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I remember a post here a while back from a guy running Bitcoin mining in his dorm room. One day he realized he could offer his spare cycles to grad students wit

I remember a post here a while back from a guy running Bitcoin mining in his dorm room. One day he realized he could offer his spare cycles to grad students with high computing workloads and undercut cloud computing prices while increasing what he made far over just mining. It's very weird that we haven't fully arbitraged $/instruction to a single (low) price yet (or storage/hosting, whichever). If only there were an Uber for unused cycles or storage... let everyone turn their unused capacity into mini AWSs with a common interface and safety and reliability guarantees. Maybe there are too many barriers, like security.

akg_67 6y ago
> If only there were an Uber for unused cycles or storage... let everyone turn their unused capacity into mini AWSs with a common interface and safety and reliability guarantees. Funny, this was our idea with first startup 18 years ago, federation of unused storage and redistribution. There were no takers as no one wanted to contribute their unused storage but wanted others. It was much easier to centrally locate our own storage and allocate to users who required it.
Fornax96 6y ago
> If only there were an Uber for unused cycles or storage... let everyone turn their unused capacity into mini AWSs with a common interface and safety and reliability guarantees This is exactly what Sia.tech is building for storage. A competitive marketplace for storage providers where anyone can set up a host and start selling their spare storage space. It's not completely finished yet, but it's pretty close. A bunch of companies are already building products on top of it (including me)
- swyx 6y ago
  how much replication do you need to make this kind of thing reliable? since anyone can pull storage at any time. does that then make transactions super slow? any numbers you can put on this would be helpful. also, whats your product? (just curious)
  - Fornax96 6y ago
    Sia uses reed-solomon encoding to spread files over 30 hosts with a redundancy of 3x. So Any 20 hosts can fail at the same time and the files would still be available. This does mean that you need to upload all your data 3 times. Sia also needs to monitor your uploaded files all the time to make sure the hosts behave. This means hosts periodically run checksums on the stored data to prove to the client that the data is still there. The team is currently working hard on performance upgrades. On regular consumer hardware you can currently upload / download data at a rate of about 500 Mbps. The next release is expected to improve this significantly. Here's an introduction article which explains how Sia works with a bit more depth: https://support.sia.tech/article/dk91b0eibc-welcome-to-sia https://support.sia.tech/article/dk91b0eibc-welcome-to-sia My own product is a file sharing website: https://pixeldrain.com https://pixeldrain.com. It uses Sia to store large files because it's cheaper than conventional cloud storage. I plan to make it possible to download directly from Sia hosts as well so I can save on bandwidth costs too.
    - swyx 6y ago
      awesome :) i was able to upload a big file and immediately share it and view it in browser! very nice! what pdf viewer component did you use? i also like the pastebin functionality. im sure you hear this a lot but... has anyone done a heads up comparison with filecoin?
      - Fornax96 6y ago
        Thanks, glad you like it. I use Mozilla's pdf.js. It's super simple to implement, just load it in an iframe with the path to the PDF file in an URL parameter. Et voilà, a PDF viewer. Comparing with Filecoin is hard because there's not much information available about it. The rollout keeps getting delayed too. I know that the founder of Sia has criticized Filecoin's whitepaper a few times because it contains unsolved problems which could cause significant issues during the rollout of the network. Sia took a more conservative approach and worked out all the math before the development of the network started in 2015. Now, 5 years later, Sia has solved all the fundamental issues with the protocols and such and are working on upgrading the performance and building apps on top of Sia's core protocols. In terms of development Sia is about 3 years ahead of Filecoin.
Darkstryder 6y ago
Remember that the "cost per instruction" ought to be very different depending on a lot of other factors, including but not limited to: - how much data do you need to move to actually perform the computation - whether the computation performance is expected to be reliable or if best-effort is acceptable - whether there are confidentiality and accuracy requirements on the input and output of the computation. Most software engineering teams are not working at a granular enough level to properly describe which parts of their computations and data are expected to be reliable or not (in availability, confidentiality and integrity). However this can impact the cost per instruction of a computation by multiple orders of magnitude.
user5994461 6y ago
Then he got tracked down by the dorm and expelled, because him or his customers were running bitcoin miners. Turns out the dorm has to cover the electricity and that's not a supported use case for them or the dorm insurance.

akg_67 6y ago

> If only there were an Uber for unused cycles or storage... let everyone turn their unused capacity into mini AWSs with a common interface and safety and reliability guarantees. Funny, this was our idea with first startup 18 years ago, federation of unused storage and redistribution. There were no takers as no one wanted to contribute their unused storage but wanted others. It was much easier to centrally locate our own storage and allocate to users who required it.

Fornax96 6y ago

> If only there were an Uber for unused cycles or storage... let everyone turn their unused capacity into mini AWSs with a common interface and safety and reliability guarantees This is exactly what Sia.tech is building for storage. A competitive marketplace for storage providers where anyone can set up a host and start selling their spare storage space. It's not completely finished yet, but it's pretty close. A bunch of companies are already building products on top of it (including me)

swyx 6y ago
how much replication do you need to make this kind of thing reliable? since anyone can pull storage at any time. does that then make transactions super slow? any numbers you can put on this would be helpful. also, whats your product? (just curious)
- Fornax96 6y ago
  Sia uses reed-solomon encoding to spread files over 30 hosts with a redundancy of 3x. So Any 20 hosts can fail at the same time and the files would still be available. This does mean that you need to upload all your data 3 times. Sia also needs to monitor your uploaded files all the time to make sure the hosts behave. This means hosts periodically run checksums on the stored data to prove to the client that the data is still there. The team is currently working hard on performance upgrades. On regular consumer hardware you can currently upload / download data at a rate of about 500 Mbps. The next release is expected to improve this significantly. Here's an introduction article which explains how Sia works with a bit more depth: https://support.sia.tech/article/dk91b0eibc-welcome-to-sia https://support.sia.tech/article/dk91b0eibc-welcome-to-sia My own product is a file sharing website: https://pixeldrain.com https://pixeldrain.com. It uses Sia to store large files because it's cheaper than conventional cloud storage. I plan to make it possible to download directly from Sia hosts as well so I can save on bandwidth costs too.
  - swyx 6y ago
    awesome :) i was able to upload a big file and immediately share it and view it in browser! very nice! what pdf viewer component did you use? i also like the pastebin functionality. im sure you hear this a lot but... has anyone done a heads up comparison with filecoin?
    - Fornax96 6y ago
      Thanks, glad you like it. I use Mozilla's pdf.js. It's super simple to implement, just load it in an iframe with the path to the PDF file in an URL parameter. Et voilà, a PDF viewer. Comparing with Filecoin is hard because there's not much information available about it. The rollout keeps getting delayed too. I know that the founder of Sia has criticized Filecoin's whitepaper a few times because it contains unsolved problems which could cause significant issues during the rollout of the network. Sia took a more conservative approach and worked out all the math before the development of the network started in 2015. Now, 5 years later, Sia has solved all the fundamental issues with the protocols and such and are working on upgrading the performance and building apps on top of Sia's core protocols. In terms of development Sia is about 3 years ahead of Filecoin.

Darkstryder 6y ago

Remember that the "cost per instruction" ought to be very different depending on a lot of other factors, including but not limited to: - how much data do you need to move to actually perform the computation - whether the computation performance is expected to be reliable or if best-effort is acceptable - whether there are confidentiality and accuracy requirements on the input and output of the computation. Most software engineering teams are not working at a granular enough level to properly describe which parts of their computations and data are expected to be reliable or not (in availability, confidentiality and integrity). However this can impact the cost per instruction of a computation by multiple orders of magnitude.

user5994461 6y ago

Then he got tracked down by the dorm and expelled, because him or his customers were running bitcoin miners. Turns out the dorm has to cover the electricity and that's not a supported use case for them or the dorm insurance.