Review on Aeternity by Madeleine Herbert

Name: Aeternity
Item: Aeternity
Rating: 4

September 19, 2018

Aeternity have stated they are planning to use a variant of Bitcoin-NG…

Aeternity have stated they are planning to use a variant of Bitcoin-NG (already implemented in the Waves cryptocurrency) as their consensus algorithm. Bitcoin-NG will bring significant improvements in transactions per second on the Aeternity base protocol, the team have estimated 100tps onchain (this does not include any transactions in state channels).
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Pros

Aeternity have opted for on-chain governance though delegated voting, weighted by the amount of tokens the account hold. Votes will take place natively on the Aeternity blockchain where AE holders can either (1) Vote themselves, (2) delegate their votes to a trusted third party or (3) not use their votes at all. I haven’t found any information regarding incentives for voting / delegating your votes however I assume people will be rewarded with more AE through inflation, if anyone has more info on this please reach out!

Cons

Coin votes may place arbitrary time frames on decisions that become rushed and effect the outcome in a negative way. Many on-chain governance mechanisms reduce governance down to a vote when in reality governance should be seen as a complex multifaceted decision making process that requires inputs from many stakeholders and requires many checkpointing stages to see if the changes suggested are valid / beneficial.