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

Guess who's back in town?
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=245263
Does he know he is more than invited to visit?

Thanks! It is nice to be noticed! Grin

I've been lurking, and still following the progress of XEL closely week to week. Unfortunately I can't say that I've been particularly happy to see where it has been headed, personally. IMO the decision to partially re-centralize with bonded master-nodes and the decision to launch a "lite wallet" token are both likely mis-steps.

Having 0 stake in XEL it is obviously not my business, but I had held high hopes... and now I have little but worry for E-K's work ever making it out into the world in a form that is anything like what he would have really intended.

I've been thinking a lot, lately, about a the idea of a relatively simple variant of the earlier XEL design which might address several of the concerns with the model, particularly with regard to the PoW rewards. It would eschew a dedicated programming language, in favor of a machine model, but at the same time make for a more consistent work calculation and allow for some additional assurances. It may not be something I ever pursue further but I am ever more convinced (though still not quite 100%) that the whole thing might even actually be possible after all.

I guess with masternodes you mean so called SNs (supernodes), right? Well, I didn't like them too. Not sure if it's possible at all at this stage, but perhaps with your support, it could be possible to think it over again, and get rid of those special nodes.

The great thing about an open source project like this is that any developer can take it any direction they'd like as long as the community adopts it.

I'm open to ideas other than the SNs, just keep in mind there are a lot of constraints that need to be met. So if people have alternate solutions for how a distributed network can fully validate the POW / Bounty submissions without creating a bottleneck, please provide your ideas.

I've also pitched a couple of alternate ideas to EK, but really he's pretty busy right now so this would probably be the best opportunity to revisit this topic before he has time to work on the Core Server again.

One last thing...regardless of what we do, maybe it would be best to change the name of it...even in the current design it's not a SuperNode the way other blockchains think of it. It's simply a Core Server node that has the ability to run the ElasticPL engine to validate POW / Bounty submissions.