In 2019, the bull market is ahead, but blockchain projects and technologies are gradually advancing.
On March 14, with the launch of the first official Hub, the Cosmos mainnet was finally launched after a two-year delay. According to news in early April, the Ethereum 2.0 "Serenity" update will be completed in 2021. Yesterday (May 23), Vitalik, the founder of Ethereum, even tweeted: "In fact, we have made all the research breakthroughs needed to fully implement ETH2.0."
Thanks to the clarity of the Ethereum 2.0 roadmap and the launch of Pos projects such as Tezos and Cosmos, the staking economy has rapidly become popular this year. Big exchanges such as Coinbase have entered the market, and first-tier Ethereum mining pools such as Yuchi and Spark have deployed, and funds have also rushed to the beach. According to stakingrewards.com data, the total value of tokens in the pledged state has exceeded 7 billion US dollars.
These pan-PoS/Staking projects can be roughly divided into two factions: the DPoS mechanism represented by EOS and Tron, with the existence of super nodes, and the top 20 voters can become nodes. Due to the small number of nodes and the centralized power of nodes, they are often criticized for being too centralized. PoS mechanisms such as Cosmos emphasize equality and ordinary user participation.
According to Odaily’s observation, as each nascent PoS project matures, the public chain in the PoS/staking era will usher in two factions, public governance and plutocratic governance, which are caused by the understanding and differences of decentralization.
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The battle for decentralization in the PoW era: anti-ASIC
Before understanding the different concepts of the PoS public chain, let's review the PoW era first. As early as at this time, the debate between decentralization and centralization has been quite fierce.
In 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto released the Bitcoin white paper, and the system went online the following year, and Bitcoin was born here.
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Bitcoin issuance is essentially a simple and rough collision (random guessing) of random numbers. The greater the computing power, the more guesses can be made per unit time, so it is called PoW (Proof of Work, see details)This article. ) Contribute workload to maintain network security, the network also belongs to everyone.
Unfortunately, with more and more information on the entire network, it is difficult for individuals to directly become mining nodes, and professional mining machines are beginning to appear. Bitcoin began to deviate from Satoshi Nakamoto's original vision.
A mining machine whose price is several times that of an ordinary laptop can increase its computing power (affecting revenue) by 1,000 times. Today, it is impossible to mine bitcoins with ordinary notes.
Currencies have begun to add anti-ASIC algorithms to the consensus mechanism to resist centralization. It’s just that many algorithms have been developed by ASIC miners for special mining machines, including Wright, Dash, Zcash, etc.
In March 2018, Bitmain announced the launch of the Monero custom mining machine X3. After hearing the news, the community decided to launch an emergency operation, planning to change the mining rules of Monero in April to prevent the invasion of ant mining machines .
The anti-ASIC feature of the Ethereum algorithm is particularly prominent. Bitmain announced that it has developed a dedicated mining machine. The community is obviously panicked. The vote shows that most members want to change the Ethereum algorithm to resist Bitmain.
Mining machine manufacturers are increasingly pressing, and the PoW consensus mechanism has problems of slow confirmation and serious energy consumption. During this period, someone proposed PoS (Proof of Stake), and more and more people believe that PoS is the future of the application-oriented public chain.
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Plutocratic rule in the prologue of PoS: EOS super node carnival
After the emergence of Bitcoin and Ethereum, the PoW mechanism has been criticized for a long time, but there is still no mature PoS public chain.
Classical blockchain believers would never have imagined that the first phenomenon-level public chain that opened the prelude to the pan-PoS era turned out to be EOS, which was complained about being too centralized.
The DPoS mechanism used by EOS is similar to representative democracy or corporate system. Holders vote, and the top 21 nodes become block producers (referred to as BP), which directly participate in block generation and governance, and at the same time receive annual inflation rewards. Ordinary users cannot participate in block production, because supernodes have extremely high requirements for hardware configuration.
"21 super nodes, less than deputies to the National People's Congress." Veterans of Bitcoin have questioned whether EOS is not decentralized enough. V God also called this "plutocracy".
Such accusations, but EOS believers take it lightly. They admit that EOS is indeed not decentralized enough, but it is the most practical. Many supernodes said: "Complete decentralization is impossible." Hello EOS founder Zi Cen once said: "The obsession with anonymity and decentralization is poisoned by Bitcoin."
To this day, EOS is still considered "not a blockchain" by its naysayers.
However, among the top ten cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, apart from Ethereum, only EOS and Tron are a few public application chains with relatively active DApps. look againstaking rewardingAmong them, the market value of EOS locked/staked tokens far exceeds 2 or 3.
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PoS Decentralization Returns to Decentralization: Allowing Users to Participate in Block Generation and Governance
In the era of PoS, efforts to achieve decentralization continue.
EOS, born in the post-PoW era, sacrificed decentralization, and the public chain of public governance is striving to realize the spirit of Satoshi Nakamoto.
The factor that distinguishes chaebols from public governance in this article is mainly the threshold of becoming a node. In the final analysis, whether it is DPoS or PoS, users can vote to participate in block production, but becoming a node is the most direct way to participate in governance. This is also the original intention of Satoshi Nakamoto's white paper - every computer is a node.
Pure PoS is unrealistic, and the consensus mechanism of Dazhongpai can only be said to be closer to PoS: users are encouraged to participate directly, the threshold for becoming a node is relatively low, and a large number of nodes are allowed to participate in block production, even without quantity restrictions, even if they hold a small amount of coins. Participate in block generation, etc. - all reflect decentralization.
Cosmos, which started the staking boom this year, is the most typical representative. Among the existing PoS projects, its consensus mechanism has the lowest threshold for nodes. The first step is as long as the coins you hold can send the transaction fee in full to apply for becoming a verification node. . Most of the remaining public chains are still not online. The pure PoS Algorand plans to launch the main network in June, and ETH 2.0 will take 2 years. The specific details of PoS are still under discussion.
In Dazhongpai, the consensus mechanism UPoS designed by the public chain En-Tan-Mo (referred to as ETM) that Odaily has recently come into contact with is very interesting.
1. Convert the stakes of all voters into corresponding votes through convex function mapping: the principle here is to suppress the stakes of large investors and encourage retail investors.
1. Convert the stakes of all voters into corresponding votes through convex function mapping: the principle here is to suppress the stakes of large investors and encourage retail investors.
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2. Combining with factors such as time and past performance of nodes, the probability of being elected for each node is calculated, and 101 nodes are selected in each block generation cycle to participate in this round of competition for block generation.
Time is the length of holding currency. A retail investor who holds currency for 2 months may bring more probability of being elected to the node than a large investor who holds currency for 1 day.
3. The selected miners participate in the random lottery together (combined with chaotic sorting and improved PoW), the winning node has 3 seconds to produce a block, and if the block is not successful within 3 seconds, it will be skipped.
4. Start the next lottery. The result of the lottery is determined by the hash value of the previous block, which is difficult to predict. Enter the next cycle after completing 101 blocks.
"The bottom 80% of the books can also account for 50% of the traffic." Just as the Amazon online bookstore has subverted the sales ratio of the 28th law, ETM hopes that the nodes in the long tail of the ranking can also be selected. Founder Aaron Yuan said that the UPoS consensus mechanism does not want the node with the most votes to be the block producer for a long time.
Odaily is curious, won’t the practice of suppressing large investors directly disperse coins, operate multiple nodes, and put them in multiple wallets?
"It may be dispersed, and no economic system can completely suppress the existence of capital." ETM hopes to reduce the monopoly of capital to the greatest extent through mechanism design. Aaron explained that first of all, the number of votes can only affect the probability of being elected. A large household may not be elected if all the rights and interests are invested in itself. It is better to put eggs in multiple baskets to increase the probability of winning.
"Linear revenue is acceptable, but ASIC mining machines generate exponential revenue. Mining machines that are several times more expensive than laptops have hundreds of times higher revenue. What we want to suppress is this monopolistic revenue." he added.
Summarize the characteristics of the ETM consensus mechanism:
First of all, it is a probabilistic event for UPoS nodes to participate in the competition, and it is possible to be elected regardless of the number of votes. From the perspective of the number of nodes, the number of nodes in Cosmos is at most 100, and the number of votes is too high to have no chance to produce blocks; the number of votes of UPoS nodes only determines the probability of participating in the "competition to produce blocks", which prevents large households from continuing to monopolize the right to produce blocks.
Second, UPoS has a very low threshold for nodes. Tezos has a high threshold for holding tokens for nodes, 10,000 XTZ reaches RMB 10 according to the market price, but there is no requirement for the number of nodes.
Third, the idea embodied by UPoS is more "socialist" or "equality of results" - the more votes a large household has, the more likely it will be to support the election, but the rate of increase will be smaller than that of retail investors. ETMs are called convex functional relationships.
Finally, UPoS encourages direct participation, not representation.
ETM block rewards are 6-2 ETM, decreasing year by year. 48% of the total amount will be distributed to miners; 5% will be distributed to voters, of which 2.5% will be distributed in the form of fixed income (you can get it when the voted node enters 101), and the rest will be distributed in the form of a lottery, which will be drawn every 5 minutes. to one person. This is different from other PoS public chains, which seem to reward miners more than voters.
In this regard, Aaron’s response is to encourage every user to be a miner and directly participate in block generation without the need for an intermediary. ETM has developed a one-click mining software for this purpose. Users only need to install it on their computers to become miners. Ordinary laptops equipped with independent display and i5 dual-core CPU can be installed.
This software also has a dual-mining design: since the UPoS PoW algorithm is compatible with ETH, if the node is not selected into 101, it can also use idle computing power to mine ETH.
The popular faction and the plutocratic rule, who will win in the end?
In the short 10-year history of the blockchain, the consensus mechanism has gradually entered the PoS era from the PoW era.
Obviously, in the trade-off between efficiency and fairness, the game of decentralization and centralization has never stopped.
To be fair, plutocratic rule is more effective, not a complete oligarchy, but the way users participate is more indirect. It improves performance, effectively drives super nodes to maintain the community, and builds an ecology. After the aforementioned referendum was cancelled, the project progressed rapidly, and the long-prepared resource exchange Rex was finally launched.
Standing in the top ten market value, EOS with 160,000 active addresses on the chain is undoubtedly a success, but there are also failures.
Recently, 21 EOS supernodes voted to amend the "User Agreement" (originally translated into "EOS Constitution"), and changed the original referendum to node voting on 15/21.
The modification of the public election of super nodes marks that EOS has completely abandoned community governance involving user participation.
The original convention stipulates that each proposal must go through a referendum, with at least 15% of the voter turnout, and a large majority can be passed. It's a pity that the turnout rate for a single proposal has been hovering at a few percentage points. This undoubtedly slows down the entire product iteration process.
This tragedy of the commons is like a footnote to the American scholar Lippmann's "Phantom Public": the public does not exist, and it is impossible to ask the public to participate in public affairs. If they are not interested and have time to understand, there should be Professionals are responsible for this.
Even so, Yiyou PoS public chain works hard to motivate users to participate.
"Decentralization is the most essential feature and development trend of blockchain."
Aaron believes that it is indeed limited by the current technology - for example, most of the current "is not a peer-to-peer network, and the uplink and downlink speeds are much different" - the decentralized structure of the system, there is no way to have too high efficiency, EOS and others choose to sacrifice decentralization It is only a compromise method.
Just like the early days of the Internet that served centralization, computers were only affordable for large companies at the beginning. Apple’s invention of the PC (personal computer) was ridiculed, but the pioneers became more frustrated and courageous. In the end, the development of science and technology has created "the victory of the common people", and the Internet has become "the one who wins the root wins the world".
Aaron Yuan believes that although people are still a certain distance away from the real "decentralization" so far, "don't those of us who are engaged in technical research want to put people's seemingly unrealistic ideas into practice?" Perhaps, China The vision originally described by Satoshi Ben will one day be realized.
Perhaps many representatives of the popular faction have similar ideas. However, current users prefer to speculate in coins rather than vote; they believe in K-lines rather than ideals.
In this environment, whether the future of the chaebol faction and the popular faction means life and death or integration is left to time to answer.
