TL;DR: EOS is a consensus blockchain operating system that provides databases, account permissions, scheduling, authentication, and internet-application communication to massively improve the efficiency of smart business development that uses parallelization to make possible blockchain scalability to millions of users and millions of transactions per second.
Disclaimer: Most of what follows is my cliffs notes summary of Dan's Consensus presentation, and I've also (crudely) redrawn some of his key slides. Anything and everything contained herein should be properly attributed to Dan, @dantheman.
EOS: the elected, epic, enterprise, consensus, blockchain operating system.
In order to introduce EOS, we first need to understand the current state of blockchain tech, and how we got here. Bitcoin of course introduced the idea of a public ledger system and Ethereum proved the demand for decentralized applications more generally. However, in order to see blockchains truly go mainstream, we need to address the sheer volume of traffic and operations occurring on real world business applications. For example, credit card networks need to be able to process 20,000 transactions per second. Facebook processes 52,000 likes per second, and that doesn't include actual posts and other activity. The financial industry processes 100,000 transactions per second, potentially per market.
In contrast, Bitcoin is currently limited to ~3 transactions per second because of blocksize, and Ethereum is limited to ~30 transactions per second due to gas restrictions. The most important restriction of current blockchain technology is the single-threaded performance of all major blockchains.
EOS has already attracted significant interest and investment.
How did we get here?
In 2013, the decentralized exchange Bitshares was built, and in 2014 Bitshares was launched. It used delegated proof-of-stake giving 3 second confirmation times with very predictable, reliable block production. The first version of Bitshares was built off of some of the same ideas as Bitcoin and shared some technology, but still didn't meet the performance requirements of an exchange. In 2015 Graphene was created, and Bitshares was completely rewritten. This was able to achieve 100,000 transaction per second on a single machine, and decentralized global stress testing achieved 18,000 transactions per second on a distributed network. Account names were also introduced with Bitshares (advanced hierarchical dynamic threshold multisig), which separated accounts from keys, allowing organizations to be structured and permissions to be delegated to other users. In 2016 Steem was launched which had new conceptual issues. Social media users don't want to have to pay for every vote, they need account recovery options, etc... Steem also took the block rewards which are wasted in mining and redistributes them to people who are posting on the blockchain, enabling thousands of people to become active participants through massive decentralization allocation of funds. Steem went from concept in January to working blockchain in March to working website in July. At this point, Steem and Bitshares have more real world transactions occurring every day than the rest of the major blockchains combined. Steem also has a higher female-to-male ratio of users than any other blockchain. However, both Steem and Bitshares are application-specific blockchains. If you want to run multiple apps on the same blockchain, there are significant scalability issues that need to be solved.
There are still significant barriers to mainstream blockchain adoption.
If you look at the blockchain industry, everyone wants to build smart businesses, decentralized organizations, etc..., and in the process developers built decentralized computers from the ground up which can run their smart apps. In this process, all app developers have to solve many of the same problems: account systems, recovery processes, multi-sig, manage challenges, and what they're missing is the operating system, which could provide all the common features that every application depends upon, allowing applications to focus on what makes them different. For example, there is a huge commonality between Bitshares and Steem in terms of functions, and relatively a very small difference in terms of application business logic. EOS aims to provide this operating system to provide all the core functions to app developers and allow them to focus on just the business logic that makes their apps unique.
EOS provides an operating system and a decentralized computer to radically improve the efficiency of smart business development.
What do DAPPs require?
In order to be successful, DAPPs need to be accessible from a web browser (downloadable apps are nice as well), need to scale to millions of users in order to monetize and earn a return on investment, they need to be free for users of the app (especially for social media), they need to be responsive with fast confirmation times, they need to be upgradable, be accessible with human friendly account names, have account recovery, and have a strategy for fixing bugs. EOS provides all of these to application developers.
EOS provides parallel processing of smart contracts through horizontal scalability, asynchronous communication, and interoperability. It will provide databases, account permissions, scheduling, authentication, and internet-application communication. For example, both Bitshares and Steem can be run on EOS in parallel, and because of the asynchronous communication, additional nodes and entire clusters can be thrown behind the processing of transactions to scale up to any transaction volume you want.
EOS is the first blockchain operating system. It provides your application with databases, a schema, multiple indices so you can have sorted data that's easy to manage. it gives you account permissions and a whole set of users, account recovery, handles all the complexities of scheduling multiple tasks across CPU cores or even clusters, handles all the authentication and key management so you can focus on business logic and not cryptography, and it handles all the internet-application communication. EOS is the operating system that we've been waiting for that allows us to focus on building the apps that our users need without getting in the way, without forcing gas, without requiring users to purchase anything before using, and it dramatically accelerates the rate at which developers can build apps.
EOS aims to be scalable, flexible, and usable.
Scalable: EOS can support 1000s of commercial-scale DAPPs through parallel execution and asynchronous communication. It separates the authentication from the action. For example, a transfer is a simple action of reducing one account's balance and increasing another, but all the authentication steps are validating signatures, checking to make sure that are sufficient funds, etc... but authentication steps only need to happen once when the block is produced. After a block is irreversibly added to the blockchain you never have to authenticate again. EOS puts the source code on the blockchain so that it is human readable what the contract says, and everyone can see it and developers can optimize it and compile on different machines, all without breaking consensus. It also eliminates gas to eliminate the extra operations that are required to count the important operations.
Flexible: Because EOS will use delegated proof-of-stake, if an app is broken or fails, elected block producers can freeze the application until a bug can be fixed and then update the code. So if the DAO had been implemented on EOS, for example, it could have been frozen, fixed, and updated, all without ever having to hard fork or disrupt any other application on the chain. EOS is also flexible in the sense that you only have to run the applications that you need. If you are running an exchange, you don't have to run the social media apps, and you can configure your local node to process only the data you care about. Not every node needs to run and maintain the full state of the blockchain. EOS also publishes source code, not assembly, and provides generalized role-based permissions.
Usable: EOS will include a web toolkit for interface development, self-describing interfaces (data that goes on the blockchain can be read by humans but is also compressed), self-describing database schemas, and a declarative permission scheme. This allows a fine-grained level of permissions in which you can easily delegate specific account permission to other accounts.
Governance: Delegated proof-of-stake has elected block producers. A legally binding constitution (think decentralized peer-to-peer terms of service) establishes a common jurisdiction for disputes and dispute resolution. EOS will also include self-funded community benefit apps that are selected through stake-weighted voting. Ever account will have to sign the constitution. One idea is that every transaction may include the hash of the current state of the constitution. The constitution itself is something that can be modified and evolve, and captures the intent of what the blockchain is trying to express and guides the way when trying to resolve disputes. Signing the constitution expires if you do not use the platform just like other apps updating their terms of service.
EOS Token:
EOS has a token called EOS, which works on the same principles as Steem. Unlike other systems there are no fees, it's not consumed. If you own 1% of the network, you have access to 1% of the computational power, 1% of the bandwidth, and 1% of the network storage. You can then lease it out to other parties or use it for your own app. Once you fund your app with enough EOS to support its usage, you don't have to worry about topping it off or paying any fees, because it's an "own" model, rather than a "rental" model. You then figure out how to monetize your app by charging the user. Network bandwidth can be allocated and delegated paying customers through a free market hosting ecosystem. Block production is controlled through stake-weighted voting as in traditional delegated proof-of-stake. There is also a constitutionally limited 5% annual increase in EOS supply which woulc be lowered to 0%. This supply is distributed to three different smart contracts which are selected based on stake-weighted voting. The additional supply may be simply destroyed by locking them away in a smart contract which prevents them from ever being used (eliminating inflation), or they can be distributed to decentralized administration (such as Steem), or centralized administration (such as the Ethereum foundation, EOS foundation, etc...).
Current Development Team:
Brendan Blumer: CEO
Daniel Larimer: CTO
Kokuei (Guo) Yuan: President
Andrew Bliss: CFO
Michael Cao: partner
Ian Grigg: partner
Brock Pierce: partner
Li Xiao Lai: partner
Wendy Lee: CLO
Bo Shen: partner
Project Status and Roadmap:
The project was started a couple of months ago, and code will be released on github after the Consensus 2017 conference. Code will be tested out this summer. Visit eos.io to sign up for the newsletter. The EOS team is trying to treat project information very sensitively so that there is no inside group with access to key information before the greater community, so make sure to sign up for the mailing list!
Very exciting! Anyone remember when BitShares was "ProtoShares"?
It's been a while now :p I think with EOS we might see Bitshares 3.0 built on top of it.
Hello @trogdor & thank you for this very solid intro to EOS!
Your post has been featured in the latest issue of STEEMINT - The STEEM Intelligence Journal
Thanks! and thanks also for the shout out, I'll check out the post.
I still don't understand what this actually do. Will people running the nodes be actually running the OS?
So, I'm not an expert, just a guy who is interested and trying to answer the same question as you. Basically, there will be many similarities to Bitshares and Steem, just more general. So, the system will be delegated proof of stake, which means (as far as I know) that only the witnesses are actually running the full EOS blockchain. Then many different users who are interested in specific apps (like Bitshares or Steem) can run significantly reduced code on their computer that interacts with the blockchain, but only with the data from the app they are interested in. That's my naive understanding. I need to learn more.
I assume STEEM is a more "application specific" blockchain, and EOS will be more Ethereum based and generic, to run many kinds of apps.
To me, it's very interesting that Dan wants to work with Ethereum at all. Here is someone that has "rolled their own" blockchain and is now working with Ethereum, so I'm thinking he learned something from Brenden and BAT?
Good points. I wouldn't say EOS is ethereum based though. The only connection to Eth is the ico, and that was simply because Eth is pretty much the only smart contract platform that would allow an auditable distribution. Once the initial token distribution is settled, the Erc-20 tokens will be locked on the Eth network and there will be no connection at all.
I see, I see, that's very interesting, and NOT OBVIOUS, even after I had read much of the white paper. Thanks for helping clarify that.
Trogdor, I have created an Ethereum account. How do I use that to hold EOS? Erc-20 is a new term for me, how does that work?
Heya trogdor,
You may also be interested in FriendUP. It is a full OS you can download or request from here:
https://friendup.cloud
https://github.com/FriendUPCloud/friendup
Peer to peer networking makes for an exciting time in terms of the next phase of internet development. This is especially the case when it is questioning perceived relationships between hardware and software - translating it all into code in the case if the Friend Unifying Platform (FriendUP).
If you want to know more just ping us at our Telegram group: https://t.me/friendupcloud
They are confusing me by calling it an operating system. For now I will just summarize it as a smarter Ethereum platform.
Thanks for your post.
The OS concept comes from the provision of aggregated common services used by the applications that will sit "on top" of EOS. With a form of directory services complete with delegated rights model, database services etc. , the term OS comes closer than maybe any other label, unless you want to call it something like "Common Services Abstraction Layer for Blockchain" :)
Thank you for sharing @trogdor!
Thanks for reading, it's my pleasure!
The constitution element is really interesting. Haven't been this interested in a project for a while.
I definitely agree. I'm going to be following this one closely.
@trogdor Thank You 4 the time & work You put into creating this post !!
UpVoted & Following... please consider following me. Thanks again !!
Thanks! I'll check out your page.
@trogdor Thank You >> : ~ ))
Well written. Congratulation for serving this to the community. Upvoted...this surely need tips. The function is coming soon and it will make it easy to tips a post. thks
Thanks! I hadn't heard about the tip function yet. I need to spend some time looking into the updates coming up soon.
Desperately waiting to test EOS , once it gets released....I think this will be a game changer for blockchain based technologies with some superior features.
I definitely agree! Thanks for commenting.
I have signed up for this mailing list! I love the scalability factor of EOS! Do you think this becomes bigger than ETH?
Thanks for commenting! It's hard to say about ultimate potential, but it sounds like in terms of sheer network capacity, EOS should be able to handle orders-of-magnitude more transactions than the Ethereum network. I think that probably app developers will also come to see it as a much more efficient platform for building apps on, since they can focus on just the business logic and let EOS handle the crypto.
It continues to get better in the blockchain world!
It makes sense that developers would rather not have to focus on the crypto side!
Definitely!, I wish I would have thought of it.... haha
That makes two of us! haha
I`m new to this, but it seems better than Ethereum.
wow, great job with this - it's almost like a complete transcript + images of Dan's EOS intro. gonna include this in my Consensus2017 / EOS highlights post.
Thanks so much! I'll definitely be looking out for your highlights post, because all I'm getting is little pieces here and there on other Steemit posts :)
nicely written. and adding the video presentation for ease of access for other readers:
https://www.pscp.tv/w/1YpJknevAnEGj
Great, thanks for adding the video! Fun fact about Brock Pierce: he once starred in the Mighty Ducks :)
Oh, a nice movie!
that sounds amazing. thanks for the overview. Didn't know that Dan left Steem to work on this...
Upvoted & followed
Thanks! I'll definitely be excited to see where this thing goes. I thought it was strange that Dan left Steem, but now we see why!
This is another game changer that I really want to be updated on each development; signed up on its newsletter. Thanks for sharing. Followed you @trogdor
Definitely! I'm hoping we'll get new info as soon as the Consensus conference is over and hopefully any details on a more specific time frame.
Ok, I'll keep watching how everything will unfold... then share a ride when opportunity comes. :)
Definitely!
Wow...thanks. Definitely signing up for the newsletter.
Definitely, I'm hoping that they will start sending some updates after the Consensus conference is over.
Great Recap!
Thank you @trogdor
Thanks!
Wow, this looks incredibly exciting. Thank you so much for the write-up. I am getting on this newsletter.
Thanks! I'm hoping that we'll start getting some updates sometime soon.
This is a fantastic idea! I've never heard of the project before this post, thank you very much for introducing me to it!
No problem, thanks for reading!
Hey, man! Care if I copy/paste this into my EOS talk video? Of course, linking to this post as well.
Side note: Dan said they're throwing together a well-produced version of his talks. Just a heads up on something to look forward to!
Sure thing, go ahead. And thanks for the heads up!
Awesome, thanks! You're welcome, just paying respects and giving credit where it's due.
Also, super glad to see someone reppin' my boy Trogdor!!!
Aaaaaand, it's up! Thanks again.
EDIT: It's actually too long to fit in the description so I'm just going to add the TL;DR and link to the full article, is that cool. Thanks again! Following ya.
Thank you for this effort.
No problem, thanks for commenting!
Definitely in to support this awesome project. :)
Thumbs up! I'm in too!
An extremely informative and "stupidly" simple to understand article. I had not "digested" very well what EOS meant so far. Thank you very much!. I would like to request permission to translate this article so that the Spanish-speaking community that does not speak English can also know what EOS means. Of course you would be mentioned as the original author of the article with a link to it and I also propose to send you 50% of the SBD generated. Many greetings and a big hug. @efrageek
Thanks! Glad I could be helpful, and please feel free to translate the article.
Best,
Trogdor
por favor si podes traducirlo te lo agradeceria mucho. escucho mucho sobre EOS y la verdad que entiendo a medias el proyecto. te voy a empezar a seguir para poder leerlo. es mucho pedir si podes traducir el white papper tambien?? jajaja muchas gracias por la colaboracion!!!
Thanks @trogdor for this great expanation of EOS. This is the project that i am most excited for right now. Do you know when we will be able to invest, buy EOS tokens?
I haven't heard much about when we'll be able to buy the tokens. I know the roadmap includes testing the code over the summer, and the timescale for development for Dan's projects has been quite fast in the past, i.e. Steem was built and launched in a matter of months.
Thanks, i will keep am eye out for more info.
Great post!
Lol, thanks for the graphic.
yeah, I thought you like that. Now I have to go checka da email.
Thanks a lot!
No problem, thanks for reading!
Thank you so much for writing this all down, I watched the video of Dan's presentation last night and had a hard time hearing everything he said. Having read all this, I'm even more excited about this project, it really sounds amazing!
No problem! Thanks for reading!
Excellent summary, overview and recap of an important section in this evolving crypto ecosphere Dr. Trogdor. I'm glad Princeton allows you to be let loose into the Steemworld ;-) Looking forward to many more of your contributions. Just hit the follow button ;-)
Thanks! It's amazing how much Steeming you can do when you're on vacation :p
hi there! great job!
may I translate this article to Chinese and post with my steem account?
Thanks! Feel free to translate, and thanks for asking :)
i like the idea a lot :) Keep us informed about improvements. Followed :)
Thanks, I'm hoping we will start to get more updates as soon as the Consensus conference is over.
Intriguing article! This is some good information. I'll be reading more of your posts.
That looks promising!
Nicely done! Thank you!
No problem, thanks for checking out the post :)
Thank you for sharing this outstanding information! ☆☆☆☆☆😎
No problem, thanks for checking out the post!
Perhaps you could elaborate a bit regarding smart contracts. Or just point me in the direction of some reading. I really don´t get the concept. This is the paragraph I refer to:
"This supply is distributed to three different smart contracts which are selected based on stake-weighted voting. The additional supply may be simply destroyed by locking them away in a smart contract which prevents them from ever being used (eliminating inflation), or they can be distributed to decentralized administration (such as Steem), or centralized administration (such as the Ethereum foundation, EOS foundation, etc...)" .
"There is also a constitutionally limited 5% annual increase in EOS supply which would be lowered to 0% ".
This I like, I can´t help thinking about fractional reserve banking and fiat currencies when cryptocurrencies are discussed.
Very interesting and informative post so far. Thank you.
You mention "gas restrictions" while talking about Ethereum processing speed. What does
that mean?
I tried to resteem this post, but could not. Do you know why? Is it because the post is not very recent, maybe?
PS I see more than 90 replies, but only my vote. Maybe I am responding at the wrong place.
This is amazing, thank you for sharing! EOS - a revolution inside blockchain.
Definitely, it all sounds pretty revolutionary to me!
When is the next major catalyst for EOS? There are a lot of negative conspiracy theories circulating.
It really makes sense ! Organic growth potential !
Very interesting. Thanks for sharing! Depending on how this is done, it can potentially disrupt on-demand cloud services, like AWS EC2/Lambda. But there are problems that would have to be solved:
Ensure strict isolation of DAPP containers - Access only specific local resources. Ensure someone cannot develop malicious DAPPS intended to harm/scam other people on the network.
Setting caps/limits - Allow network participants to statically or dynamically adjust how much of their resources they want utilized.
Speed - Running a function on the blockchain must be fast, very fast. Otherwise, the types of operations will be limited to things that are not time-sensitive. Like batch processing work.
I'm sure there are much more problems than this, but just a few things that I can think of.
We Covered EOS' ICO. Hope you'll find it helpful - https://coins.best/ico-reviews/eos/
from where did you got those slides?
Drew them with GIMP :)
no way. They are like from presentation :)
The content is from Dan's Consensus presentation, but I remade the slides. Looks better than screenshots of the youtube upload.
You are working on a very promising project. Thanks for the article!
Looking forward to see new posts on SteemIt about EOS.
Thank you for a very clear and complete understanding of EOS. Time to invest :-)
Good article. Ill have to check out the OS.
Here's my understanding of some of the key points that were written:
-Blocksize and Gas restrictions are holding Bitcoin and Ethereum from competing with more mainstream businesses.
-Bitshares and Graphine in 2015 helped to achieve 100,000 transactions per second on a single machine and 18,000 transactions on a distributed network.
-EOS blockchain operating system helps support 1000s of decentralized apps.
-EOS allows you to choose what nodes to run therefore allowing you to choose what applications to support.
-EOS tokens allow consumers to hold shares in company, and directly influence ability to share with other parties.
how do i sign up for the mailing list?
Hi Kelvin, you can sign up at https://eos.io
The sign up is pretty much the only thing on the site.
whoops! Thanks!
This sounds really interesting. I'm not sure I understand it all yet, but I will surely keep an eye on this and read into it a bit more. Thanks for the in depth explanation.
Great introduction to EOS! We are happy to say that Embermine, Inc. has committed ourselves to helping in the funding, research, and development of this excellent and needed platform.
We look forward to showing the world our smart contract deployment environment backed by the quick and powerful EOS! We were already well on our way working with both the Graphene and BitSharesDEX, now we have a chance to easily merge that development track with the development of the Smart Contract deployment module.
Very much looking forward to the Testnet launch!
very interesting
I stopped here:
How could you know that? That is just an assumption (with a lot of ifs maybe true but still).
That's something that Dan said during his presentation. I don't know how he arrived at that result, but at least for the major blockchains, polls have been done in this area. This is from a quick google search which claims less than 2% of bitcoin users are female: https://cointelegraph.com/news/its-a-mans-world-only-176-of-bitcoin-community-are-women
I do remember seeing a post a while back that claimed more than 50% of Steemit users are female, not sure. Once again, this is Dan's claim, not mine, but I would guess it's probably true.
Getting really excited for the release!