A Packed House!

On February 8th Thomas Cox, VP of Product at Block.One who’s responsible for delivering the governance model for the EOS.IO software, delivered a robust overview of the EOS.IO platform to a room packed with nearly 200 well-informed attendees. Thomas then lead a riveting Q&A session covering a wide variety of topics including: governance, voting, scalability, and more. The audience was comprised of diverse backgrounds and professions most of whom took the subway to attend, but many began their trip to the Meetup with a plane ride.

We want to thank many people upfront: Thomas Cox of Block.One (https://twitter.com/tbcox), Phil Mesnier (@philmesnier) of Object Computing, the AWS Pop-up loft and staff, Kevin Wilcox (@eosgo) from EOS Go, Matt Simon (https://twitter.com/eos_collective) from EOS Collective, Andrew Moriarity (@flountown) and Dan Schaeffer (@IRONMONKEEEEE) for filming, and everyone who attended to make this event such a success.

The Makeup Of An EOS Meetup in NYC

As this was the first meetup we wanted to understand the makeup of our audience. Where is your hometown? What do you do? We used a service called Mentimeter (https://www.mentimeter.com/) to help us poll the audience in real time and show the results back to them. Here’s what we learned:

"In One Word, What Does Blockchain Mean to You?"

This was inspiring to see, including Clint Eastwood ;). Marco Iansiti and Karim R. Lakhani published a great article in the Harvard Business Review (https://hbr.org/2017/01/the-truth-about-blockchain) in which they wrote: “Blockchain is a foundational technology: It has the potential to create new foundations for our economic and social systems.” We agree with the attendees and the Harvard Business Review. We are at the ground floor of a fundamental shift in how we connect and organize with one another.

“What is Your Profession”

As one would expect, great technology attracts get technology professionals. It was great to see the entrepreneurial community come out as well. Between these two groups, plus the venture capital professionals, we saw real connections forming! However, blockchain is open to everyone. This isn’t just for technologists, venture capitalists, or entrepreneurs. We were pleased to find that there were artists, medical professionals, students, among others. We hope that more people will see the value in meeting fellow EOS community members knowing the skills the average attendee brings.

“What is Your Smart Contract Experience?"

Smart contracts are new and people are unfamiliar with them. There’s tremendous opportunity for anyone interested in learning about smart contracts because there aren’t many experts! The best time to start learning was yesterday, the second best time is today.

"What Topics Would You Like To See Discussed at EOS New York Meetups?"

Are you a Meetup organizer? Below is a great list of topics generated from the audience at the event. These are also some of the topics you can expect at EOS New York Meetups moving forward.

Software Development: dApps & Smart Contract
EOS Governance
Token Utility & Staking
Community Networking
Regulatory Environment
dApp Dev Team Speakers
EOS Basics
Block Producer Plans (e.g. Roadmap)
Airdrop Model on EOS
Launch Day Plans
Outlining the Token Incentive Model
Game Development on EOS

If you are in the New York Area and would like to lend your expertise on any of these items, please contact us at [email protected] to explore presenting at future EOS New York meetups.

Thomas Cox Q&A

The most informative and exciting part of the meetup was the incredible Q&A between Thomas Cox and the extremely knowledgeable audience.

Credit to @ironmonkeeeee and @flountown for capturing these videos. EOS New York is investing in better filming equipment to increase the quality of content we deliver to you. We appreciate your patience :)

Arbitration & Preventing Malintent

The first question was related to mechanisms of preventing a bad actor from creating a smart contract, receiving tokens, and then not delivering on the intention of the contract while trying to take off with the funds. Thomas’ response gives us a bit of insight into how arbitration built into the network constitution might handle the situation.

BP Incentive and the Standby Pool

Block Producers are rewarded via newly minted EOS tokens each time a block is produced and accepted by the network. 50% of that reward is funneled into the standby producer pool which any node within the top 21 producers or top 100 standby producers can withdraw once a day an amount of EOS tokens commensurate with the votes they have.

Launching the EOS Genesis Block

The information presented in this video is not up to date (even after less than a week). As Thomas stated in the video this process is still being worked out internally at Block.one. We are sharing it to give an idea of what Block.One is thinking with the understanding of changes to come.

Voting on EOS

We get the following question a lot “What do I get for staking a vote for a Block Producer?” We’ve started a series called “Why Your Vote Matters” (https://steemit.com/eos/@eosnewyork/voting-matters-on-eos-token-price-volatility-and-its-effect-on-the-eos-io-network) to address this because it’s a nuanced question but we can address the topline concern here. There’s no direct financial incentive built into the EOS.IO software for staking your vote for a Block Producer i.e. you do not receive tokens for voting. Furthermore, EOS New York is firmly against paying for votes because, once you do you are only receiving a vote and not an informed voter. This could lead to substandard Block Producers in the top 21 because they simply promised to pay out their block rewards.

The EOS network will thrive when those who are willing to vote do. By voting you are committing your tokens for a period of six months. This exposes you to the effects of your decision. You can instantly change your vote at anytime, but once you repurpose those tokens for anything other than a vote you can only reclaim them at a rate of 1/26th each week. This is by design so we can be sure that those who are voting are doing so with a degree of confidence that they’ve made an informed and correct decision. Not to mention, if superb BP’s are adding value back into the network, it’s likely your tokens will be worth more at the end of the six month vote than before.

Network Policy, Code Changes and How BPs Indicate Their Support

This is great to get clarification on. The way BPs will indicate their support is by continuously voting for, against, or abstaining for 30 days. This is plenty of time for the token holder to review proposed changes and see how the BPs they voted for are choosing to support those changes. 15/21 BPs must approve a change for it to take place.

How Many Token Holders Do You Think Will Vote?

Thomas states that he thinks only 5% of all token holders will cast votes for Block Producers. This number may even be too high. Consider STEEMIT, a similar DPoS platform, and the fact that it’s estimated that only 1.5% of all token holders utilize all 30 of their available votes for witnesses (source: https://steemit.com/steem/@sc-steemit/witness-stats-how-many-users-are-actually-voting-for-a-witness). But this is ok, only those most invested in the health of the network will vote.

On Transactions Per Second and Avoiding Decentralization

Block Producer numbers are configurable. It can be 21, 1 or 10,000. 21 is most likely the number we start out with. But in contrast, how decentralized are other networks? ETH & BTC are controlled by less mining pools than you have fingers. Is 21 perfect? Maybe, maybe not. Remember, we are part of one of the largest economic experiments ever conducted.

AWS Gives The Audience A Friendly Challenge

Possibly one of our most favorite moments of the night was when our host declared that governance is the most boring aspect of the EOS blockchain and asked “How will EOS actually be used”? Thomas asked the crowd to stand if they were working on an EOS idea and asked for one word summaries. The use cases we heard were so interesting and we can’t wait to provide venues for these ideas to cultivate and grow amongst the EOS community in New York and across the world.

Here is the list of use cases the audience gave:

Political Party
Local Marketplace
Wallet/Keychain Management
RPGs (Role Playing Games, not Rocket Propelled Grenades)
Transparent Voting
Exchanges
Collectible Marketplace
Automotive Marketplace
Browser
Insurance
Hiring Platform
Game Development
Storage
To Empower Writing
Securities Lending
Advertising w/ Privacy
Retail Things
Layer to trade in game objects, save games, licenses, accounts between multiple games.

Full Video of Meetup

Finally, here’s the full video of the meetup. AWS unfortunately was having microphone technical challenges so we apologize for the audio cut-outs.

Thank you again to Thomas Cox, Phil Mesnier, AWS, and ALL OF YOU who attended to make this a truly informative and exciting inaugural meetup.

Be sure to check out our next meetup on February 22nd with Mahbod Moghadam (@mahbodmoghadam) from Everipedia (https://www.meetup.com/EOS-New-York/events/247364353/). We are also hosting EOS Blockchain & Beers every couple of weeks around Manhattan. All of this information can be found on our Meetup page here (https://www.meetup.com/EOS-New-York/)

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EOS New York is a block producer candidate for the EOS.IO Blockchain

https://www.eosnewyork.io/
https://twitter.com/eosnewyork
https://medium.com/@eosnewyork
https://steemit.com/@eosnewyork
https://www.meetup.com/EOS-New-York/