One Blockchain Platform to Rule Them All - EOS
When I first stumbled upon EOS, I had no idea who Dan Larimer was. And here I am only about a week later, infatuated by him. In case you haven't heard of him by now, Dan is the creator of Bitshares, Steem, and now EOS. And to add onto that impressive resume, he was actually working on decentralized storage before Bitcoin was even a thing. The man is an absolute blockchain guru. If Bitcoin was blockchain 1.0 and Ethereum was 2.0, EOS is blockchain 3.0 (or what should really be considered Blockchain 1.0). Personally, I see their model becoming ubiquitous, and believe it can only be shattered by a new paradigm/discovery in consensus algorithms that would have to acheive orders of magnitude of a difference when it comes to transaction scalability or solve the problem of a fair, yet secure distribution of nodes. And even then, I think their 'business model' will still stick. That being said, if you are looking for a downside, look into the arguments against the consensus algorithm (dPOS). Some argue that it props up 'whales,' but I retort with the fact that so does PoW/PoS. One must take into account that even with an evenly distribution of PoW, we have "mining pool masters" and "mining whales" that can effectively act as a security bottleneck. There is much debate in the area of consensus, as developers love to slander each others consensus methods, but it is hard to tell just based off theory what will work best in practice given all the different centralization concepts that could/do exist. So, until something passes dPoS in practice, it is safe to assume that:
EOS is currently the ultimate solution for a public blockchain. Think of the EOS token as blockchain/bandwidth real estate on the platform.
The EOS token basically allots you bandwidth on the network. The best part of this model is that after you are done using the bandwidth to host content or an app, you get the tokens back (which may have even increased in value since)! I found it a bit humorous that Dan actually created EOS so that he could have a real platform to build on. A platform that could support the amount of transactions both Bitshares and Steem need. It is clear that Ethereum has some major shortcomings when it comes to scalability, and wont have viable solutions implemented until years down the road (which may as well be decades in crypto-time). Not to mention every time they want to update the the Ethereum code base, they have to fork the chain and risk the whole operation. On top of that, sharding is one of computer sciences hardest problems to solve and introduces all kinds of new attack vectors and headaches. Ethereum developers are in for a rude awakening if they are not paying attention to this platform. I mean, CryptoKitties is taking up over 10% of Ether's entire bandwidth for god sake. Do you really think it will be able to support all of these apps coming out that require even modest amounts of data usage? Meanwhile, EOS will have all of these problems handled from launch. It will not have to fork for updates, is designed to scale, has content storage built right in (via IPFS plus address improvement), and an inherent safety in its contract development. EOS is the full stack. The only problem that EOS doesnt solve in the blockchain space is privacy (because it was built to be a public network). That being said, you could still technically encrypt your content and publish it on EOS to solve that problem. So without further adieu, the material presented below is an off-shoot of the rabbit hole I went down, in which I have brought back the best material currently available on EOS for you.
Web Assembly Intro
EOS has opted to use Web Assembly, which I am extremely excited about. The two videos below are a good introduction for the non-technical. Keep in mind, that Web Assembly is currently running at around 70-80% native performance. I believe that it still has a way to go performance wise, until all that is left in its way is latency, a problem fiber and future WIFI technologies will help gap close. This means that as Web Assembly improves, EOS transaction capabilities improve with it. And the fact that it can compile C/C++ in the browser is AMAZING and goes without saying....
Noteworthy Links and Articles
Dan's Steemit accounts are filled with absolutely amazing articles on blockchain development, especially the ones written by him. I have left all my favorite links and articles below:
https://steemit.com/@danhttps://steemit.com/@dantheman
https://steemit.com/eos/@dantheman/web-assembly-on-eos-50-000-transfers-per-second
https://steemit.com/eos/@dan/inter-blockchain-communication-via-merkle-proofs-with-eos-io
https://steemit.com/eos/@dan/eos-example-exchange-contract-and-benefits-of-c
https://steemit.com/eos/@dan/in-defense-of-consortium-blockchains
This one deserves special mention. I found it a few days after I originally wrotre this article. The guys over at Tokenika came to the exact same conclusions as I have here. Their presentation in this article is well worth the watch.
