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Hi Luke,
What was up with BlockOne picking the 21 block producers.
How was this not Centralization?
thanks mate.

What was up with BlockOne picking the 21 block producers.

This is the type of ignorance I'm talking about. I'm not trying to be mean or single you out, but this is factually false. BlockOne did not pick any producers and are not currently voting at all. This is provable on chain. Where did you hear this information? Please hold that source accountable and correct their misinformation.

Does BlockOne have enough tokens to put in BPs? Yes, technically. Will they? I doubt it. For the same reason Steemit, inc doesn't vote for Witnesses. It would decrease trust in the system and hurt their investment. Game theory dynamics are what this all relies on.

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I think we are still discovering the pros and cons of the different consensus mechanisms. The reality is that most are still better than the centralized alternatives of banking and fiat we most use today. They will continue to rule at our detriment if we do come together more as a community to support trial and errors to learn in the process. The fact of EOS concentration is clear but how detrimental is it on a protocol that is still being developed and probably has overcapacity due to adoption still being low. We should not point out the flaws and instead work on the solutions.

Well said! Thank you. I hope to see more reasoned responses from people like this, whether they support EOS or not.

'.....bit part of it is ignorance..........'
This the case so many times that it's like a self correcting protocol. If you have too much confusion about something than we know that it is time to take a look ate what we are missing.

You shared in the beginning of the video about your experiences with the different aspects of the blockchain since 2013. Those few times when bitcoin was minted essentially out of nothing, block size debates and how a few individuals were pushing their agendas on it. The time when you watched the live fork of bitcoin and the time when mining cartels started to gather power and then essentially centralized the bitcoin................. this all reminded me of something very important.

That tells me how new we all are. It is easy to be overwhelmed by the senior people here in the world of blockchain and forget that all of us are still in the process of learning from the past mistakes. Maybe a century later from now there'll be some ironclad protocols refined over a hundred years but now is the time when the mistakes are going to be made and the most intelligent guy in the block would be the one to learn from them.

Right now we operate in a ecosystem where the onus of taking care of it lies on each and every individual. Just like Steem, where if shortsightedness gets out of hand and value extraction becomes too prevalent than we might see the ethical side of the community take a harsher stand against this abuse.................. its safe to say that not only the process of governance is evolving but the debate (for the governance) itself is evolving.

The human element is far too complicated for the code to encompass so we have to see a greater degree of human involvement in the process of governance. Probably acknowledging the human intention from the beginning is far more easier in the beginning than to be adopted mid journey and here EOS holds a big advantage. The human element is faulty and subject to greed so a consensus is a must.

In my understanding the rise of crypto in 2017 is underestimated. It has done far more than just to push the market cap into hundreds of billions of dollars. It has brought into perspective that what kind of power the people in the developer community of the blockchain can hold in the future.

It is best to bloodied now and take the losses than to be bloodied at the forefront where the level of scrutiny can possibly scare people away. We all can take this time to prepare and improve ourselves.

Just as example - In last October I entered the market thinking of making dollars and it was after that I learned about the idea of the Distributed Ledger and what it could possibly mean. After that I decided to keep the crypto as my currency, the money that is on the blockchain rather than the fiat.

Just a few months ago my roommate and I were talking about some money troubles that we were having and he reminded me that I can sell some of my Steem for the Euro and make up the rent. The first thought that struck me was the fact that I am here to earn Steem and not Euro, so why would I sell it to buy Euros.

This mindset was a much improved version of the one that was six months ago. I am still learning, sure it is taking an inordinate amount of time to just absorb one aspect of this evolving system. There is this tiny part of me that is a little afraid of the next bull run. I know for a fact that when the next ATH arrives, hundreds of people will be asking me for advice and I don't want to be the guy to point people in the wrong direction and I definitely don't want to be the fool who bought what he didn't understand.

Until now I have bought first and studied later, but I am trying to change that.

.............. shit this got really long - sorry for that!

It's a fantastic comment as always, @hashcash. Thanks for giving your perspective.

My pleasure man :D

How can they freeze accounts? The top 20 vote on it on-chain?

The 2/3+1 of the top 21 BPs can pretty much do whatever they want, just like in STEEM. Witnesses here can roll out code changes right now to freeze accounts, refund money, create 100,000,000 new STEEM tokens, etc, etc, etc. The difference being on EOS, some of these things are done in system contracts which can be updated in real time via transactions on the chain. It's like having upgradable EPROM in hardware. Some pieces of the system can be updated while it's running via consensus of the block producers. If token holders disagree, they can vote out those BPs and vote in new ones who could potentially undo whatever was done.

As for "freezing" accounts, what was done as an emergency was to use a blacklist approach in the config each BP to exclude transactions from the accounts. This was an emergency step that many were not happy with (hence the 3.5 hour call). Because it required unanimous approval (if even one producing BP didn't have the blacklist in place, the transactions would go through and the money would be gone), it was a very difficult discussion. Based on the feedback from the community, my hunch is it won't happen again (I don't think eosDAC would support it, as an example).

Interestingly, here's what the current ECAF website says:

I just got off what has become a daily BP call (70+ participants from around the world) and there's still a lot to be worked out in terms of who ECAF is, how they get funded, what role they play, etc. Doing on-chain governance is really complicated stuff.

I think the green screen needs to fill the whole frame.
Love the enthusiasm.
Don't shy away from wealth and power.
Having them isn't the problem; loving them is the problem.
As long as your love is for your fellow man, and assuming wealth and power have to land on someone, better it be you than some other schmuck.

The green screen fills the frame, but the background image I had doesn't. I'll have to fix that. I may go with just a solid color background image as well or something. Definitely need to play with it a bit more to get it right. Thanks for the feedback.

Wealth, I'm all about as it creates new opportunities. Power is a bit concerning depending on how we define it. Is it power over ourselves? Power over nature? Power over others?

Love for our fellow human beings is, for sure, the key. I have some thoughts on that here as it relates to Maslow's Hierarchy: How to Improve the World

I might also recommend lighting your green screen separately, and - if possible - at more of a distance away from your back. Part of the problem with keying it when it's so close is color spill. You're getting a little of that green on you when the light bounces off of it and onto you. If you put more of a gap between it and you, then light it separately, you'll get a cleaner key.

Thanks Winston! I got this exact advice from someone else also. I played with it a bit more today and got it looking a lot better by lighting the backdrop: https://www.facebook.com/750870567/posts/10156116519175568/

If you're a Steem witness and you're instrumental in the EOSDac team, that's going to make you incredibly influential in the very near future.
Power granted voluntarily, (and withdrawn at will) is still power.
Don't shy away from it just because evil people have wielded similar in the past.
People want leadership, and I'd rather they found it in a voluntaryist than anywhere else.

Which definition of Power are you using?

  1. the ability to do something or act in a particular way, especially as a faculty or quality.
  2. the capacity or ability to direct or influence the behavior of others or the course of events.
  3. physical strength and force exerted by something or someone.
  4. energy that is produced by mechanical, electrical, or other means and used to operate a device.

If #1, then I guess that makes sense?

#2 I don't like because it seems to drift away from voluntary interactions. #3 is fine as long as it's not over someone else. #4 is technical and doesn't apply.

I'm for leadership, vision casting, creating education that influences people because it's based on reason, logic, and evidence... but power? Well, power corrupts. I don't want power. I want people to think for themselves. I guess, in a way, I want everyone to have power as in the #1 sense of the word so that no one else could rule over them (including me).

As a witness you have power over the blockchain, where a great deal of my kids' inheritance is invested.
Those vests give me some power to pick and choose witnesses, but the witnesses can collectively make changes, increasing or decreasing the long term value of that investment.
Don't be shy to wield that power. Decisions have to be made somewhere.

The developers have far more power, IMO. They right the code. Witnesses just say "yes" or "no" when it comes to deploying the code.

i tried that too and had mediocre success because i used amateurish lightning and setup. There are several things which you should take in consideration if not answered by others:

  • even light distribution on the green screen with multiple lights positioned is crucial for easy filtering, one is insufficient
  • separate lightning of yourself, also avoids shadowing of green screen
  • a good distance to the green screen to avoid shadowing
  • the latter needs also enough space overall like a separate room or area (i hadn't at the time i tried)
  • the proper postproduction tool if you work on the footage (i prefere Premiere Pro, but also Final Cut Pro, Vegas schould work good) for green screen masking
  • fixed exposure at the camera, because automatic can lead to different exposures with different brightness levels of the green screen -> harder filtering

-> i'm personally abandoned my intention because realized it needs a lot of efforts and money to produce high quality videos with green screen

All very good points but... This is what I think and it very well could be totally wrong. Just some food for thought

Like bitcoin has many large miners which can control and determine what direction bitcoin goes. Is DPOS the same? Since only a few people running the servers have vote weight. So now 100 people are deciding what 5 million people can do and how they can do it?

BTW I do appreciate all the work and commitment and good you are doing for steem. Thank you

Thanks for the encouragement.

I think the hugely important difference between bitcoin miner cartels and DPOS is that token holders, in a single moment, can actually change their votes on who gets to be a BP. That can't happen with POW. Token holders have no say at all how things go. The motivational incentives are not inline. DPOS aligns those in a better way because it's the token holders that hold all the value for the chain. The "if you don't like it, sell your tokens" is good approach because bitcoin lost a ton of marketshare from people who still love bitcoin but didn't have a way to express their views on how it should work.

I don't think 100 people deciding is an accurate way to describe it. 21 BPs are (ideally) just securing the chain. If they are called to do something extraordinary by the community, then it's the token holders who are deciding by agreeing or disagreeing with the approach the BPs take.

Great briefing, Luke. Needs some more research on my part. Thanks for the gentle push in that direction. 😎

To the question in your title, my Magic 8-Ball says:

Yes

Hi! I'm a bot, and this answer was posted automatically. Check this post out for more information.

@lukestokes Thank you for all you do for EOS and eosDAC. I Really am getting Sick of all the FUD that has come out of Bix Weir's Mouth for the Last Few Months !

There's a lot of FUD all over the place.

@lukestokes I know what you mean. In fact Bix Weir just put up this video on YouTube and I wrote a comment asking him a question and he responded. You may find that it was an interesting response.......

I tried watching a full video of this guy and the number of things said which have no evidence gets me frustrated. It's the same reason I don't watch Alex Jones. It's shock TV designed to prey on the weakest parts of the human mind, not calm, rational, fact-based evidence. The connections being made between Brock and the actual code running EOS are ridiculous.

Hi Luke,
If Bix is spreading FUD ?
Why not contact him for a live debate on the information and facts he is spreading.
No better way to stop the FUD my friend then going after the source.
Be well..

first time saw you in a video ...you look elder in your profile picture 😋 ....i was considering you in 55🙊

Heh. That's funny. :)

Hey Luke thanks for, let me say, teaching about stuff people who're working with crypto should know. I'm really new to this all and you're showing me the easier way of getting knowledge.
Thank you and I have to say i appreciate your work.

Thank you for the encouragement!

The excitement for the future is real. To be honest I bought into Eos because of the hype and the more and more i learn about it the more Im glad that I did fomo it. Keep up the great work Luke. Don't forget to get some rest though. Lol

Hahah... Count yourself lucky. Usually FOMO doesn't end well. :)

Awesome post! I kept wanting to stop the video so I wouldn't forget all of my comments, but I ended up watching it all the way through. Your comment at the beginning about Steemit not having a set of rules made me think of Jurassic park and the line about "just because we could we didn't stop to think about if we should". Paraphrased of course. I am really excited about what EOS is going to bring. I agree with you too about the block producers being able to freeze accounts not being a bad thing. Despite what the FUD'ers are trying to put out there, I feel better knowing that someone has my back if something weird happens with my account. Plus like you said, if you don't like it, vote for a different BP, it is that simple. I am all about living in the moment, but I also can't wait to look back a year from now and see all of the awesome stuff that has been built on EOS!

Thank you!

Straight dropping knowledge my friend! Think it may be time to have you on the music and money show again. Round 2! Let me know when you are down for it :-)

Sure, let's set it up. Ping me on Discord.

Well done sir @lukestokes, that's so genius of you.

Great addition to your recording setup.

I must say, that after what you said, I think I'm pretty ignorant indeed, especially on DPOS.

Great video @lukestokes with your explanation on how EOS and Dpos work, and great answers on the comments below about the governance EOS is bringing to the crypto world!

By the way, I wrote a post about EOS finaly appearing on Blocktivity and I mentioned this video you made.
https://steemit.com/eos/@gold84/eos-listed-number-11-on-blocktivity-with-blockchains-with-most-transactions-in-the-world-with-just-a-week-of-its-mainnet-being

Looking forward to your thoughts when you get the chance!

Regards, @gold84

Thanks @lukesokes as I am relatively ignorant on all those subjects mentioned particularly EOS DPOS.
Appreciate your video :)

Great brainstorm as always! I’m just a bit sad that you didn’t reply whatsoever to my attempt.

Can you clarify which reply you mean? Did you message me in Discord, Telegram, Steemit.chat, or Steemit?

I am fully committed to many different projects right now and don't always have the time to evaluate other people's projects as well.

Sure I understand from your videos just how busy you are:)

I tried my first video-discussion-reply few weeks ago...You don’t need to worry about it though if you are busy. I just thought that we both might learn something...even though my speech feels much sloppier...still need to train that skill:P

I never saw this! I'm so sorry for not listening and replying. I normally get notifications from Ginabot whenever my account name is mentioned. I'll listen to this now.

It’s just fine! Will read it 2morrow... I got what I wanted after all...therefore I thank you for it:)

But it wasn't a vote buy. :)

Just finished the video and I really liked it! I agree being part of something that has the potential to change the world must be awesome!

My reply is going to sound like I am blowing my own horn, but bear with me.

I think the fact there is a lot of fud is not surprising, I think we underestimate how difficult it is to understand all the concepts you have been discussing in the video if you are not actually programming the systems day in day out,
Research into crypto and understanding blockchain and how nodes work with all the different governance models that are out there, it takes a lot of time to get your head around this. For most I imagine life is to short.

Even now after watching your video, I struggle to fully understand how DPOS works, my summary would be that instead of POW where all the nodes have a say, D-POS has 21 nodes that hold all power.
If we stop there, it scares me and I can imagine a lot of people and the conclusion would be that this is too much power.

Obviously that is not all as to diminish the power of these 21 nodes there is a voting system.
What I struggle to see/ understand is how and who(m) has the power to downvote BP or decide that an account should be frozen. An attempt to answer my own question would be: I think everyone is allowed that has a wallet?

If that is the case, how can you trust people to vote on questions or issues they know nothing about, how do you avoid that the 21 nodes don’t collude in such ways there is now way for the public to find out. How did they arrive to the 21 nodes, is that a sacred number that seems to work, will there be more once EOS get’s mass adoption?

Good intent is good, but some people have a different understanding of what good intent means. As a lot of people probably have no clue how the system works they will probably be delegating their votes and this again will cause centralization?

How are fake accounts checked? Could someone create a ton of accounts to manipulate votes?

Now the part where I blow my own horn 😄, my vision for my website is to have one website that has all this data available in one place. A website that gives people an incentive to do research and share found knowledge so that it becomes clear when something is already researched and stop people from doing the same research over and over. Showing only data backed up by trustworthy resources.
Once it is clear what is factual and clearly understood we can grade crypto assets better on different aspects.
My idea for Https://cryptoowls is exactly that. I would love to hear if you like it or not.