April 2nd, 2019
The Telos arbitration system has passed an important milestone with the election of its first four arbitrators and the start of voting on four more candidates. However, since my last update two weeks ago, we have not yet reached any new milestones and I expect a lot of people are wondering about the pause in progress and just when we can actually begin arbitration.
Actually, there has been a lot of progress on arbitration behind the scenes. GoodBlock and EOSphere are working together to build an arbitration portal that will manage all facets of the arbitration system. This management is actually handled by the smart contract eosio.arb, but it is very complex and the portal is necessary to make it convenient and at least somewhat intuitive. No one expects an arbitration system to be simple, but we want it to be functional both for the parties to the arbitration and the arbitrators themselves.
To achieve this, we are building a site and demux service. The dev team had a few challenges to figure out in order to get this working. We believe we are past the most challenging parts now and pushing through testing. But we need to remember that this is software development with limited-sized teams and sometimes things take longer than expected. Our updated delivery date for this system is now the third week of April.
I am writing a chapter and tutorial in the Telos Users’ Guide about the arbitration process for arbitration parties and arbitrators. It’s a big subject to encapsulate for users and until the arbitration portal is a little further along, I won’t be able to finish the step-by-step tutorial.
Once the tutorial and portal are complete and the arbitrators feel they have had enough time to train on the system, arbitration can start. This last piece is important because there’s no point in starting up the system before the arbitrators feel confident using it. Our plan is to open up the system for arbitrators to practice using it in the second week of April. (Next week!) This will let us tackle training and final testing at the same time to maximize efficiency. I will also use this period to finalize the Telos Users’ Guide chapter and tutorials with real screenshots and step-by-step processes.
Unfortunately, the question of exactly when the first arbitration cases can be filed and heard is difficult to answer with a definitive date. Telos has been built with the process of completing checklists before moving on, rather than being driven by a date. Like the mainnet launch, we very much want the arbitration system to be running as soon as it is ready, but no sooner than that. If this plan stays on target, I believe the first arbitration cases could be filed and start being processed within the month of April.
I’m very excited to be able to reveal this arbitration portal and system. Both are a big step forward for Telos (and EOSIO). The Telos arbitration system contract, eosio.arb, is one of the most complex smart contracts around. The portal is going to be a very slick way to interact with it. Together they form a very impressive dapp for Telos that, most importantly, gives users a venue to recover stolen accounts or lost keys or resolve disputes between users.
ProveAccount
Any time I write about Telos arbitration, you can expect me to mention the ProveAccount method. This is a simple way to associate a second cryptographic key with your account in case you ever lose the account keys or have the account stolen. It takes about a minute to protect an account with an Ethereum public key (that you control the matching private key for) — and if you have four Telos accounts, it honestly still just takes a minute to protect all four by sending the same message with each one. You can even send these messages using ACORN tokens so there’s no fee involved. Telos arbitration is a great system, but without a way to prove ownership of accounts, it loses a lot of its power. The ProveAccount method is free insurance against ever needing to reclaim your account through arbitration. Not only will using ProveAccount give you a better way to prove ownership, but it should also make the account reclaim process so simple that arbitrators may process it at a lower cost than other such arbitrations.
For more information about becoming an arbitrator, contact hello@telosfoundation.io
About the author: Douglas Horn is the Telos architect and whitepaper author, and the founder of GoodBlock, a block producer and app developer for the Telos Blockchain Network.
More about GoodBlock can be found at: www.goodblock.io
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