EOS BlockSmith: Block Producer Candidate

EOS BlockSmith most humbly presents ourselves to the EOS community as a Block Producer Candidate. We are the first Block Producer to guarantee complete financial independence by committing to giving no investment of any kind to any actor in EOS. This removes any potential conflicts of interest and ensures we never incentivise anyone financially to vote for us.

We further guarantee that we will never take outside investment or venture capital of any kind. We are 100% self-funded and will remain so. We will produce blocks, engage the community socially, and nothing else. No strings attached.

All of the information provided here is available on our website as well.

Company Name

EOS BlockSmith

Website Address

eosblocksmith.io

Steemit Account Name

@eosblocksmith

Headquarters Location

EOS BlackSmith company headquarters are located in a brand new office facility in downtown Edmond, OK at Vault405.

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Server Location, Technical Specs, and Scaling Plan

Taken from our Technical Whitepaper. Please note these specs are our working model, any of this is subject to change as we learn more about the requirements of the network.

Phase I: (Completed and live on May 1st)

Our first bare-metal node. Located in San Francisco.

Datacenter provider: Hurricane Electric

• HP G8 16 cores
• 256 GB RAM
• 1TB solid-state storage
• 256 Mbps dedicated

This data-center comes online May 1st. If this is our primary node for launch, we will provide a backup node in another city for which details will be available later. If Phase II is complete before launch, a backup will be unnecessary.

Phase II:

Our second bare-metal node, located in Tulsa Oklahoma. This is intended to be our primary node before, or as soon after launch as possible. The moment this node goes live, the Phase 1 node in California becomes our backup. Tulsa has a lot of fiber running through it and we believe it gives us a very good primary location relative to other BP groups in the United States with the ability to scale for a long time into the future.

Datacenter provider: TierPoint Solutions

• Fujitsu RX2530 M4 56-120 Cores
• 1+ TB DDR4
• 6+ TB solid-state storage
• 1+ Gbps dedicated

We can scale up in this location to as many cores, ram, storage, and bandwidth as we need for quite some time.

Phase III:

We can upgrade our TierPoint system far into the future. However, BlockSmith believes that EOS may some day displace services as large as Google or Amazon. If that happens, our team knows what to do. Our TierPoint stack becomes another backup, and we open our 3rd bare-metal node, most likely in Northern Virginia to begin with, with redundant nodes running in locations all over the globe.

Data center provider: Equinix

• Perhaps an IBM Z14? Will EOS run on that architecture?

The BlockSmith team has a great deal of experience building and managing complex software systems hosted in top-tier datacenters. We are ready for whatever the EOS community requires from our infrastructure.

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Employee List

Shaheen Counts, MD - Co-founder

After graduating from medical school he completed a residency in Head and Neck
surgery and moved to the San Francisco Bay Area. It was shortly thereafter that he became enraptured by Bitcoin and blockchain technology. He joined Blockchain@Berkeley as a business consultant, later leaving in 2018 to start his own blockchain education and technology consultancy. He is an avid blockchain evangelist and has a fundamental belief in the power that blockchain technology has to change the world for the better.

Craig Murray - Co-founder

Craig is a software engineering veteran of 20 years with work stretching from embedded c++ to full stack web applications. In 2017 he found decentralized ledger technology and began to study. It became clear to him the potential of these new tools to change the world and improve the lives of everyone on Earth. It was only a matter of time until he stumbled into EOS, realized it was the platform he wanted to move his career to, and began to form the vision for BlockSmith’s ‘no-strings-attached’ approach.

Verbus - Co-founder

Verbus leads the technology and infrastructure endeavors at EOS BlockSmith. Verbus is a skilled senior software consultant and IT project manager. Having worked in the realm of programming and technology for over 50 years, he is experienced in software development management, database administration, system analysis, and system programming. He also specializes in application programming, performance engineering, UNIX/Linux, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), and software training.

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Community Benefit

BlockSmith has begun plans to host our first Block Producer Summit in August. The conference is designed to help everyone in EOS, but BP groups in-particular, to all get together in a physical location so we can look each other in the eye, shake each other’s hand, and better facilitate communication and collaboration.

BlockSmith is an open and transparent business, and we will happily share our knowledge and expertise freely with the community. We are active members in the community, so please feel free to reach out to us for any reason.

Many other Block Producer groups have long sections of “community benefit” detailing how they are investing and distributing their block rewards into other businesses in EOS. BlockSmith believes this creates conflicts of interest and that it is not in the best interests of EOS to do so.

As outlined earlier, BlockSmith is pledging to accept no outside funding, and to give no outside funding, to any actor in the EOS ecosystem. That means while other BPs are planning to fund dApps with their Block Rewards, we will not. Instead we favor reducing inflation so that Block Producers are paid for their service, but do not make unreasonable profit.

However in the event that our Block Rewards become excessive we will burn tokens. Burning tokens means we are destroying them. This has the same effect as if they were never created in the first place. It creates deflation. Our rule of thumb is "If other Block Producer groups with similar rewards to us are investing in other companies in EOS, then we need to burn a similar amount of EOS".

We also believe that because we will not be acting as a Capital Management company, we can run a smaller staff with much lower payroll. This allows us to provide service at a lower cost. We will provide the highest quality service for the lowest possible price. That is our biggest community benefit.

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TestNet

We’re currently producing blocks on the CryptoLions testnet. As of this writing we are building our own testnet and will be inviting community members to connect their nodes to our network in the very near future.