EOS surprises and misconceptions: A look through the rabbit hole!
EOS - a project I have been following for a while now. It only went live a month ago but a lot of people are worried about the progress being made and governance issues arising almost daily. I wanted to comment in the telegram chat, but I think there is enough to be unpicked for a whole post.
Surprises
I am still surprised by a few things:
One is that a lot of holders got in without researching the project, expected an easy ride and either lost, didn't register or can't trade their tokens as they can't deposit it to their preferred exchange. Most of them don't really care about voting or being part of the community and there is no push from them to shape it.
Two it is still unclear to me why everyone is puzzled about frozen accounts and the power of the bps like they didn't expect this to ever happen. This was a consequence of a lot of people going to ECAF to get their tokens back. EOS was sold as a blockchain where your tokens are safe from fraud or ignorance.
After how it played out bps seem to be trying to work out the basics of governance instead of enforcing the constitution. And Dan wrote another constitution still to be voted on.
Misconceptions
In my opinion because of the way EOS was promoted there are a lot of misconceptions which drives developers away as well puts the whole project at risk. One of them is: to launch on EOS you have to have a huge capital.
Last year most of the money for small projects as well as big ones was raised through ICO's look at EOS itself. One of the arguments is that it would cost much more to run daps on ETH when the user would have to pay gas prices for every transaction. The answer to this was: build on EOS it will be free. Block.One was raising money and promised to invest a lot of it back directly to dapps through VC funds.
What is happening now is that developers are going on their own and trying to airdrop as well as pay for every user without any prospect of getting money back lets say until their token lists on an exchange and they have a fully tested and working product with enough users to get some income. That can be years.
Whats supposed to happen is the developers should go to VC funds who hold the money from Block.One if you have a working product or dapp to go global and outgrow many other projects(lets say ONO could've done that if they needed capital for argument sake). If you have an idea where less capital is needed you can go to BP's who promised to invest their share back into the development of the ecosystem and present it. We are not seeing that and it is damaging the system. Again I think blame goes to all sides: VC funds-because they are invisible; BP's-because they are too busy sorting out trivial things and maybe not reaching out to the developers who think they can't afford to airdrop or build on EOS; Developers-because they are giving up without trying all the avenues, or so it seems.
I can hear people calling out Block.One and why they don't get involved, well it's not what they said they will do all along. It was a great game of risk where solders are randomly dropped out of the skies and they had to figure out wtf just happened and where to next.
Future
A lot of people are saying now that EOS is prime real estate, where you have to be rich or you have to have a great idea and that is enough for you to be noticed. First do we really want to be that bleak and only see value in money terms. Second if it becomes this prime real estate then what? We will rise against all the other projects? I thought the whole idea of this project was to be for everyone, but if only the likes of Apple and Google, or even just Sony and Barclays lets say start using it are we loosing something?The claim EOS - Decentralize everything wouldn't really work. A lot of people are already paranoid of how centralized it looks.
The End
I don't think anyone knew what to expect after EOS launch it is really early days and it is a work in progress. If you would look at the projects which have finished their ICO's and their roadmaps, most of them won't even have a launch for a year or two. At EOS everyone is still trying to find their place: this goes to BP's, developers the community and maybe even Block.One. Nothing is final yet. No one knows the way this project will unfold. One is true it will be hell of a ride and I'm not going anywhere!
Peace, DYOR!