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The test and blockchain company Whiteblock Inc. issued an overwhelming verdict on EOS, describing it as a "distributed homogeneous database" disguised as blockchain. In a report entitled "EOS: An Architectural, Performance and Economic Analysis", the company analyzes several aspects of the EOS protocol and concludes that it suffers from a serious lack of security and network performance significantly lower than those that were claimed.
Extraordinary results
According to the report compiled by the Whiteblock research team composed of Brent Xu, Dhruv Luthra, Zak Cole and Nate Blakely, EOS has a series of upsetting security and protocol errors that fatally compromise many of the suggested use cases for the network. once nicknamed "Etereum killer".
Over the course of two months since the September launch, the test assessed the transactional throughput of the EOS network against the declared capacity. In addition, it has also tested its response to adverse network conditions, such as responding to variable transaction rates and sizes, average transaction completion time, partition tolerance, and fault tolerance. The results are all but flattering.
In a press release on the EOS test published November 2, Whiteblock abruptly stated:
"EOS is not a blockchain, rather a distributed homogeneous database management system, a clear distinction in that their transactions are not cryptographically validated.The EOS token and the RAM market are essentially a cloud service where the network offers promises of resources computational in a blackbox to allow users to access through credits There is no liability mechanism due to the lack of transparency about what Block manufacturers are able to create in terms of computational power. "
According to Whiteblock, the actual throughput recorded by EOS under "realistic" network conditions is substantially lower than that claimed by the EOS marketing materials and the network suffers from a basic security problem of repeated consensus errors and lack of tolerance to Byzantine failures .
In June, CCN reported that just a week after the launch of its mainnet, EOS has been plunged into controversy after an incident with its block makers that has led many to question the extent of decentralization of the network. Whiteblock's findings would seem to give credit to those fears, which could have a significant effect on the EOS price.
By giving its verdict on the network as a whole, Whiteblock said:
"The results of the research show the inaccuracies in the performance claims and have concluded that the foundations of the EOS system are based on an imperfect model that is not really decentralized".
Exclusive CCN interview with Whiteblock CTO
After the report was published, CCN interviewed Whiteblock CTO Zak Cole to obtain his exclusive comment on the implication of the relationship for the EOS community and the blockchain ecosystem in general.
CCN: Your research concludes that EOS transactions are not cryptographically validated, making it a homogeneous distributed database, compared to a blockchain. What is the implication of this for EOS as an ecosystem? Does it significantly change the image of what EOS has promised to do (Ethereum killer), and investors and users of EOS should be worried?
Cole: My hope is that the results of our research can help provide a healthy basis for community discussion rather than perpetuate a kind of political war between rival factions. I believe that the EOS ecosystem should evaluate their long-term goals in order to identify a concise roadmap that can help build the system initially presented. It is not productive to put an end to Ethereum against EOS when the two systems are drastically different: one is a decentralized peer-to-peer network supported by cryptographic evidence and the other is an optimized distributed database that works more like a & # 39; infrastructure-as-a -The service product would be on a common cloud computing platform.
At Whiteblock, we are not EOS people. We are not people of Ethereum. We are blocking people. The intent of our research was not to show that one is better than the other, but rather to provide an objective and scientific analysis to which the community can refer to build efficient and functional systems. The Whiteblock team will also be mentor at the EOS Hackathon in San Francisco next week. Our sole objective is to assist efforts to build a bridge that allows blockchain technology to move from the realm of marginal science to a viable solution that can provide practical use and shape the decentralized world of the future. This is why we have developed the Whiteblock test framework.
The community needs development tools that provide transparent and objective performance data to distinguish facts from marketing language and understand the function of the systems we are building. The conclusion is that EOS is not able to provide a throughput to the extent it has been implied and will not be able to do it anytime soon. The system is simply unable to perform in accordance with the messaging that drove their multimillion-dollar campaign. There is a lot of work to do and I hope they are able to keep what has been promised. However, it was an informative experiment in distributed computing.
Investors and users of EOS should be worried only if they have speculatively bet on profit from the unregulated market of an emerging technology.
CCN: The research also states that the effective throughput of EOS is significantly lower than the declared one. In other words, what does this mean for users and developers of dApp?
Cole:When determining which platform is best suited for building to build decentralized application, developers should first evaluate their priorities. If you want to experience the features of decentralized peer-to-peer transactional logic, make sure the system is actually able to provide the functionality required to do so. If you want something that offers a high level of transactional throughput, what's the problem with using an existing payment gateway like Shopify or Stripe? There is no need to be ashamed to stick to the traditional client / server architectures that really work.
Another important thing to remember is that EOS is not really free of transaction costs. Instead, these costs are offset by the same developers as dApp, and the cost of running these applications can be prohibitive. This will create a market similar to what we already see in most software systems, such as the Apple App Store, and users will probably end up paying a significant amount more than expected. I do not know if anyone has yet to notice the significant drop in transactions processed successfully, because the latency and volume of users increase, but there are more important factors at play than a simple effective speed.
CCN: EOS essentially presents a security risk to users or are these defects that can be repaired?
Cole:I believe that the EOS system, as it is now, presents intrinsic security vulnerabilities. There is no effective implementation of game theory or additional algorithmic mechanisms to ensure that block makers behave as they should and there is no guarantee that the resources that are stored today will be available or accessible tomorrow. The full value of the EOS consensus model is based on the ability of a token holder to vote for producers of blocks who choose to act on their behalf, but when there is nothing that prevents manufacturers from express votes in your personal interest, what is the point? Even if there were, there are no functions, cryptographic, computational or other, that regulate the behavior of block producers. This is obvious and does not require a three month research project to understand.
That said, these flaws can be corrected, but if they were, EOS would probably not be different from many other masternode systems like Dash or Syscoin.
CCN: Is the fact that the study was commissioned by ConsenSys a conflict of interest? [Editor’s Note: ConsenSys is an Ethereum development studio with significant investment in ETH applications]
Cole: Our research has been funded by about 20 organizations as well as ConsenSys. The funding was also provided by Bo Shen, former partner of Dan Larimer and co-founder of Bitshares, who EOS used as a basis for much of their technology. The funding of part of the research initiatives has no influence on the scientific process and should really be considered a controversial point. We conducted the same tests on Ethereum and also underlined their shortcomings. The Ethereum community has been receptive to our research and has further engaged us to continue our research. We have worked with dozens of blockchain systems. The purpose of our tests is not to highlight what is good in a system. This is not a beauty contest. In order to build more efficient and performing systems, we should be objective and transparent and identify the weak points in order to optimize them and make them aware in the design process. If the EOS community chooses to be combative of tests and observations of this nature, the whole ecosystem is condemned and will certainly never reach its supposed scale.
Here is a link to our research that cites several significant security and performance flaws in Ethereum.
Images from Shutterstock
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