What is EOS (Grapefruit)

It’s time to write about EOS, now that the EOS mainnet is up and running, and while I personally don’t like the EOS project (and have been following it), there’s no denying the changes that this controversial project has brought to the blockchain world.

Writing in the front

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The use of EOS in this article refers to the Eos. IO public chain project, not the EOS Token on Ethereum.

Introduction of EOS

EOS: Enterprise Operation System

Although ethereum creatively introduces the concept of smart contract, which greatly simplifies the development of blockchain applications, there is still a big limitation of ethereum platform, that is, the transaction confirmation time and transaction throughput are relatively small, which seriously affects the commercial application of Ethereum.

Bitcoin’s TPS is around 7, and a transaction takes at least a few tens of minutes to be confirmed. Ethereum’s TPS is around 20, and a transaction typically takes a few minutes to be confirmed. However, bitcoin Ethereum has evolved to improve TPS, such as Bitcoin’s Lightning network, Ethereum’s Sharding (Sharding) and Plasma (layering).

The EOS project aims to build a blockchain infrastructure that can host business-grade smart contracts and applications, becoming the “underlying operating system” of the blockchain world. EOS uses graphene technology to address latency and data throughput issues, with TPS in the thousands and transaction confirmation times in seconds. It also claims that the future use of parallel chains could reach up to millions of TPS.

EOS has designed a set of account permission management system. Addresses that EOS no longer uses can be used as accounts, and characters can be directly used as account names, and a set of account permission system has been designed.

In addition, transferring transactions and running smart contracts on EOS do not require the consumption of EOS tokens. It is not accurate to say that the EOS system, in which collateral tokens obtain the corresponding resources to execute the corresponding transactions, runs the program completely free on EOS.

The value of EOS project is also based on the ETHEREum ERC20 Token ICO, its ICO lasted 355 days, as a project that was not online at that time, raised an unprecedented $4 billion.

The controversial technical genius BM

The main developer of EOS is Daniel Larimer, known as BM(GitHub nickname: ByteMaster), who is the CTO of BlockOne, the project owner of EOS. Like V god, he is also a magical figure. There have been many debates between them on the Internet due to their ideological differences. BM has a great statement: My lifelong mission is to find some cryptoeconomic solutions that will guarantee property, freedom and equality for all.

Having successfully founded three blockchain projects: BitShares, Steem and EOS, BM is a technical genius and a mercurial person. In 2009, BM also prepared to show its hand in digital currency. After its research on Bitcoin, BM put forward some problems of Bitcoin in 2010 and wanted to improve them. Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto accused him of “If you don’t believe me or don’t get it, I don’t have time to try to convince you, It’s up to you. I don’t have time for you. So BM set out to create its own blockchain project, BitShares, the world’s first decentralized exchange for digital currency, which was launched in 2013.

When BitShares was launched in 2014, it was a star project at that time. Due to too many bugs, poor experience and BM’s failure to provide downward compatibility when upgrading individual versions, users gradually lost. What’s more, BM took advantage of more than 1/3 of its accounting nodes, and without reaching a consensus in the community, Forced a fork to increase the total amount of BitShares issued. Despite offering improvements in the technology and releasing the graphene toolset, the community ultimately voted BM out of BitShares.

BM, who left BitShares, founded the blockchain project Steem in 2016. The decentralized social network Steemit is based on Steem. During the operation of Steemit, BM and Ned, CEO of Steemit, had a lot of war of words. In 2017, BM left the Steem project he founded (perhaps no one except BM himself knows the real reason why he left Steem) and chose to cofound BlockOne with Bloomer to build EOS project.

Graphene and DPOS

Like BitShares and Steem, graphene technology is employed at the bottom of EOS. Graphene is an open source blockchain bottom-shelf developed by BM, and it adopts the consensus mechanism of DPOS (Delegated Proof-of-Stake). In Bitcoin and Ethereum networks, anyone can participate in bookkeeping, but DPOS limits the number of people who can participate in bookkeeping in order to improve the block speed TPS. In DPOS, bookkeepers are not called miners, but witnesses. Now EOS has a new word: Block Producer, or BP, is translated as “supernode” (witness is still used in this article; supernode is more of a marketing term).

In EOS, the number of witnesses is 21, and in BitShares it is 101. The opening time of BitShares is 1.5 seconds. In EOS, the opening time of BitShares is 0.5 seconds.

Unlike Pow and Pos, where miners can freely choose to participate in mining, DPOS nodes need to participate in the witness election, and only the node that wins the election can be responsible for block allocation. In EOS, the 21 nodes that win the election take turns in block allocation. There are also 100 standby witnesses (candidate nodes) to replace the 21 witnesses if they fail. The total number of EOS issues is 1 billion. After completing the block package, the witness can receive a block reward. The block reward comes from the inflation of the issue, which is close to 5% per year.

BM features decentralization

In my personal understanding of blockchain, its biggest revolutionary is its neutrality. Its operation should not be disturbed by anyone. In POW consensus, miners, project parties (developers) and transaction parties are independent of each other.

In EOS, BM himself has a huge number of votes, so he can influence the election of witnesses to a certain extent. Meanwhile, BM also formulated the constitution for EOS, requiring all witnesses to abide by the constitution. Therefore, BM can control the operation of EOS system to some extent.

This article is a personal understanding of EOS, due to my own vision limitations may understand the deviation, welcome to approve correction, my wechat: XlbXiong.

EOS related information:

  • EOS Developer Resources
  • The official website
  • Lot code

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