Dan Larimer Explains EOS

Dan Larimer, CTO of EOS, discusses his latest blockchain in this video, which is edited from a number of presentations.

Larimer is noted for creating two earlier, and still popular decentralized blockchains:

  • Bitshares
  • Steem.

From those projects he conceived what he considers to be a better platform, which has led to his current development of EOS.

Philosophically, he was inspired by free markets, Austrian economics and Ron Paul. As a result he wanted to create systems that would provide freedom and are nonviolent.

Larimer’s life mission in to “Find free market solutions for securing life, liberty and property.”

Hence, we need money that is not controlled by a central authority.

He recognized the vulnerability of crypto exchanges, which could be shut down by governments, cutting the flow of digital currencies.

From that he created Bitshares (BTS) a Decentralized Asset Exchange. But that wasn’t up to the task of handling the required scalability.

He created Steem, a blockchain social media platform that rewards users for creating content. Transactions on Steem are free. But it moved away from a core principle of true decentralization.

Larimer is no longer involved with Bitshares or Steem and both of those platforms are doing well.

However, from his perspective, the industry has much to learn and with his past experience and ongoing learning he is building EOS for the purpose of establishing future applications on top of it with the intention that anyone, including himself, could develop on it.

EOS enables developers to build decentralized applications in a general purpose way, which are compatible with sustainable growth.

EOS is an open source platform that anyone can use to develop high-performance, decentralized, blockchain smart contracts.

What is EOS? (And EOS.IO?)

EOS is a cryptocurrency that powers the EOS.IO blockchain. Calling itself “The most powerful infrastructure for decentralized applications,” EOS.IO is a decentralized system that enables the development, hosting, and execution of commercial-scale decentralized applications (dapp) on its platform.

A dapp built on the EOS.IO platform does not require micropayments by end users to send messages and perform tasks. This is left up to the individual dapp developers to determine how transactions fees (which are extremely low) will be paid. This means companies are free to come up with their own monetization strategies and offer their users service for free or otherwise.

The EOSIO platform was developed by the private company Block.one and released as open-source software on June 1, 2018.

Here is how CEO, Brendan Blumer and CTO Daniel Larimer at Block.one describe it:

 

https://youtu.be/eRAxrqaqGEQ

An interesting point made by Blumer is “The idea of EOS is that if you’re able to build a basic website you should be able to build/launch a decentralized business.”

Furthermore, it’s also become the #1 (most active) blockchain on Blocktivity.info

What Are Dapps?

“Dapp” stands for “decentralized application.”

Decentralized means it’s not controlled by one entity.  Most applications on the internet, including the most well known, are centralized applications controlled by one company.  Think Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo and many other applications large and small. Currently, these are ‘not’ dapps.

More specifically Dapps are programs, tools, or applications that run on the decentralized Ethereum blockchain.

A blockchain is a digitized, decentralized, public ledger of data, made famous as the foundation of all decentralized cryptocurrency transactions.

Blockchains can support many more applications than money.

The Ethereum network is a popular blockchain.  As such, Ethereum is a decentralized technology uncontrolled by any single authority.

To further elaborate, regular apps have all their data controlled by their own company servers with one single authority. They may require a user login that collects personal information, such as name, birth date, address, user history, etc.

Alternatively, Dapps work off a blockchain.  Instead of personal information for logging in, they require a private address which can be a random string of characters that holds no personal information.

We are in the early days of Dapp development and you will be hearing more about this term as conventional applications shift from the universe of centralized control to blockchain decentralized application.