Tuesday, September 25, 2018
The discussion begins with the fact that the blacklist and EOSYS were updated EOS Block Explorer - EOS Cafe & HKEOS
EOSBetCasino | EOSBet.IO asks:
“Is the RAM bug fixed guys? Or still need to proxy the transfers?”
WinLin replies him:
“It's an option whether disable allocating RAM”.
Tal Muskal | LiquidEOS makes announcement:
“Hello BPs, we added integration with EOSLaoMao's awesome theblacklist contract to our Heartbeat BP plugin. it will now publish your blacklist hash automatically from your nodeos bp process: bancorprotocol/eos-producer-heartbeat-plugin
Hoping to get rid of the manual hash syncing,
Enjoy. We also built a plugin sololy for blacklist hash check and update: EOSLaoMao/blacklist_plugin”.
“As far as i understand, they can be used together and are doing different things. :)
our plugins only posts the action periodically. it doesn't aim to sync with ECAF or anything. and doesn't expose any endpoints.”
Sonya|Starteos also makes an announcement:
“Starteos Calling on EOS Block Producers to Freeze the Stolen Account!
As to the issue that a large amount of tokens were stolen from an EOS account, Starteos had paid high attention and froze the account with quick action.
In order to respect and protect individual asset from attacks, Starteos is calling on EOS Block Producers to join up and freeze the stolen account to leave less opportunity for the stealer and minimize the loss of the victim.”
Zhao Yu@ EOSLaoMao.com replies her:
Order is out: https://eoscorearbitration.io/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/ECAF-Order-of-Emergency-Protection-2018-09-25-AO-011.pdf
EOS Block Explorer - EOS Cafe & HKEOS
He later on asks:
“Is it against the Constitution to run nodeos(nodes that produce blocks) with 3rd party plugins?”
Jiri Jetmar | EOS Germany | [email protected] replies:
“Interesting question - I would argue as long as the 3rd party plugin does not violate the constitution as whole, there is no reason not to use additional plugins.”
Zhao Yu@ EOSLaoMao.com](http://t.me/zhaoyu) summarizes:
“As people pointed out, 3rd party plugins do add risks crashing nodeos, so I guess we just use it at our own risks.”
Jiri Jetmar | EOS Germany | [email protected] adds:
“A plugin that "reorders" e.g. a Buy/Sell RAM transations, where a BP can add his own Buy/Sell RAM transaction to scalp the RAM market would be a no-go from my perspective.. 😊. Yes, I guess this would be the BPs own risk. I personally would like to see some alternative "nodeos" implementations like parity in Ethereum. Eventually using a nice languages like Haskell 😊”.
Wednesday, September 26, 2018
Kevin Rose - EOS New York gives links Coinbase Listing Application Form, Coinbase Gears Up for Biggest-Ever Expansion of Crypto Asset Listings - CoinDesk
Zhao Yu@ EOSLaoMao.com makes an announcement:
“Guys, we have built a ElasticSearch plugin for nodeos: EOSLaoMao/elasticsearch_plugin
still trying to optimize the syncing speed, would love to hear some feedbacks.
PRs are welcome!”
Users thank him for the link.
Kedar Iyer - Everipedia - LibertyBlock wrties:
“We messed up our blacklist. Saw the 2nd order on the 25th and thought it was the same as the first order. And didn't add those accounts. added now.”
Marshall Long bp.fish eboost.fun replies him:
“Yeah we're updating now.”
Stéphane Duchesneau - EOS Canada informs:
“We've noticed that we had a lot of outgoing connections staying "dead" on our Nodeos peering nodes. Some of you might be victim of the same issues, so I'm linking these little snippets here to help you validate if you see the same behaviour!
Running the "get list" + "force reconnect" snippets from there frequently allowed us to attain a higher and more resilient outbound connection pool .
commands to get list of dead peers in Nodeos and force-reconnect them.
Let me know if you see an increase in the number of active connections or better resilience! These scripts are not production-grade stuff, but is meant to be coded into whatever management or monitoring tool that you use. If others see the same behaviour, there could be a bug in the reconnection mechanism in nodeos.”
Thursday, September 27, 2018
After a discussion about the need of professional arbitrators in the chain, Samupaha gives his point:
“ECAF is the institution where disputes will be finally resolved. That doesn't mean all disputes will be resolved in ECAF, just those that can't be resolved in any other means.
So there is the way to scaling with other system. As long as there are other dispute resolution models in use, and they produce rulings that are accepted by users, ECAF doesn't have to do anything.
The biggest question with this is how these other systems can ask BPs to enforce their rulings if parties don't do it voluntarily. Do they need approval from ECAF, or can they go directly to BPs? This is still an open question, but I'm sure it can be solved.”
Amy aks:
“No? What’s the difference? They handle 60M payment disputes a year, less than 5% of which are touched by a human being. What does EOS/ECAF do?”.
Ben Gates asks her:
“Amy ultimately answer me this. If we have forums with different RDR’s how can you resolve certain disputes if it can’t be agreed which rules are being abused by? What does ECAF do? With ZERO resources then I’d say a great deal.”
Amy asks:
“EOS hasn’t even been live for long. U think u won’t have payment disputes?”.
Samupaha answers:
“Those amounts of disputes can be resolved only in platforms that do certain kind of business. It's easy to see patterns and automate based on that. EOS is very generalized smartcontract platform. We don't know and can't know probably for years what kind of disputes there will be.”
Amy answers him:
“Interesting bc of the few hundreds of disputes u have so far, I believe EOS Argentina and such are working on automated solutions.”
Samupaha resplies:
“There are a lot of people who want to decentralize the dispute resolution system in EOS. Get rid of ECAF in the constitution, and promote lots of different dispute resolution models which can compete against each other. And so far there are very few applications that are actually used by people. Who knows at this point what kind of apps will be the most used, and what kind of disputes will be most common?”
Amy gives her point:
“I’m not talking about RDRs. I’m talking about using humans which is unscalable. There’s already data... on what disputes are most common. Have u guys not been watching any of the DR calls at all?”
Samupaha replies:
“I watched some of them. And I don't like that format because it's pretty much impossible to go back and recheck quickly what was talked about in there. With text it's much easier.
Apparently there has been made some points that you see as relevant. But it will take quite a lot of time from everybody to find the discussions where those points have been made and then watch them. So it would be easier for all if you just could tell us the relevant points here.”
BillBoz gives his thoughts:
“EOS needs an automated system for small claims that does not need BP attention at the transaction level. Please make that happen yesterday @AmyWan1 Is there anyone that disagrees with this? More quality and specialized options for the Community the better.”
Samupaha adds:
“And another point to remember is that we don't know what kind of constitution we will have in a few months. It might be completely different compared to what we have now, and that will affect on the types of disputes ECAF (and other DR organizations) will resolve.”
BillBoz adds more:
“The need will be there and there is no way to stop a better option nor do I think anyone is trying to compete for the small transaction disputes. It would be a heroic service. I do not say that lightly. I have claims that represent life savings, the stories are heartbreaking, that are so small that payment for the service and the effort BP's must undertake, especially at this early stage, does not seem justifiable. However, I will be continuing the process for these folks and let the Community decide what is best. I look forward to how this can be realized in a structure that, as far as I can see, needs a rather decent amount of checks and balances. When you say 'almost all" do you envision almost all human dispute resolution, more than just ECAF, being enforced automatically?”
Samupaha gives his point:
“Exactly. That's why I think ECAF should be mostly focusing on big and complicated disputes that happen on the core level, like big hacks of smartcontracts or thefts of big sums of money.
ECAF's mandate comes from the constitution, which is a multiparty contract and ECAF resolves disputes that arise from that contract. My guess is that these will be so complicated and unique that it's not easy to automate the process.
But then there are other disputes which happen, for example, on a dapp level between service providers (or similar role, like merchants) and their customers. Those disputes can and probably should be resolved somewhere else than ECAF. And that's where the automated solutions will work.”
Sun Tzu gives his point:
“Yes - the process of arbitration has to be built as a filtering process. We put in barriers and learning experimets. As all these things are tried, the smarter ones figure out "this is not for me."
Of course this leads to a bootstrapping question - how do we know the initial group is heading in the right direction? Instead of teaching them good gardening or samba? Well, we don't, not by that method. For that we have to use another method.
It's the same thing as Colin Rule said - don't involve the lawyers, they'll just break everything. In the first interview, I can't recall where.
Obviously this doesn't scale so well because we quickly reach limits to learning. So the construction is that community members are the arbitrators, and ECAF are responsible for providing the support they need. In practice this likely meas, allocate budget to hire some internationally-adept community-minded legally-trained people. For support.”
BillBoz asks Kevin Rose - EOS New York:
“So which Arb at ECAF would you think be most likely to corrupt? Determining this would take an enormous amount of research and very careful communication for fear of being exposed. This over simplified example is taking an enormous amount of risk compared to taking some funds from my whale account, finding at least two trusted people, one to admin the forum and another to be an Arb. Then a few more Arbs to carry a case load large enough to build trust and credibility with the BP’s, they are the only ones I would have to convince. At some point I, the whale, would have a dispute or I want to make sure that someone I care about has a dispute and I inform the Forum Admin of the case and how I want it to be ruled.
For me the latter is a simple and obvious attack vector that is far less risky than working with an unknown person that may well capture communication and expose me to the Community.”
Sun Tzu finishes with:
“We don't look for coding skills in arbitration selection. This is part of the problem. We've brought in a new discipline into a communnity that has for the most part never seen it before. To Amy's point, we are facing a barrier of learning that isn't really possible unless people spend a LOT of time, and we're facing a barrier of acceptance because the idea contradicts blockchain lore.”
Friday, September 28, 2018
Jetse Sprey EOS Amsterdam replies to the previous comment by Amy: “Well, there was a decision early on that it’d be easier to train technologists on law than lawyers on technology. Which I find interesting bc after 10 years of schooling and practicing of law, I often find there’s more I don’t know. Certainly not saying lawyers are better—I just find the whole idea baffling.”
The answer is this:
“The constitutions v 1 and 2 show that writing legal text to start with, is something that is better done by a skilled lawyer. As for lawyers and technology: their are many of those. All patent attorneys in Europe need to be lawyer AND have a university degree in physics.”
Eva argues with that point:
“No. Something like a constitution does not need to be written by a skilled lawyer. But by someone with some ideas of issues and about what should be clarified and how governance structures would need to be established. A lot of lawyers don't know that. What a lot of lawyers - especially Anglo law based lawyers - are good at us producing texts that are unreadable by others. Especially over cultural borders. Which leads to the issue that other people cannot read and understand them. So we come to a comparable issue as we have with smart contracts from a legal perspective. How to make sure, that people actually agree to the matter if its early impossible to read the language? I'm not new in this field. I've some legal background, have worked as an Arbitrator, have setup multiple constitutions for multiple organisations. Some of those for prospering communities, where the constitution like text did not need any adjustment for over 15 years. “
She continues:
“I'm one of a handful people who have read and understood e.g. Malta crypto legislation, as Malta was a candidate for governing law. Maltese lawyers have asked me about my advise on it afterwards. So yes, I can deal with legal texts. But if I've to read usual English contracts I'm quite often desperate. Because they are written with a focus to be unreadable. It's much better better with German contracts. Not because of it being my native language, but because German judges will possibly reject stiff that cannot be parsed in a reasonable manner If you would give this task to a normal "experienced" lawyer, you would get a text 10 pages long that reads like your next T&C. Then have a look at US constitution, which is written in an older language. But it's something where people get some idea what it actually is saying. When I write such "codes for poeople" I also always have to ask myself if another clause is necessary and to remind me to keep the text as short as possible but also as complete as necessary. And when I'm working as a software developer (which is my trade) I always have to remind myself to speak a language that my customers understand. Which lawyers are usually not trained to do.
Here the people are technical people. So technical people should be able to understand the core documents. Most lawyers, even experienced lawyers, don't know how to phrase legal relevant tests that technical people can understand Where I agree is, that those who write constitutions better should have some experience in setting up constitutions or organising communities. And I also woukd say that there is room for improvement. But I would not give the task to just lawyers. I would give it to a group who have experience but different backgrounds. Both cultural but also from their training.”
Jetse Sprey EOS Amsterdam replies her:
“Writing clear text needs skills. We will present our version of the c very soon. I trust you will find it clear.”
Ben Gates replis her as well:
“Sorry Eva but that isn’t true. Lawyers are trained to write clear and concise advise that their clients can understand. At least in the UK. In terms of constitutions they are rarely written by lawyers alone. The lawmakers write what they want and the lawyers then tidy it all up, correct the language and try to close obvious flaws and loopholes that they can identify.”
Jetse Sprey EOS Amsterdam adds:
“Exactly. Lawyers don't invent the rules. They write them down in a coherent and executable manner (hopefully)”.
Eva writes:
“Well, it's a difference who the customer of the lawyers. Quite often it's not those who are mostly affected by the contracts. Also I've seen multiple contracts in UK and comparable versions in Germany. German contracts tend to be much shorter and the sentences used are much shorter as well. Which really is something to say. however it IS a trend that legal texts become much harder to read when you allow lawyers to formulate them. look at any legislation and check if it's easy or hard to read and then look up the history who formulated it. Law firms want be paid for their work, so they have to present work, so what they provide has to look impressive enough”.
Jetse Sprey EOS Amsterdam adds:
“That's why we have introduced fairness as the arbitrator's guidance when giving the award. There are two ways an arbitrator may rule: according to the law or according to fairness without being bound to the strict rules of law.”
Eva introduces her point:
“Yes and no. An arbitrator usually cannot just ignore the law. A mediator can ask parties to agree on something that is not as law has designed it but not breaking it. Sometimes an arbitrator possibly can rule in that direction. But usually people should be able to rely on laws. Laws should be there for everybody and nobody should be allowed to be over or outside the law.
Some situations can create exceptions that make some laws not applicable. That can be the case in emergencies. But then it's not about fairness as such but about covering those emergencies. Fairness is relevant at other levels as well. Which is in the process of arbitration. And this is strongly highlights in the RDR. Any ruling should always aim at fairness. It's not either fairness or following laws. It's both. If the law says I've a right, and I've relied on that right it would not be fair to ignore that. If I've an obligation by lae and somebody has relied on that it's not fair to ignore that.”
Amy gives link to the community call:
“Community Call with Amy Wan (Chair of EOS Alliance Dispute Resolution and Arbitration Working Group; Attorney; Founder of Sagewise) and Dr. Anyu Lee. Call conducted in Chinglish.”
Jetse Sprey EOS Amsterdam finished the conversation with the announcement:
“We proudly present our EOS Charter (A.K.A. Constitution v 3) for community consultation. Looking forward to all of your comments! The press release and the links are found here: Press release”