Block.one Announces It Will Begin Voting For Block Producers, With A Caveat

Block.one, creator of the EOSIO, has announced it will be getting more involved in EOS governance. A day after releasing a new proposed constitution, it has announced that now that the “swift and successful launch” of the EOS mainnet has been accomplished, it will participate in the election of block producers.

But there’s at least one catch: Block.one states it will only give its votes to block producers that support the new constitution recently proposed by Block.one.

In the announcement, Block.one said the “values and considerations that will guide Block.one’s participation in the block producer election process,” include “alignment on the EOS Constitution, the latest of which can be found here.”

The “latest” constitution mentioned links to Block.one’s own proposal for a new constitution. Though the phrasing suggests the constitution is already in effect, this new constitution is actually only a proposal (from Block.one) that has yet to be voted on.

Discussion among EOS community members seems to indicate a lack of clarity about the state of the constitution. Some apparently believe that they are currently functioning under an interim constitution, while others suppose there is really no constitution at all, since this interim constitution was never actually voted on.

It is also unclear from where Block.one derives its power to propose a new constitution. The EOS white paper states amendments to the constitution are to come from the block producers, who are then to seek 15/21 approval from their fellow block producers.

Block.one maintains possession of 10 percent of EOS tokens. Since EOS does not use a one-person-one-vote system but instead allocates votes based on “stake,” these tokens could give Block.one considerable voting power.

While it has been reported that this increased involvement is a reversal for Block.one, there doesn’t seem to have been any official announcement from the company indicating it originally intended to stay out of elections.

But that’s not to say such an announcement was never (officially or unofficially) made. There are multiple channels through which the EOS members communicate: reddit, YouTube, Telegram, Medium, Steemit (among others); block producers have their own sites.

While the decentralization that EOS is attempting has led to some chaos and argument, it should be expected to some extent – chaos and argument are features of any form of direct democracy. But the EOS community can’t even agree where they should talk about governance. As one user pointed out in a recent discussion on Telegram:

Another user immediately dismissed the idea, calling such a centralized forum “a huge attack vector,” before a third user pointed out that, in fact, such a forum already exists (though they admitted “people don’t use it”).

A different solution to the chaos and lack of focus of the EOSIO Gov channel was offered by another user who created an entirely new EOS Telegram channel, an alternative to EOSIO Gov called EOS Governance:

So far the new channel has three members.

Tim Prentiss is a writer and editor for ETHNews. He has a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Nevada, Reno. He lives in Reno with his daughter. In his spare time he writes songs and disassembles perfectly good electronic devices.

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