Tuesday, September 25, 2018
Kevin Rose - EOS New York gives link to the article:
“EMPOWERWOMEN” Proxy for the EOS Blockchain and Much More
Katie | @eosasia | myeoskit.com makes a reminder:
“This Friday ends the eosbits give out to active community members in this group. Thank you @SirFuzzalot for sponsoring this event. If anyone wants eosbits for participating in here DM me. If anyone has DM'd me and are still waiting for their eosbits, please remind me!”
Later, she writes:
“Hey Everyone. Woke up to this top 21 today” and posts:
(https://t.me/eosproxies/5280), (https://t.me/eosproxies/5281). EOS Asia is in 29 place.
“When do we realize we are the slow boiling lobsters?? I count only 8 BPs that are not based in Asia. And every day we do not take action these accounts gain EOS they can use to stake to vote for themselves. That means that many more small token holders we have to attract to counteract this. How long until we lost @orcus @eosnewyork @GunnisonCap from the top 21? How long until our independent BPs close up shop due to low EOS price and low EOS payout?”
Anders ' coachbjork ' eos sw/eden replies her:
“Ye, very happy that the community speaks up and start to talk about stuff, hopefully it will lead to action from the community. We need more people like @theblockchainkid and @summerskin”.
“There are only two solutions that I can see:
Blockchainkid’s excellent suggestion....Or something like it.
2. Fork and remove the massive whales who are voting against the community and
damaging it.
The job of a BP is to make blocks in a timely fashion and to grow the network capacity. Some of the stalwart BPs who have given much and communicated very well are apparently NOT as good at that job as they should be. We must be careful to judge BPs on their primary role first and foremost..... before looking to option 1. or 2. We need clear data about the relative capabilities of BPs relating specifically to their primary job in order to see how bad the situation truly is. Global distribution of BPs must be included in that analysis of course.”
Katie | @eosasia | myeoskit.com adds:
“There needs to also be a natural friction between BPs so that consensus is arrived at fairly and truthfully. If BPs are all backed by the same people that’s a huge problem”.
Anders ' coachbjork ' eos sw/eden also adds:
“To be honest, as long as they keep the chain going, produce blocks and no issues. They are doing what they are supposed to do. Only issue is the ability to do bad stuff, but so far, no such thing has been shown. Sure, I like a more spread chain, BPs that contribute in many ways. But that could be done with a wpf as well. The projects that is.”
Shaheen Counts - EOS BlockSmith replies him:
But the risk is centralization, no? If you don’t have 21 independent agents, then you’ve defeated the point of DPOS. I have heard that Pacific is doing strong work in Asia. But outside of them, I know essentially nothing about the other 4. And I’ve been heavily involved in this community since about 4 months before launch. Now maybe that just speaks to my ignorance. Or maybe it speaks to something else more concerning. But when do you start raising concerns, right? I think that’s all we are doing. Is starting to raise concerns so we can at least start the discourse of how to address them. Assuming something is starting to go wrong. There is this idea that “the community will vote out bad actors and vote in good ones”. But with low voter turnout and high Whale activity, I think we need to start thinking that THAT idea is not really accurate.”
Anders ' coachbjork ' eos sw/eden answers:
“Concerns are risen. People are speaking about it. So thats great. So far they are shady, and thats it. We have little or no info, they are not following the bp agreement, so we have issues.
But so far, its mostly rumors and fear. And I share the concern about both parts.
Vote traiding, fake bps etc. People by nature are scared about stuff they know little about. Scared about stuff behind closed doors. As they many times should be. But we have to remember that it is a natural response to be frightened. And focus on facts, and there are several facts that we can discuss and solve. Or at least try to solve. The discussion will often be directed towards the unknown, the fear etc. Which is why I think it is important for the strong characters within the EOS space do not participate in that. leave the FUD to the other people, and discuss facts and issues that are present. We need to raise questions, but that is being done by people like @theblockchainkid , and I agree with him. More proxys could take that role and discuss stuff BPs "can't".”
Katie | @eosasia | myeoskit.com gives her point:
“Well maybe it would be helpful to think about why we wanted distributes nodes pre-launch.
- security from gov intervention
- difficult consensus causing better outcome of decisions
- spread out representation of cultures for eos mass adoption
We don’t need proof of anything to know the current top 21 is unhealthy for the chain.
Also, if we passively give benefit of the doubt we will have only ourselves to blame when we lose all our independent BPs talent. We all know the BPs pulling the most weight behind the scenes. It is no secret to the BP community 💜”
Ben Mason replies to the discussion:
“What I would like to see as an independent voter is this...and I think some of this exists already, I may not know how to find it presently all in once place.
Clear facts on BP performance
Clear facts on BP infrastructure (indicative of investment and potential to scale)
Clear facts on BP regional distribution
Clear facts on relative independence
Then a massive community driven effort to encourage greater voter participation with crystal clear reasoning behind how voting secured the health of the network...covering all aspects.
I know many eos holders who have eos but have not yet voted because they are new to crypto and haven’t yet seen the benefits of eos for themselves or are unsure of themselves so are simply holding. They have jobs, families etc and are a little detached from the highly involved, rapidly changing eos environment.”
Shaheen Counts - EOS BlockSmith replies him:
“I’ll give you some more facts. A few of us joined the Volga telegram channel on morning that they popped up, out of obscurity, with 20 million votes overnight. We wanted to gain some more information about this new BP before casting any judgement. So far the Volga group is essentially just us. The admin has not looked at the group since it was created on 9/14.
Maybe there is a language barrier? But still, you would think that the admins would have at least looked back at their own telegram channel once in the past 10 days if they are for REAL.”
BlockchainKid
“My opinion is that producing blocks and basically fulfilling your technical duties are the bare mininum requirements for a BP. "Better" or "worse" technical performance does exist, but measuring that in any fair and consistent way at the moment is fraught with issues. Potentially a bad path to go down until we can really nail it It's the other things, like good governance practices and development of the community tools that you'd like to think would drive the distribution of the Top 21 and support a meritocracy. However, it seems that might not be what we have at the moment. We should be encouraging all BPs to adopt a governance framework to adopt that goes beyond a bp.json file. There is a lot of low hanging fruit to pick off there.”
Kevin Rose - EOS New York gives his point of view:
“Not every BP is ready to release financial information but that doesn't mean they won't.
Some may never, sure. I doubt BPs that are profit centers within larger companies will ever be able to provide satisfactory transparency. But alot of it has to do with accounting as well.
Anecdotally, many block producers haven't figured out how to get a bank account.
I hope that after a year, the majority of block producers are providing ample transparency. But it's very early to expect it from the majority. Personally, we won't be ready until Jan-Feb.
All of this said though, EOS Sw/eden did a cool job with their quarterly report. It's more than just financial transparency. Like they showed, it's about "here is what we accomplished". @orcus.”
Ross (EOSphere)🇦🇺 introduces one more point:
“Disclaimer... Speaking as token holder, not super-biased BP guy... One thing that hasn't been mentioned much in this discussion is geographic/network distribution of BPs from a business continuity/DR perspective. I've been an infrastructure guy for many years, and what I do want as a token holder is to make sure the chain isn't exposed to risk. This includes having too many eggs in one geographic/government basket and also too many eggs in one corporate (think AWS/Google Cloud/Azure) basket. Whether I'm sitting in Singapore or Iowa, I want to make sure if there is some sort of trade war, real war, or corporate anti-blockchain action that we don't lose half of the BPs. Then there is a huge problem.”
Users agree with this point.
Kevin Rose - EOS New York gives good news:
Regium Introduces the Digital Royalties Platform to Transform Data Economies by Making It Easy to Build Blockchain based Apps.
EOSIO is taking over.
Users are cheering.
Wednesday, September 26, 2018
Marcus gives link to the article about the KARMA rewards:
Get more than 30 Million KARMA rewards on TokenPocket
The article of BlockchainKid called The EOS Elephant in the Room was ranslated into Chinese. People are commending the article.
BlockchainKid in regard to his article:
“It looks like the article got quite a lot of hits on Bihu, so people are reading it which is good. Also got a lot of likes so I'm pleased to see it reasonates with both West and East. As I said in the article, I’m not sold yet on whether changing the election process to incorporate number of voting accounts using biometric IDs is necessarily the right solution. It’s just a possible solution that I think is worth discussing, and there will be a lot of people who can put strong arguments both for and against this. However, one of the arguments that I’ve heard against this is that people will then just buy others’ biometric IDs to control the vote. I suppose this is possible and so that is a risk. But I don’t think this is a reason to not make changes. For me, it’s about putting in a system in place that makes it harder for people to game this process. You don’t buy home security system so that nobody will ever be able to break into your home. You buy it to put up obstacles and to discourage/make it harder for people to break into your home. At the end of the day, if someone wants in, they’ll get in.
It’s so hard (probably impossible) to develop an all-encompassing solution. There are likely just “better” and “worse” solutions. Any change undoubtedly needs a lot of thought, but there’s diminishing ROI on time spent spinning our wheels looking for the holy grail solution, IMO.”
Earlier Shaheen Counts - EOS BlockSmith wrote:
“I’m tired of this bullshit line that that keeps getting thrown around in response to this.... “those with the most at stake will vote in the best interest of the network”. There is increasingly clear evidence that this is not happening.”
DataJunky | GenerEOS replies him:
“Yeah, that's just plain false. All indicators are saying that the larger token holders are voting for themselves and making vote trading deals which essentially is vote buying and collusion. This is a conspiracy of votes.
It will eventually sort itself out, but these growing pains are tough, especially for the honest hard working BP's Shaheen, I wish the community could do more to protect you guys from this corruption but the solutions are still being devised and built, while at the same time, new manipulations and tactics for bad actors are also being considered.
The game has begun.”
Kevin Rose - EOS New York replies him:
“I'm thinking more about Anyx's account of STEEM. Whales decimated the space and that's when it cleaned up. Cleansing by fire.”
He later gives links to EOS Block Producer Research Portal(https://www.alohaeos.com/vote?sort=vote_count&sortDir=desc).
“Put the windows side by side.”
BlockchainKid writes:
“Agree with cleansing by fire, but I think we've already that the community is not willing to let that happen. Correct me if I'm wrong, but we could have fixed the RAM situation by cleansing by fire. i.e., RAM price goes so high that nobody develops on the platform ===> RAM price falls.”
Users disagree with his point.
Katie | @eosasia | myeoskit.com:
“The community and devs are what make EOS valuable. The community just needs to realize the power they have.To vote, to publicly express their frustration, to sell their tokens, to file arbitration, to fork, etc.”
BlockchainKid replies to her:
“My concern around the community's power to vote is that we have 250 million tokens voting, 100M locked up by B1 (for now at least), and another 250M held by exchnages which are unstaked and not voting (presumably it's for liquidity). That's 60% of the token supply accounted for. I think he was referring to the fact that they hold a lot of tokens that aren't being voted, but I could be wrong. Median voter turnout in developed countries is 65%, and those occur every 4 years and aren't subject to decay lol.”
Samupaha replies him:
“On the long run individual votes might become problematic. Right now we have pretty educated group of people, but what about in the future when we have millions of normal people as users? If they all can vote, it might be too easy to influence their votes with FUD and hype. Most of them won't understand at all how blockchains work or how they are supposed to work.”
DataJunky | GenerEOS in regard to the previous comment that exchanges help:
“Yeah for sure, the exchanges are a tremendous help in that regard. We certainly are grateful for the exchanges and all the ramps they built for crypto adoption. The exchanges primary focus is on making profits off crypto trading and in doing so they have positioned themselves as a middle man business. Now we have to keep them honest in the face of voter diversity, or the "democratic" element within EOS will be lost.
The biggest fear here (I think) is that the rich will represent the poor. NOBODY but the rich wants that.”
Justin Buck gives his point:
“I actually really like what Telos is doing for voting (not plugging them, just sharing an opinion). You get voting power based on community involvement, as voted on by the community.”
Sharif Bouktila - eosDublin intoduces new point:
“One question which came up yesterday in London was: Should Proxies votes in referendum be counted ? In the current design they won’t. What does the Proxy Channel think?”
Nate D - Aloha EOS answers him:
“Correct, if your account uses a proxy, you're vote still counts. The hard part is handling if an account uses a proxy and both of them vote. @eosnewyork I'll try to work in that Proxies are allowed to vote and the Tally is accurate (ex: no double voting). It adds more logic to include Proxies, however it can be done without changing the smart contract, simply just how the tally adds up numbers.”
In general, the community things that the proxies votes need to be counted.
Anders ' coachbjork ' eos sw/eden gives link to the documents about the collusion, mutual voting, and pay-offs that occur amongst the Chinese BP community. - Maple Leaf Capital.
Thursday, September 27, 2018
The conversation mainly includes concerns about the pinned message and news about collusion.
Katie | @eosasia | myeoskit.com begins with:
“Yes, it's an open secret now that a cartel of BPs are probably voting for each other and sharing profits. It's more important than ever that good actors come together and draft next steps for dealing with this. This tweet thread summarizes the situation: MapleLeafCap.
Kevin Wilcox replies her:
“Seems likely we'll have to file an arb case and go through the process we currently have. If / when a ruling goes against the bad actors and they're asked to fork over some EOS, we will see whether the cartel moves to block execution of the order. If they do block it we can fork the chain and cut out all wallets involved. However, such drastic measures may not be necessary - the very threat of that happening could be publicized, to see if fear of punishment may get the cartel in line. This is a hypothetical solution. This will be a long process I think. Part of it is we need DEX adoption - if we fork a chain right now and cut out exchange wallet bad actors, they won't list our new token and we won't have any liquidity
Problem has a lot of sides to it. Luckily, an arb order takes a while to go through 😁. We should be openly advertising the importance of DEXs in the community, I think this is the first step for us while we wait for arb.”
Liam Wu-吳林海✌🏽@EOS42 gives his point:
“I think the community should aim for solutions that are sustainable. If we don’t sort this out there will be others who will do the same for the sake of profits. Instead of wondering around with some band aid solutions why don’t we sit back and think for a bit - we should think about how can we get higher voter participation - as the voter participation increase, the influence of whales will decrease.”
Anna | EOS Tribe (eosTribe.io):
“Someone anonymously reached out to me and asked I give them the doc, so I am not caught in the middle of the situtation. Thank you!”.
She gives link to the doc [Inside the secret information of the fire coin by EOSONE](@mountain_cloud - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GeWtQOJsXqrkJJ5_Xi-OI8gtIk60pbzsu7voH1CuqTc/edit?usp=sharing).
Joe writes:
“Double safe options:
- Wait for REX
- Wait for the B1 iOS wallet
- Wait for a B1 Android wallet
- Raise an arb case for this particular episode and follow the ruling when it's delivered
- Continue to say that we need to improve voter turnout without knowing how to do it.”
Zane - @FreedomProxyEOS gives his point:
“Dan said back in the day that having an open market for vote buying is the best way since it in unenforceable to try and prevent vote buying. At least it could help bring it to the surface. If what we are seeing is a tight knot group of vote traders then I don't see how an open market for trading votes would help initially.”
anyx — TeamGreymass replies him:
“Vote trading — which is vote buying with a barter rather than a currency — can completely degrade the security of DPoS. I wrote about this a while back, here:
How Vote Incentivization Degrades Delegated Proof of Stake — Steemite”.
BlockchainKid gives his opinion:
“Not saying that the leaked document is in fact from Huobi, but we don't have any proof of that, do we (let me know if I'm mistaked)? It's all just he said, she said until you can prove it. It needs more than just an excel file with an authors name and comments in it. Also, I read the article using google translator, a lot of it is very circumstantial (again, as far as I can tell - some things may be lost in translation). Also, anyone else find it a odd that the independent non-profit body that published this research called EOSONE has a twitter handle which is @eosonebp. I'm just saying that I'm not sure you can bring succesful arbitration based on this alone. No arbitrator worth their salt is going to rule against on this kind of evidence alone (again, unless I'm just missing something).”
Ricardo Marliere writes to the suggestion: “Eliminate whales and exchanges from voting, thats only the solution.”
“No. Increase voter turnout. Make it simple through an official wallet while INCENTIVIZING voting. Otherwise its gonna stay the same: whales controlling majority of voting. If the constitution can't be enforced its a failed experiment. the end. back to anarchy and the drawing board. We just need to get EVERYONE to vote.”
Kevin Rose - EOS New York replis him:
“Increase # of BPs one can vote for to 75 at least and ask B1 to vote with the full 100MM.”
Ricardo Marliere replies Kevin:
“I dont expect b1 to vote anytime soon nor do I really think thats what I want... I think its the semi nuclear solution, apart from forking nuclear button :P. B1 is a software company that does not manage a chain. If B1 were to vote their dominating 10% it would challege their standing as "only software producers. All I'm saying is that is way more easy to own 51% of 1M EOS voting stake than it is to own 51% of 500M EOS. The higher the turnout, the harder it is on bad actors. The real problem is how to increase the turnout effectively without mindless voting. I mean... forcing people to vote isnt ideal but in my country its what we do... I strongly believe making a requirement of voting for 30 BPs for one to claim interest on REX would be a good strategy. But I also have no idea how far away REX really is and I'm sure the same actors we're discussing about will lobby about putting that propposal to referendum. Thus delaying it even more. I'm fairly convinced by speculation only that this alone would increase the turnout by a far margin, IF there is demand for leasing. Accordingly to eosauthority: Actual EOS Votes: 259,111,007.5368 EOS (25.55%)”.
What is the probability of a crypto cartel owning 700 million dollars equivalent of EOS tokens? Now what would it be the probability of them owning 1400 if we could ever reach 50% supply for voting”.
“Wooha. This is what I have been wanting more information on... is this toxic to the ecosystem, or is it just a group of people producing blocks? My concern (which might be unfounded) is that if they get 15 BPs in the top 21 that gives them ultimate control over the eco system updates then bad actors can further manipulate the system for their own agendas. What steps can be put in place to ensure this doesnt happen? What happeneded to 1 group/account not owning more than 10% of EOS tokens? This needs to be addressed in the referendum (however it'll probably be rejected since the total EOS in this coalition seems to be 150milEOS :\ ) I am concerned. Not even 40% of tokens are voting RN. Who knows how many more whales are sitting in idle.”
Tanish EOSMetal (eosmetaliobp) asks if anybody read the article Early Execs Leave Block.one, The Peter Thiel-Backed Crypto Startup Behind EOS - CoinDesk.
Katie | @eosasia | myeoskit.com replies him:
“After reading this article it seems like they will help launch Dapps and forks of the eosio software.”
Raman Bindlish - Investing with a difference asks:
“I think we need to look at some basic facts and discuss what to do. Do we have ownership details of 14 BPs from Asia. Do we have anyone analyzing their voting pool and overlaps? And of course, we need to build communication channels and learn what is going on. Beyond this, we need to talk about systematic changes to ensure that the voting is fair. E.g. Exchanges not voting without clear transparency of proxy voting.”
Asher in reply to previous comment by Ricardo Marliere: “so everyone that knew that beforehand could have split his tokens on many accounts? sounds like a deal....”
“This really doesn’t make sense. By the time Telos was announced, the genesis snapshot had already been taken and it would have been too late to game the system in that way. None of the BPs that are even remotely associated with Telos control that many votes or we would know by now. Capping whale accounts is probably the only viable way of addressing this problem long term. This is a good conversation and I’m glad we’re having it but it really has nothing to do with Telos.”
Ricardo Marliere replis him:
“Right. someone brought up and I stated that this mechanism didnt convince me and still doesnt. nothing against telos personally and I agree we should keep on eos here. pardon my ignorance towards the sister chain.”
Justin Buck talks about Chinese members:
“Straight up naive theory here, please feel to tell me this is stupid.
Are Chinese members of EOS more against centralization, like ECAF, than “western” members because of the governance structure they have lived under? Or am I an assuming asshole, and it’s something else? Thanks!
Further, I’m mostly against centralization. I am also speculative of the value of base layer arbitration.”
Guillaume - EOS Titan replis him:
“That's my impression. Several of them quite openly refused to comply with disclosure requirements for this reason. Can't imagine why, with the chinese government shutting down crypto companies and medias, freezing bank accounts and jailing people hehe.”
Raman Bindlish - Investing with a difference gives his point:
“I guess it is a catch 22. Chinese BPs are not going to comply with disclosure requirements (perhaps for good reasons). But DPOS works on trust. They should go back to POW if they can't comply.”
Friday, September 28, 2018
BlockchainKid introduces the discussion:
“Curious how the Top 30 $EOS BPs would look if the number of voting accounts was factored into the BP election process, as suggestion in my article? Check out the graphic below and he gives link to the image BPs voting.
He then adds:
“Right, this is all premised around being able to prove 1 identity 1 vote. Without it, it's useless. I could argue for days for and against whether or not it makes sense to make changes like these to the election process. it's a very complex issue. but when you look at the right two tables, something just "feels" a little more right about it, doesn't it?”
Sharif Bouktila - eosDublin replies him:
“So I wrote a post on this earlier , I’ve since edited it as one point was distracting attention from the idea. [Good Money after Bad] (https://medium.com/@eosdublin/good-money-after-bad-b908368156b5).
Then the conversation movies to Chinese voters.
Raman Bindlish - Investing with a difference writes:
“If China holds 50% of tokens, what is so surprising that the votes are going there? But we should not react if the BPs are Chinese. We should focus on finding the best voting practices, transparency and spreading knowledge. And we need some sort of data analytics experts to figure out vote collusion patterns. This is something SEC uses to red flag coordinated trading in stock market. There must be experts available in this area.
Well, if you can't be constructive, try to stay out. Our voting list is public.”
controllinghand asks:
“Maybe it's time to start supporting TELOS?”.
Raman Bindlish - Investing with a difference replies:
“How would Telos solve the problem? If they become significant, what stops whales to buy that token and start manipulation. Whales are not a problem. There are good and bad whales. Problem is transparency. Would love to hear more about how Telos is solving the issue of exchange voting.”
controllinghand answers:
“Good point. It it my understanding that it would water down the whales over 40K EOS.”
The conversation goes on about whether there is need to but Telos.
James Davis gives his opinion:
“Buying Telos would be different than buying during the presale. The price would be driven up. 90% of EOS is owned by whale accounts. I don't believe that Telos could ever (practically) get in that position. Every token someone buys on Telos comes from a live account on the open market. Buying in quantity drives the price up. I'm not saying that there won't be accumulation of Telos (why would we not want that?) I'm saying that it would be very difficult to get into the extreme position that EOS started with.”