The 2018 EOS Community Conference was held in Seoul, Korea shortly after the launch of the EOS Mainnet. This event was mainly a place for the BPCs to make themselves known to the holders and get votes. In October 2019, the second EOS Community Conference was held, and it was nothing like the first.
The second ECC was held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. You can not ask for geographic decentralization of the nodes, if you do not try to reach the regions where EOS is not so popular, and that is why focusing on Latin America was a very smart decision. Thanks to EOS Nation and its Ambassador program, and being their ambassador to Latin America, I had the opportunity to go and meet some of the celebrities of the EOS ecosystem. The event lasted 4 days, from intro to blockchain, conferences, deconferences and even work tables to make plans or even start working together on the improvements for EOS that we will soon see.
The keynote speech was led by Yves La Rose, from EOS Nation, with the theme "Reigniting the Magic". The year 2017 was impressive for blockchain, and 2018 was, for many, a disappointment of unrealized expectations. Yves talked about what role BPs play to help meet those expectations. It was impressive for me to be able to talk to Yves and learn a lot from him as a leader.
Several of the conferences focused on how Latin America is the perfect place to adopt blockchain: we do not trust our governments, we have superinflation in the currencies of many countries, and the economy of all countries depends heavily on remittances. For people in the United States, who have never changed their dollars, to listen to the experiences of latinos who listen every day the exchange rate in the chicken bus on their way to work, is to know another reality. On the other hand, people who see on blockchain the opportunity to make trading easier, a stable coin may sound ridiculous, but for some people in Latin America, it is a solution to not starve, literally. Applause to EOS Rio, EOS Venezuela, EOS Costa Rica and EOS Argentina for achieving this space of presenting Latin America as the best place to adopt blockchain.
The 2nd half of the event was 2 days to discuss problems or opportunities for improvement. Thanks to his charisma, Daniel Keyes of EOS Nation served as a project manager, placing an order on the deconferences. There was a space for everyone to express their opinion of the issues to be discussed, opinions were organized into categories, and they concluded at work tables to attack the different problems. As a programmer, I focused on technical work tables.
The technical aspect of EOS has always been its strongest point. I have always said that EOS is the most "dev-friendly" blockchain, but like every engineer, we always see an opportunity to improve things. One of the priority points that was discussed, was the full-history-nodes, as they are very important part for the apps. I was very happy to see how all the participants in solving the problem agreed on the same solution: a load balancer of Hyperion nodes. This takes advantage of the existing effort and gives developers a single access point facilitating development.
The second topic discussed was to improve network health by reducing latency and thus improving interconnectivity between nodes, to reduce skipped blocks. Software reforms were defined to define the order of the BPs and it was seen that it is a relatively easy change to adopt. This adds a lot of value to the blockchain, and we hope to see it soon in the Jungle testnet. Finally, the issue of inter blockchain communications, or IBC, was discussed. After much discussion, it was concluded that, although, from a marketing point of view, it sounds very attractive, technically it is not necessary, or has a very low priority. We did not find a use case that depended on IBC, and it was concluded that at the moment it is not an issue to solve.
The EOS Community Conference 2019 achieved its goal, which was to make the community live together and create bonds to improve trust. And although blockchain is based on "trustless" transactions, technology only takes you to a certain point, and as Yves said in his talk of reigniting magic, "everyone, although competing with each other, works with the same goal", to create a better blockchain, and this is only achieved if there is trust among those who create it.
There are many things that I learned beyond the facts that I narrate, and I hope I can make time to relay them, so if you are interested, I invite you to follow me to read more my opinion about it.