So I'm trying to explain how EOS works on reddit to a new user, and figured it'd be more beneficial to post it here first.
Here's a real-world analogy of EOS:
One of the requirements for a computer to work is an operating system, like Windows or Linux or Mac. For personal computers, the operating system is in the hard disk of the computer. For enterprise systems, sometimes, it becomes a little "decentralized" and the technology for this is called clustering, where a group of computers are bundled together to serve as a single computer. This is used for fault tolerance - when one computer in the cluster goes down, the other computers will pick up its workload, thereby eliminating the downtime. However a little "decentralized", this is far from what Block.One is trying to accomplish with its EOS Software, as the resources are still owned by a single entity.
What Block.One is building is the EOS Software for hosting Decentralized Apps (dApps). You can look at the EOS Software as the Operating System of a computer, and the dApps as the programs you install in the computer, like Photoshop, Google Chrome, etc., and the computer hardware running it is the collection of nodes connected to the EOS network.
To recap:
- Operating System: EOS Software
- Programs: dApps using the EOS platform
- Computer: collection of nodes in the EOS network
I hope this helps explain how EOS works. What do you think guys?