Why is EOS Getting Hate?

EOS has received an unusual amount of hate since it was first announced. EOS creator Dan Larimer is a controversial figure in the business world, with some accusing him of being a “Deadbeat Dev”, while others accuse him of being a snake oil salesman. Furthermore, there is an inherent distrust of ICOs in most (rational) investors, after disasters like Onecoin and Enigma. So the fact that EOS raised $4 BILLION before even proving that it worked naturally drew criticism from many. Please note that this article is not my way of bashing EOS as a cryptocurrency, it is just my way of criticising their recent screwups.
The EOS blockchain has been promising BIG things since it’s announcement, and there were plenty of skeptics who doubted that EOS could pull it off. The launch of EOS’s mainnet on June 2, 2018 was supposed to be the event that would silence the haters and prove that it could back up all the hype. What followed, however, was probably not what Block.one (the EOS development team) wanted.

First, hackers managed to hack Block.one’s Zendesk account and sent phishing emails that stole the recipients funds. Next, Qihoo360, a reputed Chinese internet security firm, discovered many security flaws that could disrupt the network. Qihoo360 claimed to have reached out to Block.one to notify them of the issues and said that Block.one would postpone their mainnet launch until the issues were resolved. Block.one denied this however, stating that all the bugs were fixed and promised that their launch right on schedule. The weird thing is that the next day they announced a bug-hunting competition, which doesn’t make sense if their previous statement about their bugs being fixed were true. Confusing decisions by Block.one like this definitely lost even more trust with investors.

As if security issues were not enough, EOS’s constitution has been attracting criticism by many people for being poorly written and too ambiguous. Nick Szabo, a computer scientist and cryptographer tweeted about the constitution and said, “Great thread about how much EOS depends on a naively drafted “constitution”, human-interpreted wet code. As a result EOS will be labor-intensive, permissioned, jurisdictionally biased, and will have poor social scalability.”

Finally, the decentralization of EOS has been coming into question. Specifically, article 5 of the constitution has a troubling line that says, “This blockchain has no owners, managers or fiduciaries; therefore, no Member shall have beneficial interest in more than 10% of the SYS token supply.” The problem here is that Block.one is estimated to own about 10% of the token supply, which means that this could be their way of making sure that nobody will ever have as much power over the EOS ecosystem as they do.

Trust me, this is just scratching the surface of what critics have to say about EOS. The immediate future of EOS will probably be pretty rocky. Only time will tell whether EOS will ever be as respected as its peers.