6 ms·

It's a shame that every decentralized projects needs to be compared to cryptocoins now

by seydor 3y ago

AnthonyMouse 3y ago
It's not the comparison, it's that it's one of the things cryptocoins are actually useful for: You have people all over the world with GPUs, some of them want to pay the others for use of them, but their countries use different payment networks or the developers want to be able to automate it without forcing the users to all sign up with the same mercurial payment processor who could screw over any of the users at random.
- littlestymaar 3y ago
  > it's that it's one of the things cryptocoins are actually useful for It's what their proponent claim that they are useful for, yet there's no single instance of a successful blockchain project actually achieving this kind of resource-sharing goal. > You have people all over the world with GPUs, some of them want to pay the others for use of them The gigantic success of bitTorrent shows that humans as a group don't need to have monetary incentives to share their spare hardware. In fact, it's likely that trying to add money into the mix will just break the system instead of improving it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overjustification_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overjustification_effect
  - joshuaissac 3y ago
    > It's what their proponent claim that they are useful for, yet there's no single instance of a successful blockchain project actually achieving this kind of resource-sharing goal Sia and Filecoin already work in this way to for people to share storage. > In fact, it's likely that trying to add money into the mix will just break the system instead of improving it This depends on the amount of money people are willing to pay for processing power. Volunteer contributions would be reduced, but the paid contributions could make up for it if the people who want to train their model pay enough to attract more people into the system and if those people can compete with conventional commercial offerings.
    - littlestymaar 3y ago
      > Sia and Filecoin already work in this way to for people to share storage. You'll notice that I said “successful” in my original sentence. > This depends on the amount of money people are willing to pay for processing power. Volunteer contributions would be reduced, but the paid contributions could make up for it if the people who want to train their model pay enough to attract more people into the system and if those people can compete with conventional commercial offerings. That's a very big “if”: the distributed nature of things is always going to make it more expensive than a traditional solution, especially if you need byzantine fault tolerance (which you need as soon as their monetary value to earn by cheating), the same way that a blockchain is orders of magnitude more expensive than a cloud KV store database, and by pushing the volunteers away you'll end up with a small pool of for-profit actors and these actors themselves likely would be better off if they provided their own cloud offering. For instance filecoin only has a low thousands nodes, the average filecoin node has something like 10PB of available storage, the top three having 90PB each and making barely $1600 a day, which is $6.4 a year per TB.
      - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
        > the distributed nature of things is always going to make it more expensive than a traditional solution > especially if you need byzantine fault tolerance For storage this can be done much more efficiently with erasure coding and hashing. For compute, reputation. A node with no reputation has all of its output verified (and so gets paid less). A node with a good reputation history only gets random spot checks, but fail a spot check and you're back to getting paid less, maybe even retroactively. > For instance filecoin only has a low thousands nodes, the average filecoin node has something like 10PB of available storage, the top three having 90PB each and making barely $1600 a day, which is $6.4 a year per TB. So it costs too much and it's too cheap? The nature of something like this is low barrier to entry, so the high competitiveness is going to result in low prices. That's kind of the idea. The result is going to be two main categories of supplier. One, huge nodes with economies of scale. These might take lower prices than some retail cloud offering, but they also don't have customer acquisition or support costs. Two, nodes with "free" storage, e.g. you built a media center which is already on 24/7 but still has a few TB of free space, so until you get around to using it yourself you'll take the however much in free money. In both cases because they have lower costs than competing providers. It sounds like the network is providing several exabytes of storage for an extremely competitive price. How is that not a success?

It's a shame that every decentralized projects needs to be compared to cryptocoins now

by seydor 3y ago

It's a shame that every decentralized projects needs to be compared to cryptocoins now

It's not the comparison, it's that it's one of the things cryptocoins are actually useful for: You have people all over the world with GPUs, some of them want to pay the others for use of them, but their countries use different payment networks or the developers want to be able to automate it without forcing the users to all sign up with the same mercurial payment processor who could screw over any of the users at random.

littlestymaar 3y ago
> it's that it's one of the things cryptocoins are actually useful for It's what their proponent claim that they are useful for, yet there's no single instance of a successful blockchain project actually achieving this kind of resource-sharing goal. > You have people all over the world with GPUs, some of them want to pay the others for use of them The gigantic success of bitTorrent shows that humans as a group don't need to have monetary incentives to share their spare hardware. In fact, it's likely that trying to add money into the mix will just break the system instead of improving it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overjustification_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overjustification_effect
- joshuaissac 3y ago
  > It's what their proponent claim that they are useful for, yet there's no single instance of a successful blockchain project actually achieving this kind of resource-sharing goal Sia and Filecoin already work in this way to for people to share storage. > In fact, it's likely that trying to add money into the mix will just break the system instead of improving it This depends on the amount of money people are willing to pay for processing power. Volunteer contributions would be reduced, but the paid contributions could make up for it if the people who want to train their model pay enough to attract more people into the system and if those people can compete with conventional commercial offerings.
  - littlestymaar 3y ago
    > Sia and Filecoin already work in this way to for people to share storage. You'll notice that I said “successful” in my original sentence. > This depends on the amount of money people are willing to pay for processing power. Volunteer contributions would be reduced, but the paid contributions could make up for it if the people who want to train their model pay enough to attract more people into the system and if those people can compete with conventional commercial offerings. That's a very big “if”: the distributed nature of things is always going to make it more expensive than a traditional solution, especially if you need byzantine fault tolerance (which you need as soon as their monetary value to earn by cheating), the same way that a blockchain is orders of magnitude more expensive than a cloud KV store database, and by pushing the volunteers away you'll end up with a small pool of for-profit actors and these actors themselves likely would be better off if they provided their own cloud offering. For instance filecoin only has a low thousands nodes, the average filecoin node has something like 10PB of available storage, the top three having 90PB each and making barely $1600 a day, which is $6.4 a year per TB.
    - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
      > the distributed nature of things is always going to make it more expensive than a traditional solution > especially if you need byzantine fault tolerance For storage this can be done much more efficiently with erasure coding and hashing. For compute, reputation. A node with no reputation has all of its output verified (and so gets paid less). A node with a good reputation history only gets random spot checks, but fail a spot check and you're back to getting paid less, maybe even retroactively. > For instance filecoin only has a low thousands nodes, the average filecoin node has something like 10PB of available storage, the top three having 90PB each and making barely $1600 a day, which is $6.4 a year per TB. So it costs too much and it's too cheap? The nature of something like this is low barrier to entry, so the high competitiveness is going to result in low prices. That's kind of the idea. The result is going to be two main categories of supplier. One, huge nodes with economies of scale. These might take lower prices than some retail cloud offering, but they also don't have customer acquisition or support costs. Two, nodes with "free" storage, e.g. you built a media center which is already on 24/7 but still has a few TB of free space, so until you get around to using it yourself you'll take the however much in free money. In both cases because they have lower costs than competing providers. It sounds like the network is providing several exabytes of storage for an extremely competitive price. How is that not a success?