Blockchain Evolution
In 2008 Bitcoin proved the concept of a trustless ledger and the importance of blockchain technology. For the first time in history users could transmit assets online securely and safely. Bitcoin eliminated the double spending problem.
In 2014 Ethereum proved the demand for generalised smart contracts. After bitcoin proved the importance of digital money, Ethereum aimed to build the "programmable money" or smart contracts. A smart contract is a computer protocol intended to facilitate, verify, or enforce the negotiation or performance of a contract.
Future Blockchain dApps (Decentrilized Applications)
(Decentrilized Applications) Decentralized applications (dApps) are applications that run on a P2P network of computers (blockchain) rather than a single computer. Future apps on the Blockchain (dApps) will require new scale of performance. Currently Ethereum is limited to less than 30 transactions per second. The apps that we currencly use such as facebook, snapchat, amazon, require far more transations that what Ethereum currently handles.
Visa and Mastercard required 20,000 transactions per second not mentioning the other payment systems. Facebook has 50,000 likes per second not counting the posts, reactions and other actions. The financial industry requires 100,000 transactions per second. If we put all of these in a single blockchain platform so they can operate it will require millions of transactions per second.
Blockchain Technology Today
There is a big gap where we are now and where we need to be in order to process millions of transactions per second.
Solution: Blockchain Operating System
In order to achieve this massive scalability so future dApps developers can build dApps an Operating system is needed. Think of this like all the apps that are build on Apple computers. They need to be build on top of MacOS. EOS aims to be the MacOS of the blockchain technology.
What is EOS?
EOS is a smart contract platform or an app development platform that allows developers to build and run apps on the blockchain without asking anyone permission to do so. Is like an hosting environment for a DApps (decentralized applications). Developers will be able to build DApps much cheaper and be able to integrate with each other. EOS will be able to handle millions of transactions per second so the future Dapps can be build on top of it.
What are the requirements of Decentralized Applications?
1. Web Application- Users dont need to download and install anything.
2. Needs to support millions of users. If you can't support millions of users it will be hard to build a profitable business or competitive business with the current centralized platforms.
3. Free for App users. If the apps charges micro payments to the users every time they load the web page users will leave the platform.
4. Responsive- When a user clicks submit it needs to be responsive immediately.
5. Upgradable- No business or app can survive without being able to change and upgrade to the demand of the changing market. Users may expect new features and the app developer should be able to upgrade to accommodate such requirements.
6. Account Names - Users are used to account names and not to cryptographic keys that they can loose and never be able to access their accounts.
7. Account Recovery - This is a very important feature that is missing on the current blockchain ecosystem. If you lose your private key or it get stolen you lose everything forever. Mass adoption of blockchain apps needs to provide a system of recovery easy for users.
8. Thousands of Actions per second. As we have established in order for users to have the same experience with current centralized apps like (Facebook, Visa, Amazon) the dApp needs to perform thousands or millions of actions per second.
9. Bug Recovery- According to Dan Larimer "Software is an imperfect art" and there is only one way to do it right and an infinite ways to screw it up. So statistically speaking there will be a bug sometimes. These bugs can cost millions of dollars lost like in the case of DAO. On the Ehtereum platform broken apps result in loses like DAO or hard forks like Ehtereum Classic. With EOS all of this will be preventable.
EOS aims to provide all of the above features. All of the above features are not currently possible on the Ethereum network. Note that Vitalik Buterin Ethereum founder has laid out a roadmap to "unlimited scalability" which heavily relies on the concept of sharding. More of this on another post.
Conclusion
EOS aims to be the first Blockchain Operating System with faster blockchain application development and massively reduces the difficulty of building dApps. EOS is currently under development and I am personally positive for both platforms and that there is a future in case both deliver on their promises. I believe it's safe to say that EOS offers several innovative features that simply are not available on the Ethereum network. Feel free to comment below with comments or criticisms!
Please do not consider anything in this post to be investment advice, and always do your own due diligence and research.