Everipedia, the Wikipedia fork that aims to build the most accessible online encyclopedia in the world, might be on the verge of taking itself off the EOS network after CIO and former Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger stated that the EOS network is “de facto centralized in the hands of the Chinese.” This comes as high-profile EOS backer Brock Pierce acknowledged for the first time that a “Chinese oligarchy” exists within the blockchain’s DPoS system.
We cannot continue to build dapps on EOS if the network is de facto centralized in the hands of the Chinese.
I’ve been making noise internally at EP about this since I learned about it earlier this summer.
Sorry, but it can’t go on much longer, as far as I’m concerned. https://t.co/oUe2qvcjQM
— Larry Sanger (@lsanger) August 22, 2019
Everipedia, through abandoning its Dapp launch on $EOS, confirmed $EOS is a centralized Chinese coin – where Chinese miners control 17 of the 20 super nodes
Everipedia canceled its plan launch Dapp on $EOS because it says $EOS is a centralized coin controlled by Chinese money pic.twitter.com/Tm4ZiZgLrj
— ๑ THE CRYPTO PANDA ๑ (@PandaofBinance) August 22, 2019
EOS Problems Rooted in Design
EOS’s centralization concerns go back to its very inception and the problems with the DPoS consensus mechanism, in particular the presence of only 21 block producers which immediately led to accusations that it would be easy to manipulate the voting process and form a corral of block producers that would be hard to shift. This has seemingly become the case, with months of denials from EOS and their supporters being seemingly undermined by an admission from Brock Pierce, a driving force behind EOS in its early days, that the DPoS node allocation is not as decentralized as supporters were led to believe. The admission came during the 2019 EOS Community conference, a video of which was posted by Pierce in which he acknowledges that “the ecosystem is a little bit of a Chinese oligarchy right now…everyone recognizes that and the question is how do we solve this issue.” This seems to be the first admission of the huge Chinese influence over the EOS blockchain, which has not gone down well with app developers like Sanger, who was not the only Twitter user to recognize the problem:
Pierce Preaches “Rock the Vote”
EOS was even downgraded in the Weiss 2019 crypto ratings two months ago, with the agency claiming that, “#EOS has serious problems with centralization…so we’ve severely downgraded its technology score.” In the video, Pierce dismisses a ‘1 token, 1 vote’ system and instead preaches more voter participation to overcome the “major problem”, suggesting that exchanges could also be more involved in the process. Whether this is enough to convince app developers that EOS can overcome the problem and make the network more decentralized will only be known with time.
