EOS - Blockchain for Big Brother?

Since the EOS mainnet launch earlier in June, a number of potential issues have come to light that makes you wonder whether they have been a little ambitious too soon.

Firstly they launched with full turing complete smart contracts and a number of serious vulnerabilities have already been found that make the parity bug on Ethereum look clever. One of the most severe was found by China-based cybersecurity firm Qihoo 360. The alarming description of the vulnerability is taken from their report:

"To use this vulnerability, (an) attacker could upload a malicious smart contract to the nodes server, after the contract get parsed by (the) nodes server, the malicious payload could execute on the server and taken control of it. After (it has) taken control of the nodes server, (the) attacker could then pack the malicious contract into (a) new block and further control all nodes of the EOS network."

Ouch. So effectively one skilled hacker could take control of the whole blockchain. The worst part is that the team that found it believes things are going to get worse over time. Presumably by other vulnerabilities being exposed.

To add insult to injury, the grand daddy of smart contracts, Nick Szabo has publically criticised EOS' unusual implementation of internal governance:

“In EOS a few complete strangers can freeze what users thought was their money. Under the EOS protocol you must trust a ‘constitutional’ organization comprised of people you will likely never get to know. The EOS ‘constitution’ is socially unscalable and a security hole,”

If I was Dan Larimer I might be taking notes.

On June 22nd this concept was seen in practice. 27 wallet addresses were blackholed by the blockchain administrators. The official statement of the EOS Core Arbitration Forum (ECAF) – a body set up to resolve disputes in the community - read:

"It is hereby ordered that the EOS Block Producers refuse to process transactions for the following accounts and keys indefinitely. (Until further official notice and instruction from the ECAF.)"

This sounds a little bit 1984 to me, which is the polar opposite to the ideology public blockchains were conceived for.

EOS is a huge project pushing the boundaries of the technology and governance structures, so teething problems are to be expected, but after raising US$ 4.1 billion during their ICO, it has to be said that their launch has not quite matched the performance of their funders.

Disclosure: I do not own EOS but I am tentatively following their progress.