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

[Evil-Knievel]

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.

Well, I really think that these guys have brilliant ideas, however, I am not yet sure how this thing is supposed to work in practise. But I may just not understand it fully (yet).
The way I understand it right now is that their approach makes it pretty easy to verify the soundness of transactions without the need to have a full copy of the Blockchain. So basically, you could just download the latest state and verify the zk-SNARKs which prove that there exists a valid transaction chain up to the genesis block that would result in that exact state. Something, you would need the full copy of the Blockchain for in more traditional systems; how else could you make sure that a transaction of mine is actually valid (in terms of that I have really received the coins I'm spending in the past, and not just claiming so).

So in that sense, this approach is pretty cool. The biggest question mark is though ... if you are just checking the zkSNARK to see whether there exists a transaction chain all the way back to the genesis block, you are exposed to all sorts of attacks: the simplest one is most likely to just create a private side chain where you create a state that you want to spoof to someone else, and somehow submit this state along with perfectly valid zk-SNARKs to your victim. How in this world can he know that state is invalid and that there exists a different state with a "greater cumulative difficulty" containing the same coins spent to someone else (longest chain approach)? I cannot think of any way, but like I said, probably I am just not understanding it correctly

I think to mitigate this issue you would at least need to downlod all block headers to verify your „state“ is actually in the longest chain which wouldn't make it "succinct" anymore.

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[ttookk]

(…)

So in that sense, this approach is pretty cool. The biggest question mark is though ... if you are just checking the zkSNARK to see whether there exists a transaction chain all the way back to the genesis block, you are exposed to all sorts of attacks: the simplest one is most likely to just create a private side chain where you create a state that you want to spoof to someone else, and somehow submit this state along with perfectly valid zk-SNARKs to your victim. How in this world can he know that state is invalid and that there exists a different state with a "greater cumulative difficulty" containing the same coins spent to someone else (longest chain approach)? I cannot think of any way, but like I said, probably I am just not understanding it correctly

Yes, this is exactly my concern as well.

But in regards to XEL and distributed computing, my question is whether this can be used to somehow verify computations without going through the motions. I don't have enough insights into how zkSnarks work to know or understand whether they can be applied to arbitrary data, or whether the data has to have certain properties.
As far as I know, XEL is currently limited to hard to compute, easy to verify computations. I wonder whether zkSnarks could be a way to get over this limitation.

[Evil-Knievel]

I don't have enough insights into how zkSnarks work to know or understand whether they can be applied to arbitrary data, or whether the data has to have certain properties.

To be honest, neither do I    Sounds like I'll be spending the day reading papers and maybe I find out more.

[trofim21]

supercomputer on the blockchains is something new, this I have not met, I think it will be interesting to many investors, I will follow the development of the project.

[Evil-Knievel]

Well, "investors" should probably go to the other projects because there is no way you can invest in this project. Nobody here will take your money, and promise you any kind of "profit sharing" or participation in the growth of any "company". So even if you wanted to invest, you just can't. Sure, you can gamble, but that I would not consider an investment whatsoever.

I wish someone would point out this difference so the community can understand that. What I see very often is people gambling with Tokens in dodgy Telegram groups and considering themselves
"investors" which, they believe, gives them the right to demand all kinds of things according to the common definition of an "investor". But there is no such thing here!

Well, I cannot prevent you from buying tokens from someone, just make sure you know that you are gambling. If you lose, there is noone else to blame than you. I would strongly discourage you from getting any tokens unless you want to actually perform calculations on the network.

[cryptodv]

Well, "investors" should probably go to the other projects because there is no way you can invest in this project. Nobody here will take your money, and promise you any kind of "profit sharing" or participation in the growth of any "company". So even if you wanted to invest, you just can't. Sure, you can gamble, but that I would not consider an investment whatsoever.

I wish someone would point out this difference so the community can understand that. What I see very often is people gambling with Tokens in dodgy Telegram groups and considering themselves
"investors" which, they believe, gives them the right to demand all kinds of things according to the common definition of an "investor". But there is no such thing here!

Well, I cannot prevent you from buying tokens from someone, just make sure you know that you are gambling. If you lose, there is noone else to blame than you. I would strongly discourage you from getting any tokens unless you want to actually perform calculations on the network.

You just shut a lot of people up EK. Keep it up. Elastic is still one of my favorite projects in crypto. Can't wait to see what the future holds.

[bspus]

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.

When you say it works you mean in the testnet right?
AFAIK, the mainnet release has not changed since last year where there is a blockchain for trading but no computations.
Perhaps when the working product reaches the mainnet we will see coverage in articles and interest from the community.

Right now most of the people in crypto are not even aware of this project

[Evil-Knievel]

When you say it works you mean in the testnet right?
AFAIK, the mainnet release has not changed since last year where there is a blockchain for trading but no computations.

The mainnet went live a couple weeks or months ago  

[bspus]

When you say it works you mean in the testnet right?
AFAIK, the mainnet release has not changed since last year where there is a blockchain for trading but no computations.

The mainnet went live a couple weeks or months ago  

Duh, that's embarrassing 
I gave it a look with the new xeline wallet. It seems there is not a single available job 

It also pains me to say that, as it is said on their website and by you earlier, the system just isn't user-friendly and that is a great weakness for adoption right now. Good tech on it's own has never been enough.

I really hope better days come.

[ttookk]

When you say it works you mean in the testnet right?
AFAIK, the mainnet release has not changed since last year where there is a blockchain for trading but no computations.

The mainnet went live a couple weeks or months ago  

Duh, that's embarrassing  
I gave it a look with the new xeline wallet. It seems there is not a single available job  

It also pains me to say that, as it is said on their website and by you earlier, the system just isn't user-friendly and that is a great weakness for adoption right now. Good tech on it's own has never been enough.

I really hope better days come.

I have yet to come accross a really userfriendly blockchain application other than paying people (and those are not that intuitive either). I am very convinced that we are still in the dial-up/no-GUI/barebones stage of the whole ecosystem.

Plus, XELs targeted group is most probably technical people, who are able to figure it out. I think that there isn't much happening is lack of awareness for the most part. Not sure how to address that, especially since there isn't an ICO style war chest to fling around.

[Evil-Knievel]

Plus, XELs targeted group is most probably technical people, who are able to figure it out. I think that there isn't much happening is lack of awareness for the most part. Not sure how to address that, especially since there isn't an ICO style war chest to fling around.

Unfortunately, this is one of the biggest problems most projects face. Most of them were designed for solving technical problems, but 99% of those who are interested are simply "traders".

This ICO war chest others have does not make it better. I am yet to see a real application running on any of these. When I look at Ethereum for example, Cryptokitties was the first actual broadly used application. All the years before, ETH was (and this was my personal impression) mostly limited to dodgy ERC20 ICO tokens. This obviously extends to other "Storage", "Computation" or "Smart Contract" platforms as well.

I have no idea how to encourage people to use these new technologies ... maybe it needs some time, maybe it needs more use-cases. It's just I think that it would not help much to spend 100.000.000$ on pitching this whole thing to people. Others have been there before.

[Evil-Knievel]

Maybe the crypto massadoption has to come first.

I mean, realistically, how high is the chance that someone needs to solve a general purpose problem or is in need of storing some data accessible by anyone, and, at the same time, is interested in crypto-currencies in the first place? I guess the intersection of these two sets is just too small at the moment. "Crypto" is still a village. It's like loading a Quantum computer in your car, driving to the next village with less then 500 residents, and trying to find someone who is interested in buying it from you.

[josegines]

Maybe the crypto massadoption has to come first.

but if you say that there are not really practical uses right now, only a few testimonials (cryptokities), how will the massadoption go then?
How will people use cryptocurrencies then? only for payments?

[ttookk]

Maybe the crypto massadoption has to come first.

but if you say that there are not really practical uses right now, only a few testimonials (cryptokities), how will the massadoption go then?
How will people use cryptocurrencies then? only for payments?

This is a really good question with a difficult answer. Because what blockchain tech misses, and what has become the end goal of just about anything in this time and age, is convenience. Blockchain tech is not easy to use, it is slow and it is inefficient.

Paypal is more convenient than Bitcoin.

Dropbox is more convenient than Sia, Storj, or whatever.

AWS is more convenient than XEL, Golem and all the others.

What blockchain is and what the others are not, is being decentralized and hard to censor. Being hard to censor has seen its use in countries like Venezuela, where people have an actual real life use case for cryptocurrencies, which is hedging against hyperinflation. Let's face it, in the "western/first/developed" world, the only real mass use case of cryptocurrencies is to get more fiat money value. Most traders are happy sitting in fiat when the markets go down.

Decentralization is not that easy to come by either. The general narrative is that this would let people use and sell ressources they were unable to trade before. Like, when you get a new smartphone, you have tons of ressources you don't need. It comes with 64 GB storage, but for the first 6 months, you only need 30. With a working decentralized sharing and micropayment ecosystem, you could rent out the remaining 34 GB to a cloud storage service. If you don't use it, the processor you paid for to do stuff is doing nothing. You could rent it out. Same with internet access. Your phone could be a hotspot for others who have no direct internet access.
This vision sounds nice, but it has a huge problem: the economics don't add up. For one, you'd probably earn close to nothing, a few cents a day. So little that you soon realize that it's not worth the effort you have to put into it. With all the organizing, updating, managing your tokens and all, you might be even working below minimum wage. Also, you are using much more electricity and your hardware wears off faster. At the same time, somewhere, someone has access to cheap electricity and hundreds of computers and storage units. That guy_gal is able to work at a competitve level, because he_she doesn't manage one unit, but hundreds at the same time, droppig the price and forcing out all the others who just wanted to pay for their new smartphone or whatever.
Maybe this can be overcome with absolute automatisation. Say, your phone does all that stuff for you without you even noticing it. Then, maybe, you have a case.

Blockchain projects thrive under pressure, because that's what they are built for. They are tanks: Slow and inefficient under normal circumstances. You wouldn't want to get your groceries with them. But under hard, inconvenient circumstances, when normal cars crap out, they show what they are built for.

I guess this doesn't really help much. Maybe we really need a full-blown crisis to help blockchain tech reach mass adoption. But maybe we can get them in "through the backdoor" as well. For one, we still have a long way to go when it comes to convenience.

For another, we shouldn't rule out the power of games.

Games have been around since before humans existed. Even animals play. Games and playing have an extremely real life application: they help learning in a safe enviroment.

When it comes to blockchains shortcomings, here's the thing: games are supposed to be inconvenient. They are intended to present you with a challenge. At the same time, they define their own rules, which means, you have no hard-pressing real life problem to address. Provided you manage to get people interested in the first place, this an ideal enviroment to show off tech and, ideally, to evolve it.

I think I've posted here before about having a chess tournament on XEL, with multiple teams having a fixed amount of XEL and trying to write a chess algo, which uses XELs network to play chess. Now, I don't know if chess is really the best game for something like this, but the general idea still stands:

Host a tournament on XEL. Get teams of students involved. They'll learn what XEL is and what it is capable of. They'll remember when they need something to solve a problem for them.

[coloredcoin]

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

Thanks for the updates.
Many computing nodes compete for the task,only the first solver get the bounty,other's computing is just wasted like POW of bitcoin?

[Alohaboy?!]

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

Thanks for the updates.
Many computing nodes compete for the task,only the first solver get the bounty,other's computing is just wasted like POW of bitcoin?

I guess the other computing power is just not used in this case and not actually wasted. But might be wrong here

[ttookk]

(…)

Thanks for the updates.
Many computing nodes compete for the task,only the first solver get the bounty,other's computing is just wasted like POW of bitcoin?

Depends on how you would define "wasted". XEL is built to solve computing problems without a predetermined outcome, if that makes sense. Like, you want to find the (short) private key to a known hash. Let's say you forgot your five digits password (you should probably not have a five digit password, but whatever). You can't "compute" this in the sense that the computer gets the question, solves one equasion and has the answer. It has to try different inputs, compute them, compare the result, then try again. In the sense that all inputs will be garbage except one (or probably a few) which is valid, yes, there is a lot of computing power "wasted". But in the sense that this is still the only sensible way we know to solve such questions, no, it is not wasted.

[lda1000]

@Evil-Knievel
https://github.com/xel-software/Computationwallet-Mainnet.git

How do I build stuff here to be able to run it?

./run.sh
Error: Unable to access jarfile target/core-1.0-jar-with-dependencies.jar

[abaumgar]

Now, is your chance to help improve https://xel.org ... any input? critics? comments? suggestions?

[trumpman]

Since people keep asking here how Elastic is different to other projects I think sharing this article from the new site is a must: https://xel.org/difference-to-other-projects/