Explained: Why Aren't More EOS Token Holders Voting? (...and Why They Should)
A while back, I had a semi-viral tweet asking EOS holders why they have not yet voted for block producers:
In some cases education may be what's missing:
In others, it may come down to tokens frozen on exchanges or in wallets such as OpenLedger and Exodus:
By far, however, the number one, overwhelming reason for lack of voter turnout appears to be the lack of offline, hardware wallets:
Some appear frustrated with Block One for not building and delivering a hardware solution for Ledger/Tezor. Others like Cypherglass have put out a bounty, but we don't have details yet on a finished product (though we hope for one soon).
This Trello card for EOS Ledger Nano S support now has over 100 votes.
Meanwhile, we're still only at 31% of token holder stake voting:
Why is voting important?
Delegated Proof of Stake (DPOS) relies on token holders being engaged in the election of technically skilled, trustworthy, value-creating block producers. Block producers manage secure servers which run trusted, updated software to collect new transactions on the EOSIO Mainnet, sign them, and add them to new blocks.
If you'd like more clarity on what a blockchain actually is or how it works, this 17 minute video by @andersbrownworth is really easy to follow:
In Proof of Work (POW) systems like Bitcoin and Ethereum, the block producers (called miners) can be anyone with enough money to afford the electricity and hardware (usually warehouse's full of ASICs or GPU cards) to have enough hashing power to earn block creation rewards. Sometimes the incentives of the miners don't align with those of the token holders leading to high fees and long transaction delays. Centralization can also occur as miners team up to create larger and larger mining pools to share block rewards and thus increase the frequency of payments to block producers. This competitive system is often wasteful, so the rewards have to remain very high.
When it comes to DPOS, the block producers are elected by token holders. They don't compete with each other directly to sign blocks, but instead compete to earn the trust of the community and are scheduled by the blockchain to sign when it is there turn, if they are in the top 21 block producers by staked token vote.
If we don't have enough voters determining who the top 21 block producers are, then it's theocratically possible for a handful of large token holders who has more influence than the current 31% voting to come in and effectively decide who gets to be a block producer. This could lead to systemic risks if a small number of people could vote in block producers they directly control to eventually reach a 2/3+1 majority which gives them the power to change the network itself. There are Constitutional and Ricardian Contracts in place to help prevent this, but the best way to avoid it is to have a lot of different EOS token holders voting for the block producers they value most. Those with the most invested in EOS have the most incentive to see it succeed and remain secure, but we should not leave risks open if we can avoid it.
Yes, we want hardware wallets to make the voting process easy and secure. We also need a secure blockchain which requires voter participation. The STEEM and BitShares networks which are also DPOS have a combined market cap over over $900,000,000 and they still do not have hardware wallet support. Yes, EOS currently has a much higher market cap, but that should be an argument for more voter participation to secure the chain, even considering the perceived risk of voting with the current solutions.
As @dan mentioned recently, Block One is working on a solution:
Block.one is building a free iOS hardware wallet using Apple’s Secure Enclave.
But will that be enough for users who don't want their devices ever directly connected to the Internet? If they are waiting for Block One's solution, is it really much different than using Scatter, EOS-Voter, or SimplEOS today since those private keys are never sent over the Internet and they are encrypted at rest? Yes other options may exist on the horizon such as something called the Nebula Wallet by Cybex, but should we wait? For those that kept their ERC20 EOS tokens on their hardware devices, did they register their EOS and if so, how are they securing those private EOS keys right now? Is using a secure, encrypted tool like EOS-Voter by @greymass any less secure than however they are currently securing their private key?
For the security of the network, I sure hope the majority of token holders will no longer rely on others to secure their investment but will instead take personal responsibility to vote in block producers who will keep their investment safe and keep the network running smoothly. If they don't want to use their keys over and over again to refresh their votes, they can set a proxy voter for their account one time. You can find a list of proxies here or you can use me as your proxy lukeeosproxy as I've mentioned previously:
One of the block producers I vote for is eosDAC because I'm not only part of the launch team, but I also truly believe DACs (Decentralized Autonomous Communities) are the future, and we're helping build them. You can find out more about eosDAC and our eosdacserver block producer in this 80 second video:
For a deep dive into DACs, this 30 minute video will get you started:
We have a growing team you can join via our newsletter at http://eosdac.io/ and our Discord server: http://discord.io/eosdac
I hope your takeaways from this post include:
- The reason many EOS holders aren't voting for block producers right now is the lack of offline hardware support.
- DPOS requires broad voter participation to remain fully secure.
- Waiting for a perfect voting solution before you vote may be counter productive as the network should be secured now.
- Great, secure solutions exist right now for voting and setting a proxy including:
eosdacserver, the DAC Enabler, would appreciate your vote or you can setlukeeosproxyas your voting proxy.
Greymass has a watch and offline wallet combo that is nearly as secure as a hardware wallet. The offline wallet signs the transaction generated by the watch wallet. Then you just send the json file back to the watch wallet that's connected to the internet. The only vulnerability is in the writing to cd or usb. You should format the usb before and after each use, then check slack space to make sure malware isn't trying to write your private key.
Excellent comment, thank you. I haven't messed with the watch wallet much yet, but that combo with an offline wallet sounds great.
That's how I voted, but I also did set up Scatter on my iMac after doing several scans. I did turn up one small piece of malware on my mac but it was locked into a backup and removed from the main drive about a year ago. One can never be sure an internet connected machine is clean, but my EOS is still staked where it should be. I have a couple of laptops that never connect to the internet (one because it can't using Vista that can't upgrade past SP1 due to hardware issues) and another that has private keys to several crypto's that I've also disabled deliberately.
I'm hoping to use EOS as a consensus mechanism for automating time change info using the Olson TZ Database and also registered "timezonedata" on EOS. I believe there might be a way to automate this using machines tied to IP that monitor clock changes by users who disagree with established "authority" which right now is controlled by manual releases headed by Paul Eggert, PhD. That database is free and maintained by volunteers, but I believe there might be a way to change the financial incentives to reduce the workload on volunteers and also maybe pay them back.
Very cool! Thanks for sharing. And well done on your security precautions. I wish more people in the space care about these details.
I can tell you why people are not voting. It's simply because it is too complicated for most people. I love how TRON made it easy and understandable for people how to vote for DAC. I generally have the feeling, that EOS is behind them in many ways...
This right here... I did manage (after a couple of false starts) to get Greymass downloaded and logged in. But it should be a simpler process. I understand EOS is not like STEEM, which is the only other place I vote for Block Producers (Witnesses), but they should have something that makes it easier for the common user to get into their wallet, explore the various BP Candidates, and make selections.
Until you make it easy enough that people with no technical background can vote their stake, and then on top of that, provide a good reason for large stake holders who have not yet voted to vote, little progress is likely to be made.
Right now it is easier to get mad and give up than to actually participate in the democratic process...
Thanks for the feedback. I do agree, things are a bit all over the place and though that could be seen as a bad thing, I see it as a very good thing. We need to be decentralized and resilient. We're still very early in this process and there are already many different tools and websites out there, many of which are being improved on a daily basis. Much of this has to be driven by education so people understand DPOS and what it is they invested in so they'll be motivated to vote in order to protect their investment. That's what I'm trying to do with posts like this.
Have you installed EOS-Voter or SimplEOS? They seem pretty easy to use to me. If there are suggestions for improvements, I'm sure @greymass would love to hear them.
Thank you for your efforts to make this a better experience. I personally managed to get my votes out, but my impression is, that many people don't take the time to research and with TRON I can vote right out of my wallet and the community support was way more accessible in my opinion (e.g. interviews with candidates etc)
I guess in the end it's like iOS vs Android and which ChainOS speaks more to you and fits the usability that matches your tastes.
Anyway - EOS can be glad to have guys like you! Thanks!
Thank you. I think the healthy competition between projects is a good thing and helps keep everyone on their toes. EOS is working to be decentralized, which means they'll have some growing pains to start. But yes, I agree a little more polish along with some well-done reference clients with excellent UI/UX coming from Block One would have been great. Now it's up to us, I guess.
I have not gone through the process because of not feeling secure enough due to my lack of technical expertise. I rather have a hardware wallet but am willing to explore alternatives with trusted parties. Also, to be honest I have been a bit busy with work during the week as well as family time on the summer weekends. However, I appreciate the guidance provided on this post so I can sit and review for a plan forward. When I eventually get to it I will give you support by voting. Thanks again!
BTW, I agree that voting is very important as leaving 30% of holders decide could lend to unwanted centralization.
Thanks so much for your reply. If there's anything I can do to help you feel more confident, please let me know.
It's better to be safe than sorry.
Thanks for the information @lukestokes
I'm getting a better understanding of how things work and I'll be sharing this out to some of my other channels. :)
Thanks for sharing!
Personally, I have not voted because my current stake in EOS is too small. Actually I am not even sure if I have a total of 100 tokens. I have them on two different exchanges and have been buying them few at a time by selling my other coins. Whenever one of my other altcoins see a little bit of a high I sell a little and buy some more EOS.
I am targeting to buy 800 to 1000 EOS before the end of 2018. Although it may sound like a small amount to some, but for me my highest single purchase have been 11 EOS tokens at one time. I won't be able invest new money for in crypto anytime soon but I am for sure selling other coins to gradually increase my stake in EOS.
As for voting - I was introduced to EOS by you, so obviously eosDAC is going to be my first vote :-)
Good luck on your goals!
Thanks man!
My goals for my portfolio are not very ambitious but I think that in the long term they can be of great help to me. First is to increase both my Bitcoin and EOS stake and let them cover about 50 percent of my portfolio pie. I am not a crypto strategist but I want to do this long term and basically want to consolidate it majorly in 4 coins before the waters start to churn again.
You know, this makes me really annoyed! 'In some cases education may be what's missing'. Eh, yeah! Everyone who bought EOS is not a techie! We don't speak the language! Some of us just believe in the the potential of blockchain and blockchain related products and have severely limited technological abilities. So, where exactly did EOS let its token holders know the process of voting? Is it presumed that if we had the techno know-how to buy the token we are automatically in the techie loop? I have been interested in the crypto scene since I bought my first bitcoin in 2013 but five years later all these bright techno brains seem to be ignoring the fact that many of us tecnodummies are supporting their visions and are not even providing basic non-techie information. Get your act together techie guys! Remember that you are speaking another language, even though it is technically English. And start getting great translators so that those of us that don't speak technese can understand what buttons we need to press to get to the voting platform. Or even to understand that that there is a voting platform that we need to get a translator to help us understand!
I'm sorry you feel frustrated. I've been working hard to help with education such as http://understandingblockchainfreedom.com/ because I do understand not everyone is a technical person.
Could you help me understand which parts of my post were difficult to understand? I'm always trying hard to explain things in simple terms and if I didn't do so in this case, I'd like to now how I failed so I can improve.
I hear your argument, I really do, but please also understand people are constantly asked not to invest in things they don't understand. That's a basic rule of investing. Many, unfortunately, skip that rule because of the promises of huge returns that cryptocurrencies bring, even if the projects are in very, very early development stages and are not yet ready for mass adoption.
In the early days of the Internet, people didn't understand what all the neck-beard hackers were doing then either. The cryptocurrency space is like the Internet in the mid 1990's. Most everything was hard, confusing, and complicated then too. We're very early on here and all of us are working very hard on many things, often giving up sleep and "normal" social lives to do so. I wrote this post about 2 years ago which may help bring some perspective. This stuff is really hard, and we're moving really fast. Once the base foundations are in place, later we get Netflix, but not before. EOS will get there. Much of what we have now was built in the last 30 days. Things are moving very fast, but we also need to give it some time.
That, and education. That's always the key, even if it's out of our comfort zone.
People think "EOS" should do this or that, but many are starting to realize "EOS" is just a bunch of independent people, trying to make things better. It's not like many projects which have a core team which controls every aspect of the system. Block One still builds the core code (for now), but they are not (yet) involved in anything else. As I mentioned in my post, they have promised us secure wallets, but we don't have them yet. It's very early in this whole process.
By all means, vent your frustrations as they are valid. The cryptocurrency space doesn't have a Steve Jobs yet to make everything simple (and by that I mean hide away the complexity that is always really there).
I understand the importance that a decentralized blockchain has to offer and why voting is important. But I need more education in the details of why you need all of these different keys and also things like having to pay like possibly $40 for ram to just to get a user name. Not sure whyreal EOS tokens are not directly available in bitshares. And if as an engineer,with about forty years of experience with computers i cannot fidure it out, I can't imagine how someone with less technical experience would get anywhere. I still have a hard time with a lot of the details on how to get to a points where I can vote or get airdrops. I need a good source for explaining all of the steps needed to get real EOS tokens with voting and airdrop capability. Lots of what you see on the internet is how to do it before the mainnet launch. There is not a lot out there on how one do it after the mainnet launch. I'll keep plugging away at it. If you are interested in my progress you can follow it on my blog here; https://steemit.com/eos/@jayem/a-us-citizen-s-book-entry-into-steemit-on-how-to-get-into-the-eos-smart-contract-blockchain-part-4
the first time you drove a stick shift was really confusing, scary, and complicated, right? Remember having to use the e-brake on a hill for the first time? Total bonkers, right?
It's not much different here. These things are confusing and unfamiliar at first, but after a while they make perfect sense and you use them without even thinking about it. The multiple keys are there to protect you. You never use owner key for anything, but the active key you use as needed. That way if someone gets your active key, you can use your owner key to change it so they no longer have access to your account.
BitShares, in some ways, acts like a centralized exchange in that you send them tokens, they keep them for you and issue you an equivalent amount of a token they create representing that token you sent, like OPEN.EOSDAC. When you withdraw your EOSDAC, they then burn the equivalent amount of OPEN.EOSDAC and send you real EOSDAC.
To get the "real" tokens, just withdraw them to a wallet you control, like eos-voter I mentioned in my post. You may first need to create an EOS account and there are various services out there for doing that like this one.
This is very early on in the process, so expected polished tools right now is like expecting streaming video and Netflix in 1996. It's going to take some time to build out the protocols and then the tools on top of them.
I am motivated to get into this space, I just need details, like the one express in this comment, thanks. I'm not stopping until I get there, it just takes time, which is why you are not seeing people jump in in droves. I appreciate the hard work that youand others are doing. For me the energy I put into this I know is worthy, it is replace the bad energy with the good energy here. Thanks again. BTW, the first car that I have ever driven was a stick.
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We voted but we only hold 10 EOS.
If anybody wants to boost our vote weight though, our address is
@amvanaken113 (;
Great post friend. I think it speaks volumes to the number of speculators are in the market today. Either way, everyone who is hodling EOS should be voting! Thanks for spreading the word. #Followed Cheers!
Thanks for the encouragement! Yes, there are a lot of speculators.