Rumors of running away have caused EOS to worry about reality

BM’s series of “What if I told you….” statements triggered a “rumor-mongering vs. rumor-refuting” contest between the domestic cryptocurrency media and the EOS community.

On November 28, Daniel Larimer, the founder of EOSIO, also known as BM, appeared in the Telegram group to share his ideas about "an infinitely scalable decentralized private trading system." When discussing solutions to high TPS fees, RAM or disk issues, mortgages, and voting, he used the sentence structure of "If I tell you..."

The community saw this as some interesting ideas of BM, and when it spread to the domestic cryptocurrency circle, it became a Chinese message that "BM abandoned the DPOS mechanism and will issue new coins." Soon, concerns that "BM is going to run away" began to spread in the market.

Immediately afterwards, EOS fell 6% in a short period of time. Various node communities quickly came out to refute the rumors. Even BM himself could not sit still and appeared again to state that "I will not leave."

Although EOS, as a decentralized system, has 21 nodes to maintain and develop, and has grown a number of DApps, the role of the founder is still seen by investors as the key to the success or failure of the project and the rise and fall of the coin price. This is ironic in the idealistic world of blockchain.

Behind BM's series of fantasies is the projection of the real anxieties that EOSIO faces, such as falling coin prices, increased node maintenance costs, and tight development resources. The anxiety broke out from this information bias and was transmitted to the market.

BM fantasy triggers a "rumor-making VS rumor-refuting" competition

Early in the morning of November 29, a Chinese news flash saying "BM claims to have found a new consensus to replace DPoS and will develop a new currency in 2019" brought a new round of volatility to the already sluggish market.

BM is the abbreviation of Daniel Larimer, the founder of EOSIO. According to blockchain media reports, on November 28, BM spoke in the EOS Telegram group, saying that he planned to break his original design and abandon DPoS. He has found a solution to privacy and ultimate expansion, which can reach 10 million TPS and zero handling fees... "The new token has better security than EOS and no centralization problem."

The news began to evolve into speculation that "BM is going to run away", which further caused panic among investors. The price of EOS coin fell slightly, with the maximum drop of 10.7% in 24 hours, making it the only coin to fall among the top ten cryptocurrency market capitalization rankings.

EOS's multiple Chinese nodes and communities came out to refute the rumor. Ecological media IMEOS.ONE had to spread a message they had sent out the day before. Zi Cen, the person in charge of the HelloEOS node, sent 4 WeChat Moments in the morning, saying that the media had spread the rumor.

According to IMEOS news on November 28, BM appeared in the EOS Telegram group that day, using a series of "What if" teasing sentences. Fengchao Finance found that on Reddit, EOSGO also published BM's "interesting ideas" in the group with the theme of "Dan Larimer'What if I tell you'-Highly Scalable Decentralized Trading System", and posted screenshots of the chat.

EOSGO and IMEOS showed BM’s speech in the Telegram group

The “rumor-making and rumor-refuting” contest was lively for a whole morning. BM himself appeared in the Telegram group again to “reiterate” that he would not leave the EOSIO and Block.one team. “In the process of dealing with the security and scalability of EOS, I stumbled upon a new idea for crypto tokens. I am just exploring whether there is a market for these trade-offs.”

He said that hypothetical token, even if implemented, would be immutable, “non-programmable, and limited to a monetary role, in no way compromising the larger use cases of EOSIO applications.”

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BM came out to refute the rumor in time, but EOS investors felt bad. In the Telegram EOS group, concerns about BM's possible escape did not dissipate.

This sentiment is not unrelated to BM’s historical performance. In March this year, there were rumors that BM would leave the EOS team after the EOS testnet was launched. The words “BM leaves the team” can easily touch the heartstrings of investors, which is largely due to BM’s past record of “hands-off”.

As the co-founder of BTS, Steem and EOS, BM is currently the only person in the world who has developed three decentralized systems based on blockchain technology. Although he is known as a "genius programmer", he left the project twice after it was completed and started a new one, which caused a lot of controversy.

In 2014, BM created BTS (BitShares). He was favored by many investors in the cryptocurrency industry because he solved the two major problems of large price fluctuations and slow transfer speeds in the cryptocurrency field at that time. However, BM insisted on issuing 500 million BTS, which led to a trust crisis and a sharp drop in the price of the currency. At the end of 2015, BM chose to leave.

Shortly after leaving BTS, BM set sail again. In early 2016, based on his new understanding of blockchain technology, he founded the blockchain social platform Steem, hoping to use this platform to lower the threshold for people to enter the cryptocurrency field. The platform has produced high-quality content to educate many new users. During the operation, some users relied on relationships to like each other's posts, which seriously undermined the platform's operating rules, which deviated from BM's original intention. In addition, he fell out with his partners in 2017, and BM gave up his shares and left without looking back.

After leaving Steemit, BM turned his attention to a more ambitious direction: devoting himself to the development of a blockchain platform similar to an operating system, and EOSIO was born. Whether BM will leave at some point because of something is like a time bomb, buried in the anxiety of EOS investors.

Zi Cen, the head of HelloEOS who participated in the operation of BTS in the early years, said that BM was very hurt when he left twice before. When he left, he also published a very sad article, "The general idea is that you don't understand me, you don't want me anymore..."

After this incident, BM once again stated that he "would not leave" unless EOS holders voted to kick him out. Netizens also made fun of his statement, saying that every time BM left, he would say "I would not leave".

IMEOS lists the jokes of netizens

In fact, after EOSIO launched its mainnet in June this year, it implemented the DPoS mechanism and elected 21 super nodes to maintain the network as originally planned, generating many DApps, and from time to time, phenomenal games such as EOS Pixels emerged.

Compared with people's ideal world of decentralized blockchain, it is somewhat ironic and funny that the words and deeds of the founder of a decentralized system are still regarded as the phenomenon that affects the fluctuation of currency prices and the success or failure of the project.

In the eyes of many EOS enthusiasts, perhaps BM has already left EOS in a certain sense and is just acting as an opinion leader. In the Telegram EOS group, someone pointed out that "BM is the biggest hidden danger of EOS. If it doesn't explode now, it will explode in the future. If BM really does a new project, it will be a good thing."

EOS community members also expressed similar views. Gu Shi, the head of EOS Force, believes that the community should not always focus on whether BM will run away or not. "The community should have regarded development work as its own business long ago. EOSIO still has a lot of room for improvement. BM's vision is to allow humans to gain freedom and control their own destiny through the free market, which means that he will not go all in on a certain chain, and he may not even go all in on the blockchain all the time. There is no need to tie him down."

BM hypothesis projects many EOS ecological anxieties

BM’s series of fantasies also involved some of the current controversies and issues surrounding EOS, including TPS (transactions per second), the implementation scenarios of EOS technology, scalability and the high cost of system resources such as RAM and CPU, node voting and EOS mortgage, etc.

Real-time TPS data displayed on Eosnetworkmonitor

Although it is still impossible to determine what technology BM will use to achieve the hypothetical tens of millions of TPS, the million-level TPS that EOS has always been challenging is still a long way off.

Public information shows that the current EOS TPS peak is over 3,000. Xie Rui, XDAG developer and co-founder of Consensus, believes that the current TPS is sufficient for EOS. "EOS, as a Dapp platform, requires a relatively high TPS that can meet the needs of Dapp operation so that all processing logic can be performed on the chain. Currently, there are no major problems with Dapps on EOS, which shows that the TPS is sufficient."

Xie Rui believes that the rumors of "running away" will cause harm to EOS. He told Fengchao Finance that the rumors will sow the seeds for the decline of TPS. It is understood that as the price of the currency falls, there is cost pressure for the maintenance of each EOS node. If these nodes that maintain the TPS speed "run away", it may lead to the collapse of the entire public chain, and there is a possibility of a decline in TPS.

On November 23, BM mentioned the issue of declining node salaries in the Telegram group. He believed that nodes should develop some side businesses to offset some costs. If they only rely on inflation income, it is likely to lead to a decline in the node's resilience to the market.

At present, there are also some super nodes in the market that rent out EOS network resources such as CPU and RAM. Super EOS42 launched a P2P CPU rental market, and EOSBiXin also followed this path.

In the overall EOS system, network resources CPU, RAM and hard disk storage are important components. Due to the rapid development of gaming DApps in the EOS network recently, the prices of CPU and RAM have continued to soar, triggering hoarding and speculation.

In response to this, Zi Cen told Fengchao Finance: "There is no so-called hype. The skyrocketing prices of CPU and RAM are precisely the market playing a role in optimizing resource allocation."

Compared with technical issues such as TPS and scalability, EOS seems to be better at using the market to solve some problems.

When discussing the node salary cut with BM, Kevin Rose, the head of EOS NewYork, believed that diluting the reliance on EOS node salaries could create a conflict of interest. BM responded that if there is a conflict of interest between super nodes, the chances of collusion between nodes will be reduced.

In addition, the most criticized thing about EOS is the DPOS mechanism, which elects 21 super nodes as block producers. Large holders who hold a large amount of EOS have absolute voting rights in the election, and many people believe that this goes against the purpose of blockchain decentralization.

Zi Cen believes that centralization and decentralization have become tools for the party to unite and fight against the dissidents. In his opinion, EOS currently uses the DPOS voting mechanism to carry out checks and balances, games and collaborations among shareholders, and also uses the computing power moat of the POW mechanism to achieve the result of avoiding the risk of single-point evil through different mechanisms, which is sufficiently decentralized.