The Illusion of Usability
So in order for this story to make any sense I am required to preface it with a brief personal backstory (and here most readers will say "Oh well fuck this!" And proceed to leave this post.) Anyways, I work at ICO Alert there thats the backstory. Not so boring right!?
With that cleared up allow me to delve into the story.
[WARNING! NO EDITING WAS MADE PRIOR TO POSTING. I HATE EDITING! PROCEED WITH CAUTION]
Now yesterday I was sitting at my desk and was asked if I had a scatter wallet by my co-worker Q. I had tried previously to set up a Scatter wallet but was thoroughly confused and in my frustration gave up. The lack of centralization in the EOS community made it nearly impossible for me to easily become a member of their community. This is coming from a guy who mined btc off of USB ASIC sticks in 2013 on his Mac Mini, currently mines Dogecoin on his router, has built and hosted mining pools, and is wearing a Monero sweater while writing this post (Seriously was thinking of how to articulate my level of crypto enthusiasm and realized that I just so happened to be wearing my Monero sweater on this fine saturday evening when I should be out having coffee with my tinder date (sorry Nina crypto comes first)) Back in the day I would go to Bitcoin.org or Dogecoin.com to learn about the tech and how to use it. Yet when googling for 'EOS Wallet' I get no central entity (Congrats Dan and BlockOne ...) but rather lots of sketchy sites claiming to know what they are doing. That along with pictures like this of course
So where is the core wallet I am looking for? EOS.io is worthless yet that is where I bought my damn EOS in the ICO! (Yes I am in the USA. Arrest me.)
The problem of raising 4 Billion plus dollars to slip into the fog of "Now the community should develop it. For 'decentralization' purposes. " is the blatant illogical nature of the whole event. Let's assume EOS should be as decentralized as possible, then there should be no reality where one entity consolidates over 4 Billion dollars of the community's resources. And if it was to build and lead the charge on the development of a new world changing technology then raising money is understandable. Imagine handing Vitalik 100 BTC and instead of him saying "thanks I will use this to fuel the creation of a new cryptocurrency that you will one day receive and I will do everything I can to organize the evolution of that project in a way that will yield the best progress." he said "Thanks now I will let other people do all of that and if they want to make the coin go live guess that's up to them and by the way stop asking me about a wallet. Haven't you used the command line wallet? We gave you it so use it! Oh and by the way any other wallet you see that might actually be useful for someone who isn't a neckbearded crypto anarchist we don't support it. " That would not be taken very well back in the day. And for a project that aims to become some world changing tech, why would it relinquish direction to a bunch of corrupt exchanges? Where is the 4 billion going? Oh right the stupid game that teaches me how to code. Great.
But all of that aside is it actually useable?
I have always said that if it lived up to the hype EOS would be the best crypto, yet what ever lives up to the hype that a yearlong ICO generates? Nothing.
Back to the story, I finally figured out how to get a wallet thanks to my co-workers. Using EOS lynx I was able to make an EOS wallet without paying for it, but this is only for a limited time. Then Scatter was simple and I thought I would be ay okay to test out some dapps. So I go and I try to place a bet on EOS Dice or what ever its called. And then I see the error message telling me I dont have enough resources. Then I click the 'add resources' button and try again. No go. So I try again and again and again. Nothing. So I check my wallet and I see that my balance has dropped by 50%! At first I thought well maybe I was betting the whole time. But then I realized that I was just 'staking' by eos so that I could hopefully have enough CPU to send a damn transaction or what ever I was doing. To a user who doesn't understand staking this sounds like a scam. They would probably think that they just lost half of their EOS because its a scam site or wallet or something and never touch it again.
That is assuming that they ever even figure out how to set up an EOS wallet. Without a central entity or consensus there is no trusted authority to let new users know how they can use the protocol. But does block one care? Seems not. They even say in their disclaimer that "Block.one does not guarantee that anyone will implement such features or provide such services or that the EOSIO software will be adopted and deployed in any way." Great. So take my money? Well when the climate is put money into ICO get token sell token for 10x what you paid for it, sure take my money. But not anymore.
My point is EOS Needs to have some centerpoint of communication in order to have any shot at making it to even a level of adoption that ETH has. My grandma could (probably) use ETH via the metamask extension. She could certainly not use EOS. And even if she figured that out she still couldn't use it because the CPU system is shit. I don't want to have to stake my damn coins to be able to use them!
Not to mention the whole BP collusion issue. Centralization that still doesn't work. Wow what an improvement on ETH. and the whole 'But no fees' is so 2017. I don't give a fuck about paying a low fee on a transaction if I need to. Ideally these transactions will all be done off chain or on a different ledger (Cardano for example will be implementing this thought).
The blockchain doesn't need to know that I rolled a 98 and lost all of my money on Bet Dice. conalexander ref btw. So yeah long story long I was thinking about how if I get this frustrated over trying to loose my money on Gambling sites and then not being able to loose it because the blockchain it runs on sucks and needs me to save money in order for me to then loose it, there are going to be problems trying to convince average joes to use it. I am not inclined to ever use it again that is for sure. What is wrong with centralized casinos anyways? Do you really think DEGENs are worried about being exit scammed by a gambling site? They go their to loose their money! They don't care! That's why sites like bustabit and satoshidice have been so popular. Yet again of another example of where my favorite chart comes in handy.
Follow me on twitter give me money you know the drill.
BTW betdice Link: https://betdice.one/?ref=conalexander
BTC:12c6sJPHioCFu58DbMQJrqxc35JvErF7tz
Doge:DKL5jUP9vTUhJUsYYkEMBTrv6tjicjFQPh
ETC:0x3AdCC97E289be344166c319F01a6407D48238560
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