If you are an investor or a developer or just an EOS enthusiast, you should know about how resource allocation works on EOS.
Why should you learn?
Much like Steem, EOS token could help investors with earning passive income by staking tokens and voting for Block Producers. The liquid tokens could be staked for Bandwidth, Computational Power, RAM, Storage and Votes.
dAPP developers could build the dAPP on the top of EOS.IO and use the servers, bandwidth and computational power of EOS itself. All the services could be reserved by staking using EOS tokens. Developers could limit the usage according to their requirements and even lease few resources from others.
EOS tokens in wallets could be staked for using network resources either for personal use or leased out for developers use.
Let's try to understand each component and how will this work on the platform?
There are 5 Resources-
1.Bandwidth
- CPU
- RAM
- Storage
- Votes
BANDWIDTH
What is Bandwidth?
Bandwidth could simply be expressed as information carrying capacity. Information on all the actions is stored in the form of logs. A blockchain maintains a log of all the messages and this log is eventually downloaded by the nodes. So when you are upvoting, commenting, editing or following others on a social network like steemit, it gets stored on blockchain as logs.
Bandwidth on EOS, much like STEEM, is dynamic in nature. Gives you more bandwidth when few are using and guarantees you minimum bandwidth when everyone is using according to your stake.
Bandwidth much like 'STEEM dApps' is important for maintaining high transactions. Big dApps on EOS will be requiring more bandwidth to take care of actions performed by the end user.
Investors could lease/delegate their bandwidth to dApp developers in exchange for EOS like STEEM.
CPU- Computational Backlog and Computation
The system needs to interpret/comprehend different log/signals pointing towards different actions. The calculation done to regain the actual state of message log is taken care by CPU and is known as Computational debt.
Much like bandwidth, computational capacity is allocated on a fractional reserve basis because they are transient (unused capacity cannot be saved for future use).
Both Bandwidth and CPU have an unstacking period of 3 days. To save double spending on Bandwidth.
RAM
Unlike Bandwidth or CPU, RAM is a reserve capacity which cannot be delegated to others. One could use the RAM and freeze the capacity as long as they need it. They could unfreeze the capacity by un-staking without any delays.
For ex- A developer working on a dApp could freeze 500 MB of RAM, if in future he just needs 50 mb of it, he could un-stake EOS worth 450 MB. He could even delete his account and unstake the remaining 50 MB.
STORAGE
Storage works in a similar way as RAM. The content like blog/graphics/videos could be stored in Storage. The blockchain does't store the content it just stores the log/hash pointing towards the content.
Storage similar to RAM is a reserved capacity which could not be delegated or leased to others.
VOTES
Investors could just stake their tokens for voting different Block Producer. The tokens staked for voting are locked up for 3 days. One could unstake EOS tokens after 3 days which would itself remove his/her vote for Block Producers.
EOS staked for bandwidth/cpu could vote as well. RAM/STORAGE could not vote as they are reserved capacity and could be unstaked instantly.
Conclusion
Block Producers updates the community about the capacity for bandwidth, CPU and Storage. As the traffic on the blockchain increases, the Block Producers update the infrastructure and network resources to fulfil the demands of the network. The network resources are very much dependent on Block Producer that why it's very important to vote for the right candidate on the Blockchain.
Investors could lease their Bandwidth/CPU, while RAM/Storage being reserved capacities could not be delegated. One could set proxy for voting similar to Steem.
The voting lock-up period has been recently changed from 6 months to 3 days by Daniel Larimar to increase the participation of voters and refraining the formation of a cabal.
Image Source : PIXABAY.COM