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Comment by corethree | Hacker News Reader

I think the term "distributed computing" used in the article has a different meaning then "distributed systems" which you are referring too.

Think of it as peer to peer compute. Like bit torrent but instead of data transfer, you compute things.

Crypto is the latest iteration of this. Certainly isn't main stream

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I understand completely what the author wants distributed computing to mean. I'm also very familiar with the scene he's talking about. In my time I ran Seti@Home, Folding@Home<- (? I think that's what the thing was called), the great internet mersenne prime search etc. I've even done the crowd-sourced distributed computing thing in Eve Online.

However this kind of crowd-sourced computing is a tiny subset of distributed computing. Unless you think (for example) that the author has got it right, and me and Leslie Lamport have got the definition wrong[1].

[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3335772.3335934

> Folding@Home<- (? I think that's what the thing was called)

If only the article could help you out in finding its name.

Since it's got completely the wrong end of the stick about distributed computing I'm not sure it can be trusted on names of things in general.

That being said, I know the article mentions Folding@Home and the It Project. I know I ran a distributed protein folding thing back in about 2002. I'm not sure it was "Folding@Home" though. That's not something the article can help me with.

We are in agreement. The current state of the art iteration of that "scene" is now in cryptocurrencies.

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