My Thoughts on ECOS

Hello Steemians,

Ev Dogg here with another food token. If you haven't read them, here are my previous entries on INS, eHarvest Hub, and Foodcoin. Today I'm looking at ECOS, which is scheduled to begin its ICO on February 15th.

I first heard about this one here on Steemit, so good for us. I will be quoting a bit from that post which appears to be an interview with one of the ECOS team members.

I actually like this proposal. It seems to be the token most in line with what I envision a food token being. Namely, they are trying to certify food and beverage quality using a publicly available distributed ledger, i.e. blockchain. However, there is a big red flag which I'll be discussing shortly. The project is based in Estonia, which I assume must have a problem with bootleg booze because the whitepaper constantly refers to "counterfeit" products, and the phrase they repeatedly use to refer to their mission is "food products and drinks (including alcoholic ones)".

Their whitepaper is thankfully short and sweet, most of it dealing with the details of their ICO payout scheme. The wording refers to "you and us" as consumers, but as with all the others they are obviously targeting food and beverage producers as potential clients. I can infer further that they are specifically targeting businesses which are large enough to worry about their products being "counterfeited". Make of that what you will. As well, this is another proposal that seems rather light on the cryptography: they state that they will be subcontracting out their coding. This will also be yet another ERC20 token. For those two reasons I would skip ECOS if cryptographic security were a concern.

Now, the red flag I see comes in when they explain how users will access the data stored about a given product. The whitepaper says that the user will be able to choose between a basic readout containing (I'm guessing) what would normally be found on a nutrition label and an "Extended" readout containing "information on the full life cycle of the product, GMO content, content of pesticides, herbicides, toxic chemicals and artificial fertilizers, presence of aggressive artificial preservatives, colorants, flavorings, etc."(p. 4) In other words, a user will have to select the extended option if they have any real questions about the product at all. The whitepaper goes on to explain that the user will have to unlock this extra information by paying ECOS tokens.

Here's the relevant point from the interview I mentioned:

In the course of use of the system, tokens will be spent on different actions, such as reception of more detailed information the client is interested in, requests for information analysis, etc. It will be possible to subscribe or choose to open certain data in every particular case.

So it sounds to me like they are putting the information behind a paywall. This seems very clever, but also very evil, as it allows them to claim transparency while putting up potentially steep access barriers. Especially if they begin to use a competitive bidding system, where the cost to access certain information is determined by the participants. It could end up similar to Steem where a handful of whales have the power to outbid all the other users combined. Imagine if Coca-Cola owned a massive portion of ECOS shares and so they were able to set the price of looking up the contents of a can of Coke at $10,000?

I do like this bit:

The ECOS team would like to motivate people to find counterfeit products and fight them. For example, we plan to create a system where every participant of a chain will be able to make reports by themselves. They will also be able to attach a brief description of a product and its picture, the link to which will be fixed in the blockchain, which will, for example, allow the transporter and the supplier to make arrangements and use the ECOS system to check each other.

So they are setting themselves up as something of a Yelp!, but just like Yelp! they are leaving the potential for the people with the most money to abuse the system.

In my opinion, this is exactly what we need to be vigilant of. It's going to be very difficult for The Powers That Be to centralize an inherently decentralized technology like the blockchain, but this is certainly one way of doing it! And, this way they can claim plausible deniability, because they can simply say that it was "the will of the people".

Well, that's all for now! Gotta go pick up @daniphotography from work! Thanks for reading, commenting, upvoting, and subscribing.