The Ethereum Challengers, ep. 9: IOST (Internet of Services Token)
Proof of Believability, Scalability without Centralization, Easy Development, Mainnet Launch Q1 2019
We’ve mostly covered top market cap coins up to this point.
RSK (on Bitcoin) and NEM. EOS and Cardano. Ethereum Classic. Qtum and NEO.
Coming soon are Waves and Komodo, and then a “Defense of Ethereum” episode, but since the series started, a few other major players have captured attention. They might just find their way into the series.
Hashgraph. Dfinity. Zilliqa. Cosmos (Tendermint).
This week, it’s time for IOST, the Internet of Services project.
Unlike most challengers discussed so far, IOST had no public token sale. Instead, it raised 35,000 ether in a hard-capped private sale in January of this year and is backed by a number of notable investors including Huobi, Sequoia, and half a dozen other groups.
Why Should You Believe Me? (IOST’s Version of Proof of Stake)
IOST’s consensus protocol is what it calls “Proof of Believability.”
As with many proof-of-stake systems, IOST nodes are expected to hold tokens to increase their chances of being selected as a block validator and thus receiving a reward of tokens.
But there’s more to it than simple Proof of Stake.
First, token balance isn’t the only factor in the IOST selection process. You can boost your believability score by participating in the network — by providing reviews, for example.
Second, a portion of your “Believability” is reset to zero when you’re selected. Not permanently, of course. And not by spending all of your IOST tokens.
IOST holders and participants accumulate a non-tradable asset called “Servi” by holding tokens and by helping the network in other ways. Your Servi are all spent when your node is selected to help verify a block, reducing your Servi balance and the weight it gives you to zero. Some factors in your Believability score, like feedback from the “Fair and Transparent Feedback System” (FTFS), survive the Servi purge, but this feedback must be obtained from other users, services, and smart contracts, not from simple staking.
Upon hearing about FTFS, I immediately started thinking about how it could be gamed, probably by collusion. I’m guessing that IOST’s launch, like EOS’s, might have a few cases of possible collusion that come to light and need to be dealt with by the community.
In any case, this Servi reset helps mitigate the immense power that whale token holders can have. Perhaps other mitigations, like quadratic voting, will help this problem on other platforms. IOST wants to tackle it right out of the gate, and I’m excited to see how Servi and PoB work out.
But to make a proof of stake system fair and secure, there’s another critical component that has pestered computer programmers since the early days: the difficulty of generating random numbers.
Fooled by Randomness
One of the major problems with proof-of-stake networks — and indeed with blockchains and blockchain applications in general — is the difficulty of producing truly random numbers. Without truly random numbers, or at least unpredictable random numbers, blockchain applications can be gamed.
Read the rest of this post on blog.icoalert.com.
Topics: Cryptocurrency, News, Ethereum, Protocol, Ethereum Challengers, Decentralized
Originally published at blog.icoalert.com.
