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This seems to be solving an actual interesting problem (running untrusted applications on anonymous compute, at scale). A scraper, for example, would be the kil

This seems to be solving an actual interesting problem (running untrusted applications on anonymous compute, at scale). A scraper, for example, would be the killer application for such a platform. But the cryptocurrency integration looks tacked on, or orthogonal to the problem -- which will hamper the adoption, or even turn away application makers otherwise interested.

grosjona 8y ago
I don't know if what it's promising is actually possible. Ultimately you need to trust that the machine/node which claims to be running your code is in fact running it as-is and not running some hacked version of it which behaves the same superficially but is actually collecting all your user passwords behind the scenes. The node can always lie by perfectly adhering to the protocol but doing something completely different behind the scenes. You can hash, sign or encrypt the code as much as you like but that has nothing to do with verifying that the hardware is actually running that code. Maybe with homomorphic encryption this will be possible but AFAIK this technology is not even close to ready for such use cases.
- MaikuMori 8y ago
  The other way too. It's easy to get your server ips banned for unratelimited scraping.
- justmoon2 8y ago
  The way all distributed systems work is that you hope that some hosts may be malicious but not too many and not in a coordinating fashion. So in Bitcoin for example, Bitmain has 41% of the hashing power and a bunch of pools have 10% but you just assume they won't work together to defraud you. And turns out, you're pretty much right, that's never happened. Codius just improves on that security model by letting you choose however many hosts you want by whatever criteria you want.
gricardo99 8y ago
One of the smartest thing I’ve seen in the crypto realm was the realization by the Codius folks some years ago that smart contracts are something that would benefit from an “off chain” execution framework/platform, independent of any specific blockchain. Hence, the cryptocurrency part is purposely orthogonal to Codius. I don’t think it’s tacked on, it’s more agnostic and it’s up to end users to decide what if any blockchain integrations they want. The potential for Codius (and yes, it is an ambitious vision, with a long way to go) is a framework where you could deploy much more functional and powerful distributed applications than would ever be possible with a blockchain based approach like etherium.

grosjona 8y ago

I don't know if what it's promising is actually possible. Ultimately you need to trust that the machine/node which claims to be running your code is in fact running it as-is and not running some hacked version of it which behaves the same superficially but is actually collecting all your user passwords behind the scenes. The node can always lie by perfectly adhering to the protocol but doing something completely different behind the scenes. You can hash, sign or encrypt the code as much as you like but that has nothing to do with verifying that the hardware is actually running that code. Maybe with homomorphic encryption this will be possible but AFAIK this technology is not even close to ready for such use cases.

MaikuMori 8y ago
The other way too. It's easy to get your server ips banned for unratelimited scraping.
justmoon2 8y ago
The way all distributed systems work is that you hope that some hosts may be malicious but not too many and not in a coordinating fashion. So in Bitcoin for example, Bitmain has 41% of the hashing power and a bunch of pools have 10% but you just assume they won't work together to defraud you. And turns out, you're pretty much right, that's never happened. Codius just improves on that security model by letting you choose however many hosts you want by whatever criteria you want.

gricardo99 8y ago

One of the smartest thing I’ve seen in the crypto realm was the realization by the Codius folks some years ago that smart contracts are something that would benefit from an “off chain” execution framework/platform, independent of any specific blockchain. Hence, the cryptocurrency part is purposely orthogonal to Codius. I don’t think it’s tacked on, it’s more agnostic and it’s up to end users to decide what if any blockchain integrations they want. The potential for Codius (and yes, it is an ambitious vision, with a long way to go) is a framework where you could deploy much more functional and powerful distributed applications than would ever be possible with a blockchain based approach like etherium.