Oasis Labs: privacy-first high-performance cloud computing on blockchain
oasislabs.com
oasislabs.com
Some highlights from the article are below. Seems like a smart team tackling interesting problems, but as with most projects in this space, raising crazy amounts of money way too early.
1. Raised $45 million (!) in pre-sale financing.
2. 'Song says that her project has solved the scaling problem by separating execution from consensus.
“For each smart contract execution, we randomly select a subset of the computation nodes to form a computation committee, using a proof of stake mechanism. The computation committee executes the smart contract transaction,” Song wrote in an email exchange with TechCrunch. “The consensus committee then verifies the correctness of the computation results from the computation committee. We use different mathematical and cryptographic methods to enable efficient verification of the correctness of the computation results. Once the verification succeeds, the state transition is committed to the distributed ledger by the consensus committee.”
By having the computation committee working in parallel with the consensus committee only needing to verify the correctness of the computation creates an easier path to scalability.'
By that I mean, are they implementing sharding a different way, or are they going an alternative route?
who is that "we" who "selects" and what is the source of randomness (i.e. distributed verifiable randomness)? For example, in Satoshi PoW that PoW itself is such a verifiable source of randomness which thus does the "selection".
The blockchain space is often full of scams, but you can usually trust stuff backed by academic papers from established folks.
- What does blockchain have to do with HPC? What advantages does this give me versus current solutions?
- If I was concerned of the privacy of my data, why would I put it on an unproven, public, immutable ledger? We all know what can happen when even minor bugs rear their heads in these types of applications.
- Where does machine learning come into the equation?
- Why would I want to use this rather than AWS/GCE/etc.?
I guess really what I'm asking is, what problem is this solving? Just curious :)
Mind to provide a pointer? Generally new to Dawn's work, and I think many readers here have a similar background.
That took maybe 3 seconds to search. The amount of skepticism here is absurd.
If you list pub list, then I have no idea how to find proof of the fact.
Edit: Below are a bit ranty comments on research style. Please ignore it and provide pointers that show the person created a new research area.
And frankly, the changing of the research areas (security -> deep learning -> blockchain) are a typical symbol of smart people who are good at catching trendy research topics, but never achieved the true top-tier research results. To be specific, such people are absolutely smart and intelligent, but they have a pattern to always latch on so-called cutting-edge topics, and quickly gain high reputation. In the end, their fame and what they do usually does not well match each other.
Btw, I didn't mean to discredit but merely to get the data.
nope
Dawn is super smart so it's hard to bet against her.
Edit: Oh maybe they're using some ZK stuff now: "Our platform achieves scalability and integrity with its novel architecture and protocol design, without relying on any trusted hardware or central party. "
What makes you think they've moved away from SGX? (genuine question)
Edit: Specifically the part where they say they aren't using any trusted hardware. If Dawn et al have some sick zero knowledge proof breakthrough, that would be a big deal, but it's hard to know what they're up to :). I wish them all the best, designing trust networks of any kind is super hard.
Vague claims to solve the probably-unsolvable - Check.
> Privacy-preserving smart contracts
Heavy Buzzwords - Check
> privacy-preserving machine learning within smart contracts on our platform
Vague mention of ML - Check
My skepticism is at max here. This is awfully light on any kind of even vague detail and is super dense on meaningless buzzwords. They link out to their own previous research - which isn't by itself bad but isn't exactly trust enhancing either. Their staff seems to be all colleagues from previous research work.
Where do I sign up?
In the end cloud computing on the blockchain would make cloud computing overly complex with little to no visible benefit. Compute resources in reality are simple as hell, privacy is always first if that is your policy. But privacy comes from process and tech is just a tiny tool for it.
Frankly, this so far presents not a single hint of a usable product and reads like some people trying to cash out with questionable buzz.
Remember: scientific papers are usually a polar opposite to actual implementations.
Think Kubernetes as presented vs. actually running it.
I'm not sure how it got started, but it some sort of nonsensical pattern that developed.
If you’re from Oasis and you are reading this: please think of a better way to sell your product - unless your target market is ignorant business types who live for this stuff.
I hate to be so cynical and this teams background does seem solid but I feel the same way when I see this as when the Prince of Nigeria personally reaches out to me for a loan. With all the other failed crypto projects these announcements feel like spam at this point..
If you're right, then the thing to do is drop the snark and explain some of the "intricacies of the problems trying to be solved" instead of just vaguely alluding to them. Then we could learn something.
I think it's confusing to the public, who ultimately need to be confident in cryptocurrency as a whole if they're going to use it, when they find them asking, "wasn't this problem already solved by x?" every couple of months.