HomeBlockchainInterviewDaniel Larimer: "Blockone will never be able to promote technology that frees...

Daniel Larimer: “Blockone will never be able to promote technology that frees people”

After his decision to quit Block.one, we reached Daniel Larimer to better understand his will and what he wants to achieve in the next future, as EOS is not his project anymore.

Did your decision to leave Block.one depend on the way the next products were to be created, or was it something else?

I left block.one to pursue decentralized technologies that empower the people instead of making people dependent upon the services of regulated centralized entities. Block.one has a duty to the shareholders and to build products that comply with regulations; therefore, block.one will never be able to build and promote technology that frees people from dependence upon the powers that be. Truly decentralized technologies are hard to monetize and regulate as there are no centralized points of control where fees can be extracted or regulations can be enforced. This makes it difficult to justify R&D expenses on such technology to shareholders as the liabilities outweigh the profit potential. 

Bitcoin has failed as a payment system, do you think the EOS blockchain is an ideal “layer” for that kind of transactions?

I believe that EOS must become a more competitive form of money if it is to see the capital gains that many in the community associate with success. Bitcoin is less divisible than gold when you consider the minimum transaction fee. EOS, being far more divisible, may have better qualities for money. Moving Bitcoin to EOS will certainly help make BTC more divisible, but it will centralize custodianship of BTC while simultaneously making EOS less competitive as an independent currency. What is more valuable, shares in a stock exchange or the shares traded on the exchange? 

In the coming months the “power up model” will be implemented on the EOS blockchain, can you explain the advantages over the current system?

The new “power up model” reduces the capital costs of transacting on the EOS network. When EOS.IO was released it was structured such that if you staked 1% of all staked EOS then you could execute 1% of all transactions. In this way “transactions were free” for EOS holders because you never lost your stake. The problem with this model is that it tightly coupled the value of EOS to the capital cost of transactions. Namely, you would have to stake thousands of dollars worth of EOS in order to perform a couple dozen transactions per day. Considering most people have almost no savings, this was a high barrier to mass adoption. Under the new model, users can “rent” the bandwidth. Instead of buying thousands of dollars of EOS, they can now pay a couple dollars per month for the same bandwidth. Transactions are still “free” if you use the rewards from staking to cover the costs of renting bandwidth. This decouples the value of EOS from the cost of transacting on the network.

Some people complain about EOS not performing because of the lack of influence and marketing of Block.one, what do you think?

I think that is like blaming the company behind the open source “QuickBooks” software your business chose to adopt for the failures of your business. To achieve the price success that the EOS community is looking for requires a community adopting EOS as a currency and this means keeping EOS from being considered a security.

EOS.IO was sold as software that enables any community to adopt it and operate a “smart contract platform”. Each community’s tokens were represented as a percentage of the available network capacity. EOS has been incredibly successful at attracting the majority of daily blockchain transactions and demonstrating the lowest-latency, highest-throughput global network. 

Since the launch of EOS.IO 1.0, block.one has dramatically improved the quality of the EOSIO software and increased its throughput by an order of magnitude. During this same time the price of EOS has been relatively flat. Clearly, the technical performance and price performance are independent variables. 

We have all witnessed what happened to XRP now that the regulators are going after Ripple. Block.one maintaining clear separation between its work on the EOSIO protocol and the communities use of the software to operate a decentralized blockchain has been for the benefit of the various communities. Without this clear separation the EOS token might have suffered a similar fate to XRP with delistings from major exchanges and even greater price declines.  

Do you follow any projects/apps on EOS in particular that are worth checking out?

I have followed many of the DeFi projects on EOS. I particularly like the work the everpedia and liquidapps teams are doing. 

Read the whole interview on our free newsletter here.

Amelia Tomasicchio
Amelia Tomasicchiohttps://cryptonomist.ch
As expert in digital marketing, Amelia began working in the fintech sector in 2014 after writing her thesis on Bitcoin technology. Previously author for several international crypto-related magazines and CMO at Eidoo. She is now the co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Cryptonomist, and also PR manager for the Italian market at Bitget. She is also a marketing teacher at Digital Coach in Milan and she published a book about NFTs for the Italian publishing house Mondadori, while she is also helping artists and company to entering in the sector. As advisor, Amelia is also involved in metaverse-related project such as The Nemesis and OVER.
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