EOS and WordPress

Why EOS was the pragmatic chain for content applications in 2019, and how that judgement looks now.

The original argument

Content timestamping needs many small, cheap, fast writes. Proof-of-work chains were expensive and slow for that workload, and their energy profile made them a poor fit for publishers being asked to care about sustainability. A delegated-proof-of-stake chain with sub-second blocks and no per-transaction fee addressed both.

The seven points, as they were argued

• Throughput adequate for per-article writes
• No user-facing transaction cost
• Fast finality
• Energy use far below proof of work
• Account model suited to application users
• Governance able to amend the protocol
• Tooling aimed at application developers rather than traders

How that aged

The technical arguments largely held. The governance trade-off proved to be the risk: delegated consensus concentrates power among a small number of block producers, and that is exactly the property that makes a chain worth using or not. Chains chosen for performance have to be re-evaluated on governance.

The transferable lesson

Choose infrastructure on the workload and then stress-test its governance. Performance improves with time; centralisation does not fix itself.