Is a decentralised BP bad for the heath of EOS network?

in #eos7 years ago (edited)

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Block producers are the custodians of the EOS network (DPOS). Stakeholders are inclined to vote for good block producers to keep the network secure and healthy keeping the bad actors out. The competition among the Block Producers to get the maximum rewards helps to keep the platform updated with network resources.

The major responsibilities of a Block Producer on EOS are -

  1. They should not miss blocks.
  2. Maintain the ratio of growing price and network resources i.e update Network Resources.
  3. Follow Constitution and Arbitrators Ruling.
  4. Put community thoughts forward and update Constitution with time. (14/21 Block Producers are required to amend changes in the constitution)

Majority of the block producers are the centralised organisation on the network looking for earning rewards producing blocks. Some pioneer organisation in the crypto industry are emerging as Block Producers namely Bitfinex, Bancor and Huobi on EOS network. These organisations are centralised and are much controlled by a small group of people who decides how will the earned reward spend.

The free market competition among 121 Block Producers pushes them to update network resources and market themselves among the EOS community. If they don't put efforts to upgrade the network resources or misses the blocks from time to time they eventually get voted out.

Among all the centralised Block Producers Candidates, we also have one decentralised Candidate - eosDAC. With a great team including @lukestokes, @michaelyeates and many more. They are trying to incentivize the voters using a token which they airdropped to all the stakeholders of EOS.

Isn't it actually a form of vote buying?

When I first heard about the something like eosDAC being introduced by the few members of the community, my first impression was actually vote buying.

I won't go into much of the detail as @lukestokes has nicely covered similar question and has put his own thoughts forward regarding it. Here a clip he uploaded in one of his post here putting in opinion across.

Few things I want to add to the video, which is my own opinion is-

  1. Partnership - eosDAC may represent the partnership, where most people are partnering with a single BP in order to elect him and take the rewards. If some say oh! that's vote buying, my counter question would be what about the large candidate based in China who have partnered with major investors of EOS? Won't that be counted as vote buying?

  2. Marketing efforts put up by centralised BP are allocated in terms of rewards - It's just a vague implication but the majority of Block Producer to get their name out, will be marketing them - i.e holding meetups or sponsoring events, eosDAC may just focus on upgrading the network resources and develop tools.

A very important question Lukes raised in the video is - Who you want to elect as a BP, A centralised organisation controlled by a bunch of entrepreneurs taking decision for you or a decentralised entity taking everyone decision into account and putting the best efforts to work not only for ***eosDAC ***community but also for EOS?

Let's look at the pros and cons of the Decentralised BP -

Pros

  1. Incentivizes voters - may lead to greater turnout.
  2. Decentralizes the decision making- Everyone has a say on the BP and helps decides what is best for them.
  3. Might help to incentivize the community volunteer putting the different idea across eosDAC and EOS community.

Cons

  1. Incentivizing the voters in any form looks like vote buying.
  2. With time may get corrupt, some people trying to exploit may put maximum efforts to increase the percentage rewards.

Chances of eosDAC getting corrupt IMO is directly proportional to chances of EOS getting corrupt. If @dan 's argument of taking more than 60% people are good then eosDAC may not get corrupt any soon. What if it gets corrupts anyways?

Maybe the creators themselves will start a campaign against such DAC cause they have their public image at stake. Many people in EOS community will learn about the decision being made in eosDAC community and could campaign voting them out. Either way, if they get corrupt stackers will lose most of tokens and value.

How to stop people from thinking short-term?

Again it's been wonderfully covered by Lukes in the video. The only way to that is EDUCATION! People need to learn how could their decision affects the network and token prizes.

Won't it be a nice idea if we have more decentralised BP?

It looks like a good idea to me as well, with free market competition among the Decentralised Dapps and speculators run for making someone else a BP for earning few quick bucks may help with frequent rotation of the Block Producers, keeping the network more decentralised and open for options. The downside will be the changes in the constitution are dependent on the active block producers and frequent changes may delay the changes or upgrading. I haven't given it much a thought, maybe you could help me figure out what if we have the majority of decentralised BP in the network? What do you think how will it affect the EOS network?

Thank you!

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Thank you for such a well-thought our post! I’m camping at the moment but wanted to leave a quick comment of thanks. This is a complicated topic with many passionate views. I’ve had a lot of conversations since creating that video and may do an updated one with even more perspectives for us all to think through. One argument that I’ve heard has to do with using the block producer rewards for value creation instead of value transfer. That makes sense to me. It also has me thinking about if a small portion of rewards are distributed to a coordinated DAC community, is that action something which could create new value, based on my understanding of the network effect of money? I’m not a custodian yet as eosDAC hasn’t yet launched to vote them in, but my hunch is the custodians will want most of the funds to go towards value creation via worker proposals and such, obviously after securing funds for the best infrastructure possible for the job given its current requirements. @eosdac published a nice post yesterday and they already have a million dollars in fiat money to pay for servers and infrastructure, without centralized investors who might try to influence the DAC in some way. That’s a beautiful thing, IMO. :)

Ow wow. I've just found out about this initiative of yours. Nice idea, will explore further.

I personally pay little attention to vote-buying and the said corruption-to-be. I think a lot of people, especially Steemian is missing the point. Steemian is getting used to ethical blogging system. EOS is, first and foremost, a PoS cryptocurrency. The more stakes you have, the more you get. It is plain and simple, void of intentions and ethics.

If Dan really wants to create a truly distributed crypto, then he needs to limit the stake per holder, plain and simple. But, that means no incentive for big players, which in term means EOS won't make it big. Thus, EOS is a pure PoS system, a semi-decentralized crypto platform.

The best idea I’ve heard for returning value to the community is to burn any excess profit tokens. IMO this cannot be seen as vote buying using any logic.

I doubted the idea of a DAC BP a million times, but the decentralisation of decision-making power and of course the video changed my mind. Most people don't take into account that stakeholders in the DAC have the power to vote and decide for the future of the DAC, people could put their thoughts forwards cause they are holding the 'DAC tokens', IMO that's a great thing.

I mean I would have been a lot happier if STEEM had a DAC Witness, people would have voted for increasing the bandwidth or have voted to think long term changing the trending tab, maybe the one account-one vote, I dunno, but there would have been better involvement of community and organic discussion.

I still want to know your perceptive when a majority of BP chose to be a decentralised BP, how will it look like? There would be the rotation for sure but what else? GAME THEORY 101 thinking

Just want to add few more pros which I feel will be helpful when you put your thoughts in next video and which will help the community to look eosDAC beyond vote buying.

  1. eosDAC will help the community be more informed about the internal politics going on among different Block Producers, for instance - the bernie took his support away from all the witness still supporting haejin or haejin voting for some witness. As community will be more aware of such action, as they themselves are stakeholders of a block producer, it will help everyone take vice decision.

  2. Will restrain cabal formation or at least keep people updated about it- being a part of a DAC bp, will help all the community members informed of whats going in the network. The arbitration process, the changes in the constitution and every change the network undergoes. As eosDAC (I hope) will take the responsibility of updating the community/stakeholders with an update and know how of what's going on the network internally, as most stakeholders of EOS would necessarily keep themselves updated always.

I think eosDAC should have their own forum where people could put their thoughts in threaded fashion keeping in mind the vision of the organisation. Maybe @eosdac could as well start email service updating everyone about the network.
I dunno if eosDAC is done airdropping the token or thinking about airdropping few tokens again if they are, they should airdrop them to the supporters and contributors of the eosDAC putting their best effort to make eosDAC perhaps EOS a great community.

To listen to the audio version of this article click on the play image.

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Really sounds as good idea! Upvoted :)
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Thank you for the upvote pal!