Valuing higher than SpaceX, EOS takes the gold in a bearish market. Some call it the ethereum killer and others call it a sleeping dragon - what I call it? An unproven concept. While the idea of a scalable Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) system capable of millions of transactions per second sounds great on paper, the EOS platform is yet to prove its "ethereum slaying" revolution.
What is the issue?
Speed. Currently the ethereum network can process a measly 15 transactions per second while Visa can do 1300x the amount. Apart from convenience, what other issues does this cause? The ethereum network is used for decentralized applications (DApps). If they want decentralized exchanges to work efficiently on their network, they would need 100,000 transactions per second - more than Visa.
What does EOS do differently?
It uses a new system called Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) instead of Proof of Work (PoW) to verify transactions in a much faster and environmentally friendly way. In DPoS there is no mining - instead there are delegates. EOS will have 21 delegates which are voted by EOS holders. The 21 delegates will each produce a block in a random order every 3 seconds. What if the delegate isn't doing its job correctly? Much like politicians, they will not get another term when the next round of voting happens. But wait - that's not all! Imagine multi-threading as a developer but on a Blockchain - EOS will implement a way to run multiple operations at once as opposed to the current system!
What's the catch?
With all good things in life, you have room lose some things. Creator of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin talked about EOS centralization issues, he said:
"The problem is that if you have 100 nodes the system is much more centralized. You can denial of service them. Because you have to vote for them, the nodes that win are going to be the nodes that everyone knows. So it is much easier to attack the people running the nodes. ISPs can shut them down, companies can shut them down, governments can shut it down fairly easily. That particular path to scalability does come at a fairly high cost and that cost is that if you try to achieve scalability by having larger nodes than the number of nodes becomes much smaller is that that makes the system more centralized"
While it's hard to disagree with this statement, ethereum also suffers major centralization issues without the bonus of a theoretical million transactions per second.
Buy or Bust??
So should you buy the hype? Well that's a choice you have to make based on whether or not you believe EOS has the power to change how we interact with the Blockchain and how DApps currently scale (coughCryptoKittiescough). Should you short it? Almost definitely, after all it is valued more than a company that sent a car into space.