Proving Decentralization
This has been a busy week for Telos. Not all of the developments were fun. For example, there was a bit of a dust up about the power of GoodProxy’s votes. There’s more on it below, but the TL;DR is, some people thought GoodProxy looked like a BP cabal, so within a few hours, we gracefully handed over voting control to someone not involved with any block producer. To me, the takeaway is that true decentralization is such an important quality to the folks behind Telos that if anyone makes a reasonable suggestion that something looks too centralized, we will take quick action to address it in a meaningful way.
A much more fun illustration of this decentralization happened in BP voting this week. In last week’s Weekly Report, I was congratulating EOS Dublin for being the first block producer from outside the Telos Launch Group to be elected as a “Top 21” active block producer. I predicted that we would see more of that happening pretty soon. So flash forward to this week, and EOS Vibes, The Teloscope, and EOSphere have now joined EOS Dublin in being elected to the Telos active block producers for some period of time within this week. As I write this, there are three non-TLG block producers in top positions. No doubt this trend will continue. I expect that by the time the Telos mainnet has been active for as long as the TLG was, that the Top 21 BPs will be such a mishmash that few people remember who was and wasn’t part of the launch group. All that will matter then is who is building Telos now and for the future.
Decentralization is the carnal virtue of blockchain. I’m happy that as Telos moves ahead, that we can expand and deepen the decentralization of the blockchain in meaningful ways week after week. Let’s go figure out how to make it even better next week.
— Douglas Horn
Arbitrator Elections status
All four arbitrator candidates have crossed the 1 million vote mark.
New arbitrator elections will begin immediately after the conclusion of the first round of elections. Any interested arbitrators should register their candidacy prior to March 15, 2019 in order to be eligible to receive votes.
Worker Proposals of Note
New worker proposals this week are….
WP #5 “Telos Core Devs WP #1 — Fund TCD for Work Done Since Launch”
Voting closes: April 3, 21:46 UTC
800,000.0000 (1 cycle) to ‘teloscoredev’ as financial support to the Telos Core Devs for support and work to date. No required deliverable.
https://gateway.ipfs.io/ipfs/QmYq7MWJcbYjPqsKyeA2Gdaupqy1Mf4cMxS6GxA9fPh4dh/
Yes: 3,226,024 | No: 219,893 | Abstain: 0
WP #3 “Reward Scatter for Supporting Telos”
Voting closes: March 30 0:46 UTC
50,000.0000 (1 cycle) to ‘scatter.tlos’ as financial support to the wallet Scatter for support of Telos users to date. No required deliverable. https://ipfs.telos.miami/ipfs/QmUyXMxc3czoDdyR8aoS4BXSjWTrHxyR1GBQayiGXS1HDT/
Yes: 4,137,734 | No: 338,654 | Abstain: 0
Here’s what happened this week:
- New GoodGrant recipient: Viitasphere!
- Worker proposals garner strong support
- CJAnders takes leadership of GoodProxy
- Arbitrator elections move towards history
- EOSMetal releases new Telos BP monitoring tool
- New app DecenTwitter launches on Telos
- EOSX block explorer now displays Telos tokens
- ACORN fever sweeps Telos
- Telos presentations around the world
New GoodGrant Recipient: Viitasphere!
This week, our GoodGrant program announced that its next recipient is Viitasphere, a Telos app that is working to build a global peer-to-peer economy. Viitasphere has been very engaged with the Telos community, performing an early adopters airdrop and part of their private token sale on Telos. They will also be performing a network-wide airgrab as of block 18 million for all Telos accounts that have claimed the airgrab at that point. Telos account holders can grab their VIITA at the Telos Germany online portal: https://portal.telosgermany.io/airgrab or by calling viitasphere1::open(accountname, “4,VIITA”, accountname) from any smart contract interface.
Viitasphere GoodGrant announcement: https://medium.com/goodblock-io/goodgrant-recipient-viitasphere-c2b21209d14
Worker proposals garner strong support
Telos worker proposals are taking off! Three leading proposals are the Reward Scatter (#3), Steemchurch Telos Expansion (#4), and Telos Core Devs (#5). Each of these is currently strongly passing with at least 2 million Yes votes. Proposals must have not only a simple majority of Yes votes compared to Nos, but also a 5% minimum threshold that depends on all the accounts that have ever voted on Telos, so it’s important that their supporters continue to vote.
There are two great ways to view and vote on Telos worker proposals: Sqrl wallet’s Governance tab and Chainspector.io’s Worker Proposals dashboard: https://chainspector.io/dashboard/working-proposals
CJ Anders takes leadership of GoodProxy
The largest voting proxy on Telos, GoodProxy, has transferred leadership to CJ Anders and is soliciting community nominations for additional custodians who will decide who GoodProxy casts their votes for. The change grew out of the increasing power of GoodProxy, which led to too many votes being under the control of voters who were, themselves, block producers. GoodProxy released a statement about the change in leadership.
https://medium.com/@goodblock_info/goodproxy-notice-change-of-leadership-c386a308fef4
Arbitrator elections move towards history
The first Telos arbitrator elections will be complete in less than one week. Last week one of the arbitrator candidates, Blake Lagard surpassed the 1 million vote threshold required to serve as an arbitrator. This week the other three current arbitrator candidates also passed the threshold, meaning that there will be four elected arbitrators following the election.
So what happens next? Well, new candidates can nominate themselves at any time. If there are any new candidates registered at the time when the first election ends on March 15th at 9:01 UTC then a new election will automatically begin for whatever candidates are registered at that time. This will continue until there are no candidates or the available arbitrator seats set by the Telos block producers are all filled. (Currently there are 21 available seats.)
The elected arbitrators will be empowered to begin hearing cases immediately, however, it is likely that there will be a short period of training on the new Arbitration contract and its online interface before cases begin in earnest.
EOSMetal releases new Telos BP monitoring tool
Following up last week’s release of their EOSIO Account Name Generator tool, block producer EOSMetal has released another super useful and good looking tool for monitoring Telos BPs compliance status at a glance. https://tools.eosmetal.io performs checks on block producer nodes every half hour to determine which are operating healthy nodes that are in compliance with the Telos minimum requirements, and which nodes have errors to be addressed. This provides users with information about the BPs running the network at a glance.
New app DecenTwitter launches on Telos
Twitter hits Telos! Block producer and Telos Core Devs contributor, Nebula Protocol, has released the DecenTwitter app on Telos. DecenTwitter is a decentralized short-text messaging system for the Telos blockchain. Users can upload an avatar photo, tweet message, and reply to tweets from others. You can use Scatter or Sqrl wallet to connect to the web interface. Start tweeting from your account right away and watch Telos activity blow up the way EOS did in the early days after launch with blocktwitter! https://telos.decentwitter.com/#
EOSX block explorer now displays Telos tokens
The EOSX block explorer from EOS Asia has now added the ability to display token balances on Telos accounts. Check it out at: https://telos.eosx.io/
This is pretty great and makes things much easier for Telos users. At the moment, Viitasphere’s VIITA and VIICT tokens, Cards & Tokens CNT tokens, Qubicles QBE tokens and the ever popular ACORN UBI tokens are displayed. New tokens can easily be added by creating a pull request on the EOS Asia Github repository at: https://github.com/eosasia/eos-dapps
ACORN fever sweeps Telos
People are getting excited about ACORN tokens on Telos. ACORNs are an experiment in universal basic income (or UBI) concepts implemented on the Telos blockchain. You can “sign up” for ACORN by using the “open” action on the account ‘acornaccount’ but the much more fun way is to send or receive ACORN tokens. Once someone has received any part of an ACORN, they will begin receiving a basic income of 1 ACORN per day. These are distributed to your account any time you claim them, or again, send them to another person. It’s literally more infectious than influenza and way more fun!
This week, I suggested a concept for a logo for ACORN that Josh Mandeville of GoodBlock designed into a smiling acorn UBI logo that the community adopted. I submitted the pull request for EOS Asia to add ACORN to the Telos Tokens they display as well. And I had the fun of talking about ACORN on Telos UK’s CarShare video this week: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61uogRfK8JE
TelosUK also has an ACORN explainer page at: https://telosuk.io/acorns/
CryptoTim also put out a video about ACORNs on his YouTube channel this week: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IadVH5PA4vE&feature=youtu.be
Telos presentations around the world
This week there were several great presentations about Telos. Of course, this comes on the heels of last week’s Detroit Blockchain Center Pitchfest presented by EOS Detroit. If you haven’t heard about this then read the wrap-up here: https://medium.com/@eosdetroit/eos-detroit-throws-pitchfest-competition-to-great-fanfare-5bbe8b2a15e9
Sukesh Tedla of block producer Telos Green is also a member of the Swedish Blockchain Association. Sukesh presented Telos to over 100 law and finance professionals in the Sweden.
Block Producers TheTeloscope is also preparing to present about Telos at a Spanish Blockchain Carnival hosted by the University of Oviedo’s School of Computer Engineering. More information is here: https://www.fundacionctic.org/en/news/blockchain-carnival
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
Join us on Twitter @GoodBlockio
Vote for GoodBlock on the Telos Blockchain Network @goodblocktls