A Developers Perspective of what EOS offers over Ethereum

in #eos7 years ago (edited)

I recently watched a Youtube video by Cedric Dahl titled "EOS - Real or Hype" The basis of the Youtubers question to his audience was basically if Ethereum, given its PoW hash rate and high level of security, offers a decentralized Smart Contract platform and on the oppossite spectrum Amazon Web Servers (Centralized Servers) offers all the low cost and efficiencies for normal web applications then why would developers choose EOS?

EOS - Real or Hype?

One response to the video stood out. A developer that is using both Ethereum and EOS summarized his view below:

Shane Skull
3 days ago
I'm a developer working on both ETH and EOS. I like both platforms but here is my take on it. ETH is not actually more decentralized than EOS until ETH Casper eventually launches with true proof-of-stake capability. Right now ETH can be compromised if 3 of the 5 mining pools that control it decided to collude, they won't because it's financial suicide, but they technically could. This is why EOS claims it will be more decentralized than ETH, because 21 delegated nodes provide more safety than 5 mining pools and EOS also has backup nodes in a queue if one or more of the user-elected EOS nodes are compromised.

Here is why some ETH developers are looking at EOS while they wait for ETH to launch Plasma, sharding, Polka Dot, etc.

ETH developers are running into the following problems ... (1) The network can, and has been, bogged down by the popularity of other apps/contracts causing apps to fail/delay. (2) Every interaction with your app requires an ETH transaction so even simple tasks burn ETH. (3) Time between blocks is around 12-20 seconds, this makes real-time apps a challenge to create. (4) Smart contracts are permanent and cannot be upgraded/changed, the only solution is to use very complex libraries that involve multiple other contracts, which open up your app to hacking because you have to audit much more code. (5) To create real-time apps you are forced to write much lower-level code that utilize off-chain solutions, which are essentially parallel networks, and typically require centralized servers to keep track of the off-chain attributes.

EOS provides the following solutions ... (1) Your EOS tokens equal your share of the network's compute resources, preventing apps from bottlenecking other apps. (2) The utility of EOS tokens enable fee-less apps where users can interact without requiring token burns or even EOS accounts. (3) EOS blocks are produced at sub-second time frames making it a better solution for real-time apps. (4) EOS has a user account system, database querying and a method to upgrade smart contracts. (5) No off-chain solution is necessary to create a high quality app but it can be added to EOS and side chain capability is in the pipeline if you want your app to have it's own separate blockchain yet still interact with the EOS main chain.

In summation, ETH is the trailblazer of the smart contract space and will probably solve all of their issues but EOS, thanks to observing ETH, is launching with a few key features that will give it a 8-12 month window of opportunity (assuming the launch isn't a disaster) before the other guys catch up.

Note: EOS is receiving allot of FUD about the DPoS but it's not like EOS can't change their consensus in the future. DPoS is just being used for now because it solves the app bottleneck issues. Let's also not forget that other DPoS networks already exist such as ICON, STEEM and BITSHARES without getting anywhere near the amount of criticism. We also have networks such as NEO and XRP which maintain control over their consensus nodes and then there are unique networks like DASH which have master nodes. EOS's current consensus structure is not really all that controvercial when compared to the rest of the market.