Topic: [ANN] [XEL] :: XEL - The Decentralized Supercomputer :: - page 16. (Read 253664 times)

Maybe the crypto massadoption has to come first.

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.

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.

The mainnet went live a couple weeks or months ago  

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.

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.

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.

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.

(…)

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

Any thoughts on this:

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

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.

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.

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?

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?

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.

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