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This is my dream for the blockchain: a massive global computer that no one controls. I can run my own services on it, using cryptography to maintain privacy whe

by rcme 3y ago

This is my dream for the blockchain: a massive global computer that no one controls. I can run my own services on it, using cryptography to maintain privacy when necessary, and I don’t need to worry about all the annoyances of self hosting. Everything will “just work” in perpetuity.

zabzonk 3y ago
> a massive global computer that no one controls who is paying for this?
- rollcat 3y ago
  I know it's meant as a rhetorical question, but I think it deserves an answer for everyone around here who still doesn't get it: you and I, and every other person on Earth, no matter whether they are a blockchain enthusiast, or actively interested in its demise. Proof of waste is a colossal externalised cost; you think you're trading "your" electricity and dollars for "your" imaginary money; but the fact is, you're wasting my planet. Cryptocurrencies have already caused enormous harm, and even as the fad is waning, it couldn't die soon enough.
  - rcme 3y ago
    Might want to read about proof of stake.
    - rollcat 3y ago
      Ends do not justify the means. PoS is blood stained.
      - rcme 3y ago
        How so?
        rollcat 3y ago
        How did you build the stake?
        rcme 3y ago
        You buy it?
        rollcat 3y ago
        See my original comment.
        rcme 3y ago
        And if a particular blockchain only ever had proof of stake? Or is your argument that all money has immoral origins?
        rollcat 3y ago
        Sure, name one.
        rcme 3y ago
        Solana
        rollcat 3y ago
        Brilliant, now consider the context of TFA. Is it any good as a platform for self-hosting applications for personal use? From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solana_(blockchain_platform) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solana_(blockchain_platform) > Solana was launched in 2020 by Solana Labs [...]. It was founded by a single, corporate entity, that continues to govern the project's direction... > The blockchain has experienced several major outages, was subjected to a hack, and a class action lawsuit was filed against the platform. ...was subject to major disturbances... > Solana's total market cap was US$55 billion in January 2022. However, by the end of 2022, this had fallen to around $3 billion following the bankruptcy of FTX. ...and meanwhile lost 95% of its value following the bankruptcy of an unrelated party. Read the entire comment thread under the original article. Try to comprehend the actual issues that people are struggling with. Explain how is Solana going to make self-hosting less painful. Why do we choose to self-host? Privacy, simplicity, ownership/sovereignty, cost? What issues are we struggling with, that better technology could ease? Maintenance burden, proper backups? So what value does it bring to self-hosters? Can I run my calendar and contacts sync on top of Solana? What happens if my private key gets leaked - everyone gets to know when exactly I went to the cinema with my partner? Privacy - bust. What about email? I need to point the MX records at something the rest of the Internet knows how to connect to - what's the point of a decentralised datastore if I still have to mess around with hosting a publicly reachable node? Simplicity - bust. What happens when the network experiences another outage, lawsuit, or market crash? Ownership and sovereignty - bust. What about storage - I currently need ca 6TB for personal backups - am I going to upload it all to the blockchain? What's the cost of storing 6TB on-chain, just once? Cost - bust. What's the story with maintenance? Assuming there's some magical fairy dust that makes most of the fundamental problems go away, is running your personal infra on top of a cryptocurrency-backed blockchain going to make you sleep better at night? What's stopping someone from mounting a 50%+1 attack the next time the coin loses 95% of its value overnight? Is there a single thing that I use a home server / VPS for today, that Solana can do better?
- rcme 3y ago
  The users. Each transaction in a blockchain has associated fees. Those performing the transactions have to pay the fees. It’s not dissimilar to how you pay for EC2 instance time or AWS lambda invocations.
dale_glass 3y ago
No such thing. First, blockchains are terribly limited capability-wise. You'd be much better off with a raspberry pi. Second, there's no such thing as "no one controls". There's always control. Somebody is at the top of every blockchain in existence, and their interest probably doesn't align with your. Eg, Ethereum being expensive is a problem for the users, but the people who get paid the fee love it, so there's no reason for them to be interested in decreasing costs.
- rcme 3y ago
  This is like the “horses are faster than horseless carriages” argument.
  - dale_glass 3y ago
    How so?
    - rcme 3y ago
      > First, blockchains are terribly limited capability-wise. You'd be much better off with a raspberry pi. Blockchain = horseless carriage Raspberry Pi = horse A Raspberry Pi has a number of disadvantages compared to a blockchain. It needs power. It needs an internet connection. It degrades over time. The advantage of the Raspberry Pi is, as you mention, the clock speed (so to speak) is faster / cheaper. But that doesn’t mean it will always be so. Someday, I believe blockchains will be more efficient and have fewer downsides than a Raspberry Pi.
      - dale_glass 3y ago
        Um, what do you think a blockchain runs on? The hardware is still there, the only difference is in what software is used on top. Blockchains need power and internet, and run on hardware that needs maintenance and degrades over time. > Someday, I believe blockchains will be more efficient and have fewer downsides than a Raspberry Pi. A blockchain can never be more efficient than a computer because: 1. It runs on top of computers, and does extra stuff. Extra stuff inherently has costs. 2. Blockchains are based on very low trust systems and use trickery to overcome it. This has enormous costs.
em-bee 3y ago
https://internetcomputer.org/ https://internetcomputer.org/ seems to promise that. but i still can't wrap my head around how that is supposed to work. does it turn every participating computer into a remotely accessible CPU so your code will run on random machines somewhere in the world?
- rcme 3y ago
  You should try writing a smart contract and it will become clear how it works.
  - em-bee 3y ago
    as i understand it, a smart contract is stored on the chain and is executed on your computer whenever you make a transaction that triggers the contract, or something like that. so the whole thing happens on my or your computer and not somewhere else. when i host a website and a user access that website, then it causes the host server to compute whatever the user asks for. if i put my "website" on the chain as an app (a dapp?) then i guess it is downloaded to the users computer and executed there. how can the blockchain help me access computing resources on third party services? i suppose that devices could register themselves on the blockchain as having computing resources available, and an application can then access those resources. am i missing anything?
    - dale_glass 3y ago
      It's much, much worse than that. Smart contracts execute on the blockchain, which means they execute on thousands or millions of computers in lockstep. Extra hardware doesn't add capability, it adds redundancy. Since the blockchain is public there are things you can get out of it for free by looking at the public state, but actually performing a computation that has some sort of world-wide visible effect involves executing that code on every node at once, so it's amazingly costly.
      - em-bee 3y ago
        a cursory search suggests that this is not the case and that smart contracts only run on a single node. the result of the smart contract that creates another blockchain entry causes the calculation of the new entry on every node that is mining. internet computer should be using the blockchain to manage computing resources that themselves also don't run on the blockchain.

by rcme 3y ago

zabzonk 3y ago

> a massive global computer that no one controls who is paying for this?

rollcat 3y ago
I know it's meant as a rhetorical question, but I think it deserves an answer for everyone around here who still doesn't get it: you and I, and every other person on Earth, no matter whether they are a blockchain enthusiast, or actively interested in its demise. Proof of waste is a colossal externalised cost; you think you're trading "your" electricity and dollars for "your" imaginary money; but the fact is, you're wasting my planet. Cryptocurrencies have already caused enormous harm, and even as the fad is waning, it couldn't die soon enough.
- rcme 3y ago
  Might want to read about proof of stake.
  - rollcat 3y ago
    Ends do not justify the means. PoS is blood stained.
    - rcme 3y ago
      How so?
      - rollcat 3y ago
        How did you build the stake?
        rcme 3y ago
        You buy it?
        rollcat 3y ago
        See my original comment.
        rcme 3y ago
        And if a particular blockchain only ever had proof of stake? Or is your argument that all money has immoral origins?
        rollcat 3y ago
        Sure, name one.
        rcme 3y ago
        Solana
        rollcat 3y ago
        Brilliant, now consider the context of TFA. Is it any good as a platform for self-hosting applications for personal use? From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solana_(blockchain_platform) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solana_(blockchain_platform) > Solana was launched in 2020 by Solana Labs [...]. It was founded by a single, corporate entity, that continues to govern the project's direction... > The blockchain has experienced several major outages, was subjected to a hack, and a class action lawsuit was filed against the platform. ...was subject to major disturbances... > Solana's total market cap was US$55 billion in January 2022. However, by the end of 2022, this had fallen to around $3 billion following the bankruptcy of FTX. ...and meanwhile lost 95% of its value following the bankruptcy of an unrelated party. Read the entire comment thread under the original article. Try to comprehend the actual issues that people are struggling with. Explain how is Solana going to make self-hosting less painful. Why do we choose to self-host? Privacy, simplicity, ownership/sovereignty, cost? What issues are we struggling with, that better technology could ease? Maintenance burden, proper backups? So what value does it bring to self-hosters? Can I run my calendar and contacts sync on top of Solana? What happens if my private key gets leaked - everyone gets to know when exactly I went to the cinema with my partner? Privacy - bust. What about email? I need to point the MX records at something the rest of the Internet knows how to connect to - what's the point of a decentralised datastore if I still have to mess around with hosting a publicly reachable node? Simplicity - bust. What happens when the network experiences another outage, lawsuit, or market crash? Ownership and sovereignty - bust. What about storage - I currently need ca 6TB for personal backups - am I going to upload it all to the blockchain? What's the cost of storing 6TB on-chain, just once? Cost - bust. What's the story with maintenance? Assuming there's some magical fairy dust that makes most of the fundamental problems go away, is running your personal infra on top of a cryptocurrency-backed blockchain going to make you sleep better at night? What's stopping someone from mounting a 50%+1 attack the next time the coin loses 95% of its value overnight? Is there a single thing that I use a home server / VPS for today, that Solana can do better?
rcme 3y ago
The users. Each transaction in a blockchain has associated fees. Those performing the transactions have to pay the fees. It’s not dissimilar to how you pay for EC2 instance time or AWS lambda invocations.

dale_glass 3y ago

No such thing. First, blockchains are terribly limited capability-wise. You'd be much better off with a raspberry pi. Second, there's no such thing as "no one controls". There's always control. Somebody is at the top of every blockchain in existence, and their interest probably doesn't align with your. Eg, Ethereum being expensive is a problem for the users, but the people who get paid the fee love it, so there's no reason for them to be interested in decreasing costs.

rcme 3y ago
This is like the “horses are faster than horseless carriages” argument.
- dale_glass 3y ago
  How so?
  - rcme 3y ago
    > First, blockchains are terribly limited capability-wise. You'd be much better off with a raspberry pi. Blockchain = horseless carriage Raspberry Pi = horse A Raspberry Pi has a number of disadvantages compared to a blockchain. It needs power. It needs an internet connection. It degrades over time. The advantage of the Raspberry Pi is, as you mention, the clock speed (so to speak) is faster / cheaper. But that doesn’t mean it will always be so. Someday, I believe blockchains will be more efficient and have fewer downsides than a Raspberry Pi.
    - dale_glass 3y ago
      Um, what do you think a blockchain runs on? The hardware is still there, the only difference is in what software is used on top. Blockchains need power and internet, and run on hardware that needs maintenance and degrades over time. > Someday, I believe blockchains will be more efficient and have fewer downsides than a Raspberry Pi. A blockchain can never be more efficient than a computer because: 1. It runs on top of computers, and does extra stuff. Extra stuff inherently has costs. 2. Blockchains are based on very low trust systems and use trickery to overcome it. This has enormous costs.

em-bee 3y ago

https://internetcomputer.org/ https://internetcomputer.org/ seems to promise that. but i still can't wrap my head around how that is supposed to work. does it turn every participating computer into a remotely accessible CPU so your code will run on random machines somewhere in the world?

rcme 3y ago
You should try writing a smart contract and it will become clear how it works.
- em-bee 3y ago
  as i understand it, a smart contract is stored on the chain and is executed on your computer whenever you make a transaction that triggers the contract, or something like that. so the whole thing happens on my or your computer and not somewhere else. when i host a website and a user access that website, then it causes the host server to compute whatever the user asks for. if i put my "website" on the chain as an app (a dapp?) then i guess it is downloaded to the users computer and executed there. how can the blockchain help me access computing resources on third party services? i suppose that devices could register themselves on the blockchain as having computing resources available, and an application can then access those resources. am i missing anything?
  - dale_glass 3y ago
    It's much, much worse than that. Smart contracts execute on the blockchain, which means they execute on thousands or millions of computers in lockstep. Extra hardware doesn't add capability, it adds redundancy. Since the blockchain is public there are things you can get out of it for free by looking at the public state, but actually performing a computation that has some sort of world-wide visible effect involves executing that code on every node at once, so it's amazingly costly.
    - em-bee 3y ago
      a cursory search suggests that this is not the case and that smart contracts only run on a single node. the result of the smart contract that creates another blockchain entry causes the calculation of the new entry on every node that is mining. internet computer should be using the blockchain to manage computing resources that themselves also don't run on the blockchain.