Enter Telegram or Reddit — the primary hubs of FOMO, FUD, and also the latest information on blockchains. I have been on many Telegram channels to read and interact with blockchain folks. Usually, you meet three types of people: the core tech folks, the traders, and the novice. I went from being a novice, then a trader, and currently wearing the blockchain technologist hat. During this transformation, what I learned is summarized here with EOS.IO based blockchain — EOS — being my chosen horse in the blockchain race. My experience and opinions are my own.
My goal is to share my thoughts on what needs to happen for EOS to become a mainstream technology, which inevitably will make the price of EOS token go to the moon. I see the price increase as a side-effect of mass adoption of the technology and not vice versa. Before we can understand what needs to happen in the EOS ecosystem to make it go to the moon, we need to understand the people and tech behind it and how EOS is a great parallel to the Linux revolution that took place back in the mid-90s. I hope this article will give you a bit of insight into the EOS ecosystem from a slightly different perspective.
Who are the early adopters of blockchains?
There are three types of early adopters in the blockchain space — developers, traders, and interpreters. Developers create new technology and make them available to the rest of us. Since all new blockchains use tokens and have interesting tokenomics, traders automatically flock to play. Many traders jump on board without a proper understanding of the underlying technology. These traders buy cheap when a project is very new, and then apply various tactics such as fear of missing out (FOMO) or fear of uncertainty and doubt (FUD) against the novice traders and try to manipulate the price of a token with no consideration as to the actual project. This happens a lot in this space, and hence many good people who love new technology shy away from it. Thankfully, there are also value investors who explore projects and hold on to their tokens even if the market behaves like a roller coaster out of control. They are often labeled as HODLers — holding on for dear life!
The next group of early adopters are the interpreters — they are the YouTubers, Telegram users, and Reddit posters with frequent updates on what’s going on in the blockchain industry. Most of them are just regurgitating the same information that they heard elsewhere; they may put some personal, half-baked analysis in and spin the news any way they want. There are so many lousy blockchain channels on YouTube that many newbies often bump into these poor sources of information and leave with a very odd taste for this emerging blockchain industry. Some channels are busy predicting prices with voodoo magic, some are bashing projects that they don’t understand, and some are just trying to attract people to their tokens or coins. It’s not a pretty sight.
However, there are some good ones too! This is precisely why I had started BlockSense.One — to provide blockchain information with a bit more of a professional tone and fidelity than what I had experienced in the beginning.
Once you understand the people behind the scene, it is much easier to understand the technology and its intent.
Navigating the blockchain became easier, as surprisingly blockchain people are very friendly types and often spend hours with strangers hiding behind an avatar in a chat room on Telegram. Over the course of time, I got to read, observe and experience many new twists and turns in the state of the art blockchain technologies just by donating many hours of my time to the gossip and intense discussions on Telegram. In the end, I found the technology I was looking for — EOS.IO.
Why is EOS.IO so important in the blockchain space?
When you are not the inventor, you can make choices based on comparison research, preferences and the best information. I have this luxury when choosing the best-of-class blockchain technology. I prefer EOS.IO based blockchains — namely EOS and TELOS for now because I see a great parallel to another technology that has not failed me yet — Linux!
As an avid fan of both Linux and Linus Torvalds, I have followed Linux from a server infrastructure perspective since the early 90’s. I have published quite a few books on Linux including a handful of Red Hat Press books. I have used Linux extensively in many bare-metal infrastructure projects and now continue to do so through the cloud. When I started Linux in the early 90’s, the competition was Solaris/SunOS, HP-UX, Windows NT, etc. for enterprise space. I remember that a particular telecom company made me buy a SUN Sparc clone just so that final packaging (tarballs) of a large Perl project (no binaries) was done on their favorite OS. This is how hard it was to “sell” Linux to the enterprise, and now we all know where Linux stands in the enterprise and government markets. Blockchains are new and sophisticated technology for most folks.
It’s like UNIX got married to the database and made a baby called blockchain.
Most people do not know about blockchain or understand it well. As I got comfortable with the concepts of blockchains and cryptocurrencies in general, I was looking for ways to explore them first hand. The choices were Ethereum, Ox, ADA, etc. Ethereum was the most talked about general purpose blockchain platform at the time, Ox was mostly touting exchange development (not something that interested me), and ADA seemed far far away from reality. Many projects such as Ox, ADA, OMG, etc. were exciting, but nothing excited me like Linux until I found EOS.IO.
Dan Larimer is a “developer’s developer.” He built EOS.IO so that other tech folks could develop their flavor of blockchains upon it. The EOS blockchain based on EOS.IO, is a community-run blockchain that has been up and running for a few months now. Other blockchains such as WORBLI and TLOS that are based on EOS.IO — often called sister chains — have started or will be starting soon.
These blockchains use Dan’s core platform — EOS.IO — to create their flavor of a blockchain. This jives with me as the flavoring or distribution concept of Linux — Slackware, Red Hat, SUSE, Debian, etc. Under the hood, it’s all the same kernel, but the user experience and packaging are per the community. Similarly, EOS, TLOS, and future EOS.IO based blockchains will have the same core technology with enhancements by the community and different takes on blockchain governance, fairness, and the degree of decentralization, etc. This is as good as it was for Linux! Many people worried about the complex maze of Linux distribution — but in the end, they each served a purpose in their community. This is one of the attributes of the EOS.IO community that attracted me, as EOS.IO is built in such a way that it can be a “blockchain of blockchains” and operate with each other as sister chains or side chains. Simply beautiful!
What makes me think of EOS.IO as the Red Hat Linux of the blockchain, is that EOS.IO has many features that enterprises will love in the blockchain space. For example, the multisig accounting built into the EOS.IO software will allow for complex ownership and custody mechanics to be incorporated in the smart-contracts that enterprises will surely want to create in the future. Similarly, the ability to attach a sidechain for specific applications or utility can mean that a corporation can be part of the EOS.IO ecosystem. The corporation can do this without giving up their proprietary controls, as it won’t be easy for them to give up so quickly. On top of these features, the core consensus concept of Delegated Proof Of Stake (DPOS) will likely be an enterprise favorite over energy wasting Proof of Work (PoW). I think enterprise and government adoption of blockchain will be the key to bringing out its true powers — complete transparency and fault-tolerance through decentralization and censorship resistance. However, enterprises and governments don’t jump on new tech as fast as we would like them to; they take their sweet time evaluating and seeing others crash and burn first.
This leaves us with the only group — the startups — that are willing to risk everything to disrupt a niche market. This is where I think the right adoption needs to happen for EOS.IO based blockchains, such as EOS or TLOS.
When we start seeing useful startups that solve real-world problems with real blockchain advantages, we will have value creation began in the blockchain space.
What needs to happen to take EOS to the moon?
Currently, many silly gambling-style betting games, decentralize exchanges (DEX) and other niche projects are out there. However, big and bold projects are still in the idea, design, or early development phases. What EOS.IO blockchains need are a few significant disruptors in the marketplace showcasing the real power of a fast, decentralized blockchain. We have all heard of how a blockchain eliminates the middlemen and bureaucracy, bringing transparency to all marketplaces. We need the EOS.IO version of Airbnb, Uber, Go Fund Me, Kickstarter, etc. that will disrupt the current disruptors and provide the value that blockchain brings to the masses.
Competing with businesses such as eBay, Uber, Airbnb, and Facebook requires blockchain technology capable of handling tens of millions of active daily users. In certain cases, an application may not work unless a critical mass of users is reached and therefore a platform that can handle very large numbers of users is paramount.
- Dan Larimer, CTO Block.One
When the general public experiences apps and websites that use EOS.IO based blockchains under the hood to offer better value, the public will use them. The general public doesn’t care about what’s under the hood. They care about the value, and shouldn’t have to deal with blockchain complexity, including the user experience issues associated with wallets, cryptic account names, and public/private keys.
We need real-world problem-solving solutions that integrate with and encapsulates the blockchain complexity behind the scenes — like Linux running Apache web servers! People only care if the website is accessible or not.
There are a lot of projects in the pipeline — many are building tools like wallets, liquidity, decentralized exchanges — all good stuff to make the ecosystem healthy. Without easy to use wallets or instant liquidity, people will become quickly frustrated with the blockchain. So these projects are great and needed. However, I think a right amount of effort and attention also needs to be on projects with a considerable scope that banks on the instant transactional capability, freedom from middlemen, censorship, and immutable transparency of blockchain. These projects will shake up the status quo and allow people to start experiencing the benefits of blockchain as they are intended. Here are some projects that I like and might meet these requirements.
Shining Star of EOS: Everipedia — everyone is noteworthy!
One such project is Everipedia. People understand Wikipedia, even though the shortcomings of Wikipedia is not widely recognized. People will soon realize it when Everpedia exceeds Wikipedia in their content base, which is much wider than the strictly curated Wikipedia. People will find more hits with Everipedia and learn to use it, but will hardly care that it runs on EOS.IO based blockchain for the core transparency, transaction, etc. To learn more about Everipedia, visit their website at https://everipedia.org
Disruptor Disrupted: EVA ride sharing launched!
EVA, an Uber replacement — using decentralized autonomous coops — based in Canada is launching soon. According to EVA’s white paper, traditional ride-sharing companies such as Uber or Lyft are considered the poster children of the so-called shared-economy. They are the middlemen who are siphoning off vast amounts of money from the local economies to their headquarters. On top of draining the local economies all around the world, they are also huge aggregators of metadata about the ride behaviors of people, which can lead to personal security risks if the data gets in the hands of the bad actors. Unfortunately, such data breaches are commonplace these days for centralized enterprises. EVA plans to solve this problem by decentralizing the ride-sharing ecosystem where local co-operatives run background checks on drivers, provides insurance, training, and audits. The local coops are owned by the drivers, riders, and holders of the EVA tokens. Smart-contracts on EOS blockchain will facilitate the transactions between the drivers and riders. No middlemen are needed outside of the local coop, which will benefit the local community by keeping the entire revenue local. No more multinational corporations would take huge bites into the local economy of ride sharing. To learn more about this project, visit their website at https://eva.coop
LEARNDAC — tokenizing education for unlimited opportunities
Disclaimer: this is a new project on EOS blockchain that I have founded. LEARNDAC is a decentralized autonomous community for creating infinite educational opportunities for everyone. It encourages and simplifies worldwide learning between parties using the fee-less LEARN token.
LEARNDAC eliminates all payment processing and administrative middlemen and gives control of our educational choices and independence back to the beneficiaries: parents, students, teachers, and educational service providers. Teachers everywhere can come aboard and have access to a secondary income source by managing geographic content rating, service provider rating, and managing the LEARN Grant Fund. Everything a teacher does with LEARNDAC produces income for them — a great incentive for them to join and maintain a global resource. It offers parents and students of all ages endless opportunities to earn LEARN tokens by staking them. It allows employers to provide LEARN tokens to their employees so that they can learn about things that interest them while maintaining transparency about what they are learning. Students of all ages, including adult learners, can learn new skills or take life-changing educational courses, programs and training from anywhere in the world — without dealing with international currencies, delays, or fear of credit card fraud. To learn more about our project, visit our website at https://learndac.education
We are still very early in the game!
Blockchain has been written off a few times in the past. It is slowly growing momentum, thanks to EOS.IO based chains such as EOS and TLOS. Of course, many others are competing for the limelight. Some respectable projects such as Ox protocol and ADA have distinct focuses and advantages.
Dan Larimer’s EOS.IO based EOS has been running for months. It is breaking many records in this newly emerging field of technology. I believe EOS.IO has the right stuff! Anyone developing dApps or DACs with it will be rewarded based on execution, usability, and good luck.
If you are not a developer and more like a trader looking for value, do your research. For developers, EOS and its sister chains like TLOS, WORBLI, etc. promise an excellent opportunity to build amazing new solutions. Once one or more large-scale solutions create value for the masses, EOS will undoubtedly go to the moon for its backers — be it the developers or traders.
