Quote from: ohad on September 19, 2014, 04:09:25 AM

That's exactly the point bro. Go over the literature and see how we actually solved the real underlying problems, which were pending for a long time.

I've read over all of the materials that you've made available, "bro."

I've re-read them.

I still don't see where the problems get solved.

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See also Q&A on this thread. I began working on it ~1yr ago. It's far from being only virtualization plus blockchain, and there are several very significant proprietary innovations. All can be seen from the docs.

Where? Maybe I'm missing something, but what is the actual innovation, here? How is this preferable over spot priced surplus resource from any of the big players? What is the competitive advantage? Why will XZennet "make it" when every prior attempt didn't, and failed?

The workflow is inconvenient. Reliably executing a batch of jobs will carry a lot of overhead in launching additional jobs, continually monitoring your service quality, managing reputation scores, etc. If you don't expend this overhead (in time, money, and effort) you will pay for service you don't receive or, worse, will end up with incorrect results.

By launching jobs, you're trusting in the security of a lot of random people. As you've said, you have to assume many of these people will be downright malicious. Sure, you can cut off computation with them, but by then they may already be selling off your data and/or code to a third party. Even if the service provided is entirely altruistic the security on the host system might be lax, exposing your processes to third parties anyway, and in a way that you couldn't even detect as the sandbox environment precludes any audit trail over it. Worse yet, your only recourse after the fact is a ding on the provider's reputation score.

Since authenticity of service can't be validated beyond a pseudonym and a reputation score, you can't assume computation to be done correctly from any given provider. You are only partly correct that this can be exponentially mitigated by simply running the computation multiple times and comparing outputs - for some types of process the output would never be expected to match and you could never know if discrepancy was due to platform differences, context, or foul play. At best this makes for extra cost in redundant computations, but in most cases it will go far beyond that.

Service discovery (or "grid" facilities) is a commonly leveraged feature in this market, particularly among the big resource consumers. Your network doesn't appear to be capable of matching up buyer and seller, and carrying our price discovery, on anything more than basic infrastructural criteria. Considering the problem of authenticity, I'm skeptical that the network can succeed in price discovery even on just these "low level" resource allocations, since any two instances of the same resource are not likely to be of an equivalent utility, and certainly can't be assumed as such. (How can you price an asset that you can't meaningfully or reliably qualify (or even quantify) until after you have already transacted for it?)

How can this model stay competitive with such a rigid structure? You briefly/vaguely mention GPUs in part of some hand waving, but demonstrate no real plan for dealing with any other infrastructure resource, in general. The technologies employed in HPC are very much a moving target, more so than most other data-center housed applications. Your network offers a very prescriptive "one size fits all" solution which is not likely to be ideal for anyone, and is likely to be sub-optimal for almost everyone.

Where is the literature that I've missed that "actually solved" any of these problems? Where is this significant innovation that suddenly makes CPUShare market "work" just because we've thrown in a blockchain and PoW puzzles around identity?

(I just use CPUShare as the example, because it is so very close to your model. They even had focus on a video streaming service too! Wait, are you secretly Arcangeli just trying to resurrect CPUShare?)

What is the "elevator pitch" for why someone should use this technology over the easier, safer, (likely) cheaper, and more flexible option of purchasing overflow capacity on open markets from established players? Buying from amazon services (the canonical example, ofc) takes seconds, requires no thought, doesn't rely on the security practices of many anonymous people, doesn't carry redundant costs and overheads (ok AWS isn't the best example of this, but at least I don't have to buy 2+ instances to be able to have any faith in any 1) and offers whatever trendy new infrastructure tech comes along to optimize your application.

Don't misunderstand, I certainly believe these problems are all solvable for a decentralized resource exchange. My only confusion is over your assertions that the problems are solved. There is nothing in the materials that is a solution. There are only expensive and partial mitigation for specific cases, that aren't actually the cases people will pragmatically care about.