Comment by welshwelsh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by welshwelsh | Hacker News Reader

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One big use case is decentralized cloud computing. The advantage over centralized services is low prices due to market pressures.

For example, Filecoin lets you store data for $2.33 per TB per year. If you used S3 that would be $150. The Golem network let's you run compute jobs for $0.003 per CPU core per hour.

The only barrier here is software. There just aren't enough developers to build anything useful. There could be a user-friendly web service like the AWS console that enables normal developers to use this stuff, but nobody has built one yet. Golem could support GPU compute so that people can use it to train AI models cheaply, but they are short on devs so that feature is still in the backlog.

Give it time. Encrypted email has been possible since at least the 90s, but many hospitals still haven't adopted it and are using fax machines. Before people can adopt crypto, they first need to understand it, and that's not going to happen for a long time.

Both your Filecoin and Golem examples might be inexpensive but they have no sort of SLA for end users. They can also evaporate tomorrow taking your data and compute resources down with them. Both systems are only viable if the cost to run the systems is below the money made from running it. If the whole reason users pick Filecoin is the price, they'll abandon the platform if the price ever increases (to make running nodes profitable) which creates a feedback loop that will collapse the network.

While Amazon might cost more, they're unlikely to go out of business tomorrow or in ten years. They also have an SLA and predictable prices and predictable capacity. if you build something on AWS that works today it'll likely work tomorrow.

It's hard to predict how these sorts of systems play out until they start to scale up. I don't know much about these but I can imagine a functioning incentive structure that gives hardware owners the freedom to schedule downtime with reasonable notice while penalizing them for going down without notice. A decentralized cloud could have big advantages over centralized data centers; lower costs for highly diffuse "voluntary" maintenance labor, fewer single points of failure, etc.

It might not work at all, but it's not necessarily a Ponzi scheme (which isn't even really an accurate way to describe NFTs, which are a mostly worthless asset bubble; ponzi schemes require lying about transactions having taken place, not lying about the future value of an asset)

No offense but this stance reminds me of telco people deriding the "best effort" Internet for serious commercial applications 20 years ago. A professor of mine was adamant VoIP would never take off because it just didn't work reliably.

VoIP didn't take off until it worked reliably. The same is true for "best effort" IP for various applications. Untold amount of person hours and investment have gone into making IP networks good (MPLS etc). Your professor's assertion about VoIP wasn't necessarily wrong, it just wasn't a complete statement.

The pure IP routing networks of 20 years ago were not full capable of making VoIP work well enough for general usage.

It's so strange to me that what you describe genuinely sounds useful and fairly straightforward, millions of person hours have gone into "web3" and it's all grifter stuff translating one shit coin into another and giving cheap credit or farming coins. Yet, something as obviously useful as you describe doesn't take off. Where does the discrepancy come from?

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