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Comment by digdugdirk | Hacker News Reader

Question for everyone - I've long wondered if it would be possible to use WASM to create a p2p "cloud" to reduce reliance on datacenters?

My thought would be to encrypt all data packets prior to shuffling them into the network, and have some sort of incentive for people to keep their devices running on the network to enhance reliability - probably with a blockchain of sorts that serves as the main "map" of content in the network.

The dream goal would be to create a digital "data cooperative" that enables opt-in selling of your data/usage habits, with a default setting of total privacy. Ideally this would be backed by the blockchain to close the loop on the incentive for usage.

Is there already something like this that I'm not aware of? Are there any areas of research I should look into?

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I believe this is what the Spritely Institute (https://spritely.institute/) is working on with Spritely Goblins (distributed computing using object capabilities) and Hoot (Scheme to wasm compiler).

yes it's certainly possible. i don't know if it exists but there are many things like it. not exactly what you describe, but many blockchains use wasm as the contract execution runtime. also, it kind of sounds like filecoin but with compute. i'm sure "protocol labs" has a project close to what you are talking about.

edit: the hard part to note is probably the "trust" part. might be trickier to solve than just giving incentives.

Thanks for putting me on to Protocol Labs! It's a wealth of super cool projects.

Protocol Labs here — are you familiar with Fluence or Bacalhau projects? Those might be good starting points.

Thank you! So glad you responded, Fluence seems to be very much along the lines of what I'm thinking.

Is there a good entry point to understanding the project that you can recommend? The website is drenched in crypto-speak, and I'm very much outside of that community. Just looking for an overview/white paper to be able to get my bearings before digging deeper.

The new freenet has some interesting ideas related to this in the form of "contracts" and "delegates", which are essentially distributed WASM programs with their own memory. It sounds a lot like what you're describing: https://docs.freenet.org/components/contracts.html

You can't trust third party compute.

Perhaps we could:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption

Someone far smarter than me could probably tell us if this actually works in the real world?

Maybe, but are you saying that you could perform an operation like "if string startswith("www") then ..." without decryption? That sounds enormously complicated.

And even so, it would be leaky, because you could follow the execution path and deduce things about the data.

So in summary it sounds implausible, but I may be wrong.

You mean like BOINC? But with crypto?

pretty sure https://taubyte.com does just this

You would need Middle-out compression for this to scale. Lepton from Dropbox uses Middle-out to compress jpg images.

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