They talk about smart contracts[1] but there is a huge difference between a single host executing an app and having the whole Ethereum network reaching consensus on the execution of a smart contract.
Edit: Sorry, this reply sounds a bit harsh / dismissive of Ethereum. That's not what I intended. After eight years in blockchain I just get frustrated when people assume that just because they don't know who they are actually trusting that that means the system is "trustless". It's not, no consensus system is.
In fact, I would argue that any system where people aren't aware of who they are trusting is going to be worse in the long run because nobody is paying attention to the governance of that system.
Then there's the risk to the host, which could be side channeled in the best case scenario where isolation is sound, and completely owned in the worst case where containers are... containers.
Lofty idea but extremely difficult without making it a tiny domain. There are multiple billion-dollar crypto projects aiming to do trusted distributed compute and so far none have shown anything but the most basic use cases.
> Codius billing is resource-driven, you should see a very strong correlation between the load on your servers (and the number of servers required) and the amount of money earned. from https://codius.org/docs/running-a-host/why
Codius incentive system is weird to me. I am incentivized to be a "host" and run a codius node so I can make money when people use it, and I am incentivized in maximizing my profit by faking the amount of resources used by the apps I host.
I am not incentivized to be a "guest": how can I verify that the billing is correct? How can I verify that the host is running my application correctly?
I'd love to see somebody make a browser extension that does just that!
There are a bunch of important ecosystem pieces missing from Codius still. Keep in mind that this current release of it just came out a month ago.
If I had a magic wand, the next things I'd introduce would be a Codius namespace system (have the design in my head but haven't had time to write it down) which can securely resolve an identifier like "alicescontract" to a JSON document like {"hosts":[...],"manifestHash":"...","hostPublicKeys":[...],"threshold":5}
(For the blockchain geeks in the audience: Note you wouldn't need consensus for that because names are not fungible, so some weak form of consistency would be fine.)
Then I would add a feature to Codiusd which allows a host to look up that identifier and then depending on the JSON become a proxy to that contract. What that would mean is that you could go to alicescontract.[any-codius-host] in your browser and that host would do the work of collecting responses from all the other hosts and respond once it has `threshold` matching replies. You could use whatever host you trust most as your proxy or, for the super-paranoid, you could run your own host and use that.
There are further optimizations of course but I'll stop here.