Live data from Hacker News

Peer-to-peer serverless infrastructure, powered by blockchain technology

edge.network

41–45 of 45 posts

Re: Peer-to-peer serverless infrastructure, powered by blockchain technology

#41

Some day, people will start treating their compute, everywhere as rentable commodity, and the price will go to almost zero. CPU + storage + network costs will go to zero, the "edge" will be everywhere, and organizing hosting and launching websites will never be the same. Maybe we'll even get a better federated services out of all of it (if you get people comfortable with leasing their capital, maybe they get comforta…

I wouldn't expect network costs to go to zero. If computing gets distributed we'll only get more bandwidth usage - especially in P2P gossiping situations. Having a few services using that will add non-trivial load to existing infrastructure which really likes the existing CDN pop solution.

> I wouldn't expect network costs to go to zero. If computing gets distributed we'll only get more bandwidth usage - especially in P2P gossiping situations. Having a few services using that will add non-trivial load to existing infrastructure which really likes the existing CDN pop solution.

But that bandwidth usage will localize more and more and may start going over really non-traditional mediums that weren't fully integrated into the "network mesh" before. If there are 200 people in a shopping mall, with 50 of them with some LocalCDNEdge app enabled and acting as beacons -- the request may never leave the shopping mall and return data that is fresh-enough (depending on the use case of course). Yeah there's now kind of a P2P gossip storm going inside the shopping mall, but I don't think that can't be solved with some more intelligent algorithms and at the worst case, just another wifi-router-as-pop.

I mean unless I'm thinking about this wrong -- what I'm envisioning is the CDN pop solution, just with WAY more pops. Yeah you have to coordinate the pops, but delivering the same payload to two people who are right next to each other (same apartment building let's say) from the far away CDN pop is less efficient than delivering it to one of the people, and P2P for the last mile so to speak.

Also, I think I can lean on innovation emerging in the network space for how to manage this kind of thing -- "Edge" is a buzzword now but I think there's a more innovation to be had.

Re: Peer-to-peer serverless infrastructure, powered by blockchain technology

#42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't expect network costs to go to zero. If computing gets distributed we'll only get more bandwidth usage - especially in P2P gossiping situations. Having a few services using that will add non-trivial load to existing infrastructure which really likes the existing CDN pop solution.

> I wouldn't expect network costs to go to zero. If computing gets distributed we'll only get more bandwidth usage - especially in P2P gossiping situations. Having a few services using that will add non-trivial load to existing infrastructure which really likes the existing CDN pop solution. But that bandwidth usage will localize more and more and may start going over really non-traditional mediums that weren't fully…

> If there are 200 people in a shopping mall, with 50 of them with some LocalCDNEdge app enabled and acting as beacons

Given that we still don't have phones that last more than 12h of serious usage and a big issue with xmpp was that it drained battery by not using push... Local P2P on mobile phones is really not something I expect people to use. Android went fancy with opportunistic deep sleep not that many years ago - this would undo all that effort.

Re: Peer-to-peer serverless infrastructure, powered by blockchain technology

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wouldn't expect network costs to go to zero. If computing gets distributed we'll only get more bandwidth usage - especially in P2P gossiping situations. Having a few services using that will add non-trivial load to existing infrastructure which really likes the existing CDN pop solution. But that bandwidth usage will localize more and more and may start going over really non-traditional mediums that weren't fully…

> If there are 200 people in a shopping mall, with 50 of them with some LocalCDNEdge app enabled and acting as beacons Given that we still don't have phones that last more than 12h of serious usage and a big issue with xmpp was that it drained battery by not using push... Local P2P on mobile phones is really not something I expect people to use. Android went fancy with opportunistic deep sleep not that many years ago…

Just for the record, mobile XMPP clients pretty much all support push notifications these days. But you're right, this is possible because XMPP isn't pure p2p.

I'm similarly unconvinced of the suitability of pure p2p with (at least the current generation of) mobile devices. Maybe advances in bandwidth and battery technology in coming years will make such protocols more feasible for general use.

Re: Peer-to-peer serverless infrastructure, powered by blockchain technology

#44

I was curious about their claims regarding confidential computing so I checked out their Github organization ( https://github.com/edge ), but it seems there's very little activity there and there's not a single reference to Intel SGX (the enclave they claim to use). So I'm a bit skeptical about their claims. SGX is also not a general-purpose technology and can only run highly specialized code, to my knowledge there's…

> ...there's not a single reference to Intel SGX (the enclave they claim to use). Unrelated, but amusingly, if they want to, they could use https://secret.network/ to host their workload in peer-to-peer serverless SGX enclaves, powered by the blockchain.

Mea culpa: Looks like secret.network is indeed a joke website... https://scrt.network/ is what I meant to share.

Re: Peer-to-peer serverless infrastructure, powered by blockchain technology

#45
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least, they didn't mention ML.

In late 2019 (last time I physically went to a tech conference/trade show; in this case ELCE), I actually saw a company seriously advertising "AIoT Blockchain". I have no clue what the company really did, but I clearly remember the sales person there showing me a flow chart printed on a pillow.

> I clearly remember the sales person there showing me a flow chart printed on a pillow.

wait, what?

Post reply on HN