[ANN] [XEL] :: XEL - The Decentralized Supercomputer ::

[dentolas]

There is a serious controversy about the importance of the project. From myself I want to say that the tasks for which the project is oriented are very complex and require a lot of time for development and debugging. I would not wait for a quick implementation from such a project. Here we are not talking about quick profits but about realizing the idea and bringing it to the working state.

I do agree with the points you highlighted above, but for me the main challenge for this platform is the funding, the likes of Golem, RLC, SONM and Filecoin all recieved huge amount form their ICO and could attract the best talents around. This project seems to be lacking dedicated developers and they need more hands to help out with development and this cost money

well succeded ICO's are always a big advantage... the hard thing is to do it without the ICO...
money and skilled people are needed on every project and I agree this could be what is lacking here...
maybe if the project was better known...

 

[Evil-Knievel]

... quick reminder: this project here actually works and it is, to my knowledge, the only one that is capable of distributing your work efficiently to all online miners simultaneously (similar to the concepts behind BOINC).

Regarding paid developers: my experience is that most of them are pretty good at finding a nice work-life-equilibrium: working as little as possible, but just enough to not get fired. True innovation comes from the geek in the basement  

[Mallyx]

Regarding paid developers: my experience is that most of them are pretty good at finding a nice work-life-equilibrium: working as little as possible, but just enough to not get fired. True innovation comes from the geek in the basement  

Haha that's so true

[Evil-Knievel]

Game projects? This is not a game project!

[trumpman]

Game projects? This is not a game project!

He is probably just spamming threads to increase his post count

[TheDasher]

Hi,

Could someone point me to the Github for this project please?

[lda1000]

Hi,

Could someone point me to the Github for this project please?

https://xel.org/

https://github.com/xel-software/orientation/blob/master/README.md

[potapo]

There is a serious controversy about the importance of the project. From myself I want to say that the tasks for which the project is oriented are very complex and require a lot of time for development and debugging. I would not wait for a quick implementation from such a project. Here we are not talking about quick profits but about realizing the idea and bringing it to the working state.

Most likely, all these plans will be implemented in less than one month. it should take a while for this to be realized. It should take almost a year to reach this. but I do not think it's bad.

[KYBORG11111]

There is a serious controversy about the importance of the project. From myself I want to say that the tasks for which the project is oriented are very complex and require a lot of time for development and debugging. I would not wait for a quick implementation from such a project. Here we are not talking about quick profits but about realizing the idea and bringing it to the working state.

Most likely, all these plans will be implemented in less than one month. it should take a while for this to be realized. It should take almost a year to reach this. but I do not think it's bad.

I agree with you on this matter. Of course everything takes a lot of time. And who knows generally what will happen in the future, maybe a year or two will succeed. And will be all happiness.

[trumpman]

https://www.coinex.com/vote/project?id=10

Guys if you have a coinex account please vote for xel (click link above). We need about 500 votes to get listed and it's a pretty big exchange, 500 is a doable number

[Alohaboy?!]

https://www.coinex.com/vote/project?id=10

Guys if you have a coinex account please vote for xel (click link above). We need about 500 votes to get listed and it's a pretty big exchange, 500 is a doable number

500 is indeed a doable number but I actually think many won't have an account there and are too lazy to sign up just for voting. Would be nice to see some additional exchanges even though I think the project is doing well these days



BTW is there any news from xeline? The last major update seems to be a while back now

[lda1000]

https://www.coinex.com/vote/project?id=10

Guys if you have a coinex account please vote for xel (click link above). We need about 500 votes to get listed and it's a pretty big exchange, 500 is a doable number

I think we should make an effort, register on coinex and vote.

[lda1000]

Cool account name 
http://elasticexplorer.org/address/XEL-M34X-2YTQ-JRDZ-97DKN/

...and he's buying

[Samovar555]

https://www.coinex.com/vote/project?id=10

Guys if you have a coinex account please vote for xel (click link above). We need about 500 votes to get listed and it's a pretty big exchange, 500 is a doable number

I think to get 500 votes is very easy to do for the community of a certain project. And then now it's probably best to invest in xel and buy coins. Because it is not a completely new project and not very old.

[asdlolciterquit]

Hi everyone,
i've seen that there is an other challenger of "Decentralized Supercomputer": iagon.

What do you think about it? Do you think that xel can still have its role in the market?

I am not too familiar with Iagons decentralized computing system, so I can't directly compare it with XEL, but I'm pretty sure there is a place for XEL in the ecosystem.

XEL is designed to do certain types of computations; those which are hard to compute, but easy to verify. This might seem as a shortcoming to be so specialized, but it means in this specific sector, it has huge advantages over other projects:

If you have a decentralized all-purpose computer, you either have an almost unsolvable trust problem or a lot of redundancy. For example, a common purpose for using rented computing power is rendering high quality videos. This needs a *lot* of computing power. For an attacker, it would be far easier to do the beginning and end of the video, throw some random data garbage in the middle and claim the reward. So, the user has to trust the worker to do the job they are paid for. You could set up an escrow system, but this system would need arbiters. Because the user could claim fault and present a broken file they created, even if the worker did their job perfectly. Or the user messed up by sending faulty data and blames the worker for it. A different approach would be to have two or more workers working on the same project, to check that they all did the job right. But all of them need to be paid (and they need to be paid a competitve price, mind you) and it is computing power wasted.

For most types of computation, there is no really easy way out there, at least not one that really improves on existing systems. You could just set up a centralized service, where workers can offer their computing power for ETH/BTC, with accounts and a trust system and all. Way less hussle and probably more effective.

XEL however focuses on a certain type of computations, those which are hard to compute, but easy to verify. Finding prime numbers could be one. Travelling salesman problem. Cracking passwords (only you own of course). Stuff where once you have a possible solution, you can go and say "yes, this looks about right". For this type of problems, XEL is perfect, because the system doesn't need the redundancy mentioned above. It also doesn't need a trust system. It's basically like finding blocks in a PoW system.

In that field, XEL will be competitive, because it is streamlined to do just that. Think of the other projects as swiss army knives: they can do a lot, but nothing of it really well. XEL is a high carbon, handforged chef knife, sharpened to perfection. It's really bad at opening cans and opening wine bottles, but the thing it can do, boy does it go.

thank you for this huge post. I merit you!
Anyways, now it's more clear.
I would add that, as far i know about Iagon, iagon can use computational power even from computers that runs xel.

[Evil-Knievel]

Can someone please explain this Lagon thing to me?
I just read the white paper, but except learning about existing technologies like Hadoop, AI and Markov-Chains in general, I somehow must have missed any technological explanation whatsoever on how this thing is going to work. Maybe someone of you is smarter than me?

Also, I must admit that I am a bit jealous. When you take a look at plenty of other "distributed supercomputer" projects (don't want to name any), you see them getting funded with gazillions of dollars for nothing more than a unreliable virtual machine renting system which every 8 year old could cheat by randomly hitting a few keys on their learning computer. XEL, on the other hand, works pretty well, has a unique technology not used by anyone else (frankly, I guess so because it is too complex to be understood by today's average crypto "CTO", "CFO" or "co-founder") and earns nothing but a few peanuts - probably about the amount others spend on recruiting their twitter shills alone, which, by the way, seem to have become common courtesy for today's projects. The development since late 2017 is alarming and shows me that the entire crypto-sphere is doomed to fail. No longer does it count how good or bad a technology is, but instead how many twitter followers you pay, how many ICO review sites you tip off to forge an "expert interview" for ya, and, last but definitely not least, who eventually gets "elected" as the next "big thing" by mainstream crypto-news outlets. Technology? Screw that, nobody is going to use it anyway ... right?

[ttookk]

Can someone please explain this Lagon thing to me?
I just read the white paper, but except learning about existing technologies like Hadoop, AI and Markov-Chains in general, I somehow must have missed any technological explanation whatsoever on how this thing is going to work. Maybe someone of you is smarter than me?

Also, I must admit that I am a bit jealous. When you take a look at plenty of other "distributed supercomputer" projects (don't want to name any), you see them getting funded with gazillions of dollars for nothing more than a unreliable virtual machine renting system which every 8 year old could cheat by randomly hitting a few keys on their learning computer. XEL, on the other hand, works pretty well, has a unique technology not used by anyone else (frankly, I guess so because it is too complex to be understood by today's average crypto "CTO", "CFO" or "co-founder") and earns nothing but a few peanuts - probably about the amount others spend on recruiting their twitter shills alone, which, by the way, seem to have become common courtesy for today's projects. The development since late 2017 is alarming and shows me that the entire crypto-sphere is doomed to fail. No longer does it count how good or bad a technology is, but instead how many twitter followers you pay, how many ICO review sites you tip off to forge an "expert interview" for ya, and, last but definitely not least, who eventually gets "elected" as the next "big thing" by mainstream crypto-news outlets. Technology? Screw that, nobody is going to use it anyway ... right?

You are pretty much spot on. I've seen and criticised it in different parts of the ecosystem, though. For example, I find it extremely alarming that something like Eos which is not decentralized by any stretch of the imagination has the atention (and marketcap) it has. If it wasn't so alarming, it would be actually kinda funny. It's a bit like someone found out about blockchain tech and thought that's how computers and the internet work:

"This whole distributed ledger thing looks very redundant and inefficient. You know what would be a good idea? Servers!"

This is obviously a product of the huge instream on new people and money. Cypherpunk principles have been fallen to the wayside, because the masses aren't intersted in them. And while they shouldn't need to be, because the basic premise of blockchain systems is that they don't need a trust layer, the fact that they are not scalable yet leads to half-assed solutions which completely ignore why blockchain was invented in the first place. I mean, we don't really need a digital currency; Paypal works fine in 99% of cases. We don't need trustless distributed computing, because AWS, BOINC and others work fine.

The fact that blockchain tech is a safeguard against times when shit hits the fan is absolutely no selling point for the masses. But that is literally the reason why they exist; I am not aware of any case in which a central database would be less efficient.

In regards to XEL, this poses an uncomfortable question: what exactly are the advantages over centralized/semi-centralized services? What is the scenario in which XEL is preferable over those services? I don't have the answers right now, but these are important questions that need to be addressed.


By the way, have you looked into zk-Snarks? Coda(https://codaprotocol.com/) is trying to use it as a means to verify the blockchain with very little ressources. I haven't really looked into it, but I was wondering whether this could be a way to prove the validity of complex computations without having to reperform them, since that is pretty much what they are attempting.

[abaumgar]

Can someone please explain this Lagon thing to me?
I just read the white paper, but except learning about existing technologies like Hadoop, AI and Markov-Chains in general, I somehow must have missed any technological explanation whatsoever on how this thing is going to work. Maybe someone of you is smarter than me?

Also, I must admit that I am a bit jealous. When you take a look at plenty of other "distributed supercomputer" projects (don't want to name any), you see them getting funded with gazillions of dollars for nothing more than a unreliable virtual machine renting system which every 8 year old could cheat by randomly hitting a few keys on their learning computer. XEL, on the other hand, works pretty well, has a unique technology not used by anyone else (frankly, I guess so because it is too complex to be understood by today's average crypto "CTO", "CFO" or "co-founder") and earns nothing but a few peanuts - probably about the amount others spend on recruiting their twitter shills alone, which, by the way, seem to have become common courtesy for today's projects. The development since late 2017 is alarming and shows me that the entire crypto-sphere is doomed to fail. No longer does it count how good or bad a technology is, but instead how many twitter followers you pay, how many ICO review sites you tip off to forge an "expert interview" for ya, and, last but definitely not least, who eventually gets "elected" as the next "big thing" by mainstream crypto-news outlets. Technology? Screw that, nobody is going to use it anyway ... right?

Blockchain technology is still very young and the growth has to stabilize. I guess that after that happens a consolidation phase will come and some projects will gain market share and come to dominate their respective fields, like after the dot-com bubble.

[Evil-Knievel]

In regards to XEL, this poses an uncomfortable question: what exactly are the advantages over centralized/semi-centralized services? What is the scenario in which XEL is preferable over those services? I don't have the answers right now, but these are important questions that need to be addressed.

Hi ttookk,

well. When you take a look at some other "decentralized computation" programs, there is no real advantage: some allow you to host your website on the network, some let you use virtual machines on other people's computers. All tasks that could be done more efficiently (both in terms of speed and cost) if you just rented an Amazon AWS instance. The beauty of XEL's design is that you are not just using crypto-currencies to purchase resources from someone. The key difference is, that you are putting your tasks on a billboard for anyone to grab, which causes a huge competition between everyone (not one virtual machine guy, but literally anyone) who is running a computation node. So let us say, I host my "NodeJS" service on one of the other projects for example, I get exactly one dude (or a couple, but certainly not all) to do that for me. In XELs case, you potentially start seeing thousands of nodes fighting simultaneously for being the first to solve your task. That is one of the major issues of quite a few projects - they seem to encourage people to work slowly lol ... I mean why would you run a fast VM or provide a good upload bandwith for that site while you also can just run it at very low speeds  (and potentially get paid more)?

This principle is not new, BOINC does exactly the same with the little exception that there, you rely on volunteers with an ideologic agenda. This makes it hard to convince people to work on your simulation for your homework assignment

[ttookk]

In regards to XEL, this poses an uncomfortable question: what exactly are the advantages over centralized/semi-centralized services? What is the scenario in which XEL is preferable over those services? I don't have the answers right now, but these are important questions that need to be addressed.

Hi ttookk,

well. When you take a look at some other "decentralized computation" programs, there is no real advantage: some allow you to host your website on the network, some let you use virtual machines on other people's computers. All tasks that could be done more efficiently (both in terms of speed and cost) if you just rented an Amazon AWS instance. The beauty of XEL's design is that you are not just using crypto-currencies to purchase resources from someone. The key difference is, that you are putting your tasks on a billboard for anyone to grab, which causes a huge competition between everyone (not one virtual machine guy, but literally anyone) who is running a computation node. So let us say, I host my "NodeJS" service on one of the other projects for example, I get exactly one dude (or a couple, but certainly not all) to do that for me. In XELs case, you potentially start seeing thousands of nodes fighting simultaneously for being the first to solve your task. That is one of the major issues of quite a few projects - they seem to encourage people to work slowly lol ... I mean why would you run a fast VM or provide a good upload bandwith for that site while you also can just run it at very low speeds  (and potentially get paid more)?

This principle is not new, BOINC does exactly the same with the little exception that there, you rely on volunteers with an ideologic agenda. This makes it hard to convince people to work on your simulation for your homework assignment

Good and concise answer.

Any thoughts on this:

By the way, have you looked into zk-Snarks? Coda(https://codaprotocol.com/) is trying to use it as a means to verify the blockchain with very little ressources. I haven't really looked into it, but I was wondering whether this could be a way to prove the validity of complex computations without having to reperform them, since that is pretty much what they are attempting.