is an EOS account?

When you open up your EOS wallet and look at your account, this is what you see.

The components in your account are CPU, Network and Ram! This is a computer!! Your account is describing the power and resources your computer has. The amount of CPU ( EOS staked), the amount of bandwidth or network (EOS staked) and amount of RAM available. The smallest "account computer" possible is 0.1 EOS of CPU, 0.1 EOS of Bandwidth and about 4 Kb of Ram. This represent the minimum share in the power of the main "EOS computer" run by the Block Producers. Like a computer the RAM is where all the critical data for instant access by the "EOS computer" is stored.

Think of the "EOS computer" as a computer in the cloud and all EOS accounts are just different size computers that can use the resources of this "computer in the cloud" depending on the amount of EOS staked. Sending tokens, broadcasting, buying ram, running Dapps, voting and much more.

This is very different from what we have been used to thus far. With Bitcoin when we send a transaction say sending 0.01 BTC to another account we pay a fee of hopefully 0.0001 BTC which goes to the miner and the recipient gets 0.0099 BTC. ( Ethereum works in much the same way.) In EOS if we send 0.1 EOS the recipient receives the full amount of 0.1 EOS. The transaction fee is paid by the network. For the user this is a "free" transaction. What stops the network from being spammed is that the amount of resources your " account computer" has only allows you to make a finite number of transactions within a 24 hour period after which the capacity of the "account computer" is depleted and will have to be "recharged", before it can be used again. This is an ingenious solution!

It cost a minimum of 0.2 EOS to open an account. We can see that if 1 EOS is worth say $1000 one day, it would cost $200 to open up an account! This will severely affect the number of users right? Wrong! You only need an EOS account if you want to use the EOS blockchain, hodling, holding voting and moving EOS tokens, running your Dapps. 

Remember that EOS is a computer, and as a developer of a Dapp (ono) you will need to stake a certain amount of EOS to have access to CPU, Bandwidth and Ram on the EOS computer for your users to make transactions. The more popular and successful your Dapp the more resources you will need. Your users will sign up to your Dapp and they will use the services you offer without the need to own any EOS tokens or open up an EOS account. You can even reward your users with your own native tokens (ONO). This runs separate from the EOS blockchain. If the project fails you simply sells your EOS back into the market! This is like putting up capital to start a business and if the business fails you simply resell the assets to recoup your capital. Now, this is a model for mass adoption!

Expect to see a hosts of Dapps similar to Facebook, Twitter, Telegram all running on the EOS platform. Their users can singup to use these applications and they do not need to hold any EOS tokens or have an EOS account.

To drive the point home. Remember the game of space invaders? 

You can run this program on your little Z80, Atari, Commodore or Apple computer. It uses the CPU, bandwidth and Ram resources on your little computer. Well you can run this program on your little "Eos Account" computer. All the moves will actually be recorded on the EOS blockchain in real time.

Unlike Bitcoin, transactions (moves) on the EOS blockchain are extremely fast. Send a token and by the time you refresh your page the transaction have already confirmed on the blockchain. This is so incredible that you can run Virtual Reality applications on the EOS blockchain. The mind really boggles on what this EOS computer is really capable of. Think decentralised stock exchanges, micro transactions and instant payment systems.

So what is EOS and where is EOS headed?

The inventor of EOS is Dan Larimer. Prior to EOS he has already cut his teeth on Bitshares ( a decentralised exchange ) and Steemit ( a decentralised social media platform). Steemit and Bitshares currently occupy the top two spots in number of transactions processed as tracked on Blocktivity. These two projects are running on their own blockchains. Since then, Dan Larimer has announced that he will soon release Steemit 2.0 and Bitshares 2.0 on the EOS blockchain! and on top of this he will also introduce a stable coin.

We don't know what Steemit 2.0 and Bitshares 2.0 will be like but we can be very sure that they will be huge improvements over their previous incarnations having learned from the experience. A stable coin too! like Tether? The basis of a stable coin is the asset backing ratio. Tether boast a 1:1 ratio with USD but they have difficulty proving this. BitUSD on Bitshares is said to have a 3:1 asset backing. How will this new stable coin be received?

This is what is so incredible about EOS. Everything is different and new, and yet, so far, it all works!  Even before any Dapp is launched on the platform there is already a marketplace for Ram and soon Account Names too. Only stands to reason that a market for renting EOS tokens will develop in the near future. My conclusion is that the EOS as a platform will dominate the crypto space, and EOS as a token will be worth very much more than it is now.

                                _____________________________________________

Proxy account for block producer voting - investingwad

EOS is a blockchain, a community and a society all in one. A society is only as good as the people who run the system and in EOS these are the block producers.

It is so refreshing to see that in EOS, the people we elect to rule over us actually have to be nice to us. We elect our block producers with our votes Daily. It is crucial that we counter the influence of whales who may be block producers themselves and who will vote in their own interest. 

We need to expressly know the objectives, motives and actions of these block producers.

Most users will not have the time or expertise to question, query and research these block producers and hold their feet to the fire, so to speak. They can however delegate their vote to proxies who share the same interest as them, to vote on their behalf.

I think that investingwad will vote with our interest at heart.

You can set your proxy with the Greymass wallet. Or from their Github account.

                                 _____________________________________________

A point to note.

The downside is that if EOS are lost, the resources they represents are also lost to the network and cannot be used by anybody else. In Bitcoin, when coins are lost, they have no effect on the performance of the platform. This is why EOS has a policy or proposal to "recover lost resources" after 3 years of inactivity. This is like saying that every EOS account has a temporary 3 year lease on the resources it controls and if they are never used then these resources can be reclaimed by the community. Contentious, but we can agree that these resources are precious and should not be lost to the community. There may be amendments to this policy as everything in EOS can be changed, if the community agrees by way of referendum.

BTC Price Falling Again. Will We See The Chain Death Spiral This Time?

Another Bloodbath!

Above is the 4 hour Bitfinex candle chart. Bitcoin has just dipped below $6000 and there is good reason to expect similar drops as in the previous 3 occassions. That is $1000 USD drop. I suspect we may even see Bitcoin test levels as low as $3800.

What is important to realise is that below $5000 it is unprofitable for many commercial mining operations. I have covered this in my previous post.

Bear in mind that the mining difficulty will increase by perhaps 10% or thereabouts in the next 3 days. 10% increase in difficulty will have the same effect as a 10% drop in price. This combine effect of a huge price drop and a 10% increase in BTC mining difficulty may be the perfect storm or black swan event that set in motion the dreaded chain death spiral.

One must ask why mining difficulty have gone up so much in the last few weeks? Is it because of newer, more efficient miners being deployed? Bitmain have always endeavoured to make their miners available to the public promoting mining decentralisation. Bitfury and newer manufacturers in Korea and Japan, employing more efficient chips, have kept their technology to themselves. It is certainly not good for mining decentralisation and could very well backfire on them. The future for BTC is not bright with this 'sword of damocles' hanging over it.

Something is happening and it is still hard to imagine what the crypto landscape will look like after the dust settles. The guiding principle I suppose is to invest in the technology and not the hype, and even this is hard to do as we often can't tell what or how much is hype until reality sets in. Shucks.

If in doubt, sit on the sidelines and many ( 3 billion USD ) are certainly doing this. It would be better is crypto is based on Tether than BTC or USD. I broached on this in a previous article. Whether it will, depend on the users, and in my opinion this is much better than the whole market rising and falling with the price of BTC. At least this shift will enable each coin and project to be valued on its' own merit alone. If you have a better solution - do comment!

A Terrifying Future For Bitcoin - Chain Death Spiral

Oh No - Not another Bitcoin obituary! We have had lots of that. But .... 

10 Years
In another 6 months Bitcoin would be 10 years old. The technology should have matured by now with mass adoption worldwide. Its' aim was to be the financial platform for every decentralised financial application. Sadly after steady increase in adoption over the early years, growth has now stalled.

Bitcoin could not scale and time has run out. Lightning cannot be a solution because it depends on users first owning some bitcoin. Preaching to the converted is not a recipe for mass adoption.

Bitcoin Cash moved in with the promise of unlimited blocksize and unlimited transactions. However since inception in August the number of transactions have not increased.

This means that Bitcoin Cash is also not able to gain users apart from the disillusioned initial converts who moved over from Bitcoin. Bitcoin Cash could not built on or inherit all the existing infrastructure. Herein lies the problem - It may not have the time.

The Chain Death Spiral

This phenomenon whereby Bitcoin chain slows down and finally grinds to a halt because it is unable to react to a sudden drop in miner defection, is still in play. Thus far the price of Bitcoin have kept mining profitable. This stage is fast coming to an end.

Bitmain has just stopped mining with S7 on Hashnest leaving only S9. 

As of today at a BTC price of $6100 the profit margin for BTC mining on Hashnest is 22.5%. Bitmain's S9 are the most efficient industrial miners in use today. When BTC price was $8000 the profit margin was around 60%. I believe that mining with S9 will be unprofitable if BTC's price falls below $5000.

For mining to remain profitable at $5000, the mining difficulty must decrease. Miners will shut down operations or moved to mining Bitcoin Cash which also means that the price of Bitcoin Cash must increase. If this process takes place in an orderly fashion then BTC price and BCH price will converge to equality. However this process will hardly be orderly or even predictable. If  BTC loses miners suddenly, the death spiral will set in. But will Bitcoin Cash be the winner even with BTCs' demise?

It really depends of how the future shapes out for crypto. Will there be many coins for different purposes, will there be one coin to rule them all or will there be only one coin? This has yet to be determined.

The more important question is, upon which protocol will all or most decentralised financial applications be built? Before we answer this question we have to consider another fundamental blockchain issue. Proof Of Work or Proof Of Stake.

This is a security issue. Proof of Work implies that the cost of a 51% attack is so exorbitant in the case of BTC that even governments will not attempt it. This makes BTC the most valuable blockchain because it is the most secure. Proof of Stake implies that the people owning the tokens will not attack their own basis of  wealth. Which of these two system is more secure or should we have a hybrid system like what Ethereum is proposing.

In technology two things are evident. Good enough is enough for a technology to be adopted. Take the example of TCP/IP. From mere packet transfers to online streaming today. The technology need not be perfect to start with. Users will put up with the quirks because the benefits outweighs the inconvenience. The second is being first to market. Bitcoin was first to market and has remained unassailable thus far. 

My current belief is that Proof of Stake is good enough. This is proven by Bitshares and Steemit. These two systems are still operating live, and now occupy the number 1 and 2 spots in transactions activity. 

I predict that EOS will be first to market as the protocol upon which most or all financial applications will be built. EOS is the first blockchain protocol that can scale and be used at an enterprise and industry level. You can fit all of Steemit and Bitshares in it and still have room for more.

A bigger and better Steemit 2.0 will be built by Block One on EOS. Bitshares is poised to move to EOS. Everipedia an improved version of Wikipedia is set to launch on EOS. You could build versions of  Youtube, Facebook, Twitter and more on EOS. The advantage is that you do not need to run your own servers to do so. Imagine running an operation like Facebook without investing in the servers and specialist personnel to maintain them. Yes that can be done on EOS. Every existing centralised social media platform can be cloned, disrupted and displaced. I expect that most of the existing centralised social media platform, will move to EOS, before they are disrupted because they can and the cost savings are enormous.

A new world is upon us. Aptly named DAWN. Will it spell the end for Bitcoin? Maybe, maybe Not, but the future is exciting.

The Fourth Reason Why EOS Will Take Blockchain Mainstream - Fairness

Fairness

Governance does not equate to fairness. We could easily have Governance in favour of the strong or those in control of making and changing the rules.

We are all born "good", with a consensus notion of what is "Fair". Basically we all know the difference between right and wrong and good and bad. It is the basic tenet of "Do unto others ----- ". While there are times when the few that differ from these standard norms may hold the sway, in time, the view of the majority always prevails, and ultimately we will arrive at the right path.

Immutability.
Bitcoin introduced to us the concept of truth and immutability. For the first time we can embedded 'a factual truth' into a blockchain and nobody will be able change it. The concept of, code is law, was born. For the first time a contract could be executed exactly in the way the contracting parties intended and no law or judge could alter the way the code executes. The path towards immutable smart contracts and notary functions on the blockchain was in full swing.

Then the DAO hack happened. 300 million dollars in Ethereum were stolen by a "clever" coder who in his defence said that he did nothing wrong as the code executed exactly as it was designed. Yes designed but not intended. Clearly this was not fair, therefore the developers of the Ethereum chain rolled back the transactions and thus broke the law of immutability of the blockchain. ( actually perhaps because most of the money stolen belong to them! )

But is immutability really that great a feature. Sure it takes away the abuses of the middleman but it also leaves behind a plethora of cases of loss from unintended consequences.

1) Loss of funds through loss of passwords
2) Loss of funds from fraud and security hacks
3) Loss of funds through errors in program codes

In a worst case scenario we could roll back the blockchain but this may also include all the innocent real and correct transactions within that time period as well.

Selective transaction reversal
EOS introduces the concept of selective transaction reversal. At any time if 15 of the 21 block producers agree, they can freeze and/or reverse a transaction. They become in effect the police and executors of transactions on the blockchain.

However they can only do so at the direction of the ECAF. What prevents them from acting on their own and in their own interest is the wrath of the community. Their position as one of the 21 block producer is continually "on review".

This chart on the producer vote summary is interesting. At the time of writing 26% have voted and we are starting to see the dominance of the small voters block (blue). Clearly this faction will be bigger than any whale or collusion of whales when the whole community exercise their right to vote.

This is the brilliance of the EOS system. The block producers with all their power can only exercise them with the tacit consent of the community. They have to hold themselves to the highest level of conduct, and to be seen as continuous positive contributors to the community or they will be removed by the community. There will be no nonsense like the recent censorship and years of protracted argument as in Bitcoin. The EOS ecosystem will adapt and change quickly.

We all want to live in a world where the people we elected to wield power over us are actually nice to us. This is only true in the EOS ecosystem. I guarantee that you will never see a block producer overtly expressing his or her own bias and prejudices in public. Yes deep down we are all bias and prejudice to some degree, but in the EOS ecosystem you have to keep them in check if you ever wish to hold any position of power and authority.

This underlying tenet driving all of us to behave "correctly" is what will make for a fair and equitable community. I have never seen EOS supporters speak ill of any other communities or of each other. Remember the the Go/NoGo vote? What a demonstration of co-operation and civility among competing individuals, of different ethnicity and across different continents. What a breath of fresh air. What a change to the crypto ecospace. This will bring in the crowd. The silent majority. I am all in.

http://eos-bp-votes.dapptools.info/s/api/block-producer-votes-stack-html/1/30

Perhaps weight should be given towards quantity and quality of votes
Quantity = Number of Tokens
Quality = Number of Voters

A Heads Up For EOSdac

A note about investments.

Investors put money into a security either for a return or capital gain. Most of us will be familiar with stocks and shares in private or public companies.

With the advent of blockchain companies small investors other than startup investors were able to invest in companies like Bitpay and Coinbase through investment aggregators like Bank To The Future.

Fast forward and the token ICOs on the Ethereum platform were all the rage.

The next phase will be airdrops on the latest blockchain platform EOS. EOSdac is the first.

EOSdac is currently 15 Cents and 104 on Coinmarket Cap. It has increased in price quite quickly since the EOS mainnet went public last night.

Owning EOSdac is owning a share in a decentralised block producer as EOSdac sits firmly at number 3 on he EOS block producer list. It stands to reason that EOS holders are likely to vote EOSdac as a block producer because they all hold EOSdac tokens from the Airdrop on 15 April 2018. We can expect EOS to maintain its' position as one of the 21 Block Producers.

Financial Reward
With the block producers actually producing blocks we can make accurate calculations.
EODdac earns on average 900 EOS a day

EOSdac Block Reward  900 @ $11X 360 = $3,564,000

The circulating supply based on Coinmarket Cap is 660755177  add the 300,000,000 held by developers and we get a total supply of 960,755,177 tokens

Earnings per token is therefore = 0.0037 cents or@ 13.1 cents = 2.83% Annual Return

This would mean that the market have priced the token appropriately

We can expect that the price of EOSdac will be directly proportional to the price of EOS

Looking at it another way.

900 EOS a day = 328500 EOS per year = 0.00034 EOS per year per token
10000 EOSdac = Cost $1000 = Returns 3.4 EOS PA = No End Limit
1 Bitmain S9 = $1400 = uneconomic after 6 month = Will never recover cost


Price Upside

The price of EOSdac will directly correlate with the price of EOS which is expected to rise as the airdrops and Dapps start operating on the EOS platform.

Bitfinex and Binance have not started trading EOSdac so I would expect the price to increase when they do. You can trade EODdac on CoinEx.

Price Downside

EOSdac drops out of the 21 block producer status.