As much as everyone wishes this wasn’t… this is actually a real President

Identity in EOS

Only days away from the launch of the EOS mainnet one of the big hot topics amongst the Block Producing Candidate community is identity. After many months of interacting with the community, building a reputation, spending blood, sweat, tears, and possibly large amounts of money everything is boiling down to identity and votes.

Our previous steemit post Name Bidding and Premium Names on EOShighlights how names work in the current version of the EOSIO software. Account names are required to be 12 characters long and shorter names will have a powerful place in the EOS ecosystem and must be purchased by auction.

Who is real?

Meet @dan. He’s done lots of cool stuff!

Meet Joe Scammer. He’s a douchebag.

Block Producers who have spent so much energy on their identities are rightfully concerned that after the mainnet launches fraudulent block producers may register names that are similar to their own and attempt to trick voters.

This has always been a difficult issue, and companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter have had to create identity verification processes to seperate the frauds from the real people. The processes themselves have had their own controversies and hick ups and raise many questions for the EOS community:

• Should voting portals be required to provide some layer of identity verification?
• Should block producers individually raise awareness of their account name and public key and trust that voters won’t be fooled?
• Should block producers take the name debate more strongly into their own hands?

The boot process

During the boot process of the mainnet the group of block producers involved have direct control of the “eosio” account. This is a privileged system account that can “do anything it wants”. At the end of the boot process, when all system contracts have been loaded and the ERC-20 snapshot has been converted and verified the “eosio” account becomes the property of the community and can only make changes based on the governance model.

Some block producers propose using this short window to grant themselves “special names” that are shorter than the 12 character limit, or perhaps have a “bp” suffix or prefix. The idea behind this is that fraudulent accounts will be unable to mimic these special names and the community can be rest assured they are voting for legitimate producers.

The reasoning goes like this: if genereos intended to register genereos1111as our official block producing name, this small window in time might allow us to be represented as genereos or bp.genereos or genereos.bp. Now when Joe Scammer comes along and creates genereos1112 the community will know he’s a fraud.

That’s not fair!

The concern with this approach is that the block producers who participate in the boot process in the final selected mainnet have given themselves an advantage. Everyone else must abide by the 12 character account name, and everyone else must participate in the name auctions to get a shorter name.

The other concern is that should new block producers who enter the community weeks, months, years from now be entitled to be awarded a short name? Are they forever at a disadvantage to the “founding” block producers?

Some block producers argue this is a necessary evil to protect their investment, identity, and protect the community from fraudulent block producers. Others disagree and feel everyone should be placed on an equal footing.

Our stance

Team GenerEOS believes that boot block producers should not receive a special advantage by participating in the boot process. The boot process is an altruistic community endeavour to bring a functioning mainnet online – not an opportunity to gain an advantage over other members of the community.

What do you think?

We would love to hear what the community at large thinks about this. The decisions made by the boot process that ultimately becomes the mainnet will have long lasting implications and legacy.

• Should the founding block producers deserve an advantage such as short names to protect their identity?
• Should the community rely upon voting portals to filter out the scammers?
• Should everything be as fair as possible?

Please open up this debate in the comments and in your favourite telegram channels.
The mainnet goes live June 3rd and these decisions need to be finalised soon!