3 ms·

> but my mind grimace at the abomination Why would that be an abomination? It's a perfect use-case. Like you noticed people need incentives to volunteer their

> but my mind grimace at the abomination Why would that be an abomination? It's a perfect use-case. Like you noticed people need incentives to volunteer their hardware. If you hate crypto because it's crypto you can just use fiat instead.

komali2 3y ago
> Like you noticed people need incentives to volunteer their hardware. I wonder if this is because "volunteer your hardware" projects sometimes involve someone making else money, and if someone else is making money but not you, why should you donate your hardware? For the truly libre "hardware donation" projects, they seem to be doing ok without financial incentivization. What immediately comes to mind is the petabytes of data flying around on peer to peer systems through torrenting. I know people that spend thousands of dollars a year on upkeep and upgrades for what are essentially super seedbox homelabs (I'm one of them too :P ) There's also communities like soulseek where people keep TBs of music up, often seeking out rare tracks to make available to the community for free. There's folding@home and seti@home, and I'm sure other similar projects I haven't heard of, where people donate cycles just for the common good. folding@home is a great example because we can directly compare the people that are "incentivized" to participate with bananocoin, a cryptocurrency rewarded based on work cycles in folding@home. You can see all bananocoin miners here under the banano.cc team: https://stats.foldingathome.org/ https://stats.foldingathome.org/ That team is in first place for work completed, however are only just surpassing the linus tech tips team, and not to mention compared to a bunch of other teams (and private "donors") they're a very small % of work completed for folding@home So therefore I disagree that people "need" incentives, there just needs to be no, erm, disincentives, if that's a word.
- shinryuu 3y ago
  > I know people that spend thousands of dollars a year on upkeep and upgrades for what are essentially super seedbox homelabs And then you end with "there just needs to be no disincentives". If anything spending thousands of dollars a year on upkeep should be a disincentive for most people. You are not most people though, since you do it voluntarily.
  - komali2 3y ago
    I'm a maniac though. I used to run my stack just fine off a raspberri pi with a USB harddrive plugged in. Actually, before that, I used to run it off an old macbook. Do we need it to be where everyone hosts a node? I just had this conversation with a friend yesterday actually. We were in disagreement about the accessibility of self hosting and federation. He was of the opinion that we should push LLMs to where anyone can type "I want to host a video hosting platform" and chatgpt.exe will find and install jellyfin on their computer and set up a cloudflare tunnel, or whatever. I'm more of the opinion that we should increase the quality of documentation until the one person just weird and nerdy enough out of a group of 20 will be able to deploy things on leftover hardware, and share with their friends. What do you think?
    - shinryuu 3y ago
      In terms of accessibility I don't think it would be bad per se if chatgpt.exe would be able to help you with that. Though both of us know that there is maintenance involved and once something catch fire (which will happen at some point), you are kind of helpless. Something like pikapods.com certainly helps with accessibility, even if it isn't self-hosting per se. But all of that doesn't have little to do with incentives or disincentives. Even with very high accessibility there are disincentives to self-host. It will cost time and money in some way. For some people the intrinsic motivation will override those disincentives. But I think for the majority of people there will still not be enough motivation to do it. There are more important things to do for them.
      - komali2 3y ago
        > There are more important things to do for them. Well yes, because right now society disincentivizes people from ever spending their time from anything that doesn't earn them at least a little bit of money. Kind of to my earlier point that "FOSS" projects with a monetization angle dicincentivizes people to contribute their time, to make someone else money. Well, except for the fact that it's almost a requirement for people in certain geographies to have FOSS commits on their portfolio, due to economic disparity. Yay free labor pool. Should we actually leverage our technology to share the bounty of post-scarcity we could have today, don't you think people would spend more time on passion projects?
bawolff 3y ago
I mean, how do you verify nodes are being honest and not just sending fake data for the free crypto (like what happened with seti@home and there wasn't even money involved) Not to mention, where is the value of this coin going to come from? Will people pay to use this search engine? That seems unlikely. It doesn't sound like the perfect use case to me.
- px43 3y ago
  By ignoring cryptocurrencies, you've missed out on over 10 years of progress in this space. We have things like zero knowledge notaries and data availability sampling proofs. Actively Validated Services are also a thing. Service providers stake some asset, and interested parties can challenge them at certain intervals to ensure that they are properly performing their duties. Through the magic of Merkel Trees, and soon Verkel Trees (basically Merkel tress, but using vector commitments for super fast proofs) challengers can demand that that service providers generate a proof that some data they hold matches some criteria. The nice thing about it is that because it's a zero knowledge proof, the challenger doesn't even need to know what that data is, and what they get back is a succinct proof that they can check very quickly, basically like checking an md5 some for execution correctness. It's cool shit, you should really look into it.
- worksonmine 3y ago
  That's exactly why blockchain is a good choice. You verify that whatever X sends matches what Y and Z would send before any reward is received. Based on the shared index every query should return the same results, kids stuff really. The monetization is a nut to crack yes, but Kagi works as a paywalled search engine. Otherwise just serve ads like all the rest already do? Tried and proven model, and in this solution they could be very transparent as there's no corporation behind trying to dupe the users for clicks to maximize profits. I even see the possibility for a hybrid model, don't like ads? Pay for the compute with your own coins. The value comes from the network, trust and use-case. It doesn't have to be a new coin.
- numpad0 3y ago
  Agreed; feels to me that people here is underestimating malice on the Internet. Simple crypto-based search credit system will be overtaken with fake queries and fake data. I'm not entirely confident that crypto-like reward mechanisms for distributed search is fundamentally flawed and unusable, but both the problem and solution needs to be refined a bit more.

komali2 3y ago

> Like you noticed people need incentives to volunteer their hardware. I wonder if this is because "volunteer your hardware" projects sometimes involve someone making else money, and if someone else is making money but not you, why should you donate your hardware? For the truly libre "hardware donation" projects, they seem to be doing ok without financial incentivization. What immediately comes to mind is the petabytes of data flying around on peer to peer systems through torrenting. I know people that spend thousands of dollars a year on upkeep and upgrades for what are essentially super seedbox homelabs (I'm one of them too :P ) There's also communities like soulseek where people keep TBs of music up, often seeking out rare tracks to make available to the community for free. There's folding@home and seti@home, and I'm sure other similar projects I haven't heard of, where people donate cycles just for the common good. folding@home is a great example because we can directly compare the people that are "incentivized" to participate with bananocoin, a cryptocurrency rewarded based on work cycles in folding@home. You can see all bananocoin miners here under the banano.cc team: https://stats.foldingathome.org/ https://stats.foldingathome.org/ That team is in first place for work completed, however are only just surpassing the linus tech tips team, and not to mention compared to a bunch of other teams (and private "donors") they're a very small % of work completed for folding@home So therefore I disagree that people "need" incentives, there just needs to be no, erm, disincentives, if that's a word.

shinryuu 3y ago
> I know people that spend thousands of dollars a year on upkeep and upgrades for what are essentially super seedbox homelabs And then you end with "there just needs to be no disincentives". If anything spending thousands of dollars a year on upkeep should be a disincentive for most people. You are not most people though, since you do it voluntarily.
- komali2 3y ago
  I'm a maniac though. I used to run my stack just fine off a raspberri pi with a USB harddrive plugged in. Actually, before that, I used to run it off an old macbook. Do we need it to be where everyone hosts a node? I just had this conversation with a friend yesterday actually. We were in disagreement about the accessibility of self hosting and federation. He was of the opinion that we should push LLMs to where anyone can type "I want to host a video hosting platform" and chatgpt.exe will find and install jellyfin on their computer and set up a cloudflare tunnel, or whatever. I'm more of the opinion that we should increase the quality of documentation until the one person just weird and nerdy enough out of a group of 20 will be able to deploy things on leftover hardware, and share with their friends. What do you think?
  - shinryuu 3y ago
    In terms of accessibility I don't think it would be bad per se if chatgpt.exe would be able to help you with that. Though both of us know that there is maintenance involved and once something catch fire (which will happen at some point), you are kind of helpless. Something like pikapods.com certainly helps with accessibility, even if it isn't self-hosting per se. But all of that doesn't have little to do with incentives or disincentives. Even with very high accessibility there are disincentives to self-host. It will cost time and money in some way. For some people the intrinsic motivation will override those disincentives. But I think for the majority of people there will still not be enough motivation to do it. There are more important things to do for them.
    - komali2 3y ago
      > There are more important things to do for them. Well yes, because right now society disincentivizes people from ever spending their time from anything that doesn't earn them at least a little bit of money. Kind of to my earlier point that "FOSS" projects with a monetization angle dicincentivizes people to contribute their time, to make someone else money. Well, except for the fact that it's almost a requirement for people in certain geographies to have FOSS commits on their portfolio, due to economic disparity. Yay free labor pool. Should we actually leverage our technology to share the bounty of post-scarcity we could have today, don't you think people would spend more time on passion projects?

bawolff 3y ago

I mean, how do you verify nodes are being honest and not just sending fake data for the free crypto (like what happened with seti@home and there wasn't even money involved) Not to mention, where is the value of this coin going to come from? Will people pay to use this search engine? That seems unlikely. It doesn't sound like the perfect use case to me.

px43 3y ago
By ignoring cryptocurrencies, you've missed out on over 10 years of progress in this space. We have things like zero knowledge notaries and data availability sampling proofs. Actively Validated Services are also a thing. Service providers stake some asset, and interested parties can challenge them at certain intervals to ensure that they are properly performing their duties. Through the magic of Merkel Trees, and soon Verkel Trees (basically Merkel tress, but using vector commitments for super fast proofs) challengers can demand that that service providers generate a proof that some data they hold matches some criteria. The nice thing about it is that because it's a zero knowledge proof, the challenger doesn't even need to know what that data is, and what they get back is a succinct proof that they can check very quickly, basically like checking an md5 some for execution correctness. It's cool shit, you should really look into it.
worksonmine 3y ago
That's exactly why blockchain is a good choice. You verify that whatever X sends matches what Y and Z would send before any reward is received. Based on the shared index every query should return the same results, kids stuff really. The monetization is a nut to crack yes, but Kagi works as a paywalled search engine. Otherwise just serve ads like all the rest already do? Tried and proven model, and in this solution they could be very transparent as there's no corporation behind trying to dupe the users for clicks to maximize profits. I even see the possibility for a hybrid model, don't like ads? Pay for the compute with your own coins. The value comes from the network, trust and use-case. It doesn't have to be a new coin.
numpad0 3y ago
Agreed; feels to me that people here is underestimating malice on the Internet. Simple crypto-based search credit system will be overtaken with fake queries and fake data. I'm not entirely confident that crypto-like reward mechanisms for distributed search is fundamentally flawed and unusable, but both the problem and solution needs to be refined a bit more.