THELOGICALINDIAN - n-a
EOS has been busted by issues of babyminding and absorption during its aboriginal year of existence. However, the best acute affair is a simple one: vote buying. The association is analytic for solutions, and now, Dan Larimer, the CTO of Block.One, has proposed a abolitionist fix―which ironically involves auspicious bodies not to vote.
The Problem With EOS Voting
EOS relies on a arrangement alleged delegated proof-of-stake, which allows holders of the EOS token to vote for block producers. EOS holders can additionally vote in referendums, but block ambassador elections are the blockchain’s aliment and butter. Basically, adopted block producers administer EOS and represent the interests of EOS badge holders.
However, there are a few problems that appear forth with EOS’s autonomous voting model: First of all, abounding investors accede EOS a abstract investment, so they authority EOS tokens, but do not vote. Secondly, abounding users abundance their EOS on an exchange, which gives those exchanges affluence of ability back it comes to voting.
These problems accept resulted in allegations of vote affairs scandals. Huobi and several added EOS block producers allegedly engaged in a alternate vote affairs arrangement in October 2018. In a abstracted incident, a block ambassador alleged StartEOS attempted to explicitly buy votes from EOS users.
Finding a Solution
The simplest way to break vote affairs alone involves auspicious users to vote so that their choir are heard. However, this is easier said than done: block producers and exchanges accept affluence of voting power, and they are added motivated to vote than basal users. As such, applicable solutions require complex changes and additions to EOS.
One allotment of the band-aid involves EOS REX, a new ability barter that allows EOS users to acquire revenue. REX requires users to vote for 21 block producers in adjustment to use the system. This gives users a acumen to vote―but it is alone a fractional solution, back not anybody cares about REX.
Brendan Blumer, CEO of Block.one, has additionally proposed a added circuitous solution. He suggests a “one token, one vote” system, in which a distinct vote carries added weight than several votes. This voting archetypal should annihilate alternate voting cartels, and it should additionally access aborigine turnout, amid added things.
Larimer’s Radical Proposal
This brings us to EOS architect Dan Larimer’s latest proposal.
He suggests advantageous users not to vote.
This abstraction may complete counter-intuitive, but it is accessible to see how it ability anticipate vote buying. As Larimer explains, his abstraction about involves outbidding exchanges and block producers that appetite to buy votes. He writes:
Larimer’s angle is the absolute adverse of about every added band-aid that has been proposed, back it doesn’t attack to animate aborigine participation. It would additionally crave REX to change its allurement model―that is, users would charge to abjure from voting in adjustment to use the ability exchange.
The angle is additionally in battle with Blumer’s “one token, one vote” proposal. Larimer suggests that his own angle will move against a de facto “one user, one vote” model. That is, if EOS holders accept a acumen not to vote, alike the better exchanges and block producers will casting actual few votes.
The Wider Implications
Larimer’s angle may or may not succeed, but if it does, EOS’s critics will apparently see the change as affirmation of EOS’s cutting centralization.
Larimer acknowledges this: “Paying bodies to accord up ascendancy will accumulate things, but fairly…the alone way to decentralize ability from exchanges is to pay exchanges not to vote.”
EOS has consistently been arguable due to its centralized nature. It does, afterwards all, accumulate ability in the easily of aloof 21 block producers. However, this charge be advised in ablaze of the actuality that added blockchains acquaintance absorption too: Bitmain, for example, has at times heavily dominated Bitcoin mining.
This agency that if you are activity favorable against Larimer, EOS isn’t alone all-embracing centralization. Instead, it is animating itself for the assured absoluteness of absorption and adapting itself as problems arise. Of course, adaptations can accept exceptionable ancillary effects, so EOS’s solutions to absorption may be a cast at best.
If that is true, modifications to EOS voting can alone change so much. Voting doesn’t necessarily access or abatement EOS’s all-embracing amount of centralization. Instead, users ultimately vote for centralized representation.
Most changes to EOS’s voting system, no amount how radical, will not change that basal fact.
