A Primer Through Golem

https://blog.golemproject.net/golem-primer/

by kristianpaul • 5 years ago

104 80 5 years ago

blog.golemproject.net

ouid3• 5 years ago

I sort of despise the use of the word democratization to describe a system in which you pay for representation.

lostcolony3• 5 years ago

Despise, sure, but accurate.

amelius• 5 years ago

Is this sarcasm? In the sense that our political democracy is also sold to the highest bidder?

MereInterest• 5 years ago

Democracy is the principle of equal representation, one vote per person. Money is not equally distributed. Voting with money is inherently not democratic. Therefore, I would agree with ouid that "democratization" and "paying for X" are entirely separate things.

deburo• 5 years ago

If you wouldn't pay your taxes, you wouldn't be able to vote. Paying is one of the main part of our society, and I wish I'd see less HN'ers obsessing over anything with a price.

duckfang• 5 years ago

I think it's the "1$ = 1 vote" is the issue here.

That means a single person with lots of money can literally buy their way over all others.

gumby• 5 years ago

What do you mean? People who don't earn enough to have to pay taxes certainly don't lose the right to vote for that reason in any democracy I know of today.

And many people pay taxes who don't have the right to vote.

Voting power is only loosely correlated with the amount of taxes paid.

Paying taxes is important but is orthogonal with the right to vote.

Majestic121• 5 years ago

There's not really a relation between the two. A lot of systems have taxes and no vote (see medieval European society for example).

And in a lot of current countries, your vote is not linked to you paying taxes : for example in some countries very poor (and it's somewhat true of very rich as well) people pay little to no taxes, while sometimes getting a non negligible amount of money from the government, amounting to the opposite of paying taxes in a way. They still get a vote, exactly as valuable as one from someone paying a lot of taxes.

aaomidi• 5 years ago

Many countries, no matter what, you have an unalienable right to vote.

Just because American "democracy" removes the right to vote from individuals because of things they've done doesn't mean its right or even the typical behavior from a "democracy".

mLuby• 5 years ago

"Democratize" has joined "revolutionize" and "disrupt" on the list of buzzwords that make my eyes roll so far they glaze over. The words may be apt, but they need a fallow decade before being meaningful again.

Time to add "democratize" to mourner.github.io/bullshit.js. (I haven't seen it yet, but I'm predicting "catalyze" will join the list before the decade is out.)

freewilly1040• 5 years ago

Democratize has the disadvantage of never having made sense. It's usually meant to say "open access to all", but never implies any sort of distributed authority over how a system is run.

notJim• 5 years ago

Oligarchize doesn't quite have the same ring to it.

tdeck• 5 years ago

Plutocratize?

vkou• 5 years ago

I rather like it, since it is in many ways an accurate description of how representation of how the democratic process works in practice.

Voters pick winners, but get little representation, people who fund campaigns of the winners get a lot of representation.

nathias• 5 years ago

you mostly pay for it with taxes, or other people's labour (slaves)

AgentME4• 5 years ago

It's an open marketplace for anyone to sell or buy compute power, not a giveaway from someone. I think the word "democratize" is clunky but I think it has some overlap with the idea that you don't need special connections to trade in the system and act as a seller or a buyer in it.

keiferski• 5 years ago

Democratize can also just mean “make more accessible to everyday people.” Which leads to the interesting and possible scenario that one can be against democracy (as a political system) but for democratization.

Apple (at least back in the 80s) could probably be described this way. Democratizing computer technology but operated as a secretive hierarchical organization.

andrewtbham• 5 years ago

Yeh. There are two definitions. I think OP is confusing them.

- introduce a democratic system or democratic principles to. "public institutions need to be democratized"

- make (something) accessible to everyone. "mass production has not democratized fashion"

m00dy• 5 years ago

Yeah, it is also very similar how US has democratized middle east for the past 20 years

dang4• 5 years ago

The submitted title was "Golem democratizes society’s access to computing power", which is a representative sentence from the article, but since it turned out to be baitier than the main title, we've replaced it with the main title above.

ouid3• 5 years ago

Since this remains a claim in the article, I think my comment remains a reasonable contribution, even after the title has been changed. Please consider unflagging it.

Asparagirl• 5 years ago

Is the admin password “emet”?

ThaDood• 5 years ago

I bought some GNT back around 2016-17 because I thought it was a cool concept. Held it for a few months, years maybe? I can't recall for certain. I do recall Brass Golem getting released which was supposed to be a big deal and I never saw anything change. So I sold my GNT and looking at the primer, I still don't see much of a change from a few years ago.

Mined some ETH at the same time and it is doing much better.

Animats• 5 years ago

Remember Filecoin, where you can trade storage in a similar way? Does anybody really store files in it?

pupsikus• 5 years ago

Good question. Would be nice if they would. Does anybody really uses Bitcoin?

ansible• 5 years ago

I had started reading about that and Siacoin a while back. Never got around to starting a node or anything like that. With Sia at least, you had to put up a stake first before you could start a storage node (for reasons that made sense). But then I'd have had to go through the rigamarole with buying some other coin, trading for it, setting up various wallets, etc.

Maybe at the end of the day I should just be giving a little money to rsync.net or Backblaze.

Geee• 5 years ago

You can use Sia from browser nowadays. They built a decentralized CDN network called Skynet on it. https://siasky.net

You can host web apps on it too, here's the "Skynet app store": https://skapp.hns.siasky.net/#/apps/all

jimpick• 5 years ago

You can see the live file storage deals here. https://filfox.info/en/deal

ChrisClark2• 5 years ago

Yeah, it's so cheap to store on Filecoin I really want to backup to it as another offsite option. But I'm waiting until Duplicati has built in support for it instead of figuring it out on my own.

ftpssh• 5 years ago

What is the greatest value/contribution in tools of this type?

costgallo• 5 years ago

you mean of these projects? Golem decentralizes computing power: censorship resistant, and resistant to central cloud failures (remember Google down in December)

iandanforth2• 5 years ago

Sounds like this could be summarized as a compute/currency exchange. Convert compute to currency which can be used to buy compute.

Does this have the built-in price correction of PoW crypto where economic viability determines how much compute is being dedicated to the network?

Aka, do prices naturally rise in this system until it's economically viable for someone to run their system?

AgentME4• 5 years ago

Does this have the built-in price correction of PoW crypto where economic viability determines how much compute is being dedicated to the network?

The answer is essentially "yes", but I think this question is showing a misunderstanding. Golem isn't the one creating the workloads that people are running, it's just connecting people selling compute power and people paying to run workloads. (The compute workloads aren't used as a consensus mechanism like PoW. Golem just relies on Ethereum to manage consensus.) The question is like "Does ebay implement a price correction system where economic viability determines how many resources people sell to it?".

iandanforth2• 5 years ago

Ebay actively manages supply through communicating with sellers, so "Yes?"

wos-dv• 5 years ago

Is this another marketed solution that let's you do less than when not using it, effectiviley creating more problems without actually solving anything? Or am I just paranoid?

CuriousCosmic2• 5 years ago

I mean it's basically just a zero trust fog compute platform. I apologise for the buzzwords but it's probably the most concise way to describe it.

On the Consumer/Requester side it let's you farm out a parallel and reproducible compute problem at whatever the going rate is based on market forces. If you can break out the heavy lifting in your code into parallel and deterministic/reproducible components then you can run compute fairly cheaply and quickly. For most people the zero-trust security isn't as important but the redundancy aspect of it is nice.

On the Producer/Compute side it lets you sell your unused processing power to do something actually useful. Think of it like BOINC but with a financial reward attached to it. While some people may eventually try to set up data centres as producers, for the most part the intent is to allow people to get some small profits back from lending out their compute power to scientific computations, 3d renders, simulations, etc.

Golem has been through a number of iterations over the past few years and is starting to come together in a fairly cohesive manner now. There are a lot of limitations at the moment but each time I've checked in on the project it's been a lot more versatile and a lot less restricted. I don't think it's ready for a lot of use cases yet however it is getting closer.

So I'd say it's worth playing around with if you like the tech however if you are expecting a well polished product I'd recommend keeping an eye on it for the next year or two.

bitwize• 5 years ago

This is kind of cool. It's like Urbit without... well, at least half the bullshit.

seized• 5 years ago

Oddly, they don't seem to support or want the providers to be running VMs. That moves it out of "idle hardware" into "dedicated hardware" territory right there. I can dedicate a VM as I can restrict that VMs resource limits, network access, and it's separate from my processes. But even if I had bare metal servers that weren't running VMware, Solaris, FreeBSD I'm certainly not going to let their provider service run on my hardware next to whatever else is on there that's mine.

My idle compute resources all run VMWare.

AgentME4• 5 years ago

I think it's because some configurations of Golem use virtualization features to sandbox individual workloads, and some platforms have limitations around VMs-in-VMs.

CuriousCosmic2• 5 years ago

This is definitely my biggest issue at the moment. I understand the intent is to make it easy to port software to support it but I dislike the method none-the-less.

I'd much prefer they provide a constrained environment and dedicated compilers (or compiler extensions). At least that way the code can be sandboxed in such a way that you don't have to worry about what it's actually doing.

Honestly with the types of tasks they are targetting, a purely functional or algorithmic language requirement would serve them well. For example, I would be far more comfortable if they were using something like [Halide](https://halide-lang.org/) with some static analysis to deny any low level fuckery. At least that way the providers could have a reasonable assurance that they aren't going to accidentally unleash some malicious code onto their system.

AgentME4• 5 years ago

They support WASM-based workloads that are inherently very sandboxed by design (and have other benefits like being architecture agnostic).

russdpale• 5 years ago

Anything that uses the word democratized is something I'm not interested in. It's scary that paying money is considered to be some kind of representation.

shakezula3• 5 years ago

Sounds very American.

djohnston• 5 years ago

Yeah that definitely isn't the case everywhere.

ChrisClark2• 5 years ago

That's not the meaning they are going for. It means allowing everyone to have a chance. Like when Unreal Engine or Unity said they democratized game development by releasing their engines for free.

dang4• 5 years ago

goodpoint3• 5 years ago

Similar posts should be clearly flagged in the title.

Even better if we could have user-configurable filters to hide unwanted topics.

xpe• 5 years ago

Yes. There are alternative message boards that provide filtering (and many more useful features).

Hints: pincers, sideways walking, marine habitats.

goodpoint3• 5 years ago

I'd rather use https://lemmy.ml/ - it's implementing federation over ActivityPub.

smaddox• 5 years ago

This appears to have a bit in common with an idea I was toying with a month or two ago. I see nothing in this implementation that actually encourages decentralization, though. The economics of providing compute services certainly won't do it by themselves. We already have a networks of computers and ways to pay for them, and that has only encouraged centralization into a handful of cloud compute providers.

I can certainly see how something like this can reduce the barrier to entry for becoming a small-time compute provider, but I don't see how it changes the economics: specialization and centralization (up to a point) is cheaper.

Is there something I'm missing?

indigochill• 5 years ago

Well, as I think about it, it's interesting because although you're right that specialization and centralization is cheaper, if I'm Ordinary Joe and I want to make some money while my home PC would otherwise be idling, I can still sell my compute resources cheaper than someone running it as a serious business because anything is more than zero and I have essentially no upkeep costs to cover.

Granted, that kind of resource is only fit for some kinds of workloads, and I could be thinking about it wrong. But if this holds up, then I'd think the bottom's about to drop out of the cost of low-requirement cloud computing even though I expect this will not challenge the optimized cloud giants for large workloads.

ComodoHacker3• 5 years ago

The first question I have is whether a resource lender have a say in what's being computed on their resource?

If yes, it's not 'censorship-resistant'. If no, how can one be sure he's not transcoding CP at home?

shakezula3• 5 years ago

This is a hard problem, but usually gets handwaved away to "that's the cost to play". Distributed storage has the same problem - how do you know you're not storing CP? - and there are some novel approaches to attempting to solve that problem (content hash checks against known material, IP list flagging, etc...) but at the end of the day you basically have to admit you can't solve that problem. That's the price of "censorship resistance".

ComodoHacker3• 5 years ago

Anonymity isn't the only possible solution to censorship resistance. Transparency + decentralization is another.

eMGm4D0zgUAVXc7• 5 years ago

I think the more important question is:

Does the foreign code my machine runs have Internet access?

Or can it only send the work result to the Golem network itself?

I wouldn't want my IP to be used for DoS on the public Internet or whatever.

ComodoHacker3• 5 years ago

The answer is yes as long as you're using any browser, Golem wouldn't make it much worse.

SLWW• 5 years ago

I don't think i would ever want to be liable for the shenanigans of another programmer.

some of these applications will inevitably do some nasty things

voldacar• 5 years ago

It's cool to see that work has continued on this. I saw it posted a couple years ago and it seemed like just another shitcoin

A Primer Through Golem

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