5 ms·

In all honesty, I need to try building something that does semi-distributed computation. Here's my idea to throw in the pool. First, you don't get something fo

by kefka 10y ago

In all honesty, I need to try building something that does semi-distributed computation. Here's my idea to throw in the pool. First, you don't get something for nothing. So you need computers (surprise). Now, how do you share code? You can share code directly via IPFS. Now, admittedly, binary is the fastest, but limits your architecture rather greatly. So an interpreted language seems better. I'm looking at Erlang, given its functional attributes and ability of swapping code with no downtime. It also works in a cluster. I also look at Tor for entry points to get requests on these machines. We already can interact with IPFS for files, but it has no logic capability. And Ethereum is a joke in many ways (and it simply can't interact outside its blockchain). The idea: IPFS filestore for storing functions, and chaining IPFS hashes to be ran by a Erlang cloud connected by Tor Onion links. It's not completely serverless computation, but you can ideally abstract out the server so it doesn't matter where it is, or who handles it. Other ways to go about this would be homomorphic encryption (way too computationally expensive at this time)... Or some sort of trusted computing (shudder).

woah 10y ago
What's your goal here? Right now it just sounds like you want to use a bunch of cool technologies.
zapt02 10y ago
Why is Ethereum a joke? It seems to do exactly what you are trying to, and you just discount it?
- kefka 10y ago
  Primarily because they have engaged in the "We didn't really like the way project XYZ worked out, so we're going to re-do." Look at the DAO. It's more than enough reason to dismiss this as a libertarian capitalist's experiment, with straight up dictatorialism if they don't get their way.
  - UweSchmidt 10y ago
    Elaborate? Do you support Ethereum Classic and consider "being hacked by the DAO hack" == "things not going [their] way"? Just curious.
    - kefka 10y ago
      By Ethereum's own documentation, their code is the contract and the contract is the code. Yes, it sucks that they did not write tighter code and allowed a gotcha.... But when that happens in the legal world, people do pay for it. Instead, because one of founders put up a lot of ETH, they changed the rules of the game. Now, the question is, "How close to the CEO of ConsenSys do you need to be to roll out bad contracts?". That's what makes it worthless.
      - UweSchmidt 10y ago
        Right. This also means that you can't currently trust code that runs on the blockchain since there are likely more bugs like the one that was exploited. Thoughts on that? The change in Ethereum was "voted" for by a majority of hash power (but of course as influenced by the Ethereum leadership, so people had the popup in the client along with a recommendation what to vote for). So isn't that correction also in the spirit of Ethereum? Miners decide. How about fixing obvious bugs, but otherwise upholding contracts?
        PeCaN 10y ago
        > This also means that you can't currently trust code that runs on the blockchain since there are likely more bugs like the one that was exploited. To elaborate, it's especially hard to trust ETH code because it's not provable in any way. Bugs will hide, and people will find them. If ETH wasn't turing-complete this would be less problematic (because static analysis would be much easier, and possible), but as it stands there's no way to trust Ethereum contracts.
      - danielpatrick 10y ago
        You don't understand what happened. The CEO (lol) doesn't just get to choose. The network's hashing power gets to choose. The rules aren't: "the code is the contract". The rules are: "the code that is accepted by a majority of hashing power is the contract."
chriswarbo 10y ago
> Ethereum is a joke in many ways Ethereum is/was pretty interesting; but as with all blockchains, it's solving a globally-distributed byzantine/trustless problem, at the expense of being massively inefficient. It's a good idea for that domain, but such constraints don't apply to the majority of computing problems. For example, Web app A might want its events to appear in the same order to all of its clients, and Web app B might want the same for its events, but there's no reason to enforce that all clients of all apps see all events of all apps in the same interleaved order, in an open world where new apps can be created without any central authority, and where no app or client trusts any other app or client. Regarding a practical language, I think something like Morte/Annah/Dhall would be nice as a way to: - Use pure functional computation as a powerful 'sandbox' against causing nasty effects or having results affected by outside interference - Use IPFS URLs as function names - Use Church (et al) encoding and strong normalisation as a form of statically-checkable duck-typing (i.e. if it encodes to a duck, then it's a duck)
- aiy4noh2eX 10y ago
  > Web app A might want its events to appear in the same order to all of its clients, and Web app B might want the same for its events, but there's no reason to enforce that all clients of all apps see all events of all apps in the same interleaved order, in an open world where new apps can be created without any central authority, and where no app or client trusts any other app or client. Is this something that's just not part of the current Ethereum picture or that is necessarily not a part of what Ethereum is?
bergie 10y ago
We did an experiment on distributing work via IPFS and an Ethereum contract: * JavaScript function to run, stored on IPFS * Input data stored on IPFS * Result of the execution gets stored on IPFS and hash written as contract fulfillment https://github.com/flowhub/jsjob-ethereum https://github.com/flowhub/jsjob-ethereum

by kefka 10y ago

woah 10y ago

What's your goal here? Right now it just sounds like you want to use a bunch of cool technologies.

zapt02 10y ago

Why is Ethereum a joke? It seems to do exactly what you are trying to, and you just discount it?

kefka 10y ago
Primarily because they have engaged in the "We didn't really like the way project XYZ worked out, so we're going to re-do." Look at the DAO. It's more than enough reason to dismiss this as a libertarian capitalist's experiment, with straight up dictatorialism if they don't get their way.
- UweSchmidt 10y ago
  Elaborate? Do you support Ethereum Classic and consider "being hacked by the DAO hack" == "things not going [their] way"? Just curious.
  - kefka 10y ago
    By Ethereum's own documentation, their code is the contract and the contract is the code. Yes, it sucks that they did not write tighter code and allowed a gotcha.... But when that happens in the legal world, people do pay for it. Instead, because one of founders put up a lot of ETH, they changed the rules of the game. Now, the question is, "How close to the CEO of ConsenSys do you need to be to roll out bad contracts?". That's what makes it worthless.
    - UweSchmidt 10y ago
      Right. This also means that you can't currently trust code that runs on the blockchain since there are likely more bugs like the one that was exploited. Thoughts on that? The change in Ethereum was "voted" for by a majority of hash power (but of course as influenced by the Ethereum leadership, so people had the popup in the client along with a recommendation what to vote for). So isn't that correction also in the spirit of Ethereum? Miners decide. How about fixing obvious bugs, but otherwise upholding contracts?
      - PeCaN 10y ago
        > This also means that you can't currently trust code that runs on the blockchain since there are likely more bugs like the one that was exploited. To elaborate, it's especially hard to trust ETH code because it's not provable in any way. Bugs will hide, and people will find them. If ETH wasn't turing-complete this would be less problematic (because static analysis would be much easier, and possible), but as it stands there's no way to trust Ethereum contracts.
    - danielpatrick 10y ago
      You don't understand what happened. The CEO (lol) doesn't just get to choose. The network's hashing power gets to choose. The rules aren't: "the code is the contract". The rules are: "the code that is accepted by a majority of hashing power is the contract."

chriswarbo 10y ago

> Ethereum is a joke in many ways Ethereum is/was pretty interesting; but as with all blockchains, it's solving a globally-distributed byzantine/trustless problem, at the expense of being massively inefficient. It's a good idea for that domain, but such constraints don't apply to the majority of computing problems. For example, Web app A might want its events to appear in the same order to all of its clients, and Web app B might want the same for its events, but there's no reason to enforce that all clients of all apps see all events of all apps in the same interleaved order, in an open world where new apps can be created without any central authority, and where no app or client trusts any other app or client. Regarding a practical language, I think something like Morte/Annah/Dhall would be nice as a way to: - Use pure functional computation as a powerful 'sandbox' against causing nasty effects or having results affected by outside interference - Use IPFS URLs as function names - Use Church (et al) encoding and strong normalisation as a form of statically-checkable duck-typing (i.e. if it encodes to a duck, then it's a duck)

aiy4noh2eX 10y ago
> Web app A might want its events to appear in the same order to all of its clients, and Web app B might want the same for its events, but there's no reason to enforce that all clients of all apps see all events of all apps in the same interleaved order, in an open world where new apps can be created without any central authority, and where no app or client trusts any other app or client. Is this something that's just not part of the current Ethereum picture or that is necessarily not a part of what Ethereum is?

bergie 10y ago

We did an experiment on distributing work via IPFS and an Ethereum contract: * JavaScript function to run, stored on IPFS * Input data stored on IPFS * Result of the execution gets stored on IPFS and hash written as contract fulfillment https://github.com/flowhub/jsjob-ethereum https://github.com/flowhub/jsjob-ethereum